Design Thinking in Play : An Action Guide for Educators [1 ed.] 9781416628866, 9781416628859

Citation preview

Education

Design thinking is a person-centered, problem-solving process that’s a go-to for innovative businesses and gaining traction with school leaders interested in positive change. But understanding design thinking is one thing; actually putting it in play is something else.

• • • • • • • • • •

Identify change opportunities. Dig deeper into complex problems. Analyze topics to isolate specific challenges. Connect with and solve for user needs. Apply what you’ve learned about users to design challenges. Maximize brainstorming power. Create and employ solution prototypes. Pitch solutions and secure buy-in from stakeholders. Organize and analyze user feedback. Map out a solution’s specific actions and resource requirements.

Design Thinking in Play is a must-have for education leaders who are tired of waiting for someone else to solve their problems and ready to take action, have fun, and figure out what will really work for their school, their colleagues, and their students.

Kami Thordarson is a former classroom teacher and professional development and curriculum designer. A champion of the design thinking movement in K–12 education, she currently works as an administrator leading district technology integration and personalization efforts.

Browse excerpts from ASCD books: www.ascd.org/books

Alexandria, Virginia USA

Gallagher | Thordarson

Authors Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson offer educators a practical guide for navigating design thinking’s invigorating challenges and reaping its considerable rewards. They dig deep into the five-stage design thinking process, highlighting risk factors and recommending specific steps to keep you moving forward. The 25 downloadable and reproducible tools provide prompts and supports that will help you and your team

DESIGN THINKING IN PLAY

Alyssa Gallagher is an experienced public school educator, administrator, facilitator, and consultant. She leads leadership teams through the design thinking process and coaches organizational leaders to embrace creativity and the habits of designers.

Also by Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson: Design Thinking for School Leaders: Five Roles and Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change

Alexandria, Virginia USA

1703 N. Beauregard St. • Alexandria, VA 22311-1714 USA Phone: 800-933-2723 or 703-578-9600 • Fax: 703-575-5400 Website: www.ascd.org • E-mail: [email protected] Author guidelines: www.ascd.org/write Ranjit Sidhu, Executive Director and CEO; Stefani Roth, Publisher; Genny Ostertag, Director, Content Acquisitions; Julie Houtz, Director, Book Editing & Production; Susan Hills, Senior Acquisitions Editor; Katie Martin, Editor; Judi Connelly, Senior Art Director; Jose Coll, Graphic Designer; Valerie Younkin, Senior Production Designer; Kelly Marshall, Manager, Production Services; Tristan Coffelt, Senior Production Specialist; Shajuan Martin, E-Publishing Specialist Copyright © 2020 ASCD. All rights reserved. By purchasing only authorized electronic or print editions and not participating in or encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials, you support the rights of authors and publishers. Readers may duplicate this book’s tools and the handouts in Appendix A for non-commercial use within their district or school. All other requests to reproduce or republish excerpts of this work in print or electronic format may include a small fee. Please contact the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923, USA (phone: 978-750-8400; fax: 978-646-8600; web: www.copyright.com). To inquire about site licensing options or any other reuse, contact ASCD Permissions at www.ascd.org/permissions, or [email protected], or 703-575-5749. For a list of vendors authorized to license ASCD e-books to institutions, see www.ascd.org/epubs. Send translation inquiries to [email protected]. Please note that it is illegal to otherwise reproduce copies of this work in print or elec-tronic format (including reproductions displayed on a secure intranet or stored in a retrieval system or other electronic storage device from which copies can be made or displayed) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Portions of the text are from the authors’ blog. ASCD® and ASCD LEARN. TEACH. LEAD.® are registered trademarks of ASCD. All other trademarks contained in this book are the property of, and reserved by, their respective owners, and are used for editorial and informational purposes only. No such use should be construed to imply sponsorship or endorsement of the book by the respective owners. All web links in this book are correct as of the publication date below but may have become inactive or otherwise modified since that time. If you notice a deactivated or changed link, please e-mail [email protected] with the words “Link Update” in the subject line. In your message, please specify the web link, the book title, and the page number on which the link appears. PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-1-4166-2885-9   ASCD product #120030   n4/20 PDF E-BOOK ISBN: 978-1-4166-2886-6; see Books in Print for other formats. Quantity discounts are available: e-mail [email protected] or call 800-933-2723, ext. 5773, or 703-575-5773. For desk copies, go to www.ascd.org/deskcopy. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gallagher, Alyssa, author. | Thordarson, Kami, author. Title: Design thinking in play : an action guide for educators / Alyssa Gallagher, Kami Thordarson. Description: Alexandria, Virginia : ASCD, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019045993 (print) | LCCN 2019045994 (ebook) | ISBN 9781416628859 (paperback) | ISBN 9781416628866 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Educational leadership. | Educational change. | School management and organization. | Problem solving. | Creative thinking. Classification: LCC LB2805 .G254 2020 (print) | LCC LB2805 (ebook) | DDC 371.2--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045993 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045994 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20     

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

List of Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1. Design Thinking: What, why, and how?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2. Becoming a Design Thinker: How do you learn to see with new eyes?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 3. Empathize: What does your user really need?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 4. Define: How do you clarify the problem?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 5. Ideate: How do you get to a big idea?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 6. Prototype: What does your idea look like in action?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 7. Test: How do you improve your solution?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Appendix A: Guidelines and Handouts for a Design Thinking Sprint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Appendix B: Design Thinking Resources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

List of Tools Tool #

Tool Name

Tool Purpose

Page #

 1

Act Like Sherlock Holmes

Investigate a problem.

p. 31

 2

Bug List

Identify change opportunities.

p. 33

 3

Portrait of Your Inner Kid

Reconnect with wonder and joy.

p. 36

 4

Five-Why Questioning

Dig deeper and understand complex problems.

p. 39

 5

Rose, Thorn, Bud

Analyze topics to think through potential opportunities and challenges.

p. 42

 6

Empathy Interview Planner

Conduct effective empathy interviews.

p. 49

 7

Who Are Your Extreme Users?

Identify potential empathy interviewees with the most valuable perspectives.

p. 51

 8

Empathy Interview Prep Sheet

Prepare yourself to conduct an empathy interview.

p. 53

 9

A Day in the Life Of . . .

Shadow a user.

p. 58

10

Story Share-and-Capture

Capture insights after empathy interviews.

p. 60

11

Empathy Map

Connect with a user’s needs and experiences.

p. 62

12

Personas

Deepen your understanding of different types of users.

p. 64

13

Putting It All Together

Apply what you’ve learned about users to the design challenge.

p. 66

14

POV Statement Template

Turn user needs into a point-of-view statement.

p. 78

15

HMW Question Template

Turn a POV statement into topics for ideation.

p. 82

16

Warm-Up: 30 Circles

Build creative muscle.

p. 90

17

Idea Generator

Brainstorm lots of ideas quickly.

p. 96

18

Idea Evaluation Matrix

Compare and contrast ideas.

p. 100

19

Brainstorm Blueprint

Maximize your brainstorming power.

p. 103

20

Prototype Sketch Sheet

Draft a prototype.

p. 113

21

Prototype Log

Track the prototyping process.

p. 117

22

60-Second Story

Create the elevator pitch for your design solution.

p. 118

23

Prototype Feedback Sheet

Organize your testing feedback.

p. 126

24

Feedback Capture Grid

Analyze your testing feedback.

p. 128

25

Implementation Action Plan

Map out your solution’s specific actions and resource requirements.

p. 133

PDF copies of these tools are available for download at www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/ books/DesignThinkinginPlayTools.pdf. vi

Introduction Michael Fullan, a worldwide authority on education reform, first published The Meaning of Educational Change in 1982. By 2016, the book was in its fifth edition (and retitled The New Meaning of Educational Change). The takeaway here is that systemic educational change has been on every educator’s radar for a long time. But despite a few significant shifts and pockets of innovation, our education system has been largely immune to change. Blame ingrained habits and mindsets. Traditionally, the job of educators has been to dispense knowledge, assess students, and move them along to the next grade using time-tested “best practices,” many of which were established in the 1860s by Horace Mann (aka Father of the Common School). Let that sink in for a minute: Many of our current educational practices date to the 1860s. Schools were set up to teach basic essentials—reading, writing, and math—and to pass along social values deemed necessary to create responsible, law-abiding citizens able to access work and contribute to nation’s overall economy. Students were assigned by age to grade levels and batch-processed through each grade regardless of any personal differences in their aptitude, intelligence, or capabilities. Standardized testing, content standards, curriculum guides, teacher credentialing, college admissions requirements, and textbook industries all became institutionalized practices within this model of mass education. Along the way, “learning” solidified in people’s minds as something that takes place within a classroom, is led and assessed by a teacher, and results in a grade. In short, public schools were designed to be universal, nonsectarian, and free; they were not designed to meet the individualized needs of students, close the achievement gap, or help break the cycle of poverty. In fact, one could argue that schools today are doing exactly what they were set up to do: meet the needs 1

2

of the community and students as they existed back in the 1800s. The problem is that our needs have changed, and “education as usual” no longer serves today’s students or today’s society. We can continue to let inertia have its way, or we can choose to intentionally redesign our schools and our students’ learning experiences. The latter course requires us to collectively figure out We are living at a time of enormous uncertainty. Technology is advancing at an everincreasing rate, transforming the nature of work and employment. Change is happening at a disorienting pace and our institutions can barely keep up.

how to change a system designed for the past so that it serves the students of today. But here’s the exciting part: Anything that has been designed can be redesigned, including an archaic school system and the learning experiences of students. It’s

—The Brookings Institution, Meaningful Education in Times of Uncertainty (2017)

an amazing opportunity that nonetheless comes with significant challenges. The goal of this book is to help our fellow educators navigate this journey of positive change; our means to that end is design thinking.

The Fear Factor Fear Factor was a TV game show in the early 2000s that required contestants to take on scary challenges—everything from public nudity to jumping out of helicopters to being covered in spiders—in the hope of winning a monetary prize. The stunts themselves were memorable, but the contestants’ comments afterward were downright instructive: nine times out of 10, the contestants said that going through with the stunt—facing their fear—wasn’t as bad as they imagined it would be. Since the publication of our book Design Thinking for School Leaders: Five Roles and Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change (2018), we have had the privilege of interacting with hundreds of leaders across the country as they work to adopt the roles and mindsets it presented. We have been struck by how many of them seemed to be engaged in their own version of Fear Factor, afraid to take a leap into significant systemic change because of possible repercussions from school boards, faculty and staff, families, and the larger community. We can think of no better way to begin this book than by sharing a few strategies you can use to push past the fears that might keep you from embarking on the work of change.

Introduction

3

• Remember your priorities. As a leader, you will likely be criticized no matter what you do; taking criticism personally is a waste of energy. Remind yourself that as long as you ground your work in what is best for students, you can withstand any criticism that comes your way. Design thinking supports this fear-management strategy by linking every change and every solution to unmet needs. • Change the stories you tell yourself. A lot of fear stems from the stories we tell ourselves about what might happen if we take this or that action. The silver lining is that, because we invent these stories, we can change them. Try completing your fear-based story by identifying the worstcase scenario. Then flip this approach and imagine the best. Tell a story of your success. The more you see yourself as capable of creating positive change, the better prepared you are to take it on. • Embrace fear and risk as a necessary component of R&D. There are risks associated with any change, but what are these risks compared to what’s at stake for our students, our schools, and public education at large if we don’t pursue change? Fear is what makes bravery possible, and bravery is what’s required to undertake any significant challenge and make any lasting impact. Although it’s never easy to be the one questioning practices or walking the high wire of innovation, those who act boldly are more likely to make progress. Far too many in education are stuck in a holding pattern—waiting for assurance or the “one best way,” waiting for someone else to solve the problem, waiting for retirement, waiting for permission to

Do not fear change. Change fear. —Karen Salmansohn

do something different. It’s time to stop waiting and start designing. Embracing the habits and mindsets of design thinking replaces the fear of the unknown with curiosity— and, thus, changes the approach to solving problems.

The Process of Design Thinking Design thinking, a problem-solving process grounded in empathy and popularized by David Kelley of IDEO, has tremendous potential to help us reframe and solve the wicked, complex problems we are facing in education. Wicked problems are those that are difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory,

4

and changing requirements that are challenging to recognize. Wicked problems have no distinct boundaries and, as a result, have no clear solutions. Think of global warming, poverty, or world hunger. In education, think of delivering personalized learning, closing the achievement gap, meeting the needs of English language learners, and other ambitious outcomes that the 19th-century factory model of schooling wasn’t set up to achieve. Design thinking channels the habits and mindsets of designers, who are trained to tackle problems with creativity, curiosity, rigor, and discipline. Design thinking asks us to bring our whole selves to the problems we face and to focus on the people our solutions will serve. It is a process that requires both head (the rational, thinking part of our brain) and heart (our feeling, intuitive side). The process we use (see Figure A) is adapted from that of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “Stanford d.school”) and breaks design thinking into five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test (Hasso Plattner Institute, n.d.).

Figure A

Wonder Question

Ideate

Prototype

Notice

Empathize

The Design Thinking Process 

Storytell Test

Produce

Define

Figure A gives the initial impression of a neat, tidy, and reliably linear process. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll see that it’s more complicated than it initially appears. Phases overlap, and the progression through them sometimes loops back before moving forward. The reality of design thinking is even messier and freer. It is a fundamentally iterative process, and both the order and timing

Introduction

of the five phases are flexible. Phases can be skipped or repeated several times. In fact, design thinking, in practice, can look and feel a whole lot more like what you see in Figure B.

Figure B

A Messy and Nonlinear Process 

We have organized the content of this book around these formal phases of design thinking. Much like following a recipe provides a cook assurance that the end result will at least approximate the desired dish, the five-phase process of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test provides guardrails to steer you through the resolution of wicked problems. The more comfortable people are in the kitchen, the more likely they will deviate from a recipe’s strict instructions; this is true of design thinking as well. When you first try it, you will be well served by following the steps exactly as outlined in each phase of the process. As you gain experience, though, you’ll feel more confident improvising.

Design Thinking in the Education Setting Design thinking can feel counterintuitive in the world of education, where so much of the work is driven by top-down mandates, prescribed curriculum, and testing schedules. It’s such a different way of solving problems that it will likely feel foreign and strange. The first time you solve a complex challenge using design thinking, you may find yourself questioning not only the process but also your ability to navigate it (see Figure C).

5

6

Figure C

First Time Using Design Thinking This is hard! A-ha!

I don’t get it!

This is stupid. I got this!

Wow!

Don’t be discouraged! If you trust the process and work through each of the phases, when you look back on the experience, it’s likely to feel more like what you see in Figure D.

Figure D

Design Thinking upon Reflection Courage

Sense of Humor I can do this again!

Love

Humility

Willingness to look foolish

Self-reflection

In our own design thinking work with school leaders, what stands out is the number of logistical questions we have received. Where do I start? Can you provide me with tools, resources, and templates that will help me through the

Introduction

process, step by step? We have written this book to act as our proxy—a guide on the side that offers tips and tools to support you on your road to thinking and leading more like a designer. At the end of each chapter, we highlight potential risks you might encounter during each phase of design thinking. Our intent is not to add to your fear factor but to highlight these risks for your awareness and planning. We trust that after working through the process once or twice, you’ll feel confident cycling in and out of the different phases and will jump back and forth within this action guide, as needed.

Changing Mindsets and Establishing Norms For many educators, design thinking is a brand-new sandbox to play in. Before you get started, it’s helpful to know the sandbox’s parameters. With that in mind, we’d like to suggest both mindsets and norms that will enable you to get the most out of both yourself and your team. Mindsets first: • Design thinking is human centered. Everything is grounded in the needs of the user. This is critical. As the designer, you are always designing for someone else’s needs. • Design thinking is biased toward action. The point is not to just talk about change but to take action to make change happen. At every step, the process challenges you to turn insight into action and keep moving forward. • Design thinking requires radical collaboration. All parties must reach outside their comfort zone and work with others to solve the wicked problems they share. • Design thinking is fueled by prototyping. Building is the way participants learn, gather feedback, and iterate ideas. • Design thinking requires courageous curiosity. Participants commit to being relentless in asking questions, learning, and playing with ideas, practices, and traditions—even at the risk of upsetting those who are satisfied with the status quo. • Design thinking involves mindfulness. Participants are intentional about balancing process and product. Although design thinking is a way to solve wicked problems, it’s also a way to develop problem-solving skills and become better equipped to take on future challenges.

7

8

Whenever we work with groups, we always take time to establish norms— the standards of behavior expected of all individuals participating in the collaboration, such as •

Assume best intentions.

•

Be a learner, not a knower.

•

Take risks.

•

Be your authentic self.

•

Play hard!

This list is just a starting point; bear in mind that norms are most valuable when they are co-created by the team that plans to use them.

Keys to Success This book is full of opportunities for skill development, encouragement, and shortcuts. It is meant to help you question what you have come to know as “truth” in the world of education and to offer a lens to start viewing your world through the perspective of a designer. It also points out the risk factors you’ll want to be aware of and provides suggestions for turning your insights into action. Here are a few tips that will help you get the most out of what the book offers: •

Be you. We want you to bring your whole self to the design thinking process. Yes, bring your education experience and specific professional expertise, but also bring your passion, your questions, your hopes, and your dreams. Trust your intuition and try to keep your inner critic from usurping your seat at the table. Education needs you. It needs your ideas, your leadership, your mistakes, and your prototypes.

•

Do the work. We hope you will experience “a-ha!” moments while read-ing this book, but the real insights will come from the work this book inspires. You’ll have to dig in and trust the process. Go ahead and write in the book, filling out the templates provided. You can access and down-load clean copies of all of tools at www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/ books/galla-gher2020.pdf and at www.leadlikeadesigner.com.

•

Grab a buddy or two. This book is best used in a group setting. Wicked problems are too hard to solve in isolation, so enlist a colleague—or, better yet, put together a small design team and work through the

Introduction

process together. Design thinking embraces a commitment to extreme collaboration. • Love it, leave it, or use it. Don’t spin your wheels focusing on ideas that don’t inspire your passion. You should feel excited about the work you are doing—go where the energy is. Not sure if an idea will work? Look for simple solutions that create actions, gather feedback, and then decide: Is this idea worth further exploration and trial? If not, let it go, and move on to an idea that is. • Keep going. If you feel stuck at any point in the process, don’t give in. Simply identify the next smallest move or action you can take. Do that . . . and repeat. Small actions over time build the momentum necessary to create big change. • Share and celebrate your work. Don’t hide the work you are doing— good or bad, success or failure. All educators benefit when we share the wicked problems we are tackling and the solutions we are prototyping. If you are on social media, consider documenting your work-in-progress using #DT4EduLeaders. You’ll find a community of fellow educators to cheer you on toward the success you seek. We all know that “education as usual” is not working. It’s time for educators everywhere to stop waiting around for solutions and get busy figuring them out. Design thinking gives you the power to redesign anything and everything about your school. Wondering, Where do I start? What’s the first step? This book is for you.

If the problem affects you, you must solve it. Complaining is not productive. —Vineet Raj Kapor

9

1

Design Thinking What, why, and how?

never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change Y ou something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —R. Buckminster Fuller

In the business world, design thinking has long been touted as a strategic way to generate innovative solutions. Some go so far as to suggest that design thinking is the key to successful innovation. However, design thinking has been slower to take hold in education settings. Although it is definitely an emerging problem-­solving strategy—and although those using this process are experiencing ­success—it remains unknown to many education leaders, especially at the highest levels of organizations. Still, there are pockets across the education landscape where incredible things are happening as a result of design thinking and design thinking mindsets. The University of Calgary has a design thinking-based course for undergraduate students that is a required component of their Bachelor of Education degree program. The focus is on the teacher as the designer of learning. Preservice teachers identify problems of practice from their practicum experiences, use a process of divergent and convergent thinking strategies to explore the possible 11

12

underlying causes that manifest as a “problem,” collaboratively identify various solutions, and test and refine these prototypes in their final practicum. It is a wonderful process that forces preservice teachers to think beyond the immediate problem in front of them and to look for solutions that they might not have considered. This design thinking course is an eye-opener for beginning teachers and emphasizes the importance of keeping students as the focus of their work. Think about how powerful this is: every teacher candidate at the University of Calgary is being taught to solve problems using design thinking. There are design thinking success stories at every level of education. Harrisburg School District, a public K–12 school district in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has used design thinking to reimagine their elementary schools, creating a personalized learning program where students are no longer assigned to grade levels based solely on age and have more autonomy in how they are learning. In May 2019, Amanda Haughes, a 2nd grade teacher from Campbell Union School District in California, tweeted her students’ reflections about the effects of design thinking: We learn empathy by solving problems for other people. We learn to try new things when something doesn’t work. We make things we can really use & not all of our projects look the same. We figure out the problems we are having. We get to do what we want and still do what the teacher wants. We stick with it even when it gets hard. We solve problems.

There is limited definitive research as to whether students who are taught design thinking benefit academically or retain the strategies and use them outside the classroom setting. A study by researchers at the Stanford Graduate School (Chin et al., 2019), however, found that students performed better on projects and were able to apply design thinking strategies they had learned to entirely new problems without any prompting. Doris B. Chin, who led the research, shared that the overall takeaway is that we were able, through instruction, to change the way students were able to approach problems. The strategies we thought would be good are in fact good, and the kids are

Design Thinking

choosing to transfer them from classroom instruction to a different environment.” (Quoted in Andrews, 2019, para. 7)

Imagine if every educator had the opportunity to engage with design thinking and walked away with the ability to approach problems from a different perspective, one that is grounded in empathy. We have to believe education would be in a very different place than it currently is. Design thinking is well worth exploring; it offers a problem-solving and, ultimately, a change-management strategy that is grounded in empathy for the users. Because design thinking embraces the mindset of radical collaboration and is best embraced as a team sport, it offers many powerful co-creation opportunities. Top-down mandated change is not sustainable. Most people no longer want a solution dictated to them; they want to be a part of creating the solution. Contrary to the belief that people implement decisions they believe in, what we have come to find is that people implement solutions they understand. There is no better way to engage people in implementing ideas and solutions than to have them take part in co-creating new ideas and solutions that are designed to meet the needs of the end users. To effectively implement solutions, people need to understand them; because design thinking offers a path for co-creation of solutions to challenging problems, it promotes buy-in and ownership. Leaders of this effort also learn a new way of approaching problems and a new way of working with the people they serve.

Design Thinking 101 Design thinking, a process for problem solving and a method for creative action, dates to the 1960s, when design methods and practices were being investigated as a way to solve wicked problems. Although wicked problems are often the most challenging, design thinking can be applied to any problem, whether in business, in school, or even in your personal life. Because the design process is grounded in empathy, designers always start by uncovering unmet human needs that may have otherwise been invisible. Uncovering these needs yields new insights and valuable information that may lead in new directions and down new problemsolving paths. Design thinking encourages a shift from an “inside-out” method of problem solving to an “outside-in” stance. The traditional inside-out method of problem solving most commonly used in schools prioritizes internal knowledge, experience, and skills to view and solve problems. Design thinking represents a

13

14

shift in problem solving. Its outside-in stance incorporates fresh thinking and new perspectives and puts the user at the center of the problem to be solved. In education, that user may be the student, staff member, or parent. Design thinking requires spending more time with the problem—you may even hear some designers talk about needing to “fall in love with the problem” to really understand it. Too often, educators are quick to identify a problem and move right into solving it, without true clarity. Design thinking challenges many of the notions around problem definition by suspending certainty. Many a “welldefined” problem turns out to have an entirely different definition based on discoveries through design thinking; such discoveries can help education teams move in completely new directions.

Empathy: Focusing on the User Empathy is really what differentiates design thinking from other problemsolving processes and is often successful when working to shift large systems that have become path-dependent, so wedded to habit that it is challenging for anyone to try something different. All systems are layered with ingrained traditions, habits, and mindsets that create, if not immunity to change, at least a strong resistance to it. There is a complicated paradox in education: although education leaders often observe that systems are not working, they are also comfortable existing in those systems. Let’s face it—for most of us in education, our “internship” began at the age of 5 or 6. We have spent the better part of our lives being a part of a system (good or bad) that we have grown up with and, thus, unintentionally replicate. Collectively, we need a process that will jolt us out of this normalcy and support us as we work to question the underlying values and beliefs of the broader education system. Because it is grounded in empathy, design thinking offers an opportunity to completely reframe the education system and the problems we have been trying to solve for decades. Empathy places the user in the center of the problem-solving process; rather than starting with the identification and solving of the problem, design thinking requires first seeking to understand more about the experience of end users. What are they struggling with? Why are they struggling? Empathy enables speaking in a different language that recognizes others’ long-held ideas and establishes understanding and common ground. This, in turn, enables really digging into a problem while seeking to understand both the obvious needs and,

Design Thinking

more important, the hidden and often unexpressed needs—which offer the greatest opportunity for change. As Steve Jobs called out in 1997, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” We see this a lot in school when we ask students questions like What do you want school to be? When you consider that their conception of school is often limited to what they have experienced, it’s no wonder they can struggle to articulate what would be better for them. It’s the job of the designer to propose new solutions based on the needs they uncover. Homing in on the unexpressed needs of, say, the students who come to school every day but remain chronically disengaged, or the teachers who feel caught in a system that prioritizes achievement data over actual learning experiences challenges entrenched beliefs and helps leaders create sustainable change. Empathy must be the driving force behind any changes made in our nation’s schools. Empathy can and should act as guardrails to change, keeping us on the road to constantly and consistently improving the experience for our users. Nothing else matters. To effectively move our schools forward, we must be willing to listen, to compromise, and to meet people where they are.

