founder and CEO of Weaving Futures
If you have noticed that the world around you appears to be changing at a faster pace than you can keep up with, then you are right. This generation is experiencing more technologydriven change than the total sum of world change to this point. The experts tell us that we are on the cusp of an acceleration of accelerating change. Sound scary? It is. In the meantime life goes on. Principals, teachers and students come to school each day; on most campuses the bell rings to signal morning break and lunch; and all over the world we are observing the job of educating our young getting more and more difficult. There are lots of reasons for this, including social deprivation, the impact of P and alcohol on babies, technologically-distracted parenting, and schools trying to figure out the best way to use technology in the service of learning and communication. At the heart of what is happening is that schools are not adapting fast enough to keep up with the global change. Schools are making stepwise changes in an effort to keep up, when in fact they need to be taking innovative leaps. For example, the way schools communicate with whānau. In the pre-digital days it was a newsletter sent home in a school bag. Then we started emailing the newsletter, but we kept printing it for the parents who couldn’t or didn’t access email. We built websites, we created blogs, Facebook Pages, Twitter and Instagram accounts, we purchased text messaging services. STOP. All these channels of communication are almost impossible to keep up with and the irony is that even though schools are communicating more than ever before, parents report being frustrated because they can’t find the information they need at the time that they need it. This is an example of ineffectual stepwise change. So how do you take an innovative leap? The answer is with great care. Deciding that you are going to take charge of designing your future is the first step, with the second being to use a proven method of future design. Design thinking or human-centred design is probably the most well-known tool in this space. How does Design Thinking work? Design thinking begins with developing empathy for those who you are entrusted to lead. Take for example the story of the New York Police Officer who observes a man on the street, in the depths of winter, with bare feet, goes into a shoe shop and buys him some boots. The next time the man is seen on the street he
is once again in bare feet. When asked why he is not wearing the boots the man replied that he had chosen not to wear them because he was scared that someone might kill him in order to steal them. Often in our desire to do the right thing, we end up doing the wrong thing through not building empathy with those we are trying to help. This story could equally apply to a teaching intervention applied to a struggling student without first finding out from the child, what they find most helpful as a learner. Once you have built empathy the next stage of design thinking is to take your new insights and uncover innovative ways to connect, learn and grow as a community. You do this through: Clarifying the opportunity you want to bring to life Prioritising your actions based on impact over complexity ■■ Brainstorming potential solutions, then prototyping, testing and refining your best ideas ■■ Identifying a minimum viable solution. ■■ ■■
The final stage in the Design Thinking journey is to take your solution and give it to the innovators on your team – these are the small group of individuals who love taking ideas that aren’t quite finished and working out how to make them fly in your context. The final step is to engage your early majority – these are the people who are happy to implement new strategies once they know they will work, to put the innovation into practice. To Summarise Design Thinking is a proven method of innovation within organisations because it: 1. Shows you how to focus on what people need rather than what they want. As a busy school leader you cannot possibly be all things to all people. If you focus on delivering what people need you will get maximum impact for your efforts. If you have time and energy left over then look to meet the wants.
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2. Gives you fresh insights into the people you serve, and shows you how to turn these into new innovative ways to connect, learn, and grow as a community. Often in our enthusiasm to make a difference in the lives of others we rush in with how we think a problem should be solved rather than pausing to uncover the need. We need to move away from the model of designing a new strategy and then seeking feedback. Instead we need to get the feedback first and design the new strategy based on the insights we uncover. I think that as we become more experienced the more tempted we are to use solutions that have worked in the past – but these may no longer be the best strategies. 3. Amplify the impacts of Teaching as Inquiry and Universal Design for Learning. Both of these models start with the teacher designing an intervention for their students. These interventions will potentially have more impact if the first step in the process was an empathetic inquiry into learner needs. I also believe that prototyping and testing solutions before scaling across groups would strengthen these models. 4. Greatly increase the rate and effectiveness of change in your school. As a profession we are exhausted but we can’t afford to stop moving forward. We no longer have the time nor the energy to pursue ineffective change processes.
One final thing: When I first came across Design Thinking I instinctively knew that it had an application for education, but it took me another 3 years, lots of conversations, and research into how other education jurisdictions are using this process, to shape a design thinking framework tailored for New Zealand schools. If you want to know more about this framework you can find a simplified version of it at www.weavingfutures.nz or reach out to me on carolyn.stuart@weavingfutures.nz and let’s have a conversation. Bio: Carolyn Stuart has been a teacher, principal, deputy chief executive of a crown-owned company, and is now a weaver of futures. She uses her expertise in education, leadership, and design to help others author their preferred future. Carolyn is the founder and CEO of Weaving Futures, a company which specialises in design thinking for education, runs design thinking workshops, and provides online leadership coaching. Carolyn speaks and writes about the way technology is changing our lives. To find out more go to: www.weavingfutures.nz