Misk posed this challenge to our Project Team in order to ensure that 2030 Leaders Program, Misk’s new senior flagship leadership program, can make a real impact in Saudi Arabia. The 2030 Leaders Program was conceptualized to transform leaders who will help achieve Saudi Vision 2030, the country’s most ambitious national transformation initiative.
Hence, we aimed to design a critical component of the program to develop new ways of thinking and working while reinforcing knowledge and skills which can be applied to real-world situations facing the Kingdom.
And that is how the Capstone Project began.
The Program Team – comprised of Misk, Accenture, Esade, and a consortium of academic partners – focused on creating a Capstone Project with a two-pronged vision: one, to expose the participants to new ways of working that can be applied to their respective organizations; and two, to contribute to advancing Saudi Vision 2030 by letting the participants solve real challenges within the context of the Vision. This way, participants benefit personally and professionally from the program, while inspiring them to make a meaningful impact on the Kingdom.
The team designed the Capstone Project to be a significantly meaningful component of the 2030 Leaders Program. It brings local context into the classroom and fully engages participants in relevant issues where they research, understand, and consider the challenge from different perspectives to propose practical and actionable ideas and solutions.
Throughout the 9-month program, the Capstone Project is interwoven across social, formal, and hands-on classroom and online sessions. More than just an extensive case study, the project enriches the leaders’ experience and focuses on developing viable and innovative ideas that will impact Vision 2030.
Because the Capstone Project aims to advance Vision 2030, themes relevant to the Vision are assigned to groups in the two tracks of each Cohort.
We carefully select themes around challenges that need to be solved and targets that need to be met in order to support the achievement of key objectives of Vision 2030, which in the current cohorts include Artificial Intelligence, Leisure Tourism, Payments and Green Energy.
In order to select project themes from the vast number of objectives that the Kingdom has set, we looked at which objectives had current gaps in terms of progress and ambition. The themes with the largest gaps were selected, which participants had to address by developing their own solutions. As a hypothetical example, if the Tourism Sector’s ambition was to increase visitors by 70% in 2025 and is currently at 60%, then there would be no need to consider this theme. But if it is currently at 15%, then we would include this challenge in the Capstone Project.
To help provide a more holistic perspective on the themes and challenges, we are inviting Guest Speakers – i.e. regional and global partners in business and government – who support the participants by polishing their skills, strengthening their knowledge, and advising them on how to best approach the challenges. These speakers include sector experts from the public sector, associations, start-ups, and tier-1 organizations, which include SDAIA, Ministry of Tourism, SAMA, Ministry of Energy, Aramco, Mastercard, Marriott, and Microsoft to name a few.
Since the participants of the 2030 Leaders Program are accomplished Saudi leaders, it is important to add value to their leadership journey.
Hence, we designed the Capstone Project to be spread across the different classroom and online aspects of the program, linking it closely to the program’s learning taxonomy. In this way, participants are able to stay engaged with the project and with their groups through modules and bridging sessions, while giving them time to integrate learnings into their work-life outside 2030 Leaders Program.
In addition, the participants’ backgrounds are considered before assigning them to the groups. So that the challenge they must address takes them outside their comfort zone to enable them to grow and develop further.
Another unique element of the project is how it brings together valuable capabilities and insights from leaders of very diverse backgrounds. This collaboration of different mindsets, perspectives, and experiences helps deliver new and innovative outcomes at every stage of the journey.
Inspiring these leaders to develop innovative ideas is the key part of the Capstone Project. Over the course of the program, the participants adopt a new methodology and approach based around Design Thinking.
This human-centric and highly creative methodology encourages collaboration, frequent testing, and using a divergent-convergent approach throughout the innovation journey.
The divergent-convergent approach asks participants to explore issues broadly and in-depth before taking more focused actions. In the ideation stage, this means developing their ideas using knowledge from their professional experience and in the classroom sessions. These are then narrowed down when they define the value proposition.
The next step is another divergent-convergent stage – an experimentation phase where the group co-creates and refines the idea further through an iterative process. They then outline their plan to scale until they detail Minimum Viable Product (MVP) requirements, relevant to Saudi and the thematic challenge that they need to address.
Once the MVP is defined, participants then have to present a concept and how it impacts and advances Vision 2030, using their storytelling skills to creatively present to key program leadership and guest experts. After thorough deliberation, outstanding ideas may be presented to the key national decision makers and have the opportunity to become reality.
Day by day, year by year, Saudi is getting closer to realizing the scale of the Vision 2030 ambition. So the leaders of Saudi are called upon to continue this progress. In various sectors and industries, the Kingdom needs the right kind of leaders with intellectual and behavioural flexibility who can envision new and better solutions, and who can follow through and achieve what they set out to do.
The Capstone Project will contribute towards developing these leaders. As an integral part of the 2030 Leaders program, no other Capstone Project is purposefully designed to enable accomplished leaders to hone the right skills and mindsets that are relevant to the Kingdom and the realization of Vision 2030.