The Five Phases of Design Thinking This book unpacks each phase of the design thinking process (see Figure 1.1): • Empathize. The empathize phase is all about understanding the needs, feelings, and experiences of others—and it requires learning about and directly from the user. Taking the time to develop empathy for the end user is key to the design thinking process and is what differentiates it from so many other problem-solving processes. (See Chapter 3.) • Define. The define phase focuses on more accurately clarifying the needs identified in the empathize phase, defining the problem, and creating a point of view from which to identify solutions. (See Chapter 4.) • Ideate. This is the brainstorming phase. Ideating is all about creativity, divergent thinking, and coming up with “moon shot” ideas. Understanding and improving brainstorming skills enables teams to develop more innovative options for prototyping. (See Chapter 5.) • Prototype. Prototyping is about building to learn by combining and connecting different ideas. Instead of sitting around and talking about why an idea may or may not work, test it! This phase is all about transforming

15

16

an idea into a tangible form. Prototypes can be physical, virtual, or experiential, but they are always relevant, rapid, and rough. (See Chapter 6.) • Test. Design thinking is an iterative process. The first try most likely won’t be the last try. Iteration is a key component of the entire process. Testing a solution and gathering feedback reveals whether the solution meets the users’ needs and solves the problem. Testing and gathering feedback may result in returning to one of the previous phases. After cycling through a few rounds of prototyping and testing, ideas will become more sophisticated and refined—and, ultimately, will result in a solution. (See Chapter 7.)

Figure 1.1

Question

Ideate

Prototype

Notice Wonder

Empathize

The Design Thinking Process 

Storytell Test

Produce

Define

IDEO, one of the most well-known design firms in the world, simplifies this process into three phases: inspiration, ideation, and implementation, defining inspiration as “the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions,” ideation as “the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas,” and implementation as “the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives” (Brown, 2009, p. 16). Even though the number of phases differs, all of the same core components and mindsets are embedded in the process we use in this book. All design processes share the same foundational components (Ertel & Solomon, 2014):

Design Thinking

• Developing a deep understanding of, and empathy for, users and their needs; • Cycling through periods of divergent thinking to explore diverse sources of inspiration; • Learning through quick cycles of prototyping, gathering feedback, and making necessary adaptations; and • Testing solutions with a small group and only scaling up after these solutions have proved effective in meeting the identified needs.

The Power Pieces Power pieces are strategies that are infused and embedded throughout the entire design thinking process. Notice, wonder, and question. Learning to notice, wonder, and question as a part of your daily practice will help create many of the habits and mindsets of designers and open you up to new possibilities. These skills are built through reconnecting with your inner child, becoming more curious, and learning to use questioning in a new way. These strategies are so important that we’ll dive deep into them in Chapter 2. Tell a story. Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools leaders have at their disposal. Telling stories creates connections and provides entry points for the new solution, vision, or future that is being created. Intentionally telling the story throughout the process will help create fertile ground for implementation. Produce. Design thinking embraces a bias to action. After all, coming up with new solutions doesn’t matter if they are never implemented. Raising awareness of the work of a producer will help you bring hustle to the process, maintain momentum, and build the team you need to do the work. Chapter 7 will help you, as the producer of your project, toggle between creating a compelling vision and diving into the nitty-gritty details of implementation.

From Good to Great Design Good design isn’t about making something that looks good or is left up to a select group to determine. In the context of design thinking, good design solves a problem for an end user using insights gained from empathy work. Tim Brown (2009) of IDEO has described good design as the intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability:

17

18

• The solution you create has to be desirable. Your end users have to feel that the proposed solution meets their needs (perhaps in a way they never imagined) and solves a problem for them. • The solution you create has to be feasible. It has to both solve the problem for the end user and be something that can be implemented within the constraints of your organization. • The solution has to be viable. Any solution you create must have longterm sustainability. The intersection of these three qualities—desirability, feasibility, and viability—is the sweet spot for innovation and for solving problems in a way that delights the end user (see Figure 1.2). As you work to create solutions that meet the needs of your user, test solutions against this intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability. You’ll know you’ve hit the jackpot of design when all three are met.

Figure 1.2

Great Design 

Desirability

Feasibility

Great design!

Viability

The Art of Intention The design thinking process involves shifting between divergent and convergent thinking, between flaring and focusing, between problem finding and solution seeking. Skilled design thinkers are able to intentionally toggle between these vastly different modes of thinking and working. The art of intention is not only a key player in many places during the design process; intentionality is the difference between a good designer and

Design Thinking

a great designer. At the start of any design project, empathy and need finding make up the “problem” space. This is in direct contrast to traditional problem solving, where the “solution” space—searching for an answer before completely understanding the problem—is the origin point. Intentionality is key to shifting the origin point from solution seeking to problem finding. The objective in this early phase is to dig deep into the heart of the problem, identifying the underlying beliefs, values, and habits that are at its core. We want you to fall in love with the problem you are solving before falling for any potential solutions. It can be difficult to suspend certainty and resist jumping into solution mode, but with new strategies to guide you, and with practice, you can approach any problem confidently from a new direction. As illustrated in Figure 1.3, empathy and need finding— the work of understanding the problem from the perspective of your end user—occupies most of the problem identification space. This shift in approach often results in a shift in solution. Being able to name the problem is a great place to start, but spending time swirling around in the problem to develop a deeper understanding will no doubt lead to a more innovative solution.

Figure 1.3

Problem Identification Space  Define

Empathy & need finding

Ideate

Prototype & test

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem. —Malcolm Forbes

19

20

VisionSpring, a low-cost eye care provider based in India, had successfully served adults for years but was interested in improving eye care for children. (Brown & Wyatt, 2010). Although the company had experienced success with adults, it had had limited success getting children into clinics. The VisionSpring team approached this challenge by first exploring the question “How might we get more parents to understand the importance of eye care?” After engaging with their users, they uncovered new insights and shifted their focus to “How might we create a clinic experience that children find safe and enjoyable?” Their first prototype involved an eye care technician doing vision screenings at schools; children still found it scary. Their second prototype involved teachers doing vision screenings, and their third and successful prototype had students involved in helping to screen other students. Had the VisionSpring team not taken the time to understand the problem of children not getting eye care and stayed with their original problem definition, they would have likely gone down a different path of problem solving. Starting with a more interesting question will help you create a more innovative solution. The more you learn about the end user’s experience, the clearer the opportunities for innovative solutions become. Once you have gathered insights and homed in on the problem definition, you’ll diverge again in the ideation phase. Divergent thinking in the ideation phase is all about dreaming big and looking for connections between ideas that might create interesting options to prototype. When you finally converge on an idea or two, you’re ready to start building to learn and testing possible solutions. When testing solutions, be sure to create space for listening without letting your own judgments, opinions, or emotional attachment to any of the ideas push you toward favoring a solution that might not be the best solution to meet the needs of your end user. There must be intentionality every step of the way to create more space, more thinking, less judgment, and less pressure to immediately get it “right.” This space that gets created is simultaneously a beautiful part of design thinking and a source of frustration for many the first time they experience it.

Radical Collaboration + T-Shaped Thinking Design thinking embraces the notion of radical collaboration, encouraging collaboration with others both inside and outside an industry. The “T-shaped thinker” was first mentioned by David Guest in a 1991 article in The Independent and then embraced by Tim Brown, CEO and head of the design firm IDEO, as a

Design Thinking

way to find the right workers for that organization (Hansen, 2010). Essentially, a T-shaped thinker has not only deep knowledge and expertise in his or her field but also curiosity about and working knowledge of a lot of other areas. This broad base of knowledge helps circumvent the “paradox of expertise,” where deep knowledge can sometimes cloud one’s ability to see new ideas (Berkun, 2015). The world of education is filled with T-shaped thinkers, people who are both deeply knowledgeable about the craft of teaching and also have expertise and interest in other topics and disciplines. As you are assembling your design team, seek out the T-shaped thinkers. They are inventive, intellectually curious, and highly collaborative, and getting them on your team sets you up to deliver an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving that can offer more creative solutions. The entire process will be enriched as a result.

Changing Organizational Culture Design thinking is much more than a process; it is about learning to think and problem-solve differently. It has the power to help you solve your wicked problems and to help transform your culture. Globalization and technological advances are causing disruptions in many industries; companies that embrace design thinking as a problem-solving model are better able to connect with customers and find a competitive advantage. When Airbnb began in 2009, founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nate Blecharczyk were located in Mountain View, California. In the beginning, they were wildly successful, but then their customer base started to flatline. The three owners turned their attention to data and reworking their website, but when they reached out for business advice, Paul Graham, the head of startup incubator Y Combinator, sent them in a very different direction. Graham asked them where the majority of their customers were located (at the time, New York City) and told them, “Go to your users.” They followed his words of wisdom, headed to New York, and began interacting directly with their customers. Through observations, interviews, and conversations with customers, they were able to develop new creative breakthroughs that propelled the company forward. They learned that there is power in empathy and have created a company culture that not only relies on data and technology but also values the face-to-face conversations that give their insights more depth. As a result, Airbnb encourages every employee to be part of the process: to host, travel, and experience the brand from every aspect (Gallagher, 2017).

21

22

Airbnb isn’t alone; many corporate leaders are embracing design thinking to gain insight into how to truly connect and delight their customers. Imagine the possibilities in education if we were able to uncover new insights and create experiences that would truly delight our users—students, teachers, and parents. Organizational cultures that invest in teaching design thinking experience the by-products of creating a more innovative culture. Put most simply, culture is a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization. When you work to embrace design thinking—both the process and the ­mindsets—you are laying the foundation for a design-inspired culture, an environment where the mindsets and practices of designers are shared and become the “new normal.” These new practices and mindsets have the power to shift postures toward the possible and create space for more creativity and innovation. There are other tangible benefits that come from design thinking work, including increased collaboration by all stakeholders. District and school design teams who dig into empathy work have a greater understanding of purpose and thus are more connected to the solutions that are being developed. When interviewing leaders successfully using the design thinking process, we have heard over and over again, “We don’t do things to people; we do things with people.” It’s a great statement to make as a leader—and a hard statement to put into action. The practice of empathy, however, makes this statement a reality. Those you are leading feel heard and that they are part of the decision-making process, even when the decisions are high level.

Facing the Challenges of Design Thinking With all of the design thinking success stories and positive by-products, you may be wondering why design thinking has been slow to spread in the world of K–12 education. We have questioned this as well and believe there are four main reasons design thinking hasn’t yet been embraced. Design thinking is chaotic and unpredictable. Although the design thinking process is often laid out as a linear progression, it is most often messy and can be challenging to manage. There are many moving pieces (and people!) in the process, presenting different aspects during the divergent phases. It can be difficult to predict where the convergence will occur. This unpredictability can make people uncomfortable and oftentimes frustrated by the lack of a quick solution.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is more than just a process. The design thinking process is a way of being, a way of approaching a challenge, and your orientation to the world. It requires the ability to change one’s point of view at a moment’s notice. It is also a practice of visualization and looking forward. As David J. Schwartz advised in The Magic of Thinking Big (1959/1987), “Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualization adds value to everything. A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn’t stuck with the present” (p. 84). Design thinking is time intensive. There is no quick fix. Because design thinking is empathy based, it requires time to gain deeper understanding. Although data and technology can help provide some surface insights, it is the conversations that stem from curious questions that enable the development of a more valuable and suitable solution to a challenge. It takes time to have conversations; it takes time to schedule empathy interviews; it takes time to observe. Even once you start creating solutions, design thinking is an iterative process that requires time, something that is in high demand in education. Design thinking creates tension and challenges the status quo. Because design thinking has the potential to challenge prevailing practices and culture in education, the process may create tension between the articulated practices of an organization and the possible unknown. In addition, the design thinking process can bring to light additional problems or challenges, creating even more discomfort with the current status quo. This can be a positive by-product for those who are ready and willing to tackle challenges, but it can also be overwhelming. When you dig below the surface, there is a lot of work to be done and many problems to be solved; for some people, it is simply easier to go about things the way they always have. How many parts of the system, however, are no longer working for today’s students? As Margaret Wheatley (2001) noted, Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don’t want to change. We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things. If we don’t listen, things can stay as they are. But most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different. If that’s true, we have to listen more, not less. And we have to be willing to move into the discomfort of uncertainty and confusion. (para. 12)

23

24

Change is hard, and design thinking is a messy process that requires a bit of time in the land of uncertainty. Although this feels uncomfortable at first, the more you experience it, the more comfortable you will become working within it.

Getting Started Sometimes when school or district administrators get interested in design thinking, they believe they have to hire consultants or professional designers. Sure, there are times when bringing in outside expertise is beneficial for all involved, but there is also value in building internal capability. We believe educators are capable of learning how to think and behave more like designers. Design thinking is a problem-solving process that is accessible to everyone. In the world of design thinking, there are several terms that relate to people within the process. In this book, we use these terms as follows: • User/end user. The users or end users are the people for whom you are solving the problem. They are the people with whom you will interact directly to gather more information during the empathize phase. They are also the people who will directly benefit from any solutions you create as a result of the design thinking process. • Designer. This is you; you are the designer. Sometimes when we mention the word designer, people automatically remove themselves from the possibility of being one. They often assume that this role requires creativity and expression in abundance—and although both of these traits show up in the design process, they are accessible to everyone. You may not realize it, but you use the act of design in your life every day. Working through the strategies in this book will help you build the skills and experience needed to feel more comfortable calling yourself a design thinker. • Design team. This is your team or the team you choose to engage in the design thinking process. Design thinking is best played as a team sport; we encourage you to pull together a team and dig in together. Every time you solve a problem or create a plan, you are designing. Most of this is done unintentionally; however, with a little awareness and practice, you can intentionally design everything around you. Design thinking is the process needed to make the intentionality and process visible. By embracing design

Design Thinking

thinking, you and your team can become a catalyst for changing the culture of powerlessness that exists in many of today’s schools. Engaging in this process will help you look at your leadership, your team, and your school with fresh eyes and a sense of possibility. You are a designer, capable of solving wicked problems, and there are a lot of wicked problems in education. We have work to do—let’s get started!

Design Thinking: Risk Factors 1. Making assumptions. Don’t assume everyone on your team is familiar with design thinking. It is well worth taking time to familiarize your team with both design thinking terms and the process. You might also want to check in on any previous experience they have had with design thinking, negative or positive. Checking the assumptions about your team up front can often save time down the road. 2. Starting too big. We get it—you (and maybe your team) are all in and excited to tackle your wickedest problems. Consider setting those problems aside for a short time and tackling some easier-to-solve challenges first. Successfully navigating the design thinking process with an easier challenge out of the gate will build not only individual skill levels but also the team’s creative confidence. 3. Exclusivity. Often, a school’s first design team is made of volunteers who already have an interest in design thinking, but as time goes on, there will likely be broader interest in the challenges the design team chooses to tackle and the process they use. In accord with best practice, we advocate for inclusive design teams that are open to others and where artifacts of learning along the way are shared with anyone who has an interest.

25

26

Design Thinking: Insight to Action Reading is good; putting what you have read into practice is better. Here are three actions you can take now to build momentum and keep moving: 1. Create a design team. There is no “right way” to create the team. One school we worked with invited anyone interested to be a part of the team as long as they committed to doing the work. Although there is no perfect number, either, for the size of the team, we like the advice Tina Seelig shared in a creativity class that Alyssa attended: “You should be able to feed your creative team with two large pizzas.” 2. Share background knowledge with everyone on your design and administrative teams. Consider providing them with an article or book about design thinking or an article of inspiration. This helps in leveling the playing field and provides equal access to information prior to your first team meeting. 3. Engage your teams in a design thinking “sprint.” The best way to engage your team in design thinking is to dive in. We recommend taking your team through a design sprint where everyone gains exposure to the process without having to solve a problem that may be near and dear to their hearts. Set aside 60 to 90 minutes and facilitate a design sprint using the materials (facilitator guidelines and handouts to be replicated) provided in Appendix A.

2

Becoming a Design Thinker

How do you learn to see with new eyes? so much men’s ignorance that does the harm as their knowing I tsoain’t many things that ain’t so.

—Artemus Ward

We recently attended a conference in Chicago, a city that neither of us had visited before. As we traveled from the airport, we asked our driver a dozen questions or more about what we were seeing. We asked about the best place for pizza and what was a “do not miss” in the short time we were there. We wandered the city and took in as much as possible: the artwork; the architecture; and, as it happened to be St. Patrick’s Day, the dyed-green Chicago River. It was exciting to visit someplace we hadn’t been before and notice the smells, the sounds, the different scenes. All of our senses were attuned to seeing new things. Becoming a design thinker means learning to see things with a fresh set of eyes and embracing a beginner’s mindset. The more experience people have in their school or in their current roles, the more difficult it can be to do this. 27

28

Familiarity can create numbness to situations; your mind may automatically filter out a lot of information without your even realizing it. Think about it. When was the last time you questioned why things are the way they are at your school? When was the last time you noticed all of the details around you, or allowed yourself the luxury of wondering what might happen if you tested a new idea?

Notice Many of us have the sense of operating on autopilot, with habits that we repeat every day. There’s the commute to work, our workout routine, the shopping pattern in a grocery store. Have you ever looked up during a familiar car ride and thought, Where did that building come from? I didn’t see even see it go up! Our daily routines, barring any emergency, are somewhat the same. Get up, get ready, check your e-mail and calendar, eat breakfast, and get yourself to work. We get caught in a “rinse, lather, repeat” cycle. We’re like the man in the widely shared Instagram photo who is on a whale-watching excursion but so glued to his phone that he completely misses the whale surfacing mere feet away. With today’s technology and distractions, it’s no surprise that most of us take in only a small percentage of everything around us at any given moment— and each of us has a filter for what we view. For example, if you believe that your school is serving students well, then that is the filter through which you will view everything about your school, and your brain will collect data that support this view. The human brain is powerful, yet it can be trained. You can hone your attention skills and learn to pay attention to what is around you. As silly as it sounds, a good place to start is to simply notice what you notice. How could you notice more? When are you curious, engaged, or puzzled? Educators’ days are full of perplexity and noises that are continually competing for our attention. Much of our daily decision-making process is based on past practice and knowledge that we have gathered over time. We rarely take time to think about most decisions, as many have become automatic. This can affect how we manage and make school decisions. Our path dependency has blinded us to new possibilities and opportunities. But there are strategies that can help you notice more about the world around you.

Becoming a Design Thinker

Develop All Your Senses As we get older, the way our senses give us information about the world changes (Medline Plus, 2019). Our senses become less acute, and this can make it harder for us to notice details unless we are mindful about using our senses to pay attention to the small things in our day-to-day lives. Try taking a walk around your neighborhood and focus on only what you hear. When you return from your walk, create a mind map or a list of the things you heard. Was there something new you noticed? Careful listening is a skill that can be amplified and practiced. Tapping into all of our five senses can lead to some interesting new discoveries; it takes intentional practice to notice throughout one’s daily routines.

Slow Down What if “airplane mode” wasn’t just a setting on your phone but a strategy you embraced even when not on a plane? In today’s fast-paced world, taking a moment is more than a luxury—it is critical to creativity, well-being, and the thought process. As a school leader, your day moves quickly, solving problems and task switching at a rapid pace. You sit down to check the e-mail that has accumulated in the past hour and within a few minutes you have a student who needs attention, a parent standing at the front desk wanting “five minutes,” and a call from the district office that requires an immediate answer. Being on automatic pilot helps you move through the chaos and clutter of the day. But think about the difference just 30 minutes in a distraction-free zone every day could make. Maybe you could get up a bit earlier in the morning to give yourself a quiet space to reflect on the day ahead. Or you could take two 15-minute walks, one after the last bell around the school grounds to process and one before you leave school for the day—leaving your cell phone behind. No matter how you find the time, the key is to make it a habit. Find a “slow” time to gather your thoughts and reflect on decisions made or think through the ones that are ahead. You will likely find that this chance to slow down will make you more effective and efficient when you return.

Act Like Sherlock Holmes A certain well-known fictional detective said, “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know” (Doyle, 1892/2003). As a leader at your school, make it your business to know, see, and question what

29

30

other people may not. Tool 1 can help you with this effort, as can these “food for thought” questions to ask yourself about your school: • What do the artifacts on the wall say to you, and what do they suggest about how your school defines learning? • What are students discussing or not discussing? • Who is doing the work or owning the learning? • Are there clear directions to guide all students? • Does your school feel like a place you’d like to stay a while or quickly pass through?

View Something from a Different Perspective Sometimes all one needs to do is consider a challenge, problem, or experience from a different point of view. Doug Dietz, an industrial designer for GE Healthcare, created the MRI machine, which uses magnetic resonance imaging to create scans of the body (Köppen, 2015). The MRI machine is certainly a technological marvel, but it is not something that provides the most pleasant of experiences for patients, especially children. Dietz was visiting a hospital and chatting with a technician about the latest improvements he’d made to the scanner when he overheard a little girl telling her parents how terrified she was to go into the “scary machine.” For the first time, Dietz saw the experience through the eyes of a child, and it forever changed his perspective. He dug deeper and learned that a startling number of children had to be sedated for their scans. This was enough to propel him to action. Dietz developed greater empathy for children by spending time at daycare centers and talking to kids and parents about their hospital experiences. Using this information, he created the Adventure Series Scanner: Some MRI machines were created to look like pirate shipwrecks, others like underwater submarines; entire themed experiences were created for the children. They were no longer just getting a scan; they were pirates on an adventure or divers looking for mermaids. The transformation was incredible. Patient satisfaction scores went way up and the need for sedation decreased dramatically. Dietz knew he had solved the problem when he overheard a child ask about “coming back again tomorrow.” What might happen if you viewed something through someone else’s perspective, even if, like Dietz, it forces you to reexamine a personal success and something you are proud of?

Becoming a Design Thinker

Tool 1

Act Like Sherlock Holmes Investigate something at your school as though you were a detective.

Detective Clues:

Be Inclusive:

Walk your school searching for clues.

Attention is about using every one of your senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.

What clues might you miss because they aren’t obvious?

Spot the Differences:

Be Mindful:

Can you spot the differences between your vision and the day-to-day reality?

Select one thing to focus on at a time. Attention is a finite resource. What will get your attention?

31

32

Look for What Bugs You As you go through your day, you likely have annoyances; we all do. What if you kept track of things that bug you? The goal here isn’t to focus on the negative, but rather to reveal the opportunities hidden in these annoyances. Reframing a point of friction can be an incredible opportunity for a design thinker who is armed and ready to tackle problems. This is a strategy that works across all ages. Tom and David Kelley, in Creative Confidence (2015), note that adults and students alike can create and keep “bug lists,” which is as simple as it sounds: a running list of things that bug you. We have seen teachers create a “What Bugs You?” wall in their classrooms where students can place sticky notes or record the things that may be getting in their way of learning at school. These notes can provide the basis for ideas for design sprints (see Appendix A), which are a way to help students see that within every problem lies an opportunity for innovation. In one district we worked with, this tool was used to enhance administrative leadership. Each administrator kept a bug list for two weeks and then prioritized their list. Through a sticky-note process, they identified the top three common problems: (1) lack of communication, (2) a misunderstanding of priorities, and (3) confusion about processes. The team was then able to dive deeper to understand each of these annoyances. The district office leadership team was able to use this information to guide their work, which then included solutions to these issues as well. Creating a collective bug list not only helped them solve problems that had been under the radar, but also built problem-solving confidence as a group. Try creating your own bug list using Tool 2. What if you kept track of everything that bugged you for two weeks? What opportunities are hiding in your list?

Wonder Wonder is our response to something beautiful, unexpected, Children see magic because they look for it. —Christopher Moore

or unexplainable. It is often the cause of curiosity. Have you ever been part of a shared moment of wonder? Cosmic events, such as a lunar eclipse, tend to draw large crowds who gather to experience something magical together. You can feel the anticipation before the event, and when the moon covers the sun and the day turns to night, there are collective

Becoming a Design Thinker

Tool 2

Bug List What Bugs You?  1.

 2.

 3.

 4.

 5.

 6.

 7.

 8.

 9.

10.

are ties t? i n tu lis por r bug p o ou at Wh g in y n i d hi

33

34

gasps and exclamations of awe. That same experience is repeated in the current trend of pop-up museums like Candytopia, the Color Factory, and the Museum of Ice Cream. The Museum of Ice Cream consists of several rooms connected like a maze that present interactive ice cream– and candy-themed experiences to delight the senses. You progress through brightly colored rooms filled with giant popsicles, life-sized gummy bears, and candy tastings. For the grand finale, visitors are invited to dive into a swimming pool filled with rainbow sprinkles. Visiting the ice cream museum is a novel and fun experience that people are clearly craving. The San Francisco exhibit sold out its first batch of tickets in 15 minutes, and as of June 2018, the Museum of Ice Cream has brought in $20 million in ticket sales. Although visiting one of these new pop-up museums can add wonder to your life, there are other ways to help you invite more wonder into your world.

Plan a “Yes Day” What if you said “yes” to everything that came your way for a day? There is a growing trend among young families, inspired by the children’s picture book Yes Day! (Rosenthal & Lichtenheld, 2011), to set aside one day a year where the parents essentially agree to all of their children’s ideas. These days are intended to create small victories for children who may otherwise be told what to do. What is interesting is that parents who have participated in a Yes Day often find the day just as enjoyable as their children do. Yes Day is all about breaking your routine and removing “no” from your vocabulary for 24 hours. What might happen if you embraced a Yes Day, at either home or work?

