Cultivating Innovative Team Practices

This unit develops the facilitation, cultural, and interpersonal skills needed to lead design-thinking teams and sustain innovation in engineering contexts. Students practice decision-making, task reframing, interview synthesis, and strategies for tolerating failure, overcoming resistance, and measuring success to prepare for advanced project work.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze team dynamics, emotional cues, and diversity factors to create and sustain a psychologically safe, innovation-tolerant culture during design-thinking activities
• Apply structured facilitation techniques (e.g., Six Hats, point-of-view reframing, task reformulation) to enable fast decisions, maintain focus, and adapt the design process while preserving flexibility
• Demonstrate methods for stakeholder engagement—conducting and postprocessing interviews, countering objections, and following up—to iterate solutions and manage resistance effectively
• Evaluate organizational practices and workspace designs, and implement measurable strategies (including metrics and follow-up routines) to increase the chances of success and curb premature euphoria