Chapter 1: Course Content - Facilitating Change Handbook

Chapter 1:

Course Content

This handbook is based on Aalto University’s course Facilitating Change, held in the spring 2020 as an online lecture series by Risto Sarvas and Jari Ylitalo. This handbook is split into ten chapters, each having a few short videos around 10-15mins on average.

The material is designed so, that you don’t have to watch chapters in a chronological order. Individual chapters, and most of the videos, should make sense on their own. So feel free to jump to the chapters you find the most interesting, or start from the chapter 1 all the way to the epilogue!

The videos in this chapter are from the introduction lecture. Even though Risto talks about seven lectures, the course objectives, and mostly the topics covered are the same than in this handbook. And in the third video, the lecturers are of course the same, introducing themselves.

Content

Course objectives
Lecture topics
Lecturers
Further readings
Exercise

The lecture slides for all the videos in this chapter can be downloaded from here.

1. Course objectives

In the first video, Risto talks about the course objectives. Why is this course and handbook made? And why should you spend your time on it?

2. Lecture topics

As said, seven lectures were held in Spring 2020. In this handbook, the material is split into 10 chapters, but as the chapters are based on the course, the topics somewhat follow the order and content that Risto describes in the introduction lecture of the course.

3. Lecturers

In this third video lecturers Risto Sarvas and Jari Ylitalo introduce themselves.

4. Further Readings

In most of the chapters, further readings are included. They are both academic and non-academic papers, blog posts etc. that you can use to deepen your knowledge in the topic.

The topics in this handbook are nicely covered also in the following master’s theses:

Leskinen, S. (2020). Challenges Faced by Startups Preparing for Growth – an Ethnographic Approach. Aalto University.

Pesonen, V. (2020). Agile transformation in a large media company — perceptions and principles. Aalto University.

Further readings for this chapter:

Anthony, S. D., Viguerie, S. P., Schwartz, E. I., & Van Landeghem, J. (2018). 2018 corporate longevity forecast: Creative destruction is accelerating. Innosight.

Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J. (2017). Sense and respond: How successful organizations listen to customers and create new products continuously. Harvard Business Review Press.
Reeves, M., Levin, S., & Ueda, D. (2016). The biology of corporate survival. Harvard Business Review, 94(1), 46–55.

5. Exercise

The exercises were part of the course in Spring 2020, originally done in pairs and submitted by email to receive credits from the course. In this online handbook, the exercises cannot be submitted for feedback, as it is not possible to receive credits. Yet we highly encourage you to look at the exercises, and do them. Or at least think about them. They are best done with a pair, for example a colleague, mentor, or a fellow student, but can also be done alone, thinking of your own current situation.

There is no exercise for this introduction chapter.