Seek Out Mastery and Genius Wonder speaks to our desire to be moved by the world around us, to be engaged and fascinated by it. Spend some time appreciating the contributions of others who have mastered their craft and shared their genius. You might visit an art museum, take a deep dive into the works of a Nobel Prize winner, or “couch marathon” a selection of Oscar-winning movies. If you walk into a building with a beautiful atrium, take a moment to appreciate it. If your drive to work takes you over a bridge, make sure to appreciate its angles and arches and the craft of those who designed and built it.

Becoming a Design Thinker

35

Share Your Stories Most teachers know the moment when they have their students in the flow of learning and deeply engaged. Students are asking more interesting questions, their attention is laser-focused on the task at hand, and the room is buzzing with anticipation of what’s to come. Students are spellbound. This is why we teach: we love sharing these collective and powerful moments of wonder. These moments build an emotional connection—no rules, no terminology, just wonder. Draw these stories out at your staff meetings. Make time for staff to share and reflect on these moments. These stories of deep and joyful learning can ground teachers amid the challenges of the day-to-day classroom.

Get in Touch with Your Inner Kid If you have ever hiked a trail with a 6-year-old, you may have spent more time off the trail than on it. Young children are continually drawn to what lies beyond and to seeking out anything new or interesting. As an adult, when was the last time you participated in something that caused you to leave the trail or made your heart race with anticipation? As a child, one of the most exciting things to do at a park was to swing as high as possible and leap off the swing as it reached its peak. You might remember that feeling of heart-racing risk as your body left the swing and you sailed through the air, not sure of the landing. One way to reconnect with that experience is to head for the park. Jumping off a swing as an adult is still exhilarating, although you may find yourself not swinging as high as the child next to you. What did you enjoy doing when you were a kid? Tool 3 is intended to help you remember who you were as a child and reconnect with what inspired you back then.

Question We have great respect for all teachers, but there is a special place reserved in our hearts for kindergarten teachers. If you’ve never observed a kindergarten classroom, stop in for 15 minutes and listen to student conversations. More specifically, listen to the number of questions that are asked by the students. Much of how they speak to each other is through questions. A POPSUGAR Family 2013 survey found that young children ask more than 300 questions a day, whereas adults ask

The important thing is not to stop questioning. —Albert Einstein

36

Tool 3

Portrait of Your Inner Kid Empathy interviews are designed to help you identify the needs of your end user. Use this template to plan and conduct your interviews. See that kiddo with all that passion? All those ideas and dreams? That’s you! See yourself as that child. Be as gentle with yourself as you would be with that young person. Here, sketch or draw what it was like to be you at that time.

Tape a picture of yourself as a child here.

Find Your Spark What made you come alive? What was your favorite thing to do or make? What gave you a feeling of ecstatic joy?

DO THAT!

Becoming a Design Thinker

about 20 questions per day (Circle-of-Moms-Editors, 2013). Why the falloff? Perhaps it’s because adults know more, but could it be that we’ve lost some of our inquisitive nature? What if we asked as many questions, every day, as children do? Questioning is an important leadership skill, especially when working to help develop a new pathway in education using design thinking. Questions are important. They challenge assumptions, lead to breakthrough thinking, and empower people to take action. Successful designers ask great questions and great questions lead to great design . . . but questions aren’t always well received. Alyssa is co-president of her local school’s parent foundation. During budget season, she spends more time than usual at her boys’ school in budget meetings. The goal is a straightforward one: plan a budget for the upcoming school year that aligns with the school’s charter and is responsive to the needs of students. They’ve had an incredible fundraising year, so you’d think these meetings would be fun and full of possibilities—but to Alyssa, the meetings seem to be filled with what they can’t do, bureaucratic red tape, union rules, and time constraints. It seems that anyone who questions what has been funded in the past is automatically viewed as contentious and negative. All of the excitement, creativity, and “what-ifs” get lost in conversations surrounding why something won’t work. Sadly, this is all too common. The majority of K–12 education organizations are bound by rules and traditions. Instead of welcoming questions and approaching new ideas with a “Yes, and . . .” attitude, it is not uncommon to have questions shut down with “Yeah, but . . .” Both questions and new ideas are shut down without a lot of dialogue because people acknowledge any constraint as a stopping point. For most of us, the rituals and routines of schools have become well-­ established habits. We are products of these schools; we don’t question the traditions or have any expectations that school should operate any differently— especially when considering changes to the system. But what if all of these ­rituals, routines, and rules are getting in the way? What if they are getting in the way of learning for students? What if they are getting in the way of teachers who are trying to innovate? Shouldn’t we do something to change them? Here are three strategies to increase questioning and create fertile ground for design thinking practices to take hold and open people up to more possibilities.

Ask More Questions What if you just intentionally asked more questions?

37

38

Take an inventory of the number of questions you ask in a day and work to increase that number. Like any skill, if you want to get better at asking questions, you have to do it more frequently. Once you’ve upped the number of questions you are asking, pay attention to the types of questions you ask. As adults, we spend a lot of time asking closed questions or questions to which we already know the answers. What if we reversed this? Try asking open-ended questions, questions that start with what, how, or why. And, even better, try asking questions that you don’t know the answer to. You’ll be amazed at how this can change the types of questions you ask and what you learn.

Ask “Why” Five Times People tend to focus first and foremost on “what” and “how” questions. See if you can shift to asking “why”—but don’t just ask once; ask “why” five times (see Tool 4). Don’t be surprised if the first response is both simple and a little defensive; people aren’t always used to having to dig deeper. When we were working with a junior high school on reallocating time and resources, a possible solution that kept bubbling to the surface was block scheduling, a practice of lengthening the instructional time for classes and holding them every other day versus every day. Any time there was any mention of block scheduling, body language changed and there was a distinct shift in mood. Sensing this, we asked if someone could share the history of block scheduling at their school—and were given a curt response of “We tried it, and it didn’t work.” The subsequent “five whys” conversation went as follows: Why? “Block scheduling doesn’t work for all subjects.” Why? “Some subjects, like foreign language and PE, are better taught in shorter blocks.” Why? “The lessons and materials we use in foreign language and PE are created for 50-minute classes, not 90-minute classes.” Why? [Long pause.] “Because that is the way we have always done things.” Why? “Because a long time ago, someone arbitrarily made a decision that students should learn every subject every day, and the school day was broken into equivalent pieces.”

Now we were able to have a real conversation. By asking “why” five times, we unearthed a false constraint around why things were scheduled the way

Becoming a Design Thinker

Tool 4

Five-Why Questioning

Topic I am questioning Why?

Why?

Why?

Why?

Why?

Topic I am questioning Why?

Why?

Why?

Why?

Why?

39

40

they were, and this led to a more meaningful discussion about whether it was the best way for students to learn. When asking “why” questions, you need to be OK with the reality that asking questions might create discomfort for others. Remind yourself that asking “why” reflects a genuine interest in understanding something more clearly. You may also uncover false constraints that are holding people back from fully solving the problem.

Question Yourself Both of us are parents, and both of us have experienced the humble reality of finding ourselves doing things we swore we would never do before having children. Alyssa remembers when she and her husband would go out to dinner and notice the families eating around them. Very often, the children would be entertaining themselves on devices while the adults talked, and easy “kid food”—mac and cheese, pizza, chicken nuggets—would be on the table. Alyssa and her husband Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why. —Bernard Baruch

were so certain that when they became parents, they would engage their kids in meaningful conversation, and even at an early age, their kids would enthusiastically choose healthy and organic foods from a variety of cultures. Fast-forward many years. Let’s just say that the reality of being in a restaurant with two young boys is very different from what Alyssa imagined it would be. She has also learned the magic of a little screen time and the ease of

“kid food.” If you’re a parent, you have probably learned these things, too. All of us have had occasion to re-evaluate opinions and assumptions in light of new experiences. At times, this means acknowledging that we don’t have the “right” answers—but freeing yourself from the pressure of having the right answer can be liberating. Imagine if everyone were able to do this. What if everyone could become a little more uncertain and unsure of their own opinions? Over time, we’ve both realized that in most situations there can be a lot of “rights,” and we have become a lot less certain over what the “right” answer or approach could be. Now, instead of searching for the perfect way to solve a problem, we explore options—lots of options. The more experience people have in education, the more certain they may be about some of their beliefs. Try questioning yourself. In any given situation, challenge your own thinking. What might you be wrong about? What might happen if you didn’t solve a problem a

Becoming a Design Thinker

particular way? Is your experience getting in the way of creativity? How might you be contributing to the problem or hindering finding new solutions?

Fertile Ground for Design Thinking Playing with all of the different notice, wonder, and question strategies shared in this chapter will help to create fertile ground for the design thinking work. As you play with these strategies, you may start to notice opportunities, question your school’s traditions and habits, or identify a problem you want to tackle. We encourage you to start investigating these problems but to hold them lightly as you move into the first phases of the design thinking process. Your understanding of the problem will likely change over time, especially as you seek to understand the problem from your users’ perspective. Use Tool 5 as you identify possible design challenges. Start by brainstorming the “roses” that are already in full bloom (bright spots around the design challenge), the “thorns” (pain points around the design challenge), and the “buds” (potential ideas or opportunities that could be nourished to grow).

Becoming a Design Thinker: Risk Factors 1. Self-doubt. Great discoveries happen when people allow themselves to explore their hunches. Who you are influences everything you do professionally, so bring your whole self to work and try to silence that inner critic. 2. Having too narrow a focus. Have you already zeroed in on a challenge or problem? If so, you might not be as open to the strategies in this chapter. See if you can set aside your current definition of the problem to be solved while you test out the strategies shared. When you come back to this problem, you’ll do so with new insights or ideas about how to frame it. 3. Overload. Try not to think of the strategies and ideas outlined in this chapter as one more thing for your to-do list. Instead, layer them into the tasks you are already doing throughout your day. Is there space for questioning in your administrative meeting? What if you got in touch with your inner kid during recess and joined a quick game of basketball?

41

42

Tool 5

Rose, Thorn, Bud As you start to pay more attention to the problems and opportunities around you, you may identify potential design challenges. Once these ideas start percolating, this is a good tool to play with. Take a few minutes to brainstorm roses (bright spots), thorns (pain points), and buds (potentials).

Rose

Thorn

Bud

Becoming a Design Thinker

Becoming a Design Thinker: Insight to Action Reading is good; putting what you have read into practice is better. Here are three actions you can take now to build momentum and keep moving: 1. Start a “bug list” and add to it daily. Even better, start a conversation with your staff and create a collective bug list. As you dig deeper into design thinking, you’ll see that your bug list is full of design challenges to solve. 2. Carve out some time and do one thing you really loved as a kid. It can be as simple as lying in the grass and making pictures out of clouds or jumping rope on the playground. Notice the energy this brings. 3. Spend a few minutes playing with possible design challenges. Identify the potential roses, thorns, and buds for one or two challenges each day. You’ll likely be amazed by all of the opportunities that are right in front of you.

43

3

Empathize

What does your user really need? spend a lot of time designing the bridge, but not enough W etime thinking about the people who are crossing it.

—Prabhjot Singh

What initially drew us to design thinking—or human-centered design, as it is sometimes called—is that the starting point is so different from every other problem-solving process. Design thinking doesn’t start with a precooked, topdown directive or a “tried-and-true” solution. It doesn’t start with assumptions about what might work, what has or hasn’t worked in the past, or the budget. Design thinking starts (and ends) with people. Empathy is the key that unlocks relevant and innovative solutions to both large and small problems. It is the piece that allows the designer to connect with the needs of the end user and understand a problem from a new perspective. When you can truly grasp the problem and empathize with the people affected by the problem, you are 100 percent more invested in finding a possible solution. The “people” component is what excites both of us—but it is also what scares some people away from design thinking. After all, engaging with humans can be messy, unpredictable, and time consuming. Add to that the fact that the 44

Empathize

problems design thinkers are trying to solve are rarely their own, which means there is empathy work design thinkers must do to truly understand the needs of the end user, uncover insights, and apply this knowledge to the design process. Digging into empathy work can help you improve anything. Think about your school’s new teacher orientation. Chances are, it touches on vision or mission, introduces district personnel, and highlights information on how to access available resources. But we’re guessing that a large part of the day revolves around procedures and rules. Educators may accept this as the norm, but it doesn’t have to be this way. What if your new teacher orientation focused on the most important work of your district? Leaders in Menlo Park City School District in California transformed their new teacher orientation to focus on the important work of increasing equity and grounding teachers in empathy for the student experience. Menlo Park, an affluent school district, sits right next to Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto. The socioeconomic demographics of these two districts are on the opposite ends of a spectrum; through the Tinsley Volunteer Transfer Program (2018), Menlo Park accepts students on transfer from Ravenswood. The goal of the program is to increase opportunities for historically underserved students. To foster empathy for all students, part of the new teacher orientation focuses on the diversity of the student body, with facilitated conversations about privilege and bias. The new teachers are taken on a Magic School Bus–themed tour through the surrounding neighborhoods so they can literally see the vastly different demographics of their students, and the tour includes stops along the way at different schools. The feedback from new teachers has been overwhelmingly positive. Teachers feel more connected to the community and more prepared to meet the diverse needs of their learners. According to Superintendent Erik Burmeister, the Magic School Bus tour for new employees is one of the most effective things they have done to ground teachers’ work in empathy from day one. We want to stress that this solution not only met the specific needs of Menlo Park City schools but also cost them no more than the previous orientation had. Talk about a win-win solution! Magic things happen when empathy, insights, and creativity collide through design thinking. Imagine for a moment what schools might look like if empathy were part of every school decision. As you learn to think and act more like a designer, one of the first shifts you have to make is realizing that the work is not about you. Too often, educators pull from their past experiences and let their own biases and assumptions get

45

46

in the way of the work. Don’t start to supply the solution that you think other people need or want. Dig deeper into empathy work and focus on two areas: listening and observing.

Listen One of the simplest things you can do when starting out to identify the needs of your end user is to listen when you talk to people. You can learn a lot from others through conversation; how much they are willing to share depends upon your having created the right conditions for the conversation. Most people love to talk, especially on a topic of interest. Design There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing. —Walter Weir in G. K. Chesterton’s “The White Pillars Murder”

thinking is all about problem solving, and most people find being a part of a solution—especially to a problem they are experiencing—interesting. Through an accreditation process, Winston Sakurai, principal of Hanalani Schools in Hawaii, learned that his school library was outdated. Winston knew this was a problem to be solved, and he didn’t go about solving it in the “traditional” way. He

turned the problem over to students in the Applied Engineering class, who took a design thinking approach and canvassed students and teachers across all grades of the K–12 school to identify what these end users wanted in a new library space. The questions they asked included “Why aren’t you using the library?” “When was the last time you went to a library? What did you like about it?” “Where do you currently read or do homework?” and “What types of resources do you find yourself looking for in the library?” Through these conversations, the Applied Engineering students uncovered needs and gained insights that helped them focus their redesign efforts. With some funding available, the students were able to select new furniture, paint the walls, update the available resources, and even create a “quiet room.” Although the number of students involved in the redesign project was small, they successfully created a space for the entire school because they listened and uncovered the needs of their fellow classmates and teachers. The Hanalani Schools library went from being a place no one visited to one of the most happening spaces on campus.

Empathize

Listening was key to the successful design efforts at this school. Here are some guidelines for listening in order to understand and empathize with user needs.

Talk to Strangers Contrary to the advice we give young children, talking to strangers is an important strategy to build empathy. The simple act of talking to users moves the conversation from abstract discussion to real interactions. Take, for example, the students at Baker-Butler Elementary School in Charlottesville, Virginia. They wanted to support the work of Pan, a local clothing company whose mission is to eliminate illiteracy and improve the lives of children in Haiti. For every item of clothing Pan sells, it provides five textbooks to students in Haiti. Fourth and 5th grade students spent time interviewing the founders of the company to try to determine their needs—both what they needed for their company and what students in Haiti needed. The Baker-Butler students received feedback on their ideas for supporting Pan’s work throughout the design process and built an emotional connection to Haitian students they had never met (NBC29.com, 2018). What conversations can you set up with “strangers” to support your learners? What “strangers” might have experienced the very problem you are trying to solve? Empathy work is fueled from radical collaboration. Helpful strangers can be anyone who has a point of view or experience to share that is not currently tied to your school or organization. As an example, when we were working to support a district in creating personalized online professional learning for teachers, we talked to game designers outside the world of education and gained valuable insights on what makes gamers persevere through tough video game challenges. Their insights and experiences helped us think through badging and rewarding completion of online tasks in a way that we hadn’t previously considered. As you work on improving your listening skills and have more conversations about the design challenges that interest you, don’t forget to pay attention to body language. Although it can be easy to get caught up in listening to what’s being said verbally, people communicate a lot through their body language. There are many subtle, nonverbal cues that we send and receive from one another throughout our social interactions. Although facial expressions are the most obvious (we tend to look at people as they are talking), be sure to also pay

47

48

attention to other people’s body language. Are they leaning in? Leaning away? Gesturing in a certain way? Body language can tell you when others are nervous, and it can give clues to their preferences. Your own body language is something to be aware of through the interviewing stage as well. Are you positioning yourself in a way that conveys that you are open and listening?

Conduct Empathy Interviews When crunched for time and working to improve their education program, a lot of school and district administrative teams will use surveys to gather data. We get it: a survey is the most efficient way to collect information from a large number of people. Surveys feel inclusive because everyone gets a say. Surveys are inexpensive, easy to administer, and great for collecting large amounts of data—but surveys don’t get to the heart of anyone’s experience. Surveys don’t empathize. They aren’t great at getting people to share meaningful or specific experiences. In fact, most surveys ask respondents about how they “mostly” feel about something. Surveys focus on the broad brushstrokes that characterize an experience, whereas empathy interviews highlight the detail in a painting created by many different brushes. Insights are hidden in the details. Empathy interviews are structured conversations between end users and designers. This is a way to intentionally create space in which end users can share experiences and express what is important to them while allowing designers to dig into the details and uncover insights. Empathy interviews may feel a little foreign at first, but they get easier over time, and the payoff is tremendous. There is nothing more powerful than connecting directly with end users and hearing about their firsthand experiences. It is important that you, as the designer, suspend judgment: there is no right or wrong; there are only stories to be shared. The experiences users will share stand on their own, and it is your job to uncover insights and unpack needs. The information gleaned from empathy interviews is priceless and will guide every other phase of the design thinking process. To ensure that your empathy interviews are an effective part of the design process, spend some time planning them using Tool 6. Let’s look at a variety of guiding questions you can ask to steer your interview planning work. What is the problem, and whose problem is it? Think about the problem you are trying to solve. What makes it interesting to you? Perhaps there are already solutions out there, but the problem still exists. Why? How have the

Empathize

Tool 6

Empathy Interview Planner Empathy interviews are designed to help you identify the needs of your end user. Use this template to plan and conduct your interviews. What are you curious about? What problem are you trying to solve?

For whom are you trying to solve this problem? Who is your end user?

Who will you interview? Brainstorm a list twice as long as you think you will need.

49

50

current solutions not met the needs of the user? Who will benefit when you solve this problem? These questions will help you identify your end user(s) and get you thinking about who you need to interview. Who will you interview? Brainstorm a list of people who might have interesting insights on your topic. You want to reach out to those who might have experienced the problem in a drastic way as well as those who may have never experienced the problem. The middle of the bell curve is usually identified fairly easily; these are the “average” users, the ones who are usually the focus of design. Yet it’s the extreme users on either end that you need to focus on if you want to have a bigger impact. Extreme users have needs that are magnified in some way—which means they have probably also created workaround solutions that are more noteworthy. Meeting the needs of extreme users create solutions that address a much wider population, solving problems that may not be visible if the spotlight is focused on the “average” user. The OXO peeler is a perfect example of what can happen designing for an extreme user (Wilson, 2018). In 1989, Sam Farber had an “a-ha!” moment while watching his wife, Betsey, struggle with a common vegetable peeler due to arthritis. He set out to solve this problem by creating a vegetable peeler with a fatter handle that was more comfortable for Betsey to use, and he ended up creating kitchen tools that were easier for everyone to use. In education, extreme users may include families who choose to homeschool, families who need before- and after-school care, or families who need flexibility due to special circumstances such as young elite athletes or students requiring home hospital support. Who are your extreme users, and what are their unique needs? Use Tool 7 to identify your extreme users and make sure you talk to individuals at both ends of the spectrum to get the clearest picture of the problem. You don’t need to interview everyone, but you need to interview enough end users to enable identifying common themes and concerns. Who will your design partner(s) be? Conducting empathy interviews is always more fun with a friend. Select someone who is invested in solving your problem and willing to help. As a team, one of you can conduct the interview while the other captures notes, recording both exact phrases and body language. If you are engaging in the design thinking process as part of a larger team, pair off to conduct the empathy interviews. Within this framework, be sure to provide time for the team to come together to share what each pair learned from

Empathize

Tool 7

Who Are Your Extreme Users? New Insights

Majority

What problem are you trying to solve? For whom are you trying to solve this problem?

Who may not experience the problem you are trying to solve? Why?

Who may experience the problem you are trying to solve to the most significant degree?

Identify your extreme users—for inspiration and to spur new ideas!

51

52

their empathy interviews. (Story share-and-capture, which we discuss later in this chapter, is a great strategy to facilitate such conversations.) When and where will the interviews take place? Allow for a minimum of 30 minutes for an interview; sometimes it takes the first 15 minutes to establish rapport and get the conversation flowing. Interviews do not have to be conducted in a formal setting, with two people sitting on opposite sides of a conference table; often, the more at ease you can make an interviewee feel, the more quickly you can build a connection. Depending on whom you are interviewing, school may be a likely location, but you might also consider venturing to a local coffee shop, community center, or even a park. What will your questions be? When planning your questions and interview prompts, remember these types of interviews are meant to draw out stories and evoke emotions. These are not hiring interviews where you must ask everyone the same set of questions. Use Tool 8 to sketch a general outline, and then let the interview go where there is energy. Use your outline to encourage stories from those you interview. Stories— while not always being 100 percent true—reveal how someone thinks about a given topic and offers opportunities for connection. Ask about specific instances: “Tell me about the last time you . . .” or “Tell me about your best [worst] experience with . . . .” Getting users to share specific examples is extremely important. It is human nature to position ourselves in the best light possible, which means we don’t always want to share specifics. But the specifics are where the good stories live. For example, if you were to ask either of us what we usually eat for dinner, both of our responses would likely be something along the lines of grilled chicken and vegetables; we pride ourselves on being fairly healthy eaters. But if you asked either of us what we ate for dinner last night, our responses might be very different. Maybe you would ask on the day after Kami stayed late for a school board meeting and grabbed a quick slice of pizza, or the day after Alyssa, who was shuttling kids between activities after a long day at work, grabbed burgers and fries on the go. You can see how there is a much better story behind the specifics than sticking with the broad strokes of what users “usually” do. In Chapter 2, we talked about how helpful it can be to ask “why” multiple times. Even when you think you know the answer, try asking people why they do or say the things they do; sometimes the answers will surprise you. If you get stuck, you can encourage interviewees to elaborate by using prompts such as “Can you tell me more about . . .” or “What were you feeling when . . .?”

Empathize

Tool 8

Empathy Interview Prep Sheet Spending some time preparing for your interview will help you be more relaxed during the interview. Introduction

Kickoff

Introduce yourself and your partner. Explain what you are doing.

Shift the focus from yourself to the person you’re interviewing. Plan to establish rapport.

Specific Questions

Prompts to Get Unstuck

• Get the person talking and sharing stories.

• Why?

• Tell me about a time when . . .

• And why was that?

• What’s the best/worst . . .?

• Can you say more about . . .?

• Really?

Last Chance Signal that the interview is over, encourage any last thoughts, and offer a way to connect post-interview.

53

54

You can also let the interviewee ask the questions. Sometimes, interviewing others results in a focus on asking the “right” questions to the extent that the interviewee never has a chance to ask a question, but interviewees’ questions can be just as important as their answers. Consider checking Google, which collects and analyzes a ton of data regarding what people want to know. Reflecting on the questions that others are asking can give you interesting insights that can enhance your understanding of their needs. Because the goal is to evoke stories, think of your questions as a guide. If an interviewee has something interesting and juicy to share, you might only need to ask one or two questions during the entire interview. It is important to reiterate that these interviews are not like job interviews; you don’t have to ask every person the same set of questions. For example, we scripted an empathy interview to learn more about students’ homework experience at a school, including the following questions and talking points: • Tell me about your homework last night. • What has been your worst homework experience this year? Why? • Tell me about a time that homework really helped you. What does that look like? • Do you ever get stuck doing your homework? Tell me about it. These prompts created space for students to share their own unique experiences with homework and helped move the conversation beyond what might typically be expected—that students don’t like homework. We were able to learn from the experiences shared that homework was most successful for students who had additional support at home and had a routine for the homework. We also learned that, in most cases, once students got stuck, they gave up and never circled back to the work they were doing. Another important tip for success with empathy interviews is to enjoy yourself! The more comfortable you are, the more comfortable your interviewees will be sharing their experiences. And don’t be scared of silence; some of the deepest responses come after thought and reflection. The goal during an empathy interview is to find out as much as possible about an end user’s experience, motivations, and thought processes. The skill is in striking a tone that is conversational without the interview ever feeling like an interrogation. In summary, during an empathy interview, you want to build rapport quickly to gather stories and evoke emotions, you want to prompt for specifics,

Empathize

and you want to pay close attention. Figure 3.1 highlights the overall structure of an empathy interview and will help keep you on track.

Figure 3.1

Empathy Interview Structure  Explore emotions and motivations Why? Tell me more . . . Casual talk to build rapport Introduce self and partner

Ask for stories

Follow-up questions

Share design challenge

Thank you

It’s a wrap!

