Master Electives

Tailor your MSc in Organisational Change & Consulting to your interests.

Advisory Skills 

Working in any organisational environment requires numerous skills. Here, the focus is on learning one of the more prominent ones: to act in an advisory role. This role encompasses communication, advisory skills, and coaching skills. The course enables students to build and develop their advisory skills, while building knowledge of the concepts behind them. This will increase the number of ways in which they can act in organisational situations, and help students be more reflective about the strengths and weakness of their personal advisory skills. The course also offers guest presentations from visiting lecturers, consultants, trainers, and managers.

Philosophy of Organisational Change 

This elective consists of seven lectures and workshops exploring the fundamental aspects of organisational change. The lectures concentrate on a number of philosophical complexities and paradoxes surrounding the nature, conditions, and prospects of change in and around organisations. Workshops focus on several ‘fields’ of change to unveil the structure of their core ideas, and are supported by well-known literary or cinematographic examples. Students will also develop in-depth case studies from a real example of societal or organisational change. The best of these will be presented in a final workshop.

Managing Social Risk in an Organisational Environment

As a result of technological developments and the increased interconnectedness of our contemporary world, businesses as well as societies are being confronted by a myriad of different risks, ranging from environmental to societal. Up until now, however, attention has almost solely been focused on one particular type of risk, i.e. the financial one, leaving managers ill equipped to deal with all other types. In this course, students will learn to understand the nature of risk, identify the various kinds of risk facing managers today and acquire the skills necessary to deal with them. They will do so from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to make them aware of the fact that different stakeholders are likely to perceive and construct different risks, depending on their point of view.

Intervention Skills

Suppose you are asked in a company to assist an experienced colleague to reframe activities in the company. It is a tough job, people tell you, but don’t worry: the change team you are joining is experienced and the change manager is a professional change manager: he knows the department in and out. The company’s HRM manager expects this project an outstanding opportunity for your first intervention and reframing adventure. Nice people, huge opportunities, and a lot to be changed and to be reframed, she suggests. Your friends are wildly enthusiastic and ask you about the newest job. You cannot tell them more than that you will stay for half a year.

You only have questions. What to expect over there? Who are you suppose to meet? Which methods could you use in the change situations? What role do you and your colleagues have differently in the intervention process? How to co-operate with employees in the department who are themselves part of the change process? How do you prepare yourself for such an opportunity? Intervening in a department is not easy, how to anticipate unexpected resistance? And how to cope with economic and political consequences of the change to develop? What are the risks in this situation? In this course we raise these kinds of questions in order to help you actively experience several intervention methods in actual situations.

Cross-cultural Management

Cross-cultural competence is about professional ability to make sense of actions and complexities, which require comparison of values, norms and actions (verbal, material, symbolic, etc.). Future managers must be able to perform a multidimensional analysis of an emergent mix of interactive, communicative and organizing processes – in order to make sense of them, in order to help others understand them, in order to perform efficiently and effectively. 

Cross-cultural competence allows us to understand what individuals mean by words and acts. Dialogical turn in hyper-connected societies of mobile individuals requires a more coaching and servant leadership based type of managers. Students will exercise their methodological skills in deconstructing and changing complex adaptive systems by rhetoric, design and contextual shifts. They will learn how to survive “jettisoning dualities, hierarchies, and especially levels”.

Hofstede’s theoretical frame of national cultural dimensions and its modified GLOBE research project version will be studied, unzipped and applied. Students have to learn how to perform a quick cultural scan of organisations and compare the results across national, organisational and professional fault lines. We shall also ask students to hone their skills in cross-cultural analysis by submitting a comprehensive team assignment, which will include a case study, an empirical research and formatted media communication releases.