Impact Academy 1: Discovering New Solutions for Complex Problems (MGTS7820)

Understanding and Influencing Human Behaviour – For good

As the world grapples with the uncertainty of the escalating polycrisis of geo-political tensions, income inequality, cost of living pressures, mental health challenges and global warming, we need leaders to respond with deep insight, novel ideas, new solutions and transformational innovations. Many of today’s MBA students are looking for more than just accelerating their career, more than just complying with minimum corporate social responsibilities and ESG. Consequently, many are shifting away from organisations offering the later without the former. In this first session, we will discuss that solving complex problems requires empathy, humility and contextual understanding to influence humans to change their behaviour. This is perhaps one of the hardest tasks leaders need to do. WE start this semester with an overview of the course and UQ's proprietary approach called Humble Discovery.

Discovering and Understanding Your Who

This week we will explore the logic, methods, tactics and tools leaders need to navigate through the ambiguity and uncertainty of challenging BAU/Status Quo. We will introduce you to the field of ethnography; understanding people and their worlds and how you can use it to develop and deliver products and services that users, customers and stakeholders will use and love. To develop a new intervention that solves targeted stakeholders' problems or unlocks new value we need confidence and evidence we are solving the right problem or building something people will use. This week we will explore how to gather this evidence.

An overview of the requirements for Assignment 1 will be provided.

Building Empathy with Stakeholders Through Mindful Deep Listening

Building Empathy with Stakeholders with Deep Listening

In order to solve unsatisfied jobs, unresolved problems and unrealised or latent opportunities, one must ensure you are solving the right problem and gather evidence people will love what you're creating, before you create it. To do this you need to look beyond what is going on in the foreground, and instead look deeper inside and behind peoples words and behaviours to understand their motivations, fears, hopes and aspirations.

In this session, we’ll explore the fundamentals of mindful listening as a tool for fostering empathy and deeper connections with stakeholders to gain insight into problems and opportunities. Mindful listening involves actively engaging with others and setting aside personal preconceptions to truly understand other people’s perspectives. The session will cover foundational techniques, for navigating difficult conversations, constructive responding for positive engagement, as well as a values clarification exercise to align listening practices with core values. Practical exercises will be provided for continued application.

The key aim is to help you enhance both personal and professional interactions by allowing you to build a greater sense of mutual respect and connection with others. This promotes a supportive environment where stakeholders feel valued, heard, and understood.

Identifying Insights, Testing Assumptions and Finding Stakeholders

Perhaps the most important discovery we’ve made about challenging status quo is that we need to test every assumption and do not process until we have validated or invalidated our hypothesis. People are complex so this task is difficult. However, a number of methods, tools and tactics have been developed to enable innovators to test if their understanding of their stakeholders and associated problems and solutions are validate or not. This session is going to introduce you to a series of tools and tactics to increase the scale and extent of your capacity to discovery real problems needing solutions and strategies to exploit new opportunities.

Discover Problems Worth Solving and Opportunities Worth Creating?

So how do we discover the right problems to solve and the best new opportunities, products and services to create that people will love? This is the most important question in the process of innovation and entrepreneurship and the hardest skill to develop. This week, we're going to learn how to interact with lots of people in such a way to “discover” their problems without asking them directly and “create” new opportunities they will love.

Solving Puzzles and Mysteries by Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity

Perhaps one of the most helpful ways we have come to understand how new, successful innovations emerge is by using the metaphors of puzzles and mysteries. This session will explore the difference between solving puzzles and mysteries and the best practice tools we have available to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty. Solving a jigsaw-like puzzle problem requires reducing ambiguity by collecting pieces of information or data and assembling them into a picture. The image and opportunity incrementally emerge as the pieces come together. Most innovation is done this way, continuously improving products and services but rarely transforming them. In contrast, disruptive and transformational products and services are often a surprise to incumbents because the insights are unexpected and unknowable in advance. These solutions are often created through cognitive inference, where a person links non-obvious ideas to create an unexpected product or service that embodies a new meaning that consumers, users and stakeholders love.

Assignment 1 Presentation

Project teams deliver a 10-minute presentation to the class summarising their stakeholder empathy, insights and potential solutions.

See assignment for details of the presentation.

Responsible Venture Creation

In this session, we will explore the tensions between doing good and doing well and between for profit and for purpose organisations.

The global community has grown to accept the potential upsides and downsides of contemporary models of entrepreneurial disruption. Furthermore, the prevailing Neoliberal ideology justifies free markets, free trade, and limited societal governance for supposed corporate and community benefit. This has led to not only growing investment into startup activity but also an increasingly institutionalized myth that entrepreneurial disruption is inseparable from both positive and negative intended and unintended social and environmental consequences. By focusing on the possibility of ventures engaging in more responsible innovation, we aim to facilitate larger-scale societal transition toward a new ideology. We refer to this outcome as a responsible entrepreneurship ideology (REI), which facilitates innovations that do not harm and, ideally, benefit society.

In Semester Break

Designing Innovative Solutions

This session will propose a framework for project teams to develop solutions for their targeted stakeholders that are desirable, feasible and viable.

“Designing innovative solutions requires you to think differently. We will explore how you can shift your perspective on problems and opportunities to identify new pathways and increase their potential.” This session will include an ideation activity to start thinking about future products, services and business models.

Project Consultations with Lecturer and Facilitators

Project teams meet with lecturers mentors and course coordinators

Communicate New Opportunities for Maximum Engagement

This session will provide students with a process and tools to create a compelling presentation that engages an audience and convinces them your proposal is worth consideration.

Storyboarding for impact

Discover how to craft powerful narratives that resonate with decision makers by learning a strategy that goes beyond your own perspective. This workshop equips you with a repeatable approach, blending psychology and techniques from the arts to prepare compelling material confidently—even within tight timelines. You'll walk away with tools to align your message with what clients and investors need to see, helping you pitch successfully and persuasively.

Co-creating Solutions with Stakeholders

We need a system where new knowledge discovery, design, development and deployment occur through an interdependent community of stakeholders including researchers, industry, entrepreneurs, government, users and beneficiaries working together. It's only when the brightest minds in our society work alongside entrepreneurs and small, medium and large organisations and community members to co-create new products and services based on the latest understanding of how the world works and what the world needs.

Final Project Presentations

Students will present the outcome from their semesters work based on the assignment 3 criteria.