After you have completed your interviews, take some time to reflect and digest all that you learned. How will this new information influence your next steps? If you are working through a wicked problem with a team, you’ll want to share the insights gleaned from your interviews. Later in this chapter we provide some tools to help you reflect and synthesize the information you are gathering.

Observe Another way to build empathy is to hone your powers of observation and cultivate the ability to see what others may overlook. You can think of yourself as Sherlock Holmes (see Chapter 2) or perhaps as an ­ anthropologist—someone who scientifically studies ­ humans and their customs, beliefs, and relationships. Anthropologists observe and then infer meaning from people’s behaviors and habits; as a design thinker, you can adopt some of their most valuable skills:

For design thinkers, behaviors are never right or wrong, but they are always meaningful. —Tim Brown, Change by Design

55

56

• Recognize the difference between observing and looking. Looking does not require you to remember what you are seeing or necessarily to make meaning of it. Observing is seeing with the intention of using it later to make connections and meaning that will allow the development of essential questions. • Notice details. It’s easy to see the overall picture; anthropologists also pay attention to the small things. Observing also means intentionally recording and remembering those things that may escape notice on a first look. • Be wary of judgment. Observation requires neutrality. It’s easy to let bias, preconceived ideas, or prejudices leak into one’s thinking. Take a moment and reflect on your belief systems and how they may play into your observations before you begin. Here are some additional guidelines for observation.

Try a New Viewpoint Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates, a strategy and We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave. —Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

innovation firm, says, “The secret to good observation is to observe, get bored and then observe some more” (2009, p. 95). Challenge yourself to find something new in the mundane. Do you always spend time in the school office? What are you missing? Instead of sitting in your office, sit in the chairs usually reserved for those waiting to meet with you. Sit and observe. What new details emerge?

Shadow a Student (or Teacher) Shadowing a student is widely regarded as a powerful experience that pro­vides insights and can vastly improve the school experience. Shadowing teachers, similarly, has great potential. What might you learn from this experience? Have you forgotten what it is like to be in a classroom? Shadowing helps administrators reconnect with the teaching experience. Whether you choose to shadow a student or teacher, commit to it for an entire day and put yourself in the shoes of these users. Walk the halls they walk; sit in their seats. What is their daily experience at school? Administrators and teachers who have tried

Empathize

shadowing often credit it as the number one thing that helped them shift their role from accidental designer to intentional designer. What might happen if you viewed your role and approach as a principal through the eyes of your students or through the eyes of your teachers? How might that shift your focus? The more time you can give to the shadow experience, the deeper your understanding will be, and the clearer picture of possible needs you’ll have. Another piece to consider is the messaging to those around you and the person you are shadowing. Take the time to explain your purpose; if the people you are shadowing are unsure of why you’re following them around, they will be uncomfortable, and you will not get a genuine view of their experience. Think through how you will record your observations. Where will you position yourself? What type of notes will you take? How can you be that “fly on the wall” with little disruption to those around you? Finally, be sure to thank the person you shadowed at the end of the experience. School Retool, a professional development fellowship supported by IDEO to help school leaders redesign their school culture, sponsors an annual Shadow a Student Challenge (www.shadowastudent.org). You can sign on to be a part of the annual challenge, read incredible stories of what others have learned, and share your experience post-observation. Since the challenge first launched in 2016, close to 5,000 school leaders have cleared their calendars for the day and spent it immersed in the school lives of their students. Although the accountability of the Shadow a Student Challenge is great, you don’t need to wait for the official challenge to get started, and you can start with any user whose needs you intend to address—student, teacher, or other staff member. Go ahead and shadow now! Use Tool 9 to guide your experience.

Synthesizing Information Through listening and observing, you will gather a lot of new information about users and uncover interesting needs and insights. What do you do with all of these data? When trying to make sense of all of the stories and experiences and mining the data for gems, we like three particular strategies: story share-andcapture, empathy mapping, and personas. You may want to use all three to make sure you have a firm grasp on the experiences of your end users and understand their needs. Clarity on the needs now will make the rest of the design thinking process flow more naturally.

57

58

Tool 9

A Day in the Life Of . . . Shadowing is a way to gain new and detailed insights about your user’s world. After shadowing for a day, you won’t have to guess what their experience is like; you will have firsthand information.

Who will you be shadowing?

Observation notes

Empathize

Story Share-and-Capture We’ll never forget one of our first experiences engaging an entire team in empathy interviews. We were investigating how to revolutionize learning and were interested in talking to parents, teachers, and students. We broke up our design team into pairs and sent them out to interview. Each team interviewed five or six people, asking questions to solicit both stories about incredible learning experiences and stories about terrible ones. The team spent a good half-day interviewing, so we figured they would return tired. The plan was to reconvene, eat some lunch, and then spend the afternoon processing all that we had learned together. But as the team members returned, the room started buzzing with energy; you could feel it bubbling over. Everyone was excited to share what they had learned. Lunch turned into a working session, and story share-and-capture was our method for harnessing the stories and learnings. Here’s how the process works. Make sure everyone has a version of Tool 10, pencils, and sticky notes. Have all of the interview pairs review their notes and identify the top two to three stories they want to share. Then take turns. Each pair shares a story by answering a few simple questions: • Who did you meet? • What did you learn? • What insights do you have as a result of the interview? The rest of the team listens and tries to capture a sketch of the “big idea” and a headline. After the pair shares, another design team member offers a version of the story: “You met    . You learned    . And the headline I would give this story is    .” The sticky note with this story is then placed on a large chart paper for all to see. Then the next pair shares one of their stories. Story share-and-capture provides an opportunity for each pair to share a little bit about the people they met and the stories they heard; it also forces the entire team to synthesize the learning by creating headlines. As Dale Carnegie said, “Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.” In order to more clearly define end-user needs, a design team needs to be grounded in the stories gathered from empathy interviews.

Empathy Maps Sometimes you need a map. Although there are a lot of different versions of empathy maps, most are designed to help you connect to a user’s reality. They

59

60

Tool 10

Story Share-and-Capture

Headline:

Headline:

Headline:

Headline:

Empathize

help you get at what that user is thinking and feeling, hearing, seeing, and saying and doing. Tool 11 includes these four categories and also two additional areas: pains and gains. The empathy map process requires a bit of role-playing. (Don’t be afraid— just go with it.) Imagine now that you are one of your students, teachers, or parents. Use the information gathered through observations and interviews to identify what your chosen individual thinks and feels, hears, sees, says, and does. Get specific. Fill the empathy map with sticky notes for each of the four quadrants. If you can, venture into the pains and gains quadrants of the empathy map. “Pains” might include an interviewee’s fears, frustrations, obstacles to overcome, or reasons for struggle. In the “Gains” section, jot down any insights you have about the interviewee’s successes and how these were achieved. You might need to create several empathy maps, depending on the variety of experiences and stories collected. After creating an empathy map, try to summarize it. Do you have any new ideas about how to approach solutions for your students or teachers? Completing empathy maps is a great collaborative exercise. When engaging in this activity with a team, encourage each member to share thoughts about the exercise and the end user (student, teacher, or parent). Completed empathy maps make fantastic artifacts to keep posted in your working space. The visual reminders alone can help keep your team grounded in the actual experiences you heard as you and your team work through the rest of the process.

Personas Another way to synthesize the information you have gathered is by looking at the data and experiences through the lens of personas. Personas are fictional characters that you create based on meaningful archetypes of your actual end users. Obviously, not all end users are identical personalities, and many solutions will be most effective when they are personalized. No matter how great a solution is, people will ignore it if they feel the solution ignores them and their needs. Taking the time to create a few different personas based on the information you collected can help you keep individual needs front and center. When we were looking to come up with new solutions for professional learning opportunities that teachers found accessible and exciting, we created a few personas from our empathy interviews with teachers. We have provided examples for “Daniel” and “Meredith.”

61

62

Tool 11

Empathy Map

r? ea

H

Se e?

Think and Feel?

Say and Do?

Pains

Gains

Empathize

63

Daniel is a first-year teacher who graduated top of his class with a double major in liberal studies and political science. Daniel graduated with a lot of loans and is struggling to make ends meet on a teacher salary, so he works additional part-time jobs. Daniel is committed to being the best at his craft. He’s eager to learn, but other job commitments sometimes make after-school professional learning a challenge. Daniel needs just-in-time solutions that are flexible. Meredith has been teaching for 10 years but recently changed grade levels and is feeling overwhelmed getting a handle on the new curriculum. Meredith has three kids and comes to work super-early in the morning to get ahead of the day. She is open to new ideas but has been around long enough to know that the pendulum swings back and forth. Meredith needs any new learning grounded firmly in a “why” and will remain skeptical about anything new.

As part of this process, we posted information about the personas around the room where the design team was working. As we were coming up with solutions, we would ask, “How would Daniel or Meredith respond?” This kept us grounded in the unique needs of our end users. Tool 12 is intended to help you create personas and use them to enhance conversations among your design team.

The Empathize Phase: Risk Factors 1. Getting stuck. There is a danger of spending too much time in the empathize phase. When working in Los Altos School District, we used design thinking as our strategic planning process and intentionally chose to spend more than four months in the empathize phase; we wanted new insights to inform the district’s greater purpose. But even after four months, we could have continued to learn from the experiences of others. When you’ve gathered enough insights, keep moving. You can always come back to empathy, which informs every other step of the process. (continued)

64

Tool 12

Personas Description/Role:

Goals/Motivations:

Description/Role:

Goals/Motivations:

Description/Role:

Goals/Motivations:

Description/Role:

Goals/Motivations:

Empathize

The Empathize Phase: Risk Factors—(continued) 2. Being secretive. If design thinking is a new process being used in your school or district, people will be inherently curious about both the process and the findings. It is worth the time and effort to share what you are doing broadly with the community. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy. One school created a “School by Design” Google doc in read-only format that was shared broadly. Anyone who had an interest had access to it and could learn more about the process. 3. Struggling to connect. Following their survey of 14,000 college students, Konrath, O’Brian, and Hsing (2011) suggested that empathy is on the decline. These researchers found that that “empathic concern” dropped by 48 percent between 1979 and 2009, and perspective taking dropped 34 percent during the same period. Has the world become less empathetic? If so, this may make the empathy work harder as people practice “elective empathy,” choosing when and with whom to be empathetic.

The Empathize Phase: Insight to Action Reading is good; putting what you have read into practice is even better. Here are three actions you can take now to build momentum and keep moving: 1. Talk to end users, either informally through conversations or more formally through empathy interviews. 2. Observe situations and experiences surrounding the problem you want to solve. Document what you notice. 3. Summarize, synthesize, and share what you have learned with others. Use Tool 13 to get clear on all that you have learned in this phase of design thinking, and prepare yourself to apply it as you move into the define phase.

65

66

Tool 13

Putting It All Together Design Challenge What problem are you trying to solve? Why?

What did you learn from observations?

What did you learn from interviews?

What new insights do you have? How do they affect your original design challenge?

4

Define

How do you clarify the problem?

F all in love with the problem, not the solution.

—Uri Levine

When Kami was working as a principal, she headed into one staff meeting with a particular problem in mind: the student lunchroom had become unbearable. The noise level and behavior had gotten out of control, and it was not a pleasant place for anyone. She raised the issue with the staff, asking for their input and ideas for ways to turn the situation around. The discussion naturally became focused on solutions—but the “solutions” offered were practices that had already been attempted and weren’t working. The younger students needed more “practice” in the lunchroom; classes needed to review their collective agreements; teachers needed to provide more frequent reminders of behavioral expectations. Coming up with a new or interesting solution requires us to sit with the problem, walk around it, and seek new insights. Kami challenged her staff to take another look with fresh eyes. Over the next week, staff took some time to observe what was happening in the lunchroom. They revisited the “rules” with students, but this time with a learning stance and an openness to students’ ideas. Asking for feedback from students unearthed some of their struggles, including 67

68

noise, inconsistent rules, and confusing procedures. Teachers also reflected on their own practices around expectation setting and communicating with students about lunchroom behaviors. Kami looked at the processes that were in place, such as schedules, seating, and the operational logistics of the lunchroom. When the staff reconvened for the next discussion of The Lunchroom Problem, they had more ideas and more comprehensive information at their disposal. Staff and students agreed that the lunchroom rules should remain the expectations, but there were a few processes that needed tweaking. The staff identified their main challenge as developing and delivering consistent communication processes around expectations and accountability. With the problem more clearly defined, they were better able to design specific and interesting solutions, breaking the ineffective rinse-and-repeat cycle. The define phase of design thinking is all about seeking clarity and focus around the problem you are trying to solve. You and your team have done a lot of research. You have observed experiences in action, and you have talked to end users to better understand their experiences. You’ve also synthesized all of the information gathered and likely have new insights as a result. Now, in this part of the design thinking process, you’ll unpack the insights, clearly define a point of view about the problem, and make sure your team is in a space to get creative with the problem you are going to solve. The overarching goal of the define phase is to make sure you have a problem that needs to be solved and might be solved with a practical solution.

Use the Language of Possibility It is important to start to recognize potential hurdles—language being one of them—as you work to define your problem statement. Spending more time with educators has made us even more aware of the ingrained language of the profession. Language has power. Too often we hear leaders use the same words or phrases—ones that indicate a culture of powerlessness or that unintentionally support the status quo: • “Great idea, but we don’t have the time (or money, or staff).” • “We’ve never done it that way.” • “Let’s form a committee to talk more about it.”

Define

All of these responses shut down possibility and opportunity before they even have a fighting chance. If you want to start seeing potential where others see problems, focus on shifting from the language of the status quo to the language of possibility. Try replacing those idea-killing phrases with nurturing phrases: • “That sounds interesting; tell me more.” • “How can we make it work?” • “Let’s try it.” It is far easier to kill an idea than to get an idea to a workable solution. New ideas are fragile and need to be treated carefully. Even though not every idea you are presented with will work out, try to nurture all ideas long enough for them to have time to grow and become a little more robust. Practice incorporating the following phrases to change your pattern of thinking into your daily work; you’ll be surprised how such a subtle shift can open up new opportunities for the team and organization you lead: • “Yes, and . . .” Creativity is fueled by the uplifting words and actions of others. When faced with a new idea, it can be tempting to offer a “Yes, but . . . ,” pointing out reasons why it may not work—and shutting down the conversation. Instead, try to build on the idea. Focus on taking someone’s idea and making it bigger. “Yes, and...” promotes positive dialogue. • “What if . . .?” These two little words are possibly our favorite two words when combined because, together, they have so much power. Uttering these two words opens up a world of possibilities and signifies that you don’t have all the answers and are open to exploring new ideas. One person asking, “What if . . .?” is intriguing. A collective group of thought leaders or educators within an organization asking “What if . . .?” is powerful. • “How might we . . .?” These three words communicate a lot. The how implies there is not yet an answer and there is room for discovery; the might implies there is a world of possibilities; and the we implies everyone is in this situation together. “How might we . . .?” becomes an irresistible invitation to the work. Once people accept your invitation, you can continually nudge them further. Later in this chapter, we will help you craft “How might we . . .?” questions around your problem statement.

69

70

Gaynell, the principal at Mt. Abraham Union Middle School in Vermont, had to steel herself to use the language of possibility when Sam, one of her biology My favorite words are possibilities, opportunities, and curiosity. I think if you are curious, you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities.

teachers, came to her with this request: “I want

—Mario Testino

tive thoughts. She knew that Sam would only pro-

honeybees on campus.” Gaynell immediately envisioned swarms of bees, the school superintendent saying no, a sea of liability forms, and, ultimately, chaos—but she chose to silence all of those negapose ideas that were good for students. Here’s how Gaynell replied: “Tell me what I need to know to say yes.” This simple affirmative response comes from a designer

mindset (“Yes, and . . .”) that is key to innovation in schools. It would have been so easy for Gaynell to shut down Sam’s ideas. No one would fault her; having bees on campus is an unconventional idea, to say the least. By responding with a “Yes, and . . . ,” Gaynell invited Sam to share more. She learned that Sam envisioned the bees as a means to create authentic learning experiences. Beekeeping offered an opportunity to teach students a skill that they could use later in life. Sam also explained how it could connect student learning to environmental causes. Bees are a dying resource; teaching students about them would be good for the environment and good for the community. At Gaynell’s direction, Sam did additional research. She also looked for and found an experienced beekeeper, and the two of them walked the campus to identify a suitable spot to set up beehives. With all of the research and plans in place, Gaynell approached her superintendent with the proposal. Initially, the idea of honeybees wasn’t well received, but Gaynell helped her superintendent come up with a plan to address parent concerns, including shutting down the project if any health issues surfaced. They even developed a contingency plan should they need to find a new home for the bees. Gaynell wrote an article for the school newsletter—“We Are Bringing Honeybees to Campus”—that assured parents and students of their safety and provided access to resources. The honeybees came to school. Students were engaged at every step of the process. They built racks for the hives and learned how to use the smoker. Their interest in the project continued to grow: “How can I learn more?” “Do I have

Define

to take Kitchen Chemistry to work with the bees?” “Can we have a beekeeping club?” Success! None of this learning would have taken place without Gaynell’s commitment to a “Yes, and . . .” mindset. What is your first response when you encounter a wild and crazy idea? Where do you sit on the yes-o-meter? If a “Yes, and . . .” response doesn’t feel natural to you, don’t worry; you aren’t alone. Design thinking is messy and nonlinear, which can make it challenging for educators to embrace. Being open to new ideas can feel counterintuitive in a world that is often driven by mandates, but “Yes, and . . .” is a mindset that can be developed. Take inspiration from Gaynell and go ahead and borrow her response: Tell me what I need to know to say yes.

Find the Big Picture The first time either of us went through the design thinking process, trying to clearly define the problem is where things started to get fuzzy. We felt unsure about the empathy work we had done. Was it really valuable? But, time and time again, we found we were on the right track. Trust the process. Review the work you and your team completed during the empathize phase (empathy maps, artifacts from interviews, personas, story share-and-capture) and saturate a space with it. If possible, cover a wall, a section of your office, or a whiteboard. We recommend saturating a space because it lets you step away from the work midflow (as needed) and it allows you to take a few steps back to get the big picture and start seeing how everything works together. The idea here is to make visible the learnings and start looking for trends, themes, overlapping needs, and insights. Grab a stack of sticky notes and Sharpies and get to work! Call out any insights you may have, regroup the material on the wall, ask questions, and dig deeper. The goal is to start getting a clearer picture of your end users, their needs, and how they want to feel. If any of these elements emerge, caption them on sticky notes and add these to your design wall. You will most likely have a few different end users and different needs that rise to the surface. There may be connections between them—or they may be unique and different. What dots can you connect around similar themes? Is there a common thread shared by more than one user group? Clarifying each of these users or themes helps you decide which user will be your focus throughout the design process.

71

72

As a result of this work, you may have multiple design challenges. That is fine. Resist the temptation to make everything fit into one tidy package. Remember that when you design for everyone, you create a solution that delights no one.

Affinity Mapping Affinity maps (see Dam & Siang, 2019) can help you organize your data, bring the data to life, and share with other team members without limiting the scope of the design challenge you’re trying to solve. Here is an easy process to work through affinity mapping: 1. Record data, facts, observations, quotes, and drawings on sticky notes or index cards, with only one idea per note. 2. Start with one idea; read it aloud and place the note on the wall or a chart. 3. Read aloud another note, and ask, “Does this fit with the first one or is it different?” Either add it to the first to create a grouping or start a new topic area. 4. Proceed note by note, until you have created multiple cluster groups. 5. Identify each cluster with a heading. The headings will start to create structure and themes. For example, a team that had gathered data around school start times interviewed students who were habitually tardy. These sticky notes became the “why kids are late” affinity group. They were then able to subgroup those pieces of information around internal interference and external interference. 6. Prioritize the clusters. Which ones are most important? Pay attention to your motives as you rank clusters. Are these your stakeholders’ priorities or your own? On which ones should the emphasis be placed? 7. Create connections between the clusters. Try to be explicit regarding how the clusters connect. 8. Synthesize. When you step back now, what do you observe? Our guess is you and your team will have newfound clarity of the problem to be solved.

Define

Story and Journey Mapping Story mapping is an instructional tool to help students understand not just the journey of the story’s hero but also how background experiences, the setting, other characters, and situations affect the hero’s journey. It also happens to be a great tool for design thinkers. Using a simple graphic organizer similar to a traditional story map, you can consider how different story elements affect your end users and their journey (see Figure 4.1). What did you learn about their previous experiences? Who else plays a role in their story? This is your story exposition. What were some of their experiences and challenges? This is the rising action. What most frustrated them? This might be the climax. The resolution at this stage of the process is your point-of-view statement. Later in the design process, after you prototype, this story map can help you create your user story (see Chapter 6). Journey mapping helps you dig deeper into understanding your user’s experience, particularly if you are focused on a particular experience that you want to chart across time. For example, when a new theater opened in San Jose, the employees asked a few questions of patrons on the way out to understand their experience. “On a scale of 1 to 5, how was getting to the theater?” “How was buying your ticket?” “How was your experience with concessions?” “How was finding your theater number and your seat?” They went on to use these data to journey map the customer experience, identifying the high points as well as the pain points. You can unpack your user experience data by identifying different elements of the experience and plotting them across time. Journey mapping is an excellent tool for gathering school experience data. It works for all ages and can give you fresh insight into big experiences, such as a Back-to-School Night or graduation, as well as simple processes like lunchroom or assembly procedures. Each data point along a journey map, whether positive or negative, holds a design opportunity.

Frame Your Point of View Kathy Mackay, principal at Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colorado, participated in School Retool, IDEO’s professional development fellowship that helps school leaders hack their way to big change and internalize design thinking

73

74

mindsets. Kathy explained that these mindsets are now foundational to how she leads; she is constantly modeling the process for staff.

Figure 4.1

Story and Journey Mapping 

W ch hat al ar le e ng th es ei an r d ne

ed

s?

STORY MAP

What is the biggest frustration?

What is your POV statement?

What have you learned about your end user?

JOURNEY MAP Chart the highs and lows of an experience . . .

Tim

e

Recently, Kathy set out to reimagine student leadership on campus, and this included setting up a student leadership class. She began by asking the school’s student leaders, “What is our big aspiration?” It was a question designed to help

Define

75

them clarify their purpose and ground them in the why of the project. Together, Kathy and the student leaders looked at possible sources of inspiration, examples of different organizations that were grounded in a common cause, such as the Peace Corps, U.S. Congress, and tech meet-ups. They spent time synthesizing their information and identifying a lever of change they could use to move forward. When the discussion turned to point of view, however, it revealed many competing interests. Across the campus there were several leadership groups, each with its own agenda and unique perspective. There were so many points of view and needs represented in group conversations that purpose (defining goals for the class) got lost. Students became focused on one group need and came armed with specific solutions, which made for some uncomfortable conversations. Kathy encouraged the students to sit with the problem for a longer period of time rather than jumping immediately to solutions. After spending eightplus hours circling the problem, they came to a place where they had consensus and clarity. The problem was not the individual agendas of the different leadership groups across campus but a need for better communication among the leadership teams. As a result, they created the following point-of-view (POV) statement: “The Leadership Class needs to build a communication system that leverages an ongoing exchange of information and honors the differences of all student leadership teams.” This clarity would drive their work for the next semester. Reflecting on the challenges of defining a problem, Kathy shared, “This experience was about helping students learn to trust the process. At the end, it put us in a place where we had gained perspective, had recognized bias, and had a purpose that felt authentic.”

The POV Statement The POV statement will guide you and your team throughout the rest of the design process. It’s essential to your design challenge, which has evolved from a problem thrown out there to be solved to a problem that has been thoroughly investigated and considered from multiple points of view. As you work to

A problem well stated is a problem half-solved. —Charles Kettering

craft your POV statement, there are three important guidelines to keep in mind. A POV statement is grounded in empathy. The POV statement, which clarifies your design challenge, should be built on insight about your end users, their needs, and how they want to feel or what they want to accomplish.

76

For example, you might define a user as “John, a 16-year-old high school student who is habitually late for his first period class and is failing due to his tardiness. John feels frustrated because he is unable to arrive on time. He sometimes oversleeps, feels disorganized, and loses track of time in the morning.” Your POV might become “John needs to devise a process to wake up and get ready for school in way that makes him feel organized and successful for getting to school on time for his first class.” A POV that offers a solution—such as “John needs an alarm clock to help him wake up in the morning.”—is less grounded in empathy because you have already assumed that the answer is an alarm clock, leaving no space to explore other possibilities. A POV statement is appropriate in size and scope. The POV statement should be broad enough to allow for creative freedom in both the ideation phase and the prototyping phase, but not so broad that user needs get lost or are ambiguous. It’s a little like the problem Goldilocks experienced when trying to find the right-size bed, chair, and breakfast. You don’t want your POV statement to be too big or too small; you’re looking for it to be just right—something that your team can wrap their arms around. Returning to the user statement of the 16-year-old student, the alarm clock example is a POV statement that is way to narrow. A POV statement that is too large might be “John needs help getting to school on time.” But the POV statement that focuses on devising a process for getting up and getting ready to arrive at school on time is specific to the problem and allows for multiple solutions. A POV statement is action oriented. Educators are solution oriented and tend to think of solutions as soon as they hear a problem, sometimes even inserting a possible solution into the problem they are solving. Resist the temptation to define a solution within your POV statement. Focusing on what the end user needs to do will help you avoid this trap. In design thinking, needs are verbs and solutions are nouns. Here are a few verbs that can be helpful to consider: build

repurpose

inspire connect

show devise

serve improve innovate make engage

let

disrupt

share

explore

educate invent

solve

empower

desire

construct

Define

encourage

enable

increase produce

maximize align

ignite transform amplify change

customize

reflect

eliminate achieve

rally

energize

generate

assemble

motivate

use

organize

create

help

instill

imagine

develop

reimagine

reframe leverage

vitalize

Use these verbs and Tool 14 to create your POV statement. This template is a simple way to get started turning insights about your users into an action-­ oriented statement. The challenge of the define stage is to find the right focus. Working on your POV statement should help you to • Recognize patterns in your user’s needs, • See opportunities where others see challenges, • Provide clarity about assumptions, • Provide information about systems, • Consolidate and interpret information, • Understand and empathize with the most important insights, and • Create a starting point and focus for a specific point of view as you move into ideation. Sometimes it can be difficult to narrow things down to a specific user group and the insight behind their needs. We can suggest two approaches you might apply to gain more clarity. Consider multiple perspectives. Sure, you are focused on finding a specific solution that works for your defined end user, but you can also hold other views lightly in the background. You can try viewing your POV statement from other points of view—have you thought about different stakeholders (administrators, classroom teachers, students, parents)? Time (past, present, future)? Money (with money, without money)? Looking at your POV statement through a few different lenses will give you more insight and, ultimately, guidance in the ideation phase.

