CAPSTONE: Your Leadership Challenge

Welcome to the capstone project course in the Coursera Inspirational Leadership Specialization! In the next 6 weeks you’ll apply the skills you learned in the Specialization to tackle a real world leadership challenge. To better meet your own goals of taking this Specialization, we provide two options for the capstone project: 1) Personal leadership challenge; 2) Cooperate leadership challenges. You’ll select one project to implement and will receive assessments from your Capstone peers. No matter which option you choose, the capstone project will examine your skills, including self-awareness, developing quality relationships and trust, resilience, and how making decisions entails a strong sense of responsibility. For the corporate challenge, the CEO will introduce it as: “In this capstone, you will have to analyze a situation our company is experiencing today and prepare recommendations to our executive committee explaining how to implement the best possible solution to our leadership challenge.” The challenge to be addressed will touch upon the capacity for an organization to grow while keeping its sense of purpose. WIth Poilâne, the original sense of the company is anchored in the values of making the same quality bread for all. When increasing in size and outreach, how can Apollonia and her team maintain the same strong values across places and people? With Bla Bla Car, the fast pace growth of the company raises the same questions around identity. You will find more details as the Capstone unfolds. You can also choose to work on your own organization challenge. For the personal challenge, you will work on your own question addressing your capacity to grow as a leader. A challenge can be a target objective (starting a company, running a project, designing a product, winning a competition, running a marathon…) you have for yourself which puts into question what you want to achieve and how. The Capstone will help you measure the challenge, establish a process and build the steps to meet your goals. Whether you choose the corporate challenge or corporate challenge, specific questions will attest to your capacity to analyze and criticize the the problem which is faced by the company or by yourself, the capacity for the stakeholders to address the issues. You will make recommendations as if you were at the head of the company or the problem. The process that will drive the Business plan will follow step by step the relational circuit model developed in MOOC2 “Giving Sense to your Leadership Experience” and MOOC3 “Leading Organizations” with its two phases of Exploration and Projection. In the EXPLORATION, you will engage in a first step of holistic perception of the problem using your sensible skills to give a sense of perspective and give voice to you subjective apprehension of the situation as a whole. The second stage of exploration will involve your analytical skills to understand each and every component (elements of data relevant to the challenge) that plays a role in defining the situation. And the third stage of exploration will apply your relational skills where you will make sense and connect your subjective perception with your analysis. You will share the exploration results with peers to receive feedback before your can move on. The second phase, the PROJECTION part of your business plan leading to recommendations for the company or personal challenge at stake. In the projection phase you will first look at what the situation might be when you decenter the problem in time and space. Using benchmark and competitive analysis, you will work on different scenarios for the projected outcomes. Finally, with a view to build sense out of the challenge you will come up with recommendations arguing for a preferred scenario that respects the values and principles of the organization after the change. You will prepare a 10’ presentation for your recommendations to be delivered to the CEO of the company or owner of the challenge.