At Hanken & SSE Executive Education, we’re committed to crafting transformative, world-class learning journeys that help our clients address real-world challenges. Guided by nearly two decades of Nordic heritage in executive education, our mission is to merge the best of research and practice to create meaningful, measurable change for our clients.
To sustain this mission as we expand, we recently launched our first Design School, where we explored the principles of adult learning, experiential design, and innovation in education. This initiative helped us articulate and refine our unique approach to learning, grounded in research, reflection, and real-world application. Here’s a closer look at how we design impactful learning solutions and our philosophy behind each step.
Our learning philosophy: research meets practice
As we are owned by two business schools Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and Hanken School of Economics, everything we do roots to research. Yet, we recognise that executive education links to practice and actionable insights. Therefore, all our solutions blend academic foundations with real-world applications with the help of the three following steps:
- Experiential Learning: We follow Kolb's experiential learning model, valuing each participant’s unique experiences. Our solutions encourage participants to reflect on their personal and professional journeys, introducing frameworks and insights that help them gain new perspectives. This foundation allows them to apply fresh ideas and skills directly in their own work environments, creating lasting change.
- Learner-Centered Approach: Another pillar in our learning approach is that it is learner centred, meaning that learning is the participant’s experience, not the teacher’s expertise. Participants are responsible for their own learning journey, while our programme directors act as facilitators who encourage, nudge and challenge participants to reflect, experiment, and immediately apply what they learn in practice.
- Transformative outcomes: Finally, we aim for more than knowledge transfer; we aim for transformation. Our solutions are designed to change how participants perceive themselves and the world around them, empowering them as leaders and people. This shift in mindset often inspires greater motivation, confidence, and a deeper commitment to growth.
Understanding customer needs and strategic aims
A successful learning journey starts with a deep understanding of our clients’ needs. Before we can go into designing a solution for an organisation or a learning journey for a participant, we need to make sure we understand our client’s challenges and strategic aims, desired impact of the solution, and learning goals for the target group. Over the years, we have refined our co-design process, involving key-stakeholders and programme participants of the client organisation in the sense-making of what the current challenges are, and how we can together build the most impactful solution.
To keep our focus on measurable change, we have developed an impact framework inspired by Kirkpatrick’s model. This framework helps our clients to consider what success looks like from the start:
- What tangible changes and outcomes do they seek?
- How will participants benefit in skills, attitudes, and behaviors?
- What cultural and capability shifts should the programme support within the organisation?
With these questions at the core, we create programmes that are not only aligned with our clients’ objectives but are also structured for lasting impact.
Design for real impact
Achieving lasting change means engaging participants on multiple levels and supporting strategic shifts throughout the organisation. Our solutions are immersive and often call for both unlearning and relearning. To truly support behavioral changes in the participants the solution has to offer an outside-in perspective. It must challenge, surprise, support, and teach, as well as it must give space for curiosity, discovery, creativity, fun – and reflection.
Throughout the years we have developed a broad portfolio of practices and learning elements that support this kind of change to occur in people and organisations. These include a variety of learning games and simulations, role-plays, management involvement, coaching and peer-coaching, learning journals, flipped classroom-type of exercises and interactive workshops, discovery visits, customer safaris, strategic project work, team-building and networking exercises, and various types of extracurricular activities to make learning fun, challenging, and most importantly impactful.
Driving change and igniting renewal in people and organisations is what we do at Hanken & SSE every day! Please contact us if you want us to design an impactful change journey or development initiative for you.
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