77

78

Tool 14

POV Statement Template Who is your end user?

What are they trying to do? (NEEDS)

How do they want to feel? (INSIGHTS/MEANING)

Who are you designing for? (USER) needs to What do they need to do? (USER’S NEEDS)

in a way that makes them feel How do they want to feel? (INSIGHT)

Who are you designing for? (USER) needs to What do they need to do? (USER’S NEEDS)

in a way that makes them feel How do they want to feel? (INSIGHT)

Define

Consider a reverse point of view. You will have gained some clear understanding and insight into the needs of your user, but what about the person who has an opposing need? Again, you are not currently designing for this user, but this view offers more information to hold in the background as you move forward. You might find yourself designing summer credit-recovery programs for students who are behind, but what about the students who would be better served by accelerated programs that allow them to earn community college credits? For every user who is your focus, there is someone with opposing needs. Who knows? You might be able to tackle both their needs, in time.

From POV to HMW “How might we . . .?” (HMW) translates your POV statement into an invitation, opening up the design challenge and inviting others to join you in the solution space. This question remains slightly ambiguous in order to create space for possibilities and exploration in the next phase, ideation. “How might we . . .?” is a powerful little question for the following reasons: • How signals that you don’t have the answer yet. It will help your team set aside their habitual answers and look for innovative ideas rather than jumping to execute what they “think” it should be. • Might implies that there are multiple solutions—some that may work and some that may not. In the design process, you are looking to explore many creative avenues to different endings. • We signals that this is a collective effort. You will be designing and investigating solutions together. The we is also intended to flatten any hierarchy. “How might we . . .?” by itself is meaningless; when paired with a well-defined objective (i.e., your POV statement), however, you have a foundation for design work. HMW questions helps you move along the design process in several important ways. First, HMW questions break down your user’s needs. The Campbell Union School District, a K–8 public school district in California, has been weaving design thinking into learning experiences for both staff and students. In partnership with the local public library system, the district identified a design challenge: “How might we reimagine the library experience?” A recent bond had passed funding building renovations; the wording of this challenge highlighted

79

80

that the library system not only was space challenged but also faced programmatic challenges and needed to re-engage with youth. Teachers and students were thrilled to have an authentic challenge, a real client, and an opportunity to engage in real design work. Knowing that not all students in the district would be able to visit the library, the Library Design Challenge team created a site where anyone could access videos detailing the spaces and sharing empathy interviews with librarians, library patrons, and community members. The team encouraged students to conduct their own interviews as well, gathering data and stories to help inform their work. Teams of students submitted their design solutions by sharing a video or slideshow that told the story of their prototypes. The design challenge was an “opt-in” for teachers and was widely successful. At the end of the design challenge, the Campbell team had more than 60 submissions for consideration. After a first pass at narrowing down ideas, 12 teams were chosen to continue with the challenge. In round two, each team was invited to refine their ideas and pitch them to a panel that included library personnel, a city council member, and the district superintendent. At this stage, the original HMW question was broken down into more specific needs based on the team’s empathy research and the different users the students had identified. Here ‘s a sample of their HMWs: • How might we create a sound barrier between the teen zone and the adult zone? • How might we increase the “fun” element in the library? • How might we educate our families about all the programs and resources that are available for free? • How might we create imaginative reading nooks in the library? • How might we incorporate refreshments in the library experience? • How might we offer transportation to the library for students who aren’t able to get there on their own? There was no “winner” of the design challenge; each student team received feedback on the presentation of their final design. The library staff was impressed by some of the insights that students had brought forward and came away with new and intriguing ideas to add to their renovation conversations. The students in turn felt not only that their voice was heard in the design process but also that the community was interested in what they had to say. Perhaps

Define

when the library project is finished, students will be able to walk through the new community space and think, “Wow, that was one of our ideas!” The Campbell library challenge provides a great example of a larger HMW question being broken down into more specific questions. To do this, start by taking your POV statement and adding “How might we . . .?” to the beginning of the statement, turning it into a question. Tool 15 can walk you through this. For example, if your POV statement is, “Our 5th grade teacher team needs to develop a more efficient way of collaborating so that every member feels valued and heard,” it will become, “How might we develop a more efficient way of collaborating that values the experience of every member on the 5th grade team?” Looking at the data you collected from interviews, you can then break this question down into three to five smaller “How might we . . .?” questions based on more specific needs that you identified. • How might we incorporate new tools or technology to allow for ongoing collaboration outside team meetings? • How might we better understand the personalities and working styles of individuals on the team, to allow for greater collaboration? • How might we create new opportunities for collaboration beyond formal structures? Here are a few more tips for creating HMW questions. Choose the right verbs. We’ve shared the importance of using strong verbs in the POV statement; the same holds true for your “How might we . . .?” question. First, have some specific conversations about the verbs you choose. This work is about clarity; spending time and being picky about your verb is important. Are you reimagining something, or reframing? Reimagining implies a creative solution; reframing implies a new perspective. Try a few different verbs until you have one that feels right. Allow for a variety of solutions. Sometimes your HMW question might be more of an overall “big ideas” question. In this case, you will need to break it down into smaller questions that provide more clarity for the ideation phase. Multiple prototypes allow for more ideas to move into the world and also allow for more entry points with multiple stakeholders. Small teams can ideate and prototype around different “How might we . . .?” questions, or you can prioritize and focus on the one you feel is most in need of solving.

81

82

Tool 15

HMW Question Template Once you have a well-defined POV statement, you can use it as the basis for specific questions starting with “How might we . . .?” or “In what ways might we . . .?” HMW questions should be broad enough for a wide range of solutions but narrow enough so that specific solutions can be created for them. Be sure to review the observations gathered during the empathize stage of the design thinking process. HMW questions move us into ideation. It’s time to get creative and play a little!

How might we

(Action) (What)

for

(User)

in order to

(What change?)

Try creating several HMW questions:

Define

Invite Others In The empathize and define stages are closely tied together. Your design challenge needs to be framed in a way that invites all of your stakeholders into the work and allows multiple entry points for multiple perspectives. Angie UyHam, district design and innovation coach for Cambridge (Mass.) Public Schools, knows the importance of creating HMW questions that are both inclusive and disruptive. Her upper school team asked, “How might we create an environment that supports positive math mindsets and high achievement for all scholars?” Notice how the question alone can open the door for positive and creative discussions. It also invites multiple perspectives to ideate and prototype different solutions. Angie has created a “design lab” that reframes the way we look at educational problems as a community. It encourages us to see problems as opportunities and to collectively find solutions together. It promotes partnerships between schools and their communities and represents a powerful system for local, sustainable innovation. (Cambridge Public Schools, n.d.)

The design lab facilitates workshops, courses, and coaching sessions for educators, students, families, and community members. Working in teams, design lab participants meet regularly to lean into the idea of exploring a problem before approaching a solution. The broad HMW question is an invitation into the design challenge that shifts the problem into an engaging puzzle to solve. Teams continually build prototypes of their ideas, gather feedback, and return to share and iterate each version. The design lab embraces radical collaboration and has created partnerships with other local agencies, including the Cambridge Agenda for Children and the Center for Artistry and Scholarship, to bring community-based perspectives into its work. Radical collaboration inherently creates opportunities for multiple voices and connections to happen. Who might you invite to collaborate with your team as you work to define your design challenge?

83

84

The Define Phase: Risk Factors 1. Identifying the missing pieces. As you reflect on the information gathered throughout the empathy interviews, it can be easy to be consumed by all the things people said or did. Try to focus instead on what is missing. What wasn’t said? Is there a common theme of missing information? Why might that be? 2. Defining the wrong need. Sometimes we miss the mark and incorrectly identify a need. No worries. Head back to the empathize stage and do some more digging. Maybe you need to generate some new questions that will provide different information, or maybe you need to interview a few more people to give you more perspective. Could it be that what wasn’t said is just as important as what was said? 3. Getting lost in data. If you have gathered a lot of data in the empathize phase, it can be difficult to develop the 10,000-foot view. Your view may be narrowed by your own perspective and biases. Try to gain some distance so you can reflect on your own insights and interpretations as you strive for clarity on a user and point of view. Remember, this phase is about moving from divergence to convergence.

The Define Phase: Insight to Action Reading is good; putting what you have read into practice is even better. Here are three actions you can take now to build momentum and keep moving: 1. Work on intentionally shifting your language to create more possibilities. Try using phrases like “Yes, and . . . ,” “What if . . .?,” and “How might we . . .?” Try posting these phrases somewhere in your office; a visual prompt works wonders when you are embracing new habits. 2. Use Tool 14 to create your POV statement. Are you able to define your users, their needs, and any new insights? Play with verbs, keeping in mind that needs are verbs and solutions are nouns. 3. Create multiple HMW questions that you and your team could brainstorm around. Choose ones that create energy and excitement for the team. If you feel bored by the “How might we . . .?” question, it will be twice as hard to create energy for any of the ideas generated.

5

Ideate

How do you get to a big idea?

T he best way to have a good idea, is to have a lot of them.

—Linus Pauling

We’ve shared this story before (Gallagher & Thordarson, 2018), but it’s worth sharing again. Several years ago, Pacific Power & Light (PP&L), a company that provides electrical service to customers in the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Mountains region, was struggling with a major problem. Power lines were breaking due to heavy ice storms and ice hanging on the power lines every fall and spring. PP&L would send their linemen out to service the lines and shake off the ice, but it was terribly unsafe for the linemen and they all hated doing it. PP&L pulled together a diverse group for a brainstorming session to help identify solutions. During the session, one of the linemen was complaining about the last time he had to de-ice the lines. Not only were the weather conditions dangerous, but he also came face to face with a giant black bear and was chased for almost a mile. He was thankful to get out alive, and he was not looking forward to having to do that again! Another lineman overheard the story and jokingly suggested to the group, “Let’s just train the bears to climb the poles and shake them to get 85

86

the ice off the lines.” The room exploded in laughter. Then someone else added, “What if we put honey pots on top of the poles to attract the bears?” Again, laughter. How would they get honey pots on top of the poles? “I know!” contributed one lineman. “We could have a helicopter fly overhead and put honey pots on top of each pole.” The ideas were getting outlandish. It probably was tempting to shut down this conversation and get back to business, but this line of thinking had sparked something. A secretary spoke up, recalling her days of being an Army nurse’s aide. She shared how, when helicopters would come to pick up injured patients, the downwash from the helicopter blades would cause dust to fly everywhere. All of a sudden, the room went silent; no one laughed at this idea. They had found their solution. Ever since, after ice storms, PP&L helicopters fly over the top of the transmission lines, and the vibration from the helicopter shakes off the ice accumulation. This was an incredible solution, and one they would have never gotten to had they not entertained and built upon the ideas of bears and honey pots (Camper, 1993). What good ideas are hiding in plain sight at your school? How might you tease the good ideas out of your work when solving wicked problems?

Build a Culture Through Improv Improvisation is an important tool in design thinking, especially in the ideate phase, because it helps build a creative culture and boosts everyone’s confidence. Improv is the ability to say “Yes, and . . . .” It is a tool that allows people to push the creative boundaries and make their thinking more expansive. Contrary to popular belief, improv is about more than being funny; it’s a team sport that requires connection to those around you. You must be present and focused on the “now” to react to what is being said. It encourages careful listening and acceptance of what is being offered without judgment. Embracing a designer mindset and coming up with big new ideas to solve design challenges require a healthy dose of improv. Improv can be a powerful tool for change—both in terms of changing how one thinks and creating change in the environment. As Kelly Leonard and Leslie Yorton shared in Yes, and: How Improvisation Reverses “No, but” Thinking (2015): “Every time you learn to be unafraid, your brain changes. Improv is the quickest

Ideate

way to get to the neural pathway change, because it puts [people] in a situation where they are facing their fears” (p. 23). Everyone on your team can build skills for creative problem solving by practicing the tenets of improv: • Suspend judgment. When you wait to analyze, you stay present in the creative process. Save evaluation for later in the process. • Let go of your agenda. Enough said. • Listen in order to receive. Listening closely to others enables moments of agreement and support, leading to an ability to build on one another’s ideas. Rather than evaluate, encourage “Yes, and . . ..” answers. • Make everyone on the team look brilliant. If you focus outward, you remove the focus from yourself and the work is about what the group is creating together. • There are no mistakes. Embrace Tina Fey’s notion that “There are no mistakes, only opportunities” (2011, p. 48). Try introducing improv activities slowly over time. You can start by working with your design team to embrace the tenets of improv and then introduce a different improv activity each time you meet. In the beginning you may get an eyeroll or two, but with repetition you’ll find that infusing that quick and creative element of fun can create a team culture that is ready for change. Don’t let any first reactions deter you. Trust the process and encourage your team to take risks. Here are three improv games that can get you and your team started.

Zip, Zap, Zop At your next gathering, try a simple improv game that focuses on “playing at the speed of fun.” An infinity game with no winner or loser, Zip, Zap, Zop is very easy. To play, gather your team in a circle and tell them you have a bolt of energy in your hands. To start the game, send the bolt out of your hands with a strong forward motion straight to someone else in the circle (using your hands, body, and eyes), while saying “Zip.” Be sure you make eye contact with the person you pass it to. They should receive it and pass it immediately to someone else, saying “Zap.” That person passes it on with a “Zop.” The game continues, with the goal being speed and fun. If there is a mistake, encourage everyone to simply continue playing.

87

88

Wacky Introductions Looking for an activity that creates a lighthearted mood and creative energy in the room? Try Wacky Introductions. Everyone starts in a circle, then they mill around and introduce themselves to each other. Here’s the tricky part: each person then assumes the name of the person they’ve just met. So, for example, Mary and Todd introduce themselves to each other, and then they both move on to meet new people. This time, though, they would both be introducing themselves as someone else. So, when Mary introduces herself to someone new, she says, “Hi, my name is Todd.” This continues until a person “meets” himself or herself for the first time (e.g., Mary gets introduced to someone else saying he is Mary), at which point the person steps out of the game, creating an outer circle. It sounds a little complicated at first, but it is a ton of laughs and works best when you know everyone in the group. It turns out that it is a lot harder to introduce yourself as someone else to people you already know.

“Yes, and . . .” Versus “Yes, but . . .” We have previously stressed the difference between “Yes, but . . .” and “Yes, and . . . .” This improv activity puts this difference at the center of your team’s focus and opens everyone up to more possibilities. For this game, divide your team into pairs, have them designate themselves as Partner A and Partner B, and tell them they have two minutes to plan a party. Partner A starts by throwing out a party idea, to which Partner B must respond, “Yeah, but . . .” and give a reason why this is a terrible idea. Have them continue this for the full two minutes. Can you imagine any parties being planned that way? We always ask at this point whether anyone has been able to plan an incredible party, and the answer is always a resounding and frustrating no. Have them try it again, but this time Partner B is responsible for throwing out party ideas, and Partner A will always respond with “Yes, and . . . ,” building on the idea. It is amazing how creative and fun the parties get when we build on each other’s ideas. This is a great way to start building a “Yes, and . . .” culture of possibility. Improv allows your team to build something that is truly shared. It requires multiple points of view. It improves dialogue and builds communication skills. It is one of the best tools in the designer toolbox for building creative muscle and innovative solutions. A little improv can go a long way to improving your team’s

Ideate

ability to think outside the box and come up with more creative solutions. You can find more improv resources and games at Improv Encyclopedia (http:// improvencyclopedia.org/games/).

Warm Up for Creative Thinking It’s essential to provide a way for individuals to warm up their brains prior to an ideation session. In all likelihood, people are coming to your design team gathering running from another commitment with a million things on their mind. It can be hard to plop down in a chair and be asked for their “best thinking” or most creative ideas to solve a problem. So before diving in, always set aside a few minutes to engage your team in a creative exercise. Practicing brain warm-up activities helps to silence the inner critic that lives in each of us. The exact activity is less important than the process, so pick a few exercises that work for you. You might consider making them part of your routine prior to engaging in any brainstorming or creative work. These warmups can be done either with a group or individually; the only goal is to get your creative juices flowing. We both have learned to embrace warm-up exercises prior to engaging in any task that requires creativity. A quick Google search of brainstorming warm-ups yields over a million results (see, e.g., Smashing Ideas, n.d.). Most times, these activities take less than five minutes and can create positive energy in the room for the team to build on. Here are few to get you started.

30 Circles and Squiggle Birds These two drawing-based exercises happen to be our personal favorites. The goal of 30 Circles (Kelley & Kelley, 2015) is to help your team build its creative muscle and ability to convert something recognizable or routine into something completely different. You’ll need a pen and a piece of paper (or a copy of Tool 16) per person. Challenge your team to see how many of the 30 circles they can transform into different objects (e.g., a pie, a pumpkin, a baseball, a tennis racquet, a peace sign) in three minutes. Squiggle Birds (https://gamestorming.com/squiggle-birds/) is a variation of 30 Circles. You start by drawing a series of random squiggles on a page and then challenge yourself to go back and turn each squiggle into a bird by adding a beak, an eye, feet, wings, and maybe even a tail. You only need to set aside a few minutes, and you can challenge a group to see who creates the most birds.

89

90

Tool 16

Warm-Up: 30 Circles

Ideate

1,000 Uses Sometimes we just need to break out of our current thinking; taking a commonly used object and encouraging people to come up with new and different uses for it can help them become more expansive in their thinking. Divide participants into equal-size groups, pick a random object (e.g., a paperclip, a safety pin, a thumbtack), and challenge each group to come up with 1,000 uses for the object. No repeats. In each group, participants should take turns coming up with new ideas. Make sure that each group has a note taker to capture their ideas. Time the challenge for four minutes. When time is up, have each group share how many ideas they generated. The group with the most ideas wins!

Change the Prompt, Change the Product In design thinking, reframing the question influences proposed solutions. For the first round of this exercise, ask everyone to draw a TV set. Once they are finished, have them post what they drew on the board and share with others. For the second round, have everyone draw and post “a way to enjoy movies at home.” Walk your team through highlighting how different ideas were generated by the different instructions they received.

Two Buckets To help your team develop a mindset that is open to new ideas, try this ­combine-and-connect activity. One bucket contains cards listing name brands; in the other, cards list product categories. Participants select cards and pair them up. Their challenge? Create a new product with the information they have and design a slogan of six words or fewer. This is a quick activity that requires all participants to loosen up and begin exploring new ideas. An example from one of our teams was “Harley Davidson/car seat” with the slogan “Ride safe in style.” Don’t give people too long; the goal isn’t to create a product worthy of being sold.

Crazy 8s You want your team to be able to brainstorm easily, coming up with ideas and presenting them visually as quickly as they can. This warm-up builds this skill and requires nothing more than a piece of paper (folded in half three times to create eight squares) and a pencil. Give the team a nonsense prompt, like “Design a taxi that puts you in a good mood” or “Draw a stapler for a foodie” or “Show me a phone that has a cold.” In response, each member of your team needs to sketch

91

92

eight quick, rough ideas as possibilities. Your prompts can be super-silly, and the sketches don’t have to be great; as with all of our brainstorming warm-ups, the idea is to get your team into a mind frame that is open to creating new and innovative solutions.

Ready, Set, Brainstorm! At this point, you have created a team culture where all ideas are accepted. You’ve provided opportunities for The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. —Edward de Bono

your team members to warm up their brains. You are ready to dive into brainstorming! Although everyone thinks they know how to brainstorm, we have seen too many “brainstorming” sessions that actually shut down creativity and do not result in any brilliant ideas. So how do you avoid the terrible brainstorm meeting trap?

Set the Stage First, think about logistics. Brainstorming works best when people are standing and have room to move around. We find it works well to have a space lined with chart paper, with prompts to keep people focused on the topics around which they will brainstorm. Make sure you are well stocked with brainstorming supplies such as sticky notes, markers, chart paper, sticky dots, snacks (chocolate is always a crowd pleaser), and fidget toys. Consider adding music to set the mood. Allow enough time for the brainstorming session. Don’t schedule a brainstorming session at the end of an already packed agenda; chances are, it will either get cut or shortchanged due to time constraints. You need a minimum of an hour to 90 minutes for a group brainstorming session; it can take longer than you think to get the ideas flowing. If you finish early, you have given your team the gift of a little unscheduled time, something everyone appreciates. Second, invite the right people. Brainstorming is best done in small groups. An optimal size group for brainstorming is a group that can easily convene around a flip chart. We recommend 8 to 10 people; if your group is larger than that, you may want to break them into smaller groups. You can have several small groups working together to brainstorm; just remember at the end of your brainstorming session to allow time for groups to share out and hear about the ideas from the other group.

Ideate

Next, you need to set accurate expectations. Although the perspective of every participant is valued, those in the brainstorming session may not necessarily also be making the decisions. You want their best creative thinking to generate ideas, but everyone needs to be aware that narrowing of ideas might happen at another meeting or a later date. Set expectations and clarify how the brainstorming sessions will conclude from the get-go. Before any work starts, clarify the rules for the session. Although brainstorming is something everyone thinks they know how to do, failing to establish some ground rules has doomed many a brainstorming session. Helpful rules are those that apply to withholding judgment (“There are no bad ideas.” “Wild ideas encouraged!”), encourage people to be descriptive (“When possible, be visual.”), delineate the goals of the session (“Aim for quantity, not quality.”), and remind participants to be polite (“Stay focused: one conversation at a time.”). You might even consider posting the rules somewhere in the room as a visual reference.

Empower Individual Participants In addition to group warm-ups, try to incorporate a few minutes of individual brainstorming time during each session. Not everyone processes information in the same way; a few minutes of individual work can help level the playing field, especially for those who may be more introverted by nature. Throw out a topic and give people five minutes (uninterrupted) to get their juices flowing. This also helps build creative confidence, as people now have ideas to contribute more easily once the group brainstorming session begins. Similarly, in any meeting, the person who holds the pen controls the flow of information. You never want to limit the flow of a brainstorming session, so—as we’ve previously mentioned—make sure you have the right supplies. Does everyone have a pad of sticky notes and a pen or marker? Encourage people to jot down ideas, share their ideas, and add their written contributions to the chart paper lining the walls of your meeting room. One idea per sticky note is a great practice. Yes, you’ll go through a lot of sticky notes, but this also allows for regrouping of ideas by affinity groups (see Chapter 4) or by ease of implementation. Ask your team for their worst ideas. Really! Think about the times you’ve been in a meeting where an idea is prefaced by “This is probably a bad idea, but . . . .” It happens all the time. People worry about what others might think and expect to be judged on the ideas they share; asking for their worst ideas will free your team. Once everyone has shared their worst possible solutions to the problem,

93

94

everything is uphill from there. As an added bonus, sharing your worst idea will loosen people up and add an element of humor to the process. And you never know; some of the best ideas hide in the worst ideas, just waiting to be teased out.

Play with Ideas At any brainstorming session, you want to present questions that will spur new ideas, so it is crucial to think about the way you will phrase your questions. Flair is encouraged. You want to ask questions that help shift a conversation, or ones that can restart a conversation that has gotten stalled. Be sure to customize your prompts based on the language of possibility and collaborative thinking: “How might we . . .?” (see Chapter 4). For example: • What if we could create a school guided by the best instructional, innovative, and creative practices available? What would that look like? • If money were no object, what instructional practices would we want to see implemented across grades/school sites? • If we were to visit our school in the year 2120, what would it look like? • How might we prepare our students to be the ones to cure cancer, solve world hunger, or eliminate global warming? What skills do they need to learn? What would their K–12 education program look like? • Given the chance, what kind of education program would students create? How might we build in student choice throughout the instructional day? Sometimes launching into deep thinking can be hard. Is your team one that needs a little playfulness added to their work? If so, you might try some more general, “fun” prompts: • How would we solve the problem if we were the very best [teacher/scientist/philosopher/etc.] in the world? • How would Walt Disney solve your problem? What would Steve Jobs, Kim Kardashian, or Barack Obama suggest? • How might you solve your problem if you had zero teaching experience? • How would you solve your problem if your school were on the space station or on Mars? • What if we removed all technology? Conversely, what if we were designing for a virtual reality school?

