A New Way to Learn about Leadership
A breakdown of the MIIPS Leadership course and how it prepares students for industry in an unexpected way.
By Hannah Brelsford
A crucial part of the Master in Integrated Innovation for Products and Services program at the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is the required leadership course. Over the past two years, this leadership course has transformed, evolving into the Creative Leadership class that elevates learning to a new level.
“It was time to try something radically different for the course, so we thought, why not have a little bit of fun with it?” said Ellen Ayoob, the MIIPS program director.
Leadership skills are key for innovation, but innovatively teaching them is a challenge. An even bigger challenge Professor Drew Davidson had to face when producing the course was how to teach leadership in an effective way that would reach students in their respective domains with their varying industry experience levels.
Most leadership courses focus on examples and learning about specific theories, but Professor Davidson wanted to take a different approach. Instead of focusing on what makes a good leader, he wanted to offer the students an experience that showed them how to be a leader.
To engage students, Professor Davidson proposed learning leadership through game production. By the end of this new Creative Leadership course, in addition to knowing leadership principles, students were to deliver, on teams, a playable game prototype.
To dive into leadership, the course focused on two perspectives:
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How to lead teams that are doing innovation design and development
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How to become more innovative when managing a team
At the beginning of the course, students were divided into seven teams and started brainstorming game concepts. Then, part of the way through the course, teams were required to swap games by bidding on which ideas they wanted to take on. From there, they left their previous game behind to take over the game development from another team, causing them to lead on a brand new project. After the swap and more game development, the course culminated in a final open session attended by MIIPS faculty and staff where students took ownership of their work and explored the other games that their peers completed throughout the class.
“The focus was more on how they were working together than on what they were making,” said Professor Davidson when discussing the course's objectives.
The real lessons were in how the students handled setbacks, project swaps, and working alongside their peers.
Throughout the entire process, students are encouraged to consider ethics and values. Additionally, as self-reflection is a large part of leadership, students are required to self-reflect at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the course. This aspect of reflection encourages students to take accountability for their roles on the team while considering their experience.
Why is Leadership Important for MIIPS?
Leadership courses teach students how to push forward in ambiguous situations and scenarios that they are guaranteed to face within industry. Through ambiguity, professionals are expected to foster collaboration, be self-directed, and take accountability for their work. These characteristics of leadership are skills that students learned throughout the course and their experience producing the games alongside their classmates.
Within their team, students were required to take leadership over their roles in the game's production. This type of leadership is cultivated within themselves through what they are responsible for on the project. The best leaders practice self-reflection and self-management, a task students were given to complete their games.
“Leadership starts with yourself first and holding yourself responsible and accountable for what you have to do before you ask others on your team to do the same.” - Ellen Ayoob
Although producing games is a nontraditional approach to leadership education, it engages students in actively exploring the roles and responsibilities of a leader. Leadership is a dynamic skill that requires a set of soft skills to be applied to any given problem. No team is the same, and no problem is the same. With the set of leadership soft skills, students learn to approach these problems where they are, instead of attacking all problems within leadership in the same manner.
Want to learn more about MIIPS?
Ellen Ayoob
Program Director, Master of Integrated Innovation for Products and Services (MIIPS)
Ellen Ayoob has spent over 20 years working on multidisciplinary teams in academia, industry, and the nonprofit sector. She believes all design must be human-centered and cares deeply about the experiences and narratives embedded in the design interactions we have daily.
Drew Davidson
Adjunct Professor
Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories and transformational experiences across texts, comics, games and other media. He is a Teaching Professor at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of ETC Press and its Well Played series and journal. He has supported the advancement of the academic study of games, along with the design and development of games for impact.