Leadership: Designing the Future

Catalog description

This course is an invitation to discover and co-create ways to shape the world anew. This experiential, discovery-based course is designed for this generation’s emergent leaders, the interdisciplinary graduate students of the University of Pennsylvania. Sponsored and housed by the M.S. in Nonprofit Leadership at the School of Social Policy and Practice, NPLD 7910 provides opportunities for participants to create new insights that help them to reimagine their relationships with themselves, others, and the natural, man-made, and technological environments. This is the moment to advance the human condition by co-creating knowledge and perspective while also preserving the wisdom passed on to us from our collective ancestors. During the course, we will co-create a human and organizational ecosystem while exploring the group and system dynamics that shape our experience and, often, our choices. NPLD 7910 is a 1.0 credit unit, in-person, experiential course that operates on the principles of discovery learning. Simply put, there is little that is conventional about this class. There are no power-point slides. There are no universal takeaways. There are no final exams. Instead, we offer the chance to immerse, explore, and discover together. NPLD 7910 has three major components. Module 1 creates the learning community and establishes the intellectual architecture of the course through a set of directed readings and group discussions. Module 2 features a simulation that asks students to take on the identities, interests, and motivations of different groups at a time set in the future while also creating structured reflections focused on the dynamics at play within and across groups. Module 3 consists of system and group level processing of the decisions, relationships, and perceptions that shaped the choices made by the students throughout the simulation.