Ideate

You also want your team to be able to combine and connect the ideas they generate. Within a few minutes, you can take three ideas and turn them into 18 using Tool 17. Incorporating this practice into your brainstorming sessions can help you and your team experiment with different iterations of favorite ideas and turn up something entirely new. After brainstorming in small groups, ask each participant to place a red circle next to an idea with the biggest impact, a blue circle next to a “pie in the sky” idea, a yellow circle next to a quickly implemented idea, and a green circle next to an idea that is cost effective. While allowing your team members to have a say in highlighting their favorite ideas, this process can also help you to see trends or ideas that create energy within the group, either because they are the most common ideas or because they generate the most discussion.

Capitalize on Your Work If you don’t plan to continue the work of narrowing the focus any further at this stage, be sure to thank all participants for sharing their best thinking. Describe how you plan to proceed in narrowing ideas for prototyping and execution. In our experience, most participants feel a little exhausted after a brainstorming session, but also energized by all of the possibilities on the table. Even if they will not be a part of the process moving forward, most will now have a vested interest in following what happens next. There will likely be interest and excitement about narrowing ideas, learning from new ideas not previously on anyone’s radar, prototyping, and seeing their ideas in action. Capitalize on this excitement by creating a way to communicate with everyone who has been a part of the process. Take the time to document all of the ideas that have been generated. This can be shared with participants as a simple thank-you note like the following: Thank you for sharing your best thinking and ideas. Together, we generated more than 673 new ideas for our school district. I can’t wait to share what comes from our work together!

Whether you choose to share all the ideas or not, document every single one. Having participated in countless brainstorming sessions, we are always amazed at how many new practices, even years down the road, track back to these conversations.

95

96

Tool 17

Idea Generator What’s the opposite?

Idea #1

Combine with another idea.

Take it to the extreme.

Split the idea into two.

Add one element.

Subtract one element.

What’s the opposite?

Idea #2

Combine with another idea.

Take it to the extreme.

Split the idea into two.

Add one element.

Subtract one element.

What’s the opposite?

Idea #3

Combine with another idea.

Take it to the extreme.

Split the idea into two.

Add one element.

Subtract one element.

Ideate

Select an Idea to Prototype Brainstorming has given you lots of ideas; now what? The next step is to select an idea or ideas that you are ready to take into the next phase of design thinking: prototyping. But what if you have more ideas than you know what to do with? It’s time to sort through and make sense of the ideas that have been generated. The colored-dot voting system we previously described is helpful at this stage, because it enables people to react in the moment while also revealing ideas that are “fan favorites.” However, there are other ways to evaluate the ideas your team has generated. Depending on the depth and breadth of your design challenge, you could narrow all ideas way down to a single idea, or you could choose a few (two or three) that you want to learn more about. In the traditional problem-solving process, a committee would debate the merits of two ideas, ultimately selecting one for implementation. The design thinking process doesn’t encourage a debate between two ideas; instead, it encourages prototyping both ideas to learn what works when it’s put into action. Viewing ideas along an ideation horizon, comparing and contrasting them within a matrix, and conducting a strategic analysis are all tools and approaches that can help you narrow your ideas and select those that you are ready to prototype.

Look to the Ideation Horizon Viewing ideas along a “horizon” can help you sort them based on the reality of implementation (see Figure 5.1). You will likely have some ideas that can be implemented easily with little time or resources; those are the ideas that are right in front of you. Other ideas might be within your grasp but require more time or resources to fully develop; those are the ideas “beyond the trees.” And there will be other ideas that would be much harder to implement; those ideas are “over the mountains.” The ideation horizon is also a fabulous tool to gauge how “big” your team is thinking. Often, groups of adults focus on the ideas right in front or perhaps beyond the trees. Compare this with how children brainstorm: almost all of their ideas will be over the mountain. Knowing where your team’s ideas fall on the ideation horizon can help you plan for future sessions—and for implementation. Does your team need help thinking bigger? Do they need additional tools to help pare down dozens of idea? Grab a large piece of chart paper and sketch out an

97

98

ideation horizon to visualize where your ideas and your team’s ideas fall. If you’ve brainstormed ideas on sticky notes, that will make the sorting much easier.

Figure 5.1

Ideation Horizon 

In front of us

Beyond the trees

Over the mountains

Use an Idea Evaluation Matrix An idea evaluation matrix (Tool 18) can help you screen ideas under consideration. This tool is most effective when comparing or contrasting a handful of ideas, so you will need to narrow a bank of hundreds of ideas into something more manageable. We have found winnowing the list to 10 is a good place to start. While this isn’t an easy task, imposing a top 10 list constraint helps people approach the work more critically. The first step is to identify the criteria you will use to evaluate and score ideas. For example, you might use the following types of categories for evaluation: • Solves the problem: Does this idea meet the needs of our users? • Innovative: Is this idea different from or better than what already exists? • Doable: Is this idea practical, given our current set of constraints? • Cost/benefit: Does the benefit of this idea outweigh the cost of implementation?

Ideate

You could include other items—such as how easy it would be to get early adopters to implement an idea—or assign ideas a “passion score” (Is this an idea I am personally passionate about implementing?). Your scoring system can be as simple as ranking each idea in each category with a plus or minus symbol, which will allow you to assign a score for each idea.

Perform a SWOT Analysis Strategic planning sessions often include evaluating current and proposed activities through the lens of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—a SWOT analysis. SWOT analyses are often used to evaluate the state of a district or when assessing implementation of a new program, but the same methodology can be used to gauge the merit of ideas. You can work through the four SWOT factors for your top few ideas and analyze them by asking a series of questions: • Strengths: What are the strengths of the idea? What existing resources can we leverage to implement the idea? What overall strengths does the team see? • Weaknesses: What are some potential challenges with this idea? What might make it difficult to implement? What might prevent this idea from being successful? • Opportunities: Does this idea work best within certain schools or segments of our organization? Are there ways we could leverage any success as a result of implementation? In addition to meeting the needs of the user, does this idea help further our work in any particular area? • Threats: What obstacles might we face as we work to bring this idea to life? What pushback might there be from teachers, parents, or community members? Does this idea pose a threat to any other work or initiatives within the district? Another approach to this is to bring together four members of your design team (or break the team into four small groups) and have one person assess the strengths of each idea, one assess the weaknesses, one assess possible opportunities, and one assess the possible threats. You may want to limit this in-depth analysis to your top four to five ideas. In this group SWOT analysis, you would then have pairs collaborate; for example, how could the strengths be used to take advantage of an opportunity? Or you might ask the team members who

99

2 = Medium

3 = High

Or

+ or –

Ideas to Evaluate Scoring

1 = Low

Add your own question here!

Does the benefit outweigh the cost?

Cost/Benefit:

Is it practical, given constraints?

Doable:

Is it diffeent or better?

Innovative:

Does it meet user needs?

Solves the Problem:

100

Tool 18

Idea Evaluation Matrix

Ideate

101

individually focused on strengths and threats to identify how the strengths might be used to neutralize any of the threats. How do the identified weaknesses enhance the threats? What potential opportunities might be lost due to the weaknesses of an idea? Once you cycle through this entire process, you will have a fairly robust analysis of at least your top five ideas. No matter what tools you select to help you narrow down the ideas that you have generated in the ideate phase of design thinking, resist making snap judgments about ideas or situations. Certainty has the danger of shutting down ideas before they have been thoroughly considered or investigated. We’ve learned that the best ideas often hide in the wildest ones (remember the honey pots?). If you shut down an idea too quickly, you, your team, and ultimately your end users all lose out. To avoid this, suspend your judgment. Try adopting phrases that are more generative in nature—What if . . .? How might we make that work?—and work through the selection tools that seem most appropriate to you and your team. Once you have narrowed down your ideas, you are ready to move into the next phase of design thinking: prototyping.

The Ideate Phase: Risk Factors 1. Not understanding where “no” fits. Creating a “culture of yes” and being open to new ideas does not mean that there is never a time or place for “no”—which can also be freeing, and which has the potential to create space. You might need to say no to some ideas to allow others to flourish. The intent of focusing on creating a culture of yes is to counterbalance cultures that are traditionally steeped in the status quo. Learn to recognize where the “Yes, and . . .” mindset would be appropriate and where a firm “no” still may be necessary. Striking the right balance between yes and no is the art and science of design thinking. 2. Small thinking. Is your team thinking big enough? Are the ideas testing boundaries and creating audacious goals for the organization? If not, you may want to revisit your brainstorming sessions and push the team to get more expansive in their thinking. A big idea can always be scaled back, but a small idea has nowhere to go. Encourage your team to “go crazy” with ideas, and you may be surprised at the great ideas that are hidden within. (continued)

102

The Ideate Phase: Risk Factors—(continued) 3. Selecting too soon. Resist the temptation to force a selection of ideas. It can be tempting to create a forced choice and require your team to narrow it down to one idea; remember that there might be a few ideas that have possibilities, once they are explored further. The beauty of prototyping is the ability to learn about the ideas that are front-runners. Don’t spend too much time debating the merits of ideas in this phase. Get your team to narrow down their ideas to the top few. You can prototype and test multiple ideas. The feedback you receive in the next stage might be exactly the feedback you need to narrow your selection and end up with a final (and successful) prototype.

The Ideate Phase: Insight to Action Reading is good; putting what you have read into practice is even better. Here are three actions you can take now to build momentum and keep moving: 1. Make improv and warm-up activities a regular part of your culture. Not only will you get more creative thinking, but you’ll also start to create more flexible thinkers and a more innovative culture. 2. Host a brainstorming conversation where you “go big.” Plan ahead to get the right people in the room, then create the space to unleash their biggest thinking. Use Tool 19 to plan ahead. 3. Document and then sort all of the ideas generated. Which ideas could be implemented tomorrow? Which ideas are further out? By sorting ideas on the ideation horizon, your team will collectively start to paint a picture of the future based on ideas that are exciting but might be “beyond the trees” for the moment.

Ideate

Tool 19

Brainstorm Blueprint Who?

When?

Where?

Create an invite list.

Set date and time (minimum 60 minutes)

Indicate room and supplies. Set a creative stage.

Objective and Process What topics are you brainstorming around? How will decisions be made?

Prompts for Flair

Tools to Narrow

How will you spark creativity when people get stale?

What process or tools will you use to help the group winnow ideas?

It’s a Wrap! How will you document the brainstorming session? What follow-up will participants need?

103

6

Prototype

What does your idea look like in action? picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype I fisaworth a thousand meetings.

—IDEO

Travis Lape, innovative programs director in South Dakota’s Harrisburg School District, led a team of K–12 teachers in the creation of a new personalized learning program for students. Personalizing learning is a widespread wicked problem in education right now—something that everyone is trying to figure out. Travis and the team of four teachers spent 10 days over one summer learning and designing together. They created a school within a school, a personalized learning cohort (PLC), as an opt-in option for families. In this PLC, learners are not grouped by age or grade levels but by what they are ready to learn in reading and math, based on pre-assessment results. The PLC teams use the learning cycle—experience, reflect, conceptualize, and test— as a way to reach all learners and ensure they are using the best instructional practices with the most significant effect on learning. Teachers, called facilitators in the PLC, are not bound by curriculum and are constantly prototyping and iterating to create the best possible learning experiences for their learners. 104

Prototype

In the first year, the district’s PLC prototype created opportunities for students in grades 2–5; 144 students and their families opted into the program. Fastforward two years: all students in grades 2–5 throughout the district are now a part of the PLC. The team has continued to learn and iterate. The ongoing prototyping process helped them develop a PLC program that they could scale across the district. As Travis reflected on their learning of the past several years, one of his biggest takeaways related to the power of prototyping: You can’t just replicate what someone else has created. Yes, you can learn from what others have done, but you have to design for the needs of your school and build to learn. The real power is in the learning embedded in the creation and prototyping process.

Travis and his team embraced the notion that everything they were building would be a prototype. They would continually learn and recreate their program based on the feedback received from PLC students and parents. A commitment to prototyping is a commitment to learning. Shouldn’t we all be learners? When you commit to prototyping, you are choosing to live in a state of “perpetual beta,” where anything you create can be modified to meet the changing needs of your end users.

The Basics of Prototyping When we were novices at design thinking, prototyping was one of the hardest phases for us to wrap our heads around. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that both of us were first exposed to design thinking in a design sprint, where we were taken through the entire process of design thinking in less than 90 minutes (see Appendix A). Although design sprints provide a great overview of how design thinking works, when they are all you know, you’ll encounter a great deal of frustration during the prototyping phase. We, for example, failed to see how a table full of pipe cleaners and art supplies was going to help us move our ideas along. It turns out we weren’t alone. The prototype phase is frequently mentioned as a challenge in surveys of design thinkers. This might be due to some common misunderstandings of what the prototype phase is all about and what it is meant to achieve. Prototyping is all about getting ideas out of your head, making

105

106

them tangible, and creating something that engages others. Think about what it might feel like to have a conversation with your ideas; that is prototyping. The beautiful part of prototyping is that you can create anything that users can interact with—a brochure about a program, a storyboard of ideas, or even a roleplay. Regardless of the type, all prototypes are created to start a conversation, inviting others into the design process. Prototypes can be frustrating because they might fail or might not work as you had imagined. What’s important to remember is that when an idea “fails,” the process of prototyping is succeeding. Any time you are able to create a tangible form of an idea and receive feedback from others, your prototyping is ­working—even if that feedback sends you back to the drawing board to work with new ideas. Imagine for a moment the alternative to prototyping. Your team creates a new solution to meet the needs of students and is excited about implementation. You have the resources and create a plan to scale the solution across the district immediately. Unfortunately, the intended solution doesn’t work as planned, and now you have a disaster on your hands. This is essentially what happened when administrators at the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the largest public school system in the state of California and the second-largest school district in the United States—decided to move forward with supplying every student with an iPad. In hindsight, the LAUSD iPad initiative had a rushed rollout, insufficient security procedures, and inadequate training for staff. What started out as a great idea turned into a $1.3 billion boondoggle that made the news for all the wrong reasons (Lapowsky, 2015). We can’t help but wonder what might have been different had LAUSD first prototyped the implementation across one grade or one school. Would this have allowed them to identify the potential pitfalls of their solution before scaling it across hundreds of schools? With a little awareness, you might start seeing real-life prototypes everywhere. During a trip to New York City, Alyssa and her husband were celebrating their wedding anniversary with a meal at Momofuku Ko, a Michelin two-starred jewel of a restaurant. While seated at the chef’s table, they had incredible conversations with the chef about the creation of the experimental tasting menu. Momofuku Ko seats just 20 people a night in the restaurant, but there is also an attached bar where patrons can order food and no reservations are needed. The bar acts as the R&D arm of the restaurant, providing a place for the culinary team to test out new items. Every day, the planned menu for the evening

Prototype

is handwritten in a notebook. At the end of the night, comments are made on the menu, and dishes are crossed out or starred depending on how they were received by diners. This feedback is used when developing the next evening’s menu. The notebooks are kept as a reference for the culinary team and can also be viewed by customers. Handwritten menus are a simple and low-fidelity prototype, yet this is an effective prototyping system that also documents daily learning about the dishes being created. What might an R&D arm look like for your teachers or at your school? How might it change your perspective if you were able to view the lessons and experiences created for students as prototypes? What might you learn from these experiences, and how might you become more comfortable sharing the “dishes” that weren’t well received? Now that we’ve introduced the concept and purpose of prototyping, we want to share a few high-level tips for making it work.

Reframe Failure Because failure is a part of the prototyping process, it may be helpful for your team to reframe failure in the context of learning. As Winston Churchill reportedly said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.” One thing we particularly recommend is having a conversation about failure before you begin prototyping and reaching agreements about how your team will fail. For example: • We will fail in public. This means being transparent with our failures as we prototype and share our learnings. • We will fail as a team. This means working through any failure as a team and celebrating all successes as a team. • We will fail quickly and incrementally. This means placing small bets and learning from them right away, keeping in mind that even a bad idea may help us get to a better idea. • We will fail without judgment. This means no one will point fingers or judge anyone in this process. There is a scene in the animated movie Meet the Robinsons (McKim & Anderson 2007) that perfectly captures the attitude needed while prototyping. Lewis, the 12-year-old protagonist who loves to invent, tries out a new invention that fails. Everyone around him reminds him that there is nothing to do but keep

107

108

moving forward. It is a movie clip to share with your team either after a failure or prior to jumping into prototyping. No matter the outcome of your prototype, you must keep moving forward.

Remember the Three Rs When prototyping with your team, keep in mind the “three Rs” of prototyping: relevant, rapid, and rough. Prototypes are relevant. In other words, a prototype must isolate the question you are solving. It should clearly solve the problem for your end user and link back directly to the insights you uncovered during your empathy work. Imagine yourself sharing your prototype with an end user. Would they see the prototype as closely connected to their needs? Prototypes are rapid. Because you are building to learn, you need to make your idea tangible as quickly as possible. The longer you spend working on a prototype, the more emotionally attached you get to it—and emotional attachment to a solution can make it much harder to be open to feedback, especially feedback that is constructive. This is why committee work can be problematic. You’ve likely been a part of a committee and experienced this firsthand. The committee is pulled together to solve a problem, the group meets regularly for a defined period of time (often behind closed doors), and the committee creates and shares a solution or program to meet student needs. In most cases, the solution is implemented, and the committee disbands. Rarely do committees come back together to ask, “Is our solution working? What might we need to change or adjust?” Unfortunately, most committee work doesn’t tend to be iterative, and therefore the solutions are not considered prototypes. Prototypes are rough. Prototypes do not need to be perfect—just good enough. The level of fidelity should match the level of thinking. Think about that for a minute. Are you more likely to provide honest feedback to someone who presents you with a draft or to someone who presents you with a slick digital solution? When prototypes are too polished, you run the risk of communicating that you aren’t actually looking for feedback but for agreement. Don’t worry about making beautiful prototypes; spend your time and energy making prototypes to communicate and learn.

Prototype

Creating Prototypes Prototyping is a journey. It takes many forms and the process is always a little different, because each prototype is based on a specific design challenge. However, the prototyping journey always begins with the same first step: creating a simple, low-fidelity example of your idea—a sketch on a piece of paper or a doodle on a napkin. It requires little investment to get the thinking out of your head. No matter how crude your first prototype, you should be able to easily share it with a design partner to gather quick ideas for iteration. The next step in the journey is modeling the prototype. At this point, you want something that is physical, something with which your team members or your end user can interact. It might be a mock-up, made with low-cost materials. It could be sticky notes with images to represent web pages. It could be cardboard, rubber bands, and bottle caps creating a mock-up of a space or a new tool, or it could be a group role-playing an experience with some simple props. If needed, you may move into a higher-fidelity prototype, one with more polish and finish. Some examples would be a first draft of a working app that people can test, a classroom space with movable furniture, or a new way of hosting Back-to-School Night. When developing any prototype, it’s essential to build in stop points—places where your team members and users interact with your idea and provide feedback. The specific design challenge may influence how far you travel on the prototype journey. Some challenges may be less complicated in their solutions and more quickly solved; more complex design challenges may require many more attempts and changes along the way. As a result, the number of iterations of your prototype is completely dependent on the type and complexity of the challenge you are working to solve. Now, on to the practical. As the examples we’ve just shared illustrate, prototypes come in a variety of forms, but they generally fall into one of three categories: physical, virtual, or experiential. The type of prototype you select will depend on the type of solution you are creating and where you are in your prototyping journey.

Physical Prototypes A physical prototype is anything that users can touch or hold: pamphlets, products, or mock-ups. When we were creating a design thinking conference

109

110

for junior high school students, we found ourselves struggling to figure out how to best to pitch the experience to the audience we wanted to reach. So we prototyped marketing materials that we were able to share. Once these materials were in students’ hands, we were able to more accurately gauge their interest. We learned almost immediately which aspects of our planned conference were attractive to students and which elements they thought were silly or unnecessary. We joke about having to create one of our first prototypes during a Stanford Design Thinking Bootcamp with nothing but basic art supplies (e.g., cardboard, glue sticks, pipe cleaners, and pom-poms). But it can be helpful to establish a designated prototyping area, with a range of materials available and accessible for design teams. You never know when inspiration may strike; having materials at the ready can help ideas become tangible sooner. Plus, sometimes it is fun to tinker with materials and try to make something. The good news is that almost anything can double as prototyping materials. You can quickly start a prototyping station just by grabbing a couple of large plastic bins and tossing in basic office supplies—markers, sticky notes, ribbon, Velcro, a hot-glue gun, cardboard . . . you get the idea. If you keep an eye on your recycling bin for a few days and make a quick trip to an art supply store, you’ll have everything you need and more. Once your prototyping station is set up, you can encourage others to donate materials; it will really raise your awareness regarding how much stuff people throw away daily! We were surprised by how frequently our first prototype station was used and by how much teachers enjoyed making ideas come to life.

Virtual Prototypes A virtual prototype, such as a website or an app, often starts as a physical prototype. First drafts of a basic idea are often sketched on paper; over time, you move them into higher-fidelity virtual prototypes. Because creating virtual prototypes tends to require a much greater investment of time and money, consider extending the initial physical stage as long as possible. For example, in one school, staff role-played an app using a large iPad frame, with members of the design team acting out what would be happening on the screen and how the user would interact with the app. It was a quick way to gather feedback, and it helped inform the design of the team’s first virtual prototype.

Prototype

111

Fortunately, new technology tools are always being developed, allowing for more exploration in this space in the near future. Some schools and districts are experimenting with virtual prototypes as they create personalized learning platforms for students and on-demand professional learning for teachers.

Experiential Prototypes Experiential prototypes immerse the user into an experience and are powerful because they tap into users’ emotions. They are an especially effective way to get feedback on whether a type of experience will work for your end users. In Zambia, more than a third of all women give birth by age 18. Although there are free health clinics available for teen girls, historically few teens ever accessed these resources, meaning low levels of contraceptive use and high rates of pregnancy. Seeking a solution to this wicked problem, IDEO created Diva Centres, a hangout space for teen girls in Zambia to teach them about feminine hygiene and reproductive health (IDEO.org, 2018). Girls can go to Diva Centres to hang out with friends and get manicures, but while there, they can also chat about dating and boys, and have access to peers who are trained to provide accurate information about feminine health topics. When the girls are ready, they are provided with counseling services and free contraceptives. The first prototype of Diva Centres was nothing more than a small space created in an open-air market with a table, a few chairs, beauty supplies, and people offering free manicures to teenage girls. Based

We interrogate the world by making. —Bill Burnett, Designing Your Life

on the success of this experiential prototype, by 2017, the 10 Diva Centres in Zambia had served more than 5,000 clients.

Ready, Set, Prototype! Start small. Think of your first prototype as a rough draft, nothing more than a way to get ideas out of your head. Try creating several different quick prototypes before committing and going all-in on one prototype (Tool 20 can help you get started). You could even adapt the Crazy 8s brainstorming activity from Chapter 5, sketching out eight different ways you could prototype a solution. There is never only one way to prototype, so sketch out lots of possibilities and move forward with the one you feel the most energy around. If you have energy and excitement around an idea, you’re more likely to want to work through the

112

many iterations that will be required. Work quickly; you are not going for perfection. Create a simple, shareable version of your idea that will allow you to get feedback directly from users. Make sure everyone included in the design process has clarity around the process and purpose of prototyping. Each team member, when developing or presenting a prototype, should be able to answer three essential questions: 1. What do we want to learn from this prototype? 2. How might this prototype help us answer our questions? 3. What does “success” look like? Having this conversation with your team will help you ground the prototyping phase in learning. A prototyping process is always successful if you can identify the learning that has occurred as a result. Now that you are ready to prototype, here are a few reminders.

Identify Pain Points and Generate Ideas Meghan Lawson created a movement called FHSDX when she was working as the associate director of secondary curriculum and instruction for the Forest Hills School District (FHSD) in Cincinnati, Ohio. (As Meghan explains, “X marks the spot where a problem and a radical solution intersect.”) The movement was focused on identifying the pain points for high school students at school. As you are likely aware, high school is not working for many students in the United States: 1.2 million high school students drop out annually, which translates to 7,000 students dropping out every day or one student dropping out every 26 seconds (Miller, 2011). Meghan was determined to explore this student experience—not just including but understanding the pain points—in order to start to develop a solution. To uncover these pain points, Meghan and her team dug into empathy work (see Chapter 3) by shadowing students, conducting student forums, and gathering student stories. They asked a lot of questions—“What is the best part of your current high school experience?” “What is the worst part of your high school experience?” “What works? How do we improve it?” “What might be possible in high school?”—and created a website to share design resources with their broader community. Teams of students, teachers, and parents collaborated and worked to solve an identified pain point. These smaller design teams worked

Prototype

Tool 20

Prototype Sketch Sheet Who is your user?

What is their need/problem?

What is your solution? How does it solve the user’s problem?

Remember: Prototypes are relevant, rapid, and rough. Sketch your prototype below.

Now go build to learn!

113

114

through the process and submitted prototypes that addressed identified pain points, which included the following: • High school start times. This pain point for students was addressed in a prototype recommending later start times and providing research to support this recommendation. • Outdated classrooms. This pain point for both students and teachers was addressed by dramatic videos illustrating how school classrooms for the 21st century should look and feel. • A lack of common planning time. The prototype addressing this pain point for teachers proposed a new schedule with a focus on planning time. The design team’s biggest challenge was figuring out how to implement and move the prototypes forward. Although all of the proposed prototypes showed potential, they chose to first focus their attention on shifting the high school start time. They knew they had to tread carefully, as this would have a tremendous effect on the lives of families. Leveraging the student voices they had gathered during the empathize phase helped them to create a compelling story for why school should start later. The team then surveyed families and were surprised to learn that over 85 percent of families favored a later start. This was all they needed to dive in and modify the schedule, knowing that the worst case was that they might have to revert to the earlier start time if the new schedule didn’t work. They changed the schedule and shifted the start time later to meet the needs of their students. Now, thanks to the work of a small design team, one of the pain points for all high school students in the Forest Hills School District has been solved. How many pain points might we have to resolve to keep high school students invested in school? Through this project, Meghan and her team came to the realization that student voice is the most underutilized (and free!) resource in high school. Reflecting on the work they had accomplished through design thinking, she told us this: People don’t wonder enough or get curious about the problems they are trying to solve. Everyone is quick to jump to solutions, oftentimes choosing the solution that seems the most feasible or that will be the path of least resistance.

