24 leaders from across the political, business and public sector in Northern Ireland took part in the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building Fellowship (CDPB) programme this year. Running from September 2022 until March 2023, the 7-month long programme aims to prepare future leaders with the skills and knowledge to make them best placed for future leadership in their respective fields.
Through a series of curated sessions, this year’s participants also enhanced their understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the business community. The programme’s advisory board and sponsors including leading technology company Fujitsu covered key themes such as Negotiation and Conflict Management and Policy Development during these sessions, sharing knowledge and insight with the fellows.
In this year’s residential session at that University of Oxford, Fujitsu’s Martin Russell, Design Lead UK & Ireland delivered a Human Centric Experience Design thinking session (HXD).
The FUJITSU HXD approach is a unique design thinking methodology and refined end-to-end co-creation approach that can help engineer and enhance creativity and innovative thinking from purpose to impact. Developed by Fujitsu’s global co-design team, the design thinking approach is used extensively worldwide delivering transformational solutions and business value to a wide range of customers.
The system comprises four key pillars; understanding your business challenge within the context of your strategy, looking at the issues through different lenses, combining business and technology expertise to develop outline concepts and developing a joint working plan for experimentation. This is all based on a positive mix of people, purpose. outcome and design to forge a successful HXD implementation.
Commenting on his involvement in the programme, Martin said:
“Fujitsu has been a proud partner of the CDPB Fellowship since its inception and I was delighted to be a part of this session and help coach the fellows on human centric design and thinking. In delivering these sessions, our mission was to enable fellows to co-design their future and take advantage of the vast array of opportunities in this digital age.
It was great to see the collaboration between fellows and stakeholders throughout the retreat and see first-hand how they interpreted the thinking and applied it to their own situation. Each fellow came away from the session with an in depth understanding of how Design Thinking works and how it can be applied to wider policy issues in Northern Ireland.
Congratulations to the participants graduating from the programme this month, I wish them all the best as the take the next step in their careers and further develop the HXD approach in their everyday lives.”
The graduation for the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building Fellowship takes place later this week at Hillsborough Castle.
Read more about the CDPB programme at: www.democracyandpeace.org/fellowship
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