Design Thinking: key to enable current and future employees for Power Skills

Today this heading from HBR popped up in my NewsFeed:? Businesses need employees with soft skills. Are universities doing enough to teach them?

Coincidentally yesterday I read in PMI′s latest annual survey “Pulse of the Profession”

• about the top 4 critical soft skills i.e. Communication, Problem Solving, Collaborative Leadership, Strategic Thinking – ranking almost equally high in all geographic regions and in all major industries
• how critical they are for project success
• though talent decision makers only spent 25% of training budgets to train them vs. 51% of budgets spent to train technical skills
• key barriers to prioritize power skills in training and development are cost and lack of perceived value

PMI explicitly calls talent decision makers to prioritize power skills. So does WEF highlight in their Future of Jobs report amongst the Top 10 rising skills Analytical thinking, Creative thinking, Systems thinking which nicely complements PMI′s messaging and also calls to focus re- and upskilling accordingly.

NOW: ?HOW MIGHT WE ENABLE STUDENTS AND EMPLOYEES FOR THESE POWER SKILLS?

Being a Design Thinking coach & evangelist for a while I consider literacy in Design Thinking one of the best ways to deliver what has been defined Power Skill above. Other lean and agile frameworks like KanBan, Scrum, SAFE, Lean Startup, etc. also support the development of power skills. In the following 5 step approach I summarize these frameworks under the term “mental models”, referring to Peter Senge ′s great publication? “The 5th Discipline”:

1. Raise awareness about the value of the Power Skills value, especially amongst multiplicators like talent decision makers ?and academic educators like professors and lecturers
2. Raise awareness amongst the same multiplicators about mental models which effectively work with and deliver such Power Skills
3. Align more training budget ( time & money ) to train these mental models in both areas: academic education and in economic organizations
4. Finally train students and employees on these mental models
5. Establish “The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation” (ref. to Peter Senge)

Two of my recent Design Thinking engagement dealt / deal exactly with that:

1)?Raise awareness and train academic educators: in 2023 AGWW engaged me as a Design Thinking trainer. In the two-day training I deliver participants get common with the basic framework and mindset of Design Thinking and apply it on a practical challenge they face in their academic environment? (note: AGWW belongs to the network of the Universities of Applied Sciences in Hessen and provides various seminars and trainings for professors and other academic staff and lecturers ). I ′m looking forward to the second training which will take place in August and repeat the postive resonance. ?Kudos to Ralph Meuter who managed to make this course part of the regular AGWW program.

2) Train students on Design Thinking: in 2021 Prof. Dr. Kirsten Nazarkiewicz ( UAS Fulda )and Prof. Dr. Iken Adelheid ( HAW Hamburg ) engaged me to help them create an elearning course for Design Thinking. In their collaborative approach they connect two quite different academic institutions – i.e. HAW Hamburg and UAS Fulda –? however under the same topic of “intercultural communication”. In the meanwhile roughly 120 students from HAW Hamburg and UAS Fulda have passed the course. The course has been made available for free under the OER project “Glocal Campus”, part of the video material is available on Vimeo under the category “Learning Platform HAW + HS Fulda”

?Cudos to Prof. Dr. Kirsten Nazarkiewicz and Prof. Dr. Iken Adelheid as frontrunners to train their students on Power Skills! They have been able - in their complex academic?systems -? to find ways to train their students on such a key skill!

And I ′m very much looking forward to continue this project with Prof. Dr. Kirsten Nazarkiewicz and with Prof. Dr. Julika Baumann Montecinos .

Brigitta Villaronga Anette Grimmelsmann Annette Birkholz G?tz Wegenast Angelika Birk Howard B. Esbin, PhD S?ren Schaffstein Christian Zabanski Olivier D. Stephanie Loske Ingo Werthmann Nora Ast Magdalena Pertgen Gianluca Gambatesa Melissa Meise Michael G?r?g Michael D?ring Andreas Deublein

#designthinking