Prototype

The FHSDX project prototyped possible solutions for eight different challenges in a single year, with all of the solutions grounded in empathy and created by students, teachers, and parents—not by the admin team. What kind of momentum around prototyping might you and your team create in a year?

Learn from Others When developing new ideas to prototype, it is well worth time to research and investigate whether another school or district has already created a similar solution. With more than 56.6 million K–12 students enrolled in U.S. schools, it is entirely possible that other school communities are struggling with similar problems. You can learn from others and leverage their learnings. As Frank ­Westheimer, a professor of chemistry at Harvard, was quoted as saying, “A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library” (Crampon, 1988, p. 41). Don’t be so quick to move into prototyping that you forget to assess what is already out there. And be wary of the “not created by us” syndrome. Just because a solution wasn’t your team’s original creation doesn’t mean you can’t embrace, reimagine, or redesign it.

Learn from Success—and Failure When developing and sharing your prototype, it’s helpful to remember that most ideas don’t start out grand; some incredible innovations came about as accidents or failed prototypes, and many of the best inventions are a result of either happy accidents or thoughtful pivots. Take the pacemaker, a lifesaving medical device for those with heart conditions. It was originally designed as a device that would lower body temperature through the use of radio frequency. Consider the Slinky, a beloved toy invented by accident in 1943 when its inventor was developing machinery parts for a World War II battleship. Even potato chips were created (in part) by accident. The story goes that a customer kept sending his potatoes back to the chef asking for them to be thinner and crispier. The chef became annoyed by the multiple requests and decided to get even. He sliced the potatoes as thin as he possibly could and cooked them to a crisp. Little did he know this preparation would delight his customers and become a sensation. The point is, you don’t know what you will learn from your prototypes. You may not always create the perfect solution or even the solution you intended, but if you stay open to the process of prototyping and always look for the learnings embedded in the process, you might create happy accidents or find ways

115

116

to thoughtfully pivot your prototypes. Keep track of your prototypes; there is a story to be told in the different versions and iterations you create for a solution. As you toggle between prototyping and testing, you may want to keep detailed information on prototype features, learnings, and next iterations. Tool 21 can help you do this.

Develop a 60-Second Story Once you have created a prototype or two, you’re just about ready to move into the test phase of design thinking (see Chapter 7). But first, you have one more step: you need to be able to introduce the prototype, provide context to help your audience connect with your idea, and do it quickly. Tool 22 walks you through the best way to structure a 60-second story about your prototype—an “elevator pitch” that gives people the critical information they need to be able to react to, test, and provide feedback on your prototype. As you’re developing your 60-second story, it can helpful to revisit the work you did during the define stage (Chapter 4) to reconnect with your users’ needs. Story or journey maps created to unpack your empathy work can also be very valuable.

Playing with Prototypes Prototyping is a skill that, like most skills, will improve with practice. Prototyping is a creative risk. To be more successful at it, work on building your creative muscles through play—outside of the design challenge you are working on. As you engage more with Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. —Thomas Edison

the process of prototyping, your creative confidence will grow. We can recommend a couple of really valuable online tools: The Extraordinaires and Protobot. The Extraordinaires Design Studio program (www. extraordinaires.com) provides templates and tutorials to guide design thinking. The free sample download helps students and adults alike jump into the world of design by asking players to design solutions for extraordinary characters or personas. There are prompts to help you refine your pro-

totype until you are ready to unveil your unique design.

Prototype

Tool 21

Prototype Log Prototype #1

Description

Feedback Received

Changes Made

Prototype #2

Description

Feedback Received

Changes Made

Prototype #3

Description

Feedback Received

Changes Made

117

118

Tool 22

60-Second Story .

Quickly capture your learning by creating a storyboard. Provide one image and one headline for each of the following questions: • Who did we meet with? • What did we learn? (Pain point turned into an opportunity) • What was our POV statement? • What was/were our big idea(s)? • What feedback did we receive? • What is the impact (or possible next step)?

Prototype

Molly Clare Wilson, a former instructor at the Stanford d. School, developed a free online tool called Protobot (http://protobot.org), which provides randomly generated ideas to prototype (e.g., a lipstick that boosts your self-confidence, a way to capture memories for a marathon runner, a musical instrument for a rock climber). One caution: protobot is intended for adult use, and there are some prompts that might not be appropriate for young students.

The Prototype Phase: Risk Factors 1. Having a murky purpose. As you move forward with prototyping, check in with your team to make sure everyone understands what and why they are prototyping their identified solutions. A lack of clarity at this phase could be a huge waste of time and energy. 2. Not knowing the landscape. Your team has had a successful ideation session, you’ve come up with a ton of ideas, and you have settled on a few ideas to prototype. The ideas might be new or novel in your district, but they might not be new elsewhere. Be sure to do your research and take advantage of the information available. 3. Falling in love with your prototype. The danger here is of your prototype becoming too precious and you becoming overly invested in it. Poor designs often result from a lack of testing an initial prototype that a designer has fallen in love with. The goal here is to only strive for “good enough.” The saying “investment is the enemy of creativity” holds true in the prototype phase. This can be hard for perfectionists, who aren’t comfortable sharing work until they are 100 percent proud of it. In prototyping, it’s OK to share work that feels a little incomplete. You might even get better feedback if you aren’t completely in love with your solution. Move forward once things are good enough.

119

120

The Prototype Phase: Insight to Action Reading is good; putting what you have read into practice is even better. The following are three actions you can take now to build momentum and keep moving forward: 1. Give yourself or your team a time limit and create your first prototype. We do this a lot when writing together. If writing an article, we’ll set a time limit and commit to 60 minutes of writing. No, it’s not always our best work, but it forces us to get started. Pull your team together, give them an hour to create their first prototypes, and share these with each other. In our opinion, the first prototype of an idea is always the hardest. 2. Create a 60-second story to share a prototype for feedback. Use Tool 22 to create your elevator pitch for your prototype, clearly identifying your user, the problem, and how your prototype helps to solve the problem. 3. Iterate quickly. After creating a prototype and sharing it with a few people, make changes based on the feedback you receive. This is especially important if there is a feature of your prototype that is causing people to get hung up or stuck. Fix it and go back out for more feedback. The prototyping-feedback process is meant to be iterative, with quick changes along the way.

7

Test

How do you improve your solution? should be examined, learned from, and M istakes discarded; not dwelled upon and stored.

—Tim Fargo

At Campbell School of Innovation (CSI) in California, they are working to build design thinking concepts and skills through all of the curriculum. Julie Goo, a STEAM coach with Campbell Union School District, told us how the CSI team created “Innovator’s Hour,” which provides every student in this public K–8 school the opportunity to explore their passions, experience a deep dive into a topic of interest, and work through the design process. The team’s first version identified electives that teachers were interested in teaching: dance, sculpture, cooking, and programming with ScratchJr, for younger students; and digital storytelling, papercraft, programming with Raspberry Pi, and cardboard design for older students. Students could choose two of the available electives, for two weeks each. Teachers had a mix of students from different grade spans for these classes, and they engaged students in a four-week deep dive. The first round of Innovator’s Hour wrapped up with an innovation challenge where students applied what they had learned through a design project that they created and 121

122

pitched to the teacher. For example, one environmentally minded 2nd grade student who had learned to crochet decided to create a pattern for a crocheted shopping bag to help reduce the use of plastic bags. After the first prototype test of Innovator’s Hour, teachers spent time reflecting (both with each other and with students) about the experience. Teachers discovered that their students were not as prepared for the design challenge as they hoped. They needed to teach specific skills for students to feel more equipped to create and pitch their own projects. Teachers also heard from students that their interests were a bit different from what teachers had offered as elective choices, so they created a survey to get student feedback regarding what to offer in the next iteration of the prototype. Teachers had to get comfortable with not being experts on every topic and trust that they could facilitate learning while also being learners themselves. The second prototype-and-test cycle brought more insights and further shaped what Innovator’s Hour would look like. With several cycles behind them, teachers completed a journey map of the experience. They celebrated the bright spots, those experiences that aligned with their goals and vision, and began creating a design plan for some identified pain points. The test, reflect, and share process was integral to their ongoing work and holds an important place in every design challenge as they move forward.

The Purpose of Testing Formative and summative assessment are tools teachers can use to see where students are in their learning. In design thinking, the test phase offers the opportunity to gather feedback directly from users regarding how well the proposed prototype addresses the problem. When testing designs, it’s important to encourage end users to be honest; honest feedback leads to better designs. Remember, the primary goal of testing is to learn. Just as teachers learn about students through assessments, design thinkers test to learn about their solution. In the test phase, you are not looking to give reasons for your ideas or to “sell” them; you are looking to understand how your idea might be improved. Good designers are always looking for feedback and know how to graciously accept it, even when it isn’t the feedback that they had hoped for or expected. Feedback is critical in design thinking because it will let you know whether or not you have hit the mark and solved a problem for your user. It will keep you moving forward and can help unlock change.

Test

Remember, too, that prototyping is an iterative process. The information you gather from this test phase will send you back to one of the other four phases of design thinking. This can be the messy part. If you find out you didn’t accurately capture the needs of your user, testing will send you back to the empathize phase (Chapter 3). Do you need to create a new problem statement? Return to the define phase (Chapter 4). Testing might generate new ideas that you want to explore, which means returning to the ideate phase (Chapter 5). Or, if you are ready to create the next iteration, testing will lead you right back to the prototype phase (Chapter 6). Design thinking isn’t linear; it is a living, breathing process. You can cycle through the prototype-test-feedback cycle many times while working to improve your solution (see Figure 7.1). In design thinking, testing is not about figuring out what grade you deserve. There is no finality to this phase—at least, not until you get a successful prototype and are ready to move full steam ahead with implementation.

Figure 7.1

The Prototyping Process 

Create

g pin e y t to tiv

a Pro n iter ess a

Feedback

c

pro

Test

123

124

Gathering Feedback When you are ready to test your prototype and have prepared your 60-second story introduction (see Chapter 6), you are ready to start gathering feedback. First, identify your tester. We always recommend testing a prototype directly with the intended end user (e.g., if you created a solution for 5th grade students, test it out on 5th grade students and gather their feedback). You will also want to collect feedback from secondary or tertiary users. So, for example, if the solution is for students, you also want to test it with and gather feedback from teachers and families. Just keep in mind that their feedback is of secondary importance. When presenting your prototype, the goal is to remain neutral. You need to open any feedback session with a good story—but try to stick to the basic facts. Naturally, there will be some parts of your prototype that you find more appealing, and other parts that you are still questioning or that are not as developed as you would like. Try not to let your testers know this information. Let them react to your solution without swaying them one way or another. As you share your prototype, keep a flexible mindset and be open to anything your user wants to share. In addition to listening to your user, you’ll want to pay attention to body language and facial expressions, as we discussed in Chapter 3. Users may have reactions that they are not able or willing to express, and you can pick up on some of these by observing them closely. Bear in mind, too, that users may share things about the prototype that they like and don’t like, but they may also want to share other ideas that could solve the problem in a new way. Your goal is to take in as much data as possible. Everything you receive in this phase has the potential to help you improve your design. Receiving feedback isn’t always a comfortable experience. The prototype is an expression of your ideas and your best thinking to date, so it can be hard not to feel judged, especially if someone doesn’t like your prototype. Prepare yourself and your team to receive feedback. Review the “failure agreements” you and your team came up with (see Chapter 6), and take a little time to practice the best—and, in our opinion, the only—response to all feedback in the test phase: a simple “Thank you.” It is natural to feel a little defensive when receiving negative feedback, and it can be tempting to want to explain why something is the way it is, how you plan on improving it, or why they aren’t interpreting the prototype in the right way. None of these explanations is helpful in this process. Anyone who tests a solution and provides feedback is offering you a gift, so a simple “Thank

Test

you” is the only response you need. As Sir Ken Robinson pointed out, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original” (2006).

Feedback Prompts When asking users for feedback, it is helpful to provide prompts to help them organize their thoughts. A simple feedback prompt we like to use is “I like . . . ,” “I wish . . . ,” and “What if . . .?” (see Tool 23). “I like . . .” provides users with an opportunity to share positive feedback, first. “I wish . . .” provides them with an opportunity to share constructive feedback and helps to frame it in a positive manner. “What if . . .?” is open-ended and generative. It provides an opportunity for users to share anything that is on their mind, especially if they have new ideas or features to add. This process is simplistic in nature, yet we have had fantastic success using this three-part prompting to promote feedback that is both generative and actionable. You can also be more specific with the feedback prompts you provide and plan a series of questions. Just make sure the questions aren’t presumptive in nature and allow users to share open-ended feedback, such as • What is the best thing about this prototype? • If you could change one thing about it, what would you change? • How would you describe      to [a friend, a parent, a student, a teacher]? • What was your first reaction to     ? • What would be your 10-second review of     ? • What about      makes something easier? More difficult? Regardless of the type of prompts you use to gather feedback, you will be collecting a lot of information, so be mindful of documenting the feedback along the way.

Barriers to Effective Feedback Sometimes users don’t share their true feelings. This can happen if a user doesn’t feel comfortable, but sometimes it is because the design team is creating barriers to gathering effective feedback in the form of the types of questions asked, the amount of time given to the process, or the lack of context given to the user.

125

126

Tool 23

Prototype Feedback Sheet Use an “I like . . . I wish . . . What if . . .?” structure to frame feedback in a constructive manner. I like . . . statements encourage the user to share positives about the prototype. I wish . . . statements encourage the user to share ideas that might change the prototype to better address concerns or issues. What if . . .? statements create space to express new suggestions that might not have a direct link to the prototype.

I like . . .

I wish . . .

What if . . .?

Test

127

A common challenge with user feedback is that it is too general and not actionable. When gathering feedback, you are looking for the same level of specificity as you were when you conducted empathy interviews (see Chapter 3). Another barrier can be gathering feedback in a rush or on the fly. Keep in mind that others haven’t spent as much time with the prototype as you have; they may need a few minutes to play with a prototype and gather their thoughts. After a feedback session, be sure to thank individuals for their feedback and provide them a way to share thoughts after the session ends. Remember that brilliant idea that you wish you had shared but didn’t think of until you were driving home? Planning ahead enables you to capture everyone’s best thinking . . . even if it comes a little later. You can document all of the feedback you receive using Tool 24. This grid provides space for you to document every “a-ha” (new insights or positive comments), each “oh no” (things you missed or negative comments), questions (asked either of you or by you), and ideas or next steps (thoughts and ideas triggered from the feedback). There are many different ways to incorporate this tool. It can be recreated with markers on a giant chart paper if you want to be able to organize your feedback using sticky notes. You can also recreate this grid on a Google doc, allowing your group to share online. Having learned the importance of documenting every step of the process for later storytelling, we keep a feedback capture grid for each iteration of a prototype. After several iterations, it’s easy to see how far your thinking has come.

Reflection The whole point of the test phase is for everyone involved—participants, designers, and users—to reflect. Although we live and work in a complex world of interconnectedness, it is sometimes difficult to see those connections because of the speed

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.

with which we make daily decisions and move

—Margaret J. Wheatley,

throughout our day. Part of finding a successful and innovative solution through the design thinking process is taking the time needed for reflection. You are a learner. Because reflection is the most powerful piece of the learning process, it is a continuous thread throughout the design process.

128

Tool 24

Feedback Capture Grid A-has

Oh Nos

New insight or positive comments

Things you missed or negative comments

Questions

Ideas/Next Steps

Those you were asked or those you generated

Based on feedback received

Test

129

Reflection is needed to see how everything—all the insights and feedback you’ve gathered throughout the prototyping and testing phase—comes together. Take the time to explicitly connect the dots; remember, design thinking can be messy. Design thinking is both a process and a set of mindsets; intentional reflection can help you improve your skills of thinking like a designer and deepen the mindsets. The process of reflection is the foundation of all growth and learning. As you and your team reflect both on the feedback you’ve received and the design thinking process itself, here are a few questions to get you started: • What are two or three new things that you learned? • What are two or three things that you’re not sure about? • What parts of the design thinking process come naturally to you? Where might you need to build more skills? • How did your team work together? Where was the friction? How might you use the process to strengthen relationships and build the team? • How might you and your team embrace the prototyping mindset in how you approach everything you create and every problem you solve?

Success! Sharing Your Story When you and your team have finally created a successful working prototype, it’s time to celebrate—but there’s still more work to do. In all likelihood, whatever you have created will need the help of others in your school or district to implement. Now the job of the design team is to champion your new idea or solution and get others to understand how the

Every great design begins with an even better story. —Lorindo Mamo

solution came to be, why it is important to the user, how it solves a problem, and what support you require of them. Telling a great, inspiring story about your journey through design thinking can help pull in your broader team. Follow these steps to bring it all home: • Create a pitch. Practice a short and focused story. It might be for funding, or it might be for the school board to change policy. Tailor the story to your audience and inspire them with your solution. • Focus on character. You designed for a specific user; be sure to paint a clear picture of the hero of your story.

130

• Connect the dots. The most important part of a story is the plot. Your listener needs to be able to understand your “why” and see how all of the pieces clearly fit together.

From Idea to Implementation You have a solution; you have a story. Now it’s action time. This is where you put on your producer hat and oversee a higher-fidelity test from start to finish. How will you take the idea and put it into practice? If successful, how will you scale the idea? At Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colorado, Cathy Toplyn, a food sciences teacher, wanted her class to be not only about cooking but also about entrepreneurship. Fort Collins had become somewhat of a “foodie” community, with a lot of food-focused Great design is not just a solution, it is the elimination of the problem. —Onur Mustak Cobanli

events, including food truck rallies. Cathy pitched the idea of designing a food truck to her administration, and they enthusiastically supported efforts to get the project started. Community partnerships were key to making this idea a reality. The students in the class brainstormed ideas for funding, looking at grant opportunities and capital funding through social networks. They partnered with a team from Otterbox, a local company, who helped students create a business plan. Students learned

about web design, studied different food truck models, and researched food truck themes. Their second partnership was with a local entrepreneur and restaurant owner who helped them develop a platform for crowdfunding. The students raised $35,000 in 30 days! With money in hand, their next challenge was purchasing a food truck. Students needed to get a bit gritty during this phase as they worked through failed vehicle inspections, health licenses, and business permits. After navigating the red tape, the students finally had a viable food truck. They again partnered with the Otterbox team to review their business plan, particularly regarding food decisions and cost. Through their need finding and ideation, they realized that the truck would have to be adaptable; each semester, a new group of students would want to customize and learn from the experience. They named their

Test

truck Poudre Plated, so each future student crew could design their own theme and menu. The students catered school events, started Food Truck Fridays, and built momentum around each new venture. One class specifically wanted to focus on a service-learning experience, so they created a lunch menu in partnership with the local food bank to serve healthy lunches to kids in at-risk neighborhoods during the summer. The Poudre Plated food truck first hit the road in 2015, and it continues to evolve. Each new team of students asks, “How do we keep ourselves viable? How do we continue to grow the program? How do we scale the experience to touch more students?” Their biggest learnings from this experience have been grit and perseverance. “Our learning journey has been filled with small hacks and failing forward,” Principal Kathy Mackay told us. Community partnerships played a large role in this success story. There may be times when your team will feel stuck or unequipped to move forward. Perhaps you’ve created an incredible solution but lack the resources needed to implement the solution. Consider reaching out to those in your community who may be able to offer expertise, guidance, financial contributions, or even a gentle push to keep going. These partnerships are what create those authentic and real-life learning experiences for both students and those on your design team. When moving from idea to implementation, spend some time creating an actionable plan that provides the clarity needed to move forward. Coming up with a great idea is tough, but implementing an idea is often even tougher. To keep the momentum going for your team, work together to break down the specific and measurable next steps needed to implement your idea. Tool 25 is designed to help you create a transparent action plan that keeps the team moving together in the right direction. The goal is to identify the next three actions that need to be taken, who is responsible for executing, a date when the tasks will be completed, and whether any additional resources are needed or available. For example, when we were working with an administrative team to implement ideas around a new assessment and communication system, it was easy for everyone to get overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of the work to be done. To create transparency, clarity, and momentum, we would only identify the next three actions that the team needed to take, no matter how small. Every week, we would revisit the three actions and create three new actions. The momentum was incredible: not only was the team completing at least three items per week toward their big audacious goal, but they were also building the discipline

131

132

within the team to solve problems together. Breaking down the implementation of your solution into bite-size tasks revisited weekly propels your team forward while creating opportunities for celebration.

The Test Phase: Risk Factors 1. Getting it right, right away. Be leery of “getting it right” the first time. Rarely does a first prototype hit the nail on the head and solve a design challenge. If you are only receiving positive feedback on your first prototype, check yourself and how you are telling the story. Are you unintentionally swaying the feedback? What aren’t people telling you? What are your blind spots? Perhaps you got lucky, but with most design challenges, the solution goes through several iterations with a lot of learning along the way. If success comes too quickly, embrace it with a question. 2. Rushing the process. You and your team made it through the entire process and you have a working prototype, but you’ve lost momentum. This is where some teams start to feel impatient and tempted to create a “good enough” solution. Resist this temptation. You have done so much work—stick with the process so all of that hard work pays off. If your team has lost momentum, hit the “pause” button to regroup and acknowledge how everything is feeling. This might be a good time to revisit why solving this problem was important to the team in the first place. Remember: if it were easy to solve, someone else would have likely already solved it. Yes, you might go through multiple iterations of a prototype, but stay the course and you’ll end up with the best solution possible. 3. Not having a story. You and your team have been working hard. You’ve likely made some incredible discoveries along the way. You have uncovered new insights and come up with hundreds of possible solutions, some of which you’ll revisit at a later date. Then someone asks you, “What has your team been up to with all this design thinking work?” and you draw a blank. It can feel impossible to pull together and synthesize everything you have done and learned along the way. To address this scenario, synthesize and create shareable artifacts along the way to help tell the story. These don’t have to be anything fancy; you want a simple snapshot of the work you are doing. Challenge yourself to create one shareable artifact for each phase of the process. Then, when you are done, you will have a story ready to be told. The tools throughout this book can help you tell your story.

Test

Tool 25

Implementation Action Plan Solution and Long-Term Goal What’s the state of your problem now? What is the long-term change you hope to see as a result of your solution?

Specific Action #1

Who?

When?

Resources?

When?

Resources?

When?

Resources?

Specific Action #2

Who?

Specific Action #3

Who?

133

134

The Test Phase: Insight to Action Reading is good; putting what you have read into practice is even better. The following are three actions you can take now to build momentum and keep moving: 1. Create a list of people who would make good test users. Consider testing with some of the original users you interviewed or observed during the empathize phase. Reach out to them and set up a time to chat. Be sure to leave enough time, both for you to share your story and for users to fully experience the prototype with time to process and share their thinking. 2. Match feedback to needs. Take your completed feedback capture grid and put all of the feedback you received alongside the needs you uncovered during the empathize phase. Is the feedback in sync with the earlier expressed needs? If there is a gap, what does this tell you? 3. Identify the simplest action you can take to put your idea in action. At the end of the design thinking process, it is easy to lose momentum. This is where the real work of implementation begins. Take a break if you are feeling fatigued, and when you are ready, break down the implementation tasks into the smallest possible actions. Is there an e-mail you need to send? Do you need to talk to the superintendent about funding? Over time, the smallest of actions add up to help to build momentum. You are on your way!

Conclusion The design thinking process is messy, at times exhausting, and always challenging. But it can also be the most exciting work you have ever done. It feels authentic because the process is human centered, and the solutions that emerge from it are always relevant because they solve real needs. Design thinking can lead to radical change, which is exhilarating in a ­tradition-bound field like education. The reality is that change has become the normal. It’s an essential part of our volatile, high-speed world, where life is increasingly “lived in beta.” Educators, like everyone else, have two options: dig in our heels and attempt to push back the tide, or learn to ride the wave and see where it takes us. We hope you will be the kind of educator who embraces change and does so with the mindset of a designer. You have all the tools you need to get going, and we can’t wait to see where design thinking takes you. Remember to be patient with yourself and your team, and know that any problem you solve in education helps to move our entire profession forward. Together, we are capable of designing a brighter future.

135

Appendix A

Guidelines and Handouts for a Design Thinking Sprint Design thinking is best learned by doing. Sure, you can read about it, but the best way to learn is to dig in and experience the process. However, it can be tricky to solve a wicked problem while learning the design thinking process, which is why we recommend beginning by solving a much smaller problem through a timelimited session called a design thinking sprint. The challenge for this particular design thinking sprint is Redesign Someone’s Morning Routine, and the handouts referenced are available for download at www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/books/DesignThinkinginPlaySprint.pdf. You can swap in any type of experience you want to reimagine or problem you want to solve—there are so many possibilities. The idea is to work through the design thinking process while solving for someone else’s needs.

Facilitator Prework • Develop a working knowledge of design thinking by reading Chapter 1. Consider sharing with your team and asking them to do a little prereading. • Pull together materials. For this session, you’ll need copies of the handouts, sticky notes, markers, prototyping materials (basic art supplies and recycling goods), and a large pad of chart paper. • Set up your space. The learning space should be conducive to partner and group work. Think collaborative tables, not rows of chairs.

