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Executive Diploma in NGO Management

Awarded by: University of Turku, Finland

Course Curriculum

Module 1: Future Landscape of NGO’s
(28 hours, conducted in Singapore)

General Description:

Getting a good starting point for the whole NGO programme and individual development. Discussing the operational landscape of NGO management. Getting an introduction to tools for leadership and self-leadership as well as to futures thinking and foresight, strategy and innovations, and customer-orientated development. Launching the Futures and Strategy process as well as peer-mentoring.

 

​After completion of the module, students will be able to:

  • Continue the programme studies by combining previous experience /education to updated competence.

  • Identify next steps in own leadership development journey

  • Elaborate the NGO operating environment globally and locally

  • Analyse the contemporary possibilities and challenges related to NGO management

  • Apply customer-oriented view to develop NGO operations

  • Identify the role of futures thinking as a natural part of NGO operations.

  • Discover the different concepts that shape current thinking in strategy and innovations.

  • Identify extant strategic challenges in one’s own organizations.

  • Recognize the importance of entrepreneurial mindset and behave entrepreneurially at work.

  • Apply intrapreneurship as a leadership tool.

  • Analyse own actions and behaviour in organization, in connection to colleagues, employees and superiors; to understand more of roles of leadership, self-leadership and diversity in organizations.

  • Utilize knowledge of individual preferences and their impact on interaction.

Module 2: Strategy and Foresight
(28 hours, conducted in Singapore)

General Description:

Getting a good starting point for the whole NGO programme and individual development. Discussing the operational landscape of NGO management. Getting an introduction to tools for leadership and self-leadership as well as to futures thinking and foresight, strategy and innovations, and customer-orientated development. Launching the Futures and Strategy process as well as peer-mentoring.

 

​After completion of the module, students will be able to:

  • Use strategy concepts to analyze given strategy challenges and apply them to understand what creates current and future viability for the organisation.

  • Develop their own thinking as to use strategy tools to develop strategic concepts, will learn to evaluate needed actions to make strategy as a practice effective; and develop their own perspectives on how strategy and innovation concepts form a bigger picture in the organisation’s pursue of survival and growth.

  • Develop knowledge on the question how ideas become inventions and how these may transform into commercial successes;

  • Understand how different approaches to attain innovations may result out of managerial or entrepreneurial activity;

  • Learn to understand the fundamentals of a service-dominant logic,  value-driven business concepts, and other current perspectives in innovation research.

  • Develop a strategic view on identifying sources for business concept innovations;

  • Explain how the larger external (institutional, international) environment plays a role in determining the development trajectories of organisations.

  • Identify and interpret change forces of the environment.

  • Utilize different scanning methods for corporate foresight: megatrends, trends, weak signals.

Module 3: Managing Change
(28 hours, conducted in Finland)

General Description:

Leadership and  change management competencies have  become increasingly focal in all executive leadership roles. In order to help participants’ organizations become more empowered and change agile, we will be building the bridge between research-based knowledge and practical experience.

 

Conducting business activities in a global economy is highly dependent on one’s ability to decode and relate efficiently to a great variety of interlocutors from diverse cultural backgrounds. This course will help participants to understand the impact of culture on interpersonal relations, to become more conscious of their own cultural style and to develop the mindset, attitudes and tools conducive to the development of intercultural intelligence in a business context.

Module is implemented in Finland and  includes NGO cases and /or NGO visits and visiting speakers.​

 

After completion of the module, students will be able to:

  • Distinguish the most important conceptual frameworks of leadership and  change management.

  • Identify and share the most effective approaches to roll-out strategies and implement operational decisions.

  • Identify different leadership roles in times of change.

  • Create more successful approaches in renewing one’s own organization.

  • Discover major interpretations of intercultural relations.

  • Identify how national cultures impact business relations.

  • Identify and decode foreign cultural backgrounds.

  • Identify dangers and opportunities in an intercultural encounter.

  • Ability to understand how to develop one’s intercultural intelligence.

  • Appraise ethical issues in an intercultural context.

Module 4: Accounting and Finance
(8 hours, conducted in Finland)

General Description:

The purpose of this module is to gain an overview of different areas of accounting and finance from the executive’s perspective in order to be able to understand the terminology, main issues and tools, and to participate in discussion and decision-making concerning financial questions in one’s own work environment.

 

The module is designed to provide participants a holistic view of how accounting relates to broader strategic and operational issues.

This module will be conducted in Finland and includes NGO cases and /or NGO visits and visiting speakers.

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After completion of the module, students will be able to:

  • Learn how and why accounting information is important for strategy formulation and execution.

  • Gain an overview of basic management accounting and control tools (including budgeting and transfer pricing).

  • Understand the purpose and use of financial and non-financial performance indicators (including the Balanced Scorecard).

  • Understand financial statement information and interpret the underlying substance of financial analyses based on common financial ratios.

  • Discuss financial issues and participate in debates concerning financial questions in one’s own working environment.

  • Link accounting and finance knowledge to cross-functional thinking and operating style.

  • Learn from case examples.

Module 5: Managing the Strategic Journey
(8 hours, conducted in Finland)

General Description:

What differentiates a leader from a manager, more than anything else, is the leader’s ability to craft and execute strategy. McKinsey, a global consultancy, has developed a framework identifying seven distinct modes of activity in Strategy (Managing the Strategic Journey). Some of those will be the focus of this session: identifying emerging trends and implications, isolating critical uncertainties, developing realistic scenarios and refining and evaluating options within scenarios.

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During the module the Strategy and Future reports are visited and tutored.

This module will be conducted in Finland and includes NGO cases.

 

After completion of the module, students will be able to:

  • Use business foresight to strengthen strategy and strategic implementation.

  • Identify interlinkages between a range of issues in the society.

  • Identify how complexity affects the way we interpret and make decisions about the future.

  • Select and use appropriate foresight methods for differing conditions of uncertainty.

  • Utilize environmental scanning methods.

  • Apply scenario building as means to anticipate and influence the future.

  • Read and form a futures table.

  • Continue working on the Strategy and Futures project and writing the report

Module 6: Renewal and Growth

(28 hours, conducted in Singapore)

General Description:

  1. Presentations of Strategy and Futures reports.

  2. Summary and feedback on NGO studies and peer-mentoring.

  3. Reflections on heading towards new opportunities and challenges.

 

After completion of the module, students will be able to:

  • Demonstrate increased competence in conducting and writing strategy and futures report.

  • Assume stronger presentation and argumentation skills.

  • Learn of co-participants' process and results.

  • Demonstrate improved self-knowledge and the use of mentoring.

Strategy and Futures Project Work

and Report

Peer Mentoring

The Strategy and Futures Project Work in the program is designed to bring the participants’ own work context and challenges into the classroom and to find a shared approach to solving some of the organizational issues identified. The strategy and futures report constitutes the final point of a five-month process in which students identify, analyse and explore issues that are current in their organizations, have important future implications and can have a substantial effect on the development of their organisations.

 

During the Project Work students formulate a strategically important challenge their organisations are currently facing and they develop a futures approach to solving it. This typically involves developing different futures and choosing a desirable one from which to back cast the actions needed in order to meet this future. The Project Work is commented on by supervisors and presented during the last module of the programme.

Students pair up and act as sparring partners for each other during the programme. The interaction is based on mutual agreement where the foundation of success is openness and the belief in the value of the process. Peer Mentoring consists of discussions between equal partners where the goals and topics of the discussions are defined together. Peer Mentoring is confidential where both partners are bound by a non-disclosure agreement in relation to the discussions. This also binds the instructor who reads the written reports.

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