University of Houston · Fall 2026

LEAD 8365Organizational Psychology

Fourteen weeks on how people and systems actually respond to change — and a small experiment to test what you believe.

Course code LEAD8365-F26

The course site is for enrolled students. This page is open to anyone who wants to see what LEAD 8365 is and who teaches it.

About the class

Change is not a plan. It is what people do with the plan.

Organizational psychology asks an awkward question: if we know so much about how change works, why does so much of it fail? This course takes that seriously rather than treating it as a motivational problem.

You will work through sensemaking and Weick's collapse of it, learn to lead reliably when the situation is complex rather than merely complicated, take the diffusion of innovation apart, and design a safe-to-fail experiment against a real tension in your own organization.

We watch Escape Fire together, and we re-enact the Columbia Mission Management Team meeting — the one where competent people, under pressure, quietly stopped saying what they thought.

How it runs

The shape of the semester.

Fourteen weeks, four modules, and one experiment you actually run.

Thursdays, 5:30–7:00 PM Central, on Microsoft Teams
Fourteen weeks · seven live sessions · seven worked asynchronously
Two joint sessions with the Change and Diffusion class
Probe · Make Sense · Respond, every week
A Safe-to-Fail Experiment as the final deliverable

Learning objectives

What you will be able to do.

By the end of the term, you should be able to do each of these in your own setting.

About the instructor

Dr. Robert Hausmann

Educator. Facilitator. Pilot. Observer of human systems. Robert is a professor in the University of Houston EdD Professional Leadership program and an international leadership consultant. His work sits at the intersection of leadership development, organizational learning, and making sense when the stakes are high.

He founded the Open Sky Leadership Institute. The belief that runs through this class is simple: where we gather shapes what we are open to seeing. Different places reveal different possibilities. This course is one of those gatherings.

More about Robert ↗

Inside the course

Everything you need to start is behind one sign-in.

Enrolled students get the course site: the dates, the calendar file, Week 1, and the whole syllabus.

Every meeting date and timeThe full term, with a calendar file you add in one click.

Week 1, ready to writeYour first assignment, written and submitted on the site.

The syllabus, week by weekThe whole arc — and it can change, so you come back to it.

The people in the roomCrew: who your classmates are, in their own words.

Your profileHow the rest of us get to know you before we meet.

Every assignment and weightWhat each piece is worth, and when it is due.

Enter the course →

Use your UH email (@uh.edu). First time in? Choose your own password. Your course code is LEAD8365-F26 — it is filled in for you, but write it down in case you need it.