Keynote Presentation
Democratizing Design Thinking:
Scaling and Enabling Adaptability at Every Level
Jeanne Liedtka – University of Virginia, Darden School of Business
Jeanne Liedtka is the UTC Emeritus Professor of Business at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. Beginning her career as a strategy consultant for the Boston Consulting Group, she has served as Executive Director of the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation, Chief Learning Officer at United Technologies Corporation, and Interim Dean and Senior Associate Dean at Darden.
With interests at the intersection of strategy and design, Jeanne has written eight books and multiple articles on the subject of strategy, innovation, and design thinking, and consulted with a diverse set of organizations including IBM, Samsung, NASA, The United Nations, and the government of Singapore. Her most recent book is The Experimentation Field Book: A Step-by-Step Project Guide, co-authored with Natalie Foley, David Kester and Elziabeth Chen.
Delivering on the strategic intent of organization design requires aligning all relevant organizational systems and attributes, including employee and managerial capabilities. This session will examine the skills employees and managers need to continuously adapt and explore the aspects of today’s organizations that get in the way, requiring us to think creatively about how to design to remove or minimize them.
The world of work is changing fast. AI, complexity, and constant change are redefining what it takes to succeed – not just for innovation roles, but for everyone at every level of the organization. In this session, we will explore the identification of the skills employees need to adapt continuously and the specific behaviors that need to be assessed, developed, and rewarded, building on over a decade of Professor Liedtka’s academic
research at UVA’s Darden Business School focused on assessing the particular mindsets and behaviors that make people more adaptive, collaborative, and effective – no matter what role they’re in.
Working with attendees in workshop format, we will identify the aspects of today’s organizations that get in the way of such work and explore how to think creatively about how to design to remove them and better align strategic capability development and In this session, participants will:
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- Familiarize themselves with a decade of Professor Liedtks’s work to identify the skills and behaviors needed for successful continuous adaptation
- Personally experience the assessment instruments developed in that research
- Have the opportunity to participate in an interactive dialogue to identify obstacles in current organizational designs
- Establish design criteria
- Come away with practical strategies for building an organizational infrastructure for continuous evolution