BAU, Centro Universitario de Artes y Diseño de Barcelona

Master in Designing and Leading Creative Organisations

Barcelona, Spain

DURATION

1 Years

LANGUAGES

English

PACE

Part time

APPLICATION DEADLINE

Request application deadline

EARLIEST START DATE

03 Oct 2024

TUITION FEES

EUR 10,400 / per course

STUDY FORMAT

On-Campus

Introduction

The Master in Designing and Leading Creative Organizations equips professionals with the skills to effectively lead creative teams, emphasising strategic organisational design to optimise creativity and address the complexities of the dynamic creative industry landscape.

Creative teams exhibit specific characteristics in their functioning and work approach: a need for freedom and autonomy, a high degree of knowledge, low tolerance for boredom, permanent curiosity, and resistance to acknowledging leadership, among others. Although these distinctive traits create favourable conditions for creative production, they also present unique demands for those responsible for leading them.

The Master considers these traits not as problematic but as a starting point. It aims to prepare those who are responsible for leading these teams with the skills to lead individuals and collectives, so they can channel energy towards the development of products or services, maintaining creativity at the highest level and channeling it productively. This channelling involves designing suitable working conditions that help define processes and responsibilities, both in an organized and flexible manner, taking into account the demands of the environment.

The context of the so-called creative industries has always been characterized by dynamism, competitiveness, and demand, requiring almost instantaneous adaptive capacity in both results and working methods. Additionally, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to cause profound disruption to all these processes. This context, along with the intrinsic characteristics of professional activity, makes practical and unique know-how essential for those who lead and manage organizations, projects, and teams of this nature, not only to adapt but also to anticipate a complex and expectedly more complex environment. The challenge posed by all these factors in the immediate future makes the skills proposed in the Master's a key foundation for managing teams in any creative field.

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Curriculum

Module 1 – Design of Organizational Architecture

Connect environmental conditions and complexity with the state and potentialities of the organization, considering the complexity of the environment and the type of project.

Characteristics of the creative organization
Dimensions of complexity
Circular and systemic causality analysis
Project management: critical path, Agile (Scrum, Canvas, Crystal, DSDM)
Governance role
Design approaches: structural, procedural, viability.

Module 2 – The Leadership Role

Identify unconscious trends in leadership exercise, connecting them with organizational dynamics and the task to be developed.

Leadership, power, and authority
Organizational dynamics of creative teams
Role-person-system and Imago-Affective Representations (RIA’s)
Analysis of one's role and effects on teams and results
Optimal distance in anxiety or difficult situations.

Module 3 – Team Management and Group Dynamics

Intervene effectively in group dynamics that affect project development and mobilize favourable dynamics.

Group phenomena and their management
Unconscious roles in a work team
The "Negative Capacity" to manage conflict situations
Types of interventions to redirect the task
Meeting management and collaborative work methodologies.

Module 4 – Change and Transformation Processes

Acquire the skills and methodologies to effectively drive and accompany complex project transition processes and channel resistances in favour of the new direction.

Characteristics of a transformation process
Types of resistances, manifestations, and their channelling
The role of narrative as a sense-making tool
Participatory conditions in change processes
Conceptual paradigms of change approaches.

Module 5 – Political Skills

Identify the political map of project stakeholders, their interactions, and sources of influence and power, choosing the most appropriate strategies.

Impact of stakeholders on project development
Methodologies for identifying areas of political interest and influence
Political representation and its function
Tactics and influence strategies.

Module 6 – Creative and Innovation Processes

Stimulate the creative potential of the organization and a culture of innovation among organization members, making it a habitual internal operating practice.

Innovation as a process and organizational implications
Phases and states of a creative process
Ability to manage uncertainty and ambivalence
Management of contradictions as a tool for opportunity emergence
The role of creativity in creative teams.

Module 7 – Systemic Reading of the Environment

Build a systemic overview of the environment and future trends, practising propositional methodologies of organizational identity.

Understanding the target audience and new observation methodologies (Buyer Persona, Customer Journey, Customer Experience, Conversion Funnel)
Communities: new models of relationship with customers
Conceptual and strategic methodological approaches
Methodologies to shape social and business contribution
Threats and opportunities of AI.

Module 8 – Master's Final Project

This work proposes a creative reflection-action by the participant based on an organizational situation that allows the integration of the conceptual and methodological frameworks worked on while relating to the participant's own experience.