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Introduction

In a digital time people become more important. This is a leadership program meant to prepare and develop participants’ competence and insight to lead. The program will make the participants conscious about both the opportunities and challenges that communication technology brings, but also provide new insights about leadership in general in a digital time. There has never been more limitless communication, as the same time that both leaders and employees experience less contact with each other, decreased engagement to the community, less time for tasks requiring concentration, inefficient meetings, more distractions and stress. The program will develop the participants’ ability to lead better and more effective both in the digital space and physical space.

The leadership program will consist of both a digital platform with different thematic units and 3 physical face-to-face seminars. The most most important themes in the program are; work, organization and leadership in a digitalized work day, digital communication technology and leadership, communication in the digital and physical space, new leadership perspectives adapted to the digital era, aesthetic embodied leadership, meaningful meeting places and offices, arts-based methods and more.

The three physical seminars with traditional lectures and group work are aobut these themes;

  1. What new cooperation and leadership challenges do digital communication technology bring? Which new leadership opportunities are there in digital technology and virtual teams? What new leadership perspectives and theories are relevant?          
  2. How can leaders communicate better with inspiration and learning from leadership and acting techniques from the theatre, storytelling from film and the selection of meaningful places and spaces to meet?
  3. How can leaders create connection, good emotional contact and trust with mindful, aesthetic and emotional embodied leadership?

The program will both contain an intellectual knowledge dimension with the participants’ reading and elaborating academic research and theories, as well as a practice dimension with participants’ doing exercises, reflecting of what they are learning through task and group work, practicing in their job and writing about it, documenting the process by taking pictures, filming and more.  The program is in its nature inspired by newer pedagogical approaches based on digital learning platforms, but will also use insights and techniques from research about digital leadership. The program Mindful leadership (in a digital time) is in its content and format based on participants’ being involved and co-producing in the learning process by actively sharing and participating both in the class room and in the digital space. This form of shared, network based, sharing, co-producing pedagogics places the participants in the center with the academic teacher as coach and adviser in the learning process, just like many practice leadership in a digital time.

Course content

1. Psychological and sociological organizational research about work and leadership in a digital time.

2. Organizational leadership research about virtual teams and leadership in a digital time.

3. Leadership research based on humanistic perspectives like aesthetic, embodied leadership and arts-based perspectives and arts-based methods.

4. Organizational research about storytelling in leadership and organizations.

5. Architectural and organisational research about the importance of offices, places and spaces for communication and leadership.

Disclaimer

This is an excerpt from the complete course description for the course. If you are an active student at BI, you can find the complete course descriptions with information on eg. learning goals, learning process, curriculum and exam at portal.bi.no. We reserve the right to make changes to this description.