Course Design

From first conversation to full-day session — how to build the course together.

The Development Sequence
1Map the TerrainWhat does each of you bring? Where do expertise domains genuinely overlap?
2Define the StageWhat phase of the innovation and leadership process is this course responsible for developing?
3Anchor the ProjectWhat will participants be able to do for their project after this course?
A gap named now is a course design decision. A gap ignored becomes a weak week. Be candid about where neither of you has depth — that is your clearest signal about what the course needs to address.
Structuring the Three Modalities
Weeks
1–4
Asynchronous Learning Modules
Async content builds the conceptual foundation participants need to arrive at the live session ready to go deeper. It is not the course — it is the preparation for the conversation. That distinction matters for how you design it.

Participants need genuine grounding: frameworks, cases, and examples they don't already have. Without that foundation, the live session has nowhere to go. But async content should introduce and ground concepts — not resolve them. The incompleteness is deliberate. Participants should arrive with something unfinished that they actually want to work on.

Both voices should be present across the async arc — not equally, but meaningfully. A Weatherhead faculty member delivering a conceptual framework clearly and efficiently, followed by a practitioner reflection on where that framework held in practice and where it didn't, is enough. Participants who have encountered both perspectives before the live session arrive already oriented to how you think together — which makes in-person integration easier, not harder.

Week 4 async content should set up the live session explicitly — not recap the prior three weeks, but surface the productive tensions the in-person day is designed to work through.
Panel
The Panel Discussion: Synthesizing Asynchronous Learning
The panel is not a Q&A session. It is the moment where the tensions surfaced in asynchronous work are brought into productive dialogue. Design the panel questions in advance. Know where you are likely to disagree. Let participants see two expert minds grapple with the same complexity they have been sitting with for four weeks.
Full
Day
The Full-Day Session: Integrative Praxis
This is where the learning becomes action. The full-day session should be designed as a single integrated experience, not a split schedule. Both instructors should be present and actively engaged throughout. Use case simulations, DRIVE Innovation Project working time, and structured faculty dialogue — not alternating presentations. The goal is that by day's end, participants cannot tell where the theory ended and the practice began.
Regulatory, Compliance, and AI
Regulatory and compliance risk awareness is a structural thread that should run through every course. Healthcare leaders operate inside a regulatory environment whether they are thinking about it or not. Every strategic initiative, every innovation, every workforce decision has a compliance dimension. The question for participants is not whether regulation is relevant to their DRIVE Innovation Project — it is whether they have thought carefully enough about how. A useful reframe to introduce early and return to throughout: compliance is not just a constraint. It is a source of strategic intelligence. Ask participants: "Have you talked to your compliance team — not just for permission, but to understand what this initiative actually requires and what it makes possible?"
AI in healthcare should be addressed where it is genuinely relevant to your course content — not applied as a required lens on every topic. In some courses it will be central: workforce implications, clinical decision support, algorithmic risk, data governance. In others it may be contextual or background. The goal is not AI coverage for its own sake. It is helping participants think clearly about how AI is reshaping the specific leadership challenges your course addresses — and what that means for their DRIVE Innovation Project. If AI isn't the most important thing in the room for your course, don't force it to be.
Integration vs. What to Avoid
Do This
  • Design the syllabus together, from scratch
  • Appear together in asynchronous video content
  • Plan your productive disagreements in advance
  • Build explicit DRIVE Innovation Project connections every week
  • Attend each other's sessions; respond in real time
  • Show up to monthly faculty alignment meetings
  • Name gaps honestly in your check-in with Suzanne
  • Practice epistemic humility — learn from each other
Avoid This
  • Dividing the course into "your weeks" and "my weeks"
  • Presenting theory, then adding a practice story
  • Leaving the other instructor out of async design
  • Resolving every tension before participants see it
  • Treating the DRIVE Innovation Project link as a final-week problem
  • Performing agreement when genuine disagreement exists
  • Designing without reference to other program courses
  • Treating regulatory/compliance as optional rather than structural
A Worked Example — Course 1 in TCP Practice
The following uses Course 1: Leadership and Purpose to illustrate what the principles above look like when they are fully enacted from asynchronous co-design through the in-person day. It's meant to be a reference point — not what the course should actually look like or a template to be copied.
Design Intent
WSOM Faculty and the Practitioner are not playing separate roles — theory provider and story provider. They are co-equal epistemic partners whose disciplines intersect in the same intellectual space. Every module, exercise, and workshop is designed so that each instructor illuminates what the other cannot. The result is a course where the integration itself is the pedagogy.
The Transdisciplinary Question at the Center of Course 1
"What does it actually take — at the level of conviction, identity, culture, and system — for a healthcare leader to produce change that holds?"
This question cannot be answered from organizational behavior alone. It cannot be answered from clinical leadership experience alone. The answer lives in the space between. Course 1 is designed to find and work that space.
Three Integrating Threads — Woven Through Every Week
Thread 1
Purpose as Moral Architecture
Purpose is not a statement. It is the structural load-bearing element of everything that follows. How does it form, hold, and fail?
Thread 2
AI & the Changing Terrain
AI is not a tool section. It is a force reshaping what "readiness," "purpose," and "accountability" mean for every leader in this room.
Thread 3
Regulatory & Compliance as Leadership Context
Compliance is not the ceiling of ambition — it is a structural condition leaders must understand to lead transformation with integrity.
Four-Week Asynchronous Arc
Note: although each week is labeled by contributor, the async content is not two separate tracks running in parallel. Each contribution explicitly picks up what the previous one established — the practitioner names the theory, the faculty member responds to the practice, and the dialogue prompt surfaces what neither resolved alone.
Week 1 — What Is Purpose, Really?
WSOM Faculty sets the frame: Organizational identity, founder's syndrome, and what happens when institutional purpose drifts from founding mission.

