Learning Programs
Providing hands-on learning across a range of competencies to improve organizational performance for life science R&D
Kummer Consulting programs feature a powerful, personalized learning sequence crystallized from two decades of work with R&D teams:
Analysis
Participants write cases describing their critical project challenges, and work individually with faculty to build skills diagnosing barriers to progress.
Workshop
In hands-on workshops, participants practice a progression of cross-functional interaction skills on true-to-life industry cases, each addressing a targeted business outcome. They learn how to tap into the broad range of experience that diverse teams bring to complex technical problems.
Deployment
Following the seminars, participants engage in individual learning sessions with faculty to choose the right tool, apply it in real life, reflect on performance, and continuously improve.
Formats
Kummer Consulting currently offers learning opportunities in two formats: Open-Enrollment Programs and Customized In-House Programs. Open-Enrollment Courses bring together professionals from different companies in one- to two-day intensive workshops. In-House Programs are customized to accommodate specific requirements of the organization. Click on the links for more information.
Open-Enrollment Courses:
- Biopharma Leadership for a Changing World
- Learning from Leading through Upheaval
- Innovation Leadership for Biopharma, Spring, 2020
- Master Classes in Biopharma Innovation Leadership — Email Merle for more information
Sample Customized In-House Programs:
ONE-DAY CUSTOMIZED PROGRAM
New Model for Leading Pharmaceutical Teams
In this lively, interactive session, you’ll learn why traditional management practices don’t translate to 21st-century life science R&D.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the problematic results found universally in cross-functional R&D teams.
- Understand how the way managers typically fix those results reinforces the very conditions that gave rise to the problems.
- Break the cycle by re-define your role as a leader from managing results to building your team’s knowledge to create results better.
Program Description
We try to treat drug development as a predictable, linear activity – but reality is dynamic and complex. Learn what it takes to break old habits of thinking and build your team’s ability to adapt.
Agenda
- Case: Team Conversation
- Technical vs. Adaptive Leadership
- New Leadership Tools
– Unilateral and Mutual Action Models
– Designing more productive conversations - Bringing Lessons Back to your Team
ONE-DAY CUSTOMIZED PROGRAM
Knowledge-Focused Decision-Making
In this practical session, you’ll learn to create a knowledge plan for groups with differing interests, backgrounds, and constituencies to make informed, timely, effective choices.
Learning Objectives
- Use a knowledge plan to solidify information for all decision-makers.
- Explore the group dynamics and cognitive processes that affect individual decision-making.
- Design decision-making meetings where stakeholders use each other’s perspectives to illuminate—rather than disagree about—the issues.
Program Description
Group decision-making can be endlessly frustrating. Often, responsibilities are unclear, data are cloudy, time is short and tempers shorter. This workshop uses an actual case from pharma to examine the group dynamics involved in decision- making and to apply insights from cognitive science on how individuals make decisions in situations of uncertainty and incomplete data.
Employing a straightforward, intuitive process to generate knowledge for decisions, you will learn who must be included to make a decision that will stick, what information each stakeholder will find compelling and how to create settings where team members’ experiences are used to illuminate—rather than disagree about—the issues.
While most decision-management tools ignore the way humans naturally think and interact, our process capitalizes on available expertise, asking team members to face all the facts together, approach the data from multiple perspectives and generate shared conclusions.
Agenda
| TOPIC | SMALL-GROUP EXERCISE |
| 1. Introduction | Listening for perspective |
| 2. Conversation Patterns | Case: Back to the Drawing Board |
| 3. Cognitive Processes: Recognition-Primed Decision Model, Gary Klein | |
| Variation 1: Simple Match | Recognition: Accessing Individual Knowledge |
| Variation 2: Diagnose the Situation | Getting More Data: Expanding Group Knowledge |
| 4. Decision-Making Knowledge Plan | Real-Life Application |
ONE-DAY CUSTOMIZED PROGRAM
Measuring Risk for Program Plans and Budgets
In this practical session, you’ll learn a proactive approach to budgeting and program planning that will improve the quality of management decisions on funding and resourcing your projects.
Learning Objectives
- Face the toughest questions head-on.
- Measure risks.
- Sequence program activities to progressively resolve the biggest uncertainties.
- Deliver actionable knowledge on the investment value of proposed studies.
Program Description
We provide not only concepts but also spreadsheets and step-by-step instructions that enable teams and management to make an honest assessment of the risks and make informed choices on program alternatives.
We combine present value, a method for measuring the revenues and costs to determine the value of alternative project plans, and expected value, a method for adjusting the valuation based on the probability of achieving the goals.
The probability of meeting your goals has a huge impact on whether the investment is worth it. Therefore, the more effort you put into realistically determining the likelihood of achieving your goals, the wiser you can be about making program decisions.
Agenda
1. Present Value: a method for measuring the value of investments
- Time value of money – why a dollar next year is less valuable than a dollar today
- Revenues – why you must engage Commercial from the start
- Costs – focusing energy on the critical budget items and saving time on unnecessary rework
- Net present value – realistically assessing the potential of the program
2. Expected Value: A method for adjusting value based on the probability of achieving revenues
- Quantifying uncertainty to provide an objective way of discussing risk.
- Making simple probability calculations to determine the net present value at different levels of certainty.
- Moving the conversation away from competing opinions and toward serious analysis of the scientific and business issues facing the R&D effort.
ONE-DAY CUSTOMIZED PROGRAM
Managing the Organizational Politics of Decisions
Too often, the distribution of power in R&D organizations is ambiguous. Senior leaders want teams to feel empowered; functional groups want to maintain high standards; teams want clear direction from management. This seminar looks at authority from the perspective of the specific program decision, and offers a practical way for teams to drive efficient decisions when authority is not clearly defined.
Learning Objectives
- Accommodate multiple stakeholders with different interests.
- Reduce rework by surfacing disagreement before a decision is finalized.
- Build a common language to communicate effectively about control over the project work.
Program Description
Being able to talk straightforwardly about power makes organizational life both more pleasant and more productive. This seminar provides a framework for people at all levels of the hierarchy to best contribute their information and expertise to the decisions that affect them.
Applying concepts from political analysis, you will learn to step away from turf battles and frame the issues so that all parties can share their concerns and contribute to company goals.
Agenda
- Establishing authority in advance
- Articulating the real business issues behind struggles for control
- Defining rights for each decision
- Activating the decision driver