Practitioner responds directly: A candid account of a specific moment when the organization's stated purpose and its actual behavior diverged — opening with: "The framework you just heard describes exactly what happened to us in 2019. Here is what it looked like from the inside."

Dialogue Video: Both together — "We've both been in rooms where the mission statement on the wall had nothing to do with the decision being made. What does a leader actually do in that moment?" Neither resolves it.

Social Presence (Perusall): Mark the moment where your organization's purpose and its actual behavior most closely resemble each other — and the moment where they most diverge.
Week 2 — Readiness: The Honest Assessment
WSOM Faculty sets the frame: Organizational readiness theory — Lewin, Kotter, and complexity-based frameworks. Why readiness assessments consistently overestimate capacity.

Practitioner responds directly: "I have launched three major initiatives. I was wrong about readiness every time — in different directions. The frameworks you just heard explain why. Here is what I missed and what I wish I had asked."

Dialogue Video: Both together — "What does 'ready enough' actually look like? And how do you know the difference between resistance that signals a readiness problem and resistance that is legitimate dissent?" Neither settles it.

Social Presence: DRIVE Innovation Project Readiness Scan — participants score their organization across six dimensions, then compare with two peers whose challenges are structurally similar but institutionally different.
Week 3 — Stakeholders, Power & Regulatory Reality
WSOM Faculty sets the frame: Stakeholder theory, power mapping, and the organizational sociology of whose voice gets heard in strategic decisions — and whose doesn't.

Practitioner responds directly: "The power mapping tool you just saw would have changed one initiative completely for me. The stakeholder I most underestimated was not a physician or an administrator — and the map would have caught that. Here is what that cost us."

Regulatory Thread: Compliance frameworks introduced as a stakeholder category — not a constraint. Who in your organization translates regulatory reality into strategic intelligence, and are they on your map?

Social Presence: Stakeholder Ecosystem Map — built and shared with the cohort. Required peer feedback: Whose voice is missing from this map?
Week 4 — The Leader's Why & the Problem Statement
WSOM Faculty sets the frame: Authentic leadership theory and the research on purpose-driven change. What the evidence says about why some change efforts hold and others collapse when leadership changes.

Practitioner responds directly: "The research you just heard explains something I lived. Here is the problem statement I brought to my board before the initiative that defined my career. Here is what was wrong with it — and how the theory explains why. Here is what I know now."

Pre-Work: Draft problem statement submitted in advance. Faculty review before the session — not to grade, but to prepare in-person feedback for the DRIVE Innovation Project Lab.
In-Person Day — Selected Moments
9:30 – 11:00
Workshop 1 — The Power of Purpose in Leading Change
Participants draft a personal purpose statement. WSOM Faculty leads the exercise; Practitioner provides live response to two or three statements with direct practitioner reaction. Peer feedback in triads. The Named Tension is introduced explicitly: "We actually see the relationship between personal purpose and organizational mandate differently — and I want you to hear that disagreement, because you will face it."
1:30 – 3:00
Workshop 3 — The Tension Triangle
Participants map the full triangle of tension between personal purpose, organizational mission, and regulatory/compliance reality — not as a problem to resolve but as the generative friction of leadership. AI is introduced as a fourth axis: Where does AI enter your tension triangle?
WSOM Faculty: "The tensions in that triangle are not problems to be managed. They are the generative friction of leadership. Named tensions can be worked with. Unnamed tensions become sources of drift."
Practitioner: "In healthcare, regulatory reality is not just a constraint on purpose — it is sometimes the only thing that forces an organization to act on purpose. I have used regulatory pressure to do what moral urgency alone couldn't accomplish."
3:15 – 4:45
Workshop 4 — DRIVE Innovation Project Lab: The Four-Station Challenge
Participants bring their draft problem statements, pressure-tested through four weeks of async work, a panel evening, and three workshops. Project coaches are present and receive revised problem statements directly.
Station 1 — The Clinical Test
Practitioner engages as a senior executive receiving the brief — deciding whether to invest in this leader's project.
Station 2 — The OB Test
WSOM Faculty: Does this problem statement reflect organizational identity and readiness? Or is it written for the leader's comfort, not the organization's reality?
Station 3 — The AI Audit
Peer review: Is AI visible in the problem statement where it should be? Are there risks, opportunities, or compliance dimensions that need to be named?
Station 4 — The Co-Production Check
Peer review: Whose voice is absent from this problem statement? Who needs to produce this outcome with you and is not yet in the frame?
TCP Key Design Principles Enacted in This Course
Epistemic Collision, Not Division of LaborWSOM Faculty and Practitioner do not take turns. They operate in each other's territory throughout — asynchronously, in the panel, and in every in-person workshop.
Pressure-Test Over DraftThe in-person day does not ask participants to draft what they already drafted asynchronously. It asks them to defend, challenge, and deepen it across four stations and two expert lenses.
AI as Epistemic Force, Not ToolAI is woven into every week as a force reshaping what "readiness," "purpose," and "accountability" mean — applied through two disciplinary lenses that reveal different things.
Psychological Safety Modeled, Not Just TaughtWSOM Faculty and Practitioner model the Named Tension move — two experts disagreeing in public without collapsing. It is the most important modeling in the course.
"The classroom becomes a site of negotiated meaning-making. Co-teaching operationalizes that philosophy by making disciplinary dialogue visible."
— Transdisciplinary Collaborative Praxis Framework, DRIVE Program