137

138

• Schedule a 90-minute session with your team. If needed, the sprint can be compressed a bit, but it will take a minimum of one hour. We have found that frustration with the process increases if it is rushed too much.

Kick Off the Design Process • Create good energy in the room. Music helps! You can play the music throughout the session; just remember to turn it down when you are giving instructions. • Start with an improv activity to warm up the group; see suggestions in Chapter 5. (10 minutes) • Partner up your people. This is a great opportunity not only to learn design thinking but also to build relationships. Consider partnering people in a fun way. You might line up the staff in order of their tenure at the school, then pair off the longest-tenured people with the newbies. You can always choose a random pairing; however, taking some time to thoughtfully consider your group dynamics can help your culture building. (3 minutes) • Introduce the design challenge: “Redesign the morning routine for your partner.” (2 minutes)

Facilitator’s Tasks • ACTIVATE each person’s thinking by asking them to map out their own morning routine. What are their highs and lows each morning (Handout 1)? Some examples of morning highs might be a quiet coffee, breakfast with the family, and a few minutes to read the news. Some examples of lows might be packing lunches, blow-drying hair, and the rush to get out the door on time. (6 minutes) • Ask partners to INTERVIEW each other. Each partner gets 5 minutes to interview the other and learn more about his/her morning routine (Handout 2). Remind partners to explore a specific dip in their partner’s morning routine; they are working to gain empathy, insights into experience, and ideas about a possible need to meet. (5 minutes × 2 = 10 minutes) • Prompt partners to REFRAME the problem by thinking about what their partner’s deeper problem might be (Handout 3). For example, a partner

Appendix A

may have shared that they struggle to get out the door in the morning because they are rushing around to find things. What’s the deeper need here? Is it a need for organizational tools? Next, prompt partners to synthesize their learning into two categories: their partner’s goals/wishes and their insights. Remind partners to use action verbs to describe the goals/wishes. Then ask partners to take a stand by writing a point of view (POV) statement. This is the problem statement they will address; it should be a problem worth solving. (3 minutes × 2 = 6 minutes) • Provide time to IDEATE. Ask partners to generate ways to meet their partner’s needs (Handout 4). Encourage them to sketch as many radical ideas as possible. (8 minutes) • Ask partners to SHARE their initial ideas with each other, gather quick reactions, reflect, and then IDEATE again, generating at least one new idea that might have potential (Handout 5). (5 minutes × 2 = 10 minutes) • Ask partners to BUILD prototypes (Handout 6). The goal is to get the ideas out of their head and off paper by creating something tangible their partner can interact with. (10 minutes) • Provide time to TEST the prototypes and gather FEEDBACK (Handout 7). Partners should take turns sharing their prototypes. What does the other partner (the end user) like? What could be improved? What questions came up? Does the conversation spark any new ideas? (5 minutes × 2 = 10 minutes) • REFLECT with the entire team. Gather all prototypes in the center of the room and ask for volunteers who are willing to share their unique challenge and solution. Did anyone create a solution that their partner particularly liked? What did they learn? Does anyone see anything that they are curious to learn more about? If they were to continue solving for their partner’s needs, what might they try next? How might they apply the design thinking process to other challenges? After everyone who wishes to share their prototypes has had a chance to do so, offer up a prompt for a group reflection. A great one for this is I used to think    , but now I think    . It’s interesting to see what new perspectives participants have. (10–15 minutes)

139

140

Handout 1

How might we . . . redesign your morning routine? Map the highs and lows of your morning in this journey map.

Time

Appendix A

Handout 2

Your Mission: Design for your user—your partner. Start by gaining empathy. Interview (5 min x 2 = 10 mins)

Explore a specific dip from your partner’s journey map.

Switch roles and repeat the interview.

141

142

Handout 3

Reframe the Problem: Gain insight by thinking about what deeper need may lie below the information your partner shared. Have fun with this! Capture Findings (3 mins) Imagine possibilities for the following statements: It’s interesting/surprising that she/he . . .

Take a Stand with a Point of View Statement (3 mins)     (partner's name)



needs a way to

















One thing that seems to be important to him/her . . .

(partner's need)



because . . . (or but . . . or surprisingly . . .)





I wonder if this means (record your hunches) . . .

(partner's deeper need)

Appendix A

Handout 4

Ideate: Generate ways to meet your user’s needs. Record as many radical ways to meet your partner’s needs as you can.

[Write your POV statement here.]

143

144

Handout 5

Share & Ideate for an intentional second round. Share, reflect, and generate at least one new solution.

Appendix A

Handout 6

Build a Prototype (or sketch and headline your idea). Build your solution. Ideally, make something that your user can interact with. (7 minutes)

145

146

Handout 7

Test & Gather Feedback. Test your solution and document the outcomes. (5 minutes)

+ What worked:

– What could be improved:

? Questions:

! Ideas:

Appendix B

Design Thinking Resources When working with school leaders, we are frequently asked about our favorite “go-to” resources to support school teams through the design thinking process and to help build individual skills to think and lead more like designers. This appendix pulls together our (current) favorite resources; we fully expect that the list will continue to evolve over time. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it will certainly get you started.

Books to Continue Your Exploration of Design Thinking Whether you are looking to learn more about design thinking yourself or engage a team in a collective book read, these are our top 10 recommendations. 1. Design Thinking for School Leaders: Five Roles and Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change by Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson Shameless plug aside, our earlier book really is a fantastic companion to this one. While grounded in design thinking, the book focuses on ways to build mindsets that will help you approach work more like a designer, with all of the creativity, curiosity, and confidence you need to be innovative. 2. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley and David Kelley This book is an absolute favorite. It is accessible to anyone and everyone who wants to feel more confident with their creativity. It is full of fun ideas that you can easily implement and entertaining stories that make it a great group read. 147

148

3. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown This is a classic design thinking book that is very thorough in its explanation of the design thinking methods. Although geared toward leaders who want to infuse design thinking strategies into their organizations, it is accessible and recommended to anyone interested in developing a broader knowledge base in design thinking. 4. The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization by Tom Kelley This is a fun book to read, especially if you have ever sat through a meeting only to have someone kill your idea by playing the “devil’s advocate.” We’ve all been there. Far from being helpful, this shuts down ideas. Tom Kelley offers 10 other roles people can play in meetings to keep the creativity going. 5. Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy by Dev Patnaik This entire book is focused on empathy and is such a gift to read. The author embraces a journalistic approach, sharing stories of people and companies who put empathy in the center of their work and were wildly successful as a result. If you have ever thought empathy work was full of fluff, this book will change your mind (or maybe the mind of a reluctant co-worker). 6. Designing Your Life: How to Live a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans Although this book is not focused specifically on using design thinking in schools, we found it to be very applicable in our personal lives. The authors dive into design thinking mindsets and tools with direct application to your daily life. The work is personal and can be powerful as you continue to design your life. 7. The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley It’s nearly impossible to dig deep into design thinking without learning all about IDEO. In this book, Kelley shares the “behind the scenes” work at IDEO, detailing their unique problem-solving process. We like that this book contains both success stories and failures, highlighting that both are opportunities for learning.

Appendix B

8. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work by Nigel Cross This book is fun to read. The author focuses on demystifying the notion that only certain people are capable of designing. Design skills, habits, and mindsets are accessible to anyone who wants to learn. 9. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon In this book, Kleon explores the notion that everyone is creative. As he shares, “You don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself.” This one is supershort, fun, and easy to digest. Pick it up if you are needing a little inspiration. 10. Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector by Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer So many design thinking books are written from the perspective of the business world. We all can learn a lot from the world of business, but this book looks specifically at the potential of design thinking in the social sector by sharing 10 stories in fields such as health care, education, and social services.

Picture Books to Build Design Thinking Mindsets It might be the elementary teacher (or child) in both of us, but we have always loved picture books. Even as adults, when we read an outstanding picture book, we smile with sheer delight. We especially love sharing picture books that inspire creativity, risk taking, and being brave—all of which tie directly to design thinking. If you think picture books are just for children, picking up any one of the books listed below is guaranteed to change your mind. We are all in need of a little beauty, inspiration, and fun; sometimes a picture book is a perfect way to deliver that. 1. What Do You Do with an Idea? by Kobi Yamada We love that an idea is a central character in this story. This book is all about how a child brings an idea to life. The idea lingers and doesn’t start to grow until the child’s creative confidence grows. This book inspires people of all ages to nurture those ideas in their heads.

149

150

2. What Do You Do with a Problem? by Kobi Yamada This book reframes problems as possible opportunities and highlights the importance of looking beyond constraints. The story encourages the reader to tackle problems, instead of letting them get bigger on their own. 3. What Do You Do with a Chance? by Kobi Yamada We are clearly fans of Kobi Yamada. In the most recent book of this series, a child encounters a chance but isn’t sure whether to take the risk. The lesson is that if you ignore chances, they might stop coming around. It is a playful book that can encourage anyone to be brave and take a chance. 4. The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires If you have successfully made it through the design thinking process, you know firsthand how beautiful but messy creating something new can be. Things don’t always go as planned. This book describes the frustration with the creative process, shows how a little relaxation can go a long way, and ultimately highlights the beauty of the process. 5. Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg Who doesn’t love a good pop-up book? This one is focused on celebrating mistakes and turning those mistakes into something fun and even beautiful. This is a great book if you are a perfectionist and need a playful reminder that mistakes are OK. 6. Not a Box by Antoinette Portis This book is best enjoyed with young children, especially if they love playing with cardboard boxes—which is pretty much every child we have ever met! Have you ever seen how excited children are when given large cardboard boxes? They aren’t just boxes; they are the making of rockets, forts, and cars. This book is fun to read during ideation or prototyping, as it highlights how many things can be made with a box and a little bit of creativity. 7. The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken Although there are very few words in this book, it beautifully illustrates how mistakes can be turned into something new and wonderful. It is yet another

Appendix B

book that provides a helpful reminder to not take things so seriously and to learn from our mistakes. 8. After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again) by Dan Santat Humpty Dumpty is a favorite story from childhood for many, but have you ever thought of the story from Humpty Dumpty’s perspective? It’s an intriguing idea, and it almost made us imagine empathy interviews with the characters. The author explores why Humpty was sitting on the wall in the first place and follows what happens to him after the fall. 9. I Am Human: A Book of Empathy by Susan Verde This book celebrates everything that is both beautiful and awkward about being human. We love the positive focus and that it encourages children to be OK with who they are, mistakes and all. 10. Going Places by Peter H. Reynolds and Paul A. Reynolds So many school projects, even with the best of intentions, end up being cookiecutter type projects for kids—everyone follows the same set of instructions and ends up with the same project. But what happens if you don’t? This book celebrates out-of-the-box thinking and encourages children to be individuals.

Design Thinking Toolkits for Skill Building and Team Facilitation When we were both new to design thinking, we were hungry for everything we could read and loved discovering new resources that helped build our ability to use design thinking with teams. We found online toolkits especially helpful, as they tend to pair stories and examples with actionable tools that you can adapt for your process or your team. The five great toolkits listed here have the additional advantage of being free. 1. IDEO Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit (2nd edition) https://designthinkingforeducators.com IDEO created this toolkit specifically with teachers in mind. It is meant to guide teachers through the design thinking process and has a free workbook that can also be downloaded.

151

152

2. Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Kit https://www.designkit.org This design kit was originally created in 2009 and was an attempt to pull together all of the methods and strategies used by IDEO for human-centered design. The kit has become so popular it is now also available as a book for purchase, but you can still download a free PDF of the entire document. 3. The Collective Action Toolkit https://www.frogdesign.com/work/frog-collective-action-toolkit This design kit was created by Frog Design and is intended for “local change agents, to help them use design thinking to transform their communities.” 4. Tools for Taking Action https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources This set of resources is curated by the team at Stanford’s d.School. The resources available change from time to time, but it’s a site that is well worth checking out. 5. Target Design K–12: Design in the Classroom https://www.cooperhewitt.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Teacher-ResourcePacket-What-is-Design.pdf This resources packet is intended for classroom teachers and has some fantastic design prompts by grade levels that teachers can use to get students comfortable with the design thinking process. For more resources and ideas, check out www.leadlikeadesigner.com.

References Andrews, E. L. (2019, April 17). Will design-thinking strategies benefit students after class is dismissed? Retrieved from https://ed.stanford.edu/news/will-design-think­ing-strategies-benefit-students-after-class-dismissed Berkun, S. (2015, February 4). The paradox of expertise [Blog post]. Retrieved from http:// scottberkun.com/2015/paradox-of-expertise/ Brookings Institution. (2017, August). Meaningful education in times of uncertainty. Collection of essays (Skills for a Changing World Project). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center for Universal Education. Retrieved from https://www.brookings. edu/research/meaningful-education-in-times-of-uncertainty/ Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: HarperBusiness. Brown, T., & Wyatt, J. (2010). Design thinking for social innovation. Development Outreach, 12(1), 29 doi: 10.1596/1020-797X_12_1_29 Burnett, W., & Evans, D. J. (2016). Designing your life: How to build a well-lived, joyful life. New York: Knopf. Cambridge Public Schools. (n.d.). Design lab. Retrieved from https://www.cpsd.us/ departments/office_of_curriculum_and_instruction/innovation_design_lab Camper, E. (1993). The honey pot: A lesson in creativity & diversity. Retrieved from http:// www.insulators.info/articles/ppl.htm Chin, D. B., Blair, K. P., Wolf, R. C., Conlin, L. D., Cutumisu, M., Pfaffman, J., & Schwartz, D. L. (2019). Educating and measuring choice: A test of the transfer of design thinking in problem solving and learning, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 28, 337–380. doi: 10.1080/10508406.2019.1570933 Circle-of-Moms-Editors. (2013, March 29). Kids ask HOW many questions per day?! POPSUGAR Family. Retrieved from https://www.popsugar.com/family/How-ManyQuestions-Kids-Ask-Mom-28945071 Crampon, J. E. (1988, October 15). Murphy, Parkinson, and Peter: Laws for librarians. Library Journal, 113(17), 41. Dam, R., & Siang, T. (2019, August). Affinity diagrams: Learn how to cluster and bundle ideas and facts. Retrieved from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/ article/affinity-diagrams-learn-how-to-cluster-and-bundle-ideas-and-facts 153

154

Doyle, A. C. (1892/2003). The adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press. Ertel, C., & Solomon, L. K. (2014). Moments of impact: How to design strategic conversations that accelerate change. New York: Simon & Schuster. Fey, T. (2011). Bossypants. Boston: Little, Brown. Fullan, M. (2016). The new meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press, Routledge, & Ontario Principals’ Council. Gallagher, A., & Thordarson, K. (2018). Design thinking for school leaders: Five roles and mindsets that ignite positive change. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Gallagher, L. (2017, December 22). Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia on how “dog-­fooding” leads to great design. Fortune. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2017/12/22/ airbnb-joe-gebbia/ Guest, D. (1991, September 17). The hunt is on for the Renaissance Man of computing. The Independent. Hansen, M. T. (2010, January 21). IDEO CEO Tim Brown: T-shaped stars: The backbone of IDEO’s collaborative culture. Chief Executive. Retrieved from https://chiefexec­ utive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-the-backbone-of-ideoaes-collaborative-culture__trashed/ Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. (n.d.). An introduction to design thinking process guide. Stanford, CA: Author. Retrieved from https://dschool-old.stanford. edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/wiki/36873/attachments/74b3d/ModeGuide BOOTCAMP2010L.pdf IDEO.org. (2018, December 19). This manicure just might save her life. Retrieved from http://www.ideo.org/project/diva-centres. Kelley, T., & Kelley, D. (2015). Creative confidence: Unleashing the creative potential within us all. New York: Crown Business. Konrath, S. H., O’Brien, E. H., & Hsing, C. (2011). Changes in dispositional empathy in American college students over time: A meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15, 180–198. doi: 10.1177/1088868310377395 Köppen, E. (2015, July 6). Changing experiences through empathy—The adventure series [GE Healthcare Adventure Series]. Retrieved from http://thisisdesign thinking.net/2014/12/changing-experiences-through-empathy-ge-healthcares-adventureseries/ Lapowsky, I. (2015, May 8). What schools must learn from LA’s iPad debacle. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/05/los-angeles-edtech/ Leonard, K., & Yorton, L. (2015). Yes, and: How improvisation reverses “no, but” thinking and improves creativity and collaboration—Lessons from The Second City. New York: HarperCollins. McKim, D. (Producer), & Anderson, S. (Director). (2007). Meet the Robinsons [Motion picture]. United States: Walt Disney Pictures. Medline Plus. (2019). Aging changes in the senses. Retrieved from National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, at http://medlineplus.gov/ency/ article/004013.htm Miller, T. (2011, July 7). Partnering for education reform. Remarks by U.S. Deputy Secretary Tony Miller at the Church of God in Christ’s International AIM Convention

References

in Houston, Texas. Archives of the U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/partnering-education-reform  Mondovo. (2019). The most asked questions on Google. Retrieved from http://www. mondovo.com/keywords/most-asked-questions-on-google NBC29.com. (2018, April 25). Albemarle County elementary students help out nonprofit. Retrieved from https://www.nbc29.com/story/38041496/baker-butler-elementaryschool-students-helping-pan-04-25-2018 Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things. Philadelphia: Basic Books. Patnaik, D. (2009). Wired to care: How companies prosper when they create widespread empathy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press. Robinson, K. (2006, February). Do schools kill creativity? [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity Rosenthal, A. K., & Lichtenheld, T. (2011). Yes day! New York: Scholastic. Schwartz, D. J. (1959/1987). The magic of thinking big. New York: Simon & Schuster. Smashing Ideas. (n.d.). Five warm-ups to ignite your design thinking workshop. https:// smashingideas.com/five-warm-ups-ignite-design-thinking-workshop/ Stanford d.school. (2019). A virtual crash course in design thinking. Retrieved from https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/virtual-crash-course-video Tinsley Voluntary Transfer Program. (2018, September 7). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinsley_Voluntary_Transfer_Program Wheatley, M. J. (2001, November). Partnering with confusion and uncertainty. Shambhala Sun. Retrieved from http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/partneringwithconfusion.html Wilson, M. (2018, September 25). The untold story of the vegetable peeler that changed the world [Blog post]. Fast Company. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany. com/90239156/the-untold-story-of-the-vegetable-peeler-that-changed-the-world

155

Index The letter f following a page locator denotes a figure. Tools are entered in title case. action orientation, a POV guideline for, 76–77 Act Like Sherlock Holmes (Tool 1), 29–31 affinity mapping, 72 annoyances, reframing, 32 autopilot, 29

define phase—(continued) honeybee project, 70–71 insight to action, 84 define phase risk factors defining the wrong need, 84 getting lost in data, 84 identifying the missing pieces, 84 define phase stages find the big picture, 71–73 frame your point of view, 73–82 invite others in, 83 use the language of possibility, 68–71 define phase tools HMW Question Template (Tool 15), 82 POV Statement Template (Tool 14), 78 design good, 17–18 great, 18f designer, defined, 24 design phase elements affinity mapping, 72 affirmative responses, 69–71 journey mapping, 73–74 POV statement, 75–82 story mapping, 73–74 design teams creating, 26 defined, 24 exclusive vs. inclusive, 25

background knowledge, sharing, 26 big picture, finding the, 71–73 Brainstorm Blueprint (Tool 19), 103 brainstorming, 92–96. See also ideate phase brainstorming Bug List (Tool 2), 32–33 change fear-management strategies, 2–3 resistance to, 23 sustainable, 13 Change the Prompt, Change the Product exercise, 91 chaos, 22 Crazy 8s exercise, 91–92 creative thinking, warm up for, 89–92 culture, building through improv, 86–89 A Day in the Life Of… (Tool 9), 58 define phase clarifying the problem, 67–68 defined, 15 156

Index

design teams—(continued) making assumptions, 25 sharing background knowledge with, 26 design thinker, methods for becoming a ask questions, 38, 39f, 40 change perspective, 30 develop all your senses, 29 example of, 27 insight to action, 43 investigate, 29–31 look for what bugs you, 32 question yourself, 40–41 reconnect with your inner child, 35, 36 seek out mastery and genius, 34 share your stories, 35 slowing down in, 29 yes days for, 34 design thinker, risk factors in becoming a narrow focus, 41 overload, 41 self-doubt, 41 design thinker, stages of becoming a foundational, 17 notice, 28–32 question, 36–41 wonder, 32–36 design thinking additional resources, 147–152 background, 13 challenges of, 22–24 in education, 11–13 insights to action, 26 mindsets for, 7 norms, 8 power of, 21–22 toolkits for skill building and team facilitation, 151–152 design thinking phase tools Five-Why Questioning (Tool 4), 39 Act Like Sherlock Holmes (Tool 1), 31 Bug List (Tool 2), 33 Portrait of Your Inner Kid (Tool 3), 36 Rose, Thorn, Bud (Tool 5), 42

design thinking process. See also specific phases action orientations, 76–77 conclusion, 135 first use, 6f introduction to, 3–5 iteration in the, 16 people within the, 24 phases of, 4f, 5f, 16f reflection phase, 6f starting point, 44 visibility in the, 71 design thinking risk factors exclusivity, 25 making assumptions, 25 starting too big, 25 design thinking sprint, 26, 32, 105, 137–146 desirable solutions, 18 education design thinking in, 11–13 historically, 1–2 educational change, 1 empathize phase defined, 15 design thinking sprint, 138, 141 example of the, 45 insight to action, 65 purpose of, 44–45 putting it all together, 66 empathize phase risk factors being secretive, 65 getting stuck, 63 struggling to connect, 65 empathize phase stages listen, 45–55 observe, 55–57 synthesize information, 57 empathize phase tools A Day in the Life Of… (Tool 9), 58 design thinking, 49 Empathy Interview Prep Sheet (Tool 8), 53 Empathy Map (Tool 11), 62 Personas (Tool 12), 64 Putting It All Together (Tool 13), 66

157

158

empathize phase tools—(continued) Story Share-and-Capture (Tool 10), 60 Who Are Your Extreme Users? (Tool 7), 51 empathy benefits of, 22 focus on the user, 14–15 a POV guideline for, 75–76 problem identification space, 19f empathy, developing body language in, 47–48 creating personas, 61, 63, 64 empathy interviews, 47–55 radical collaboration in, 47 story share-and-capture, 59 talking to strangers, 47–48 Empathy Interview Planner (Tool 6), 49 Empathy Interview Prep Sheet (Tool 8), 53 empathy interviews defined, 48 Empathy Interview Prep Sheet (Tool 8), 53 guiding questions in, 48, 50, 52 Empathy Interview Planner (Tool 6), 49 purpose of, 48 structure, 55f successful, 54 surveys vs., 48 empathy interviews, elements of design partners, identifying, 50, 52 extreme users, identifying, 50, 51 identify the interviewee, 50 location, identifying, 52 problem, identify the, 48, 50 questions, planning for, 52, 54 time requirements, 52 empathy interview tools Empathy Interview Planner (Tool 6), 49 Empathy Interview Prep Sheet (Tool 8), 53 Who Are Your Extreme Users? (Tool 7), 51 Empathy Map (Tool 11), 62

empathy maps, 59–62 expertise paradox, 21 failure learning from, 115–116 reframing, 107–108 Fear Factor, 2 fear-management strategies, 2–3 feasible solutions, 18 feedback design thinking sprint, 139, 146 test phase stages, 122, 124–127 Feedback Capture Grid (Tool 24), 128 Five-Why Questioning (Tool 4), 38, 39, 40 genius, seeking, 34 HMW Question Template (Tool 15), 82 how might we? (HMW) purpose of, 69 questions, 81–83 translating POV to, 79–82 Idea Evaluation Matrix (Tool 18), 100 Idea Generator (Tool 17), 96 ideate horizon, 97–98, 98f ideate phase defined, 15 design thinking sprint, 139, 143–144 divergent thinking in the, 20 insight to action, 102 Pacific Power and Light ice problem, 85–86 ideate phase (IDEO), 16 ideate phase activities Wacky Introductions, 88 Yes, and… versus yes, but…, 88 Zip, Zap, Zop, 87 ideate phase brainstorming ask for worst ideas, 93–94 blueprint, 103 capitalize on your work, 95 clarify the rules, 93 empower individual participants, 93–94

Index

ideate phase brainstorming—(continued) invite the right people, 92 play with ideas, 94–96 set accurate expectations, 93 set the stage, 92–93 supplies, 93 think about logistics, 92 ideate phase exercises Change the Prompt, Change the Product, 91 Crazy 8s, 91–92 1,000 Uses, 91 Squiggle Birds, 89 30 Circles (Tool 16), 89–90 Two Buckets, 91 ideate phase prototyping idea evaluation matrices in, 98–99 look to the horizon, 97–98, 98f perform a SWOT analysis, 99, 101 use an idea evaluation matrix, 98–99 ideate phase risk factors selecting too soon, 102 small thinking, 101 understanding where “no” fits, 101 ideate phase skills, building through letting go of the agenda, 87 listening to receive, 87 making the team look brilliant, 87 no mistakes, 87 suspending judgment, 87 ideate phase stages build a culture through improv, 86–89 ready, set, brainstorm, 92–96 select an idea to prototype, 97–101 warm up for creative thinking, 89–92 ideate phase tools Brainstorm Blueprint (Tool 19), 103 Idea Evaluation Matrix (Tool 18), 100 Idea Generator (Tool 17), 96 Warm-Up: 30 Circles (Tool 16), 90 Implementation Action Plan, 133 implementation phase (IDEO), 16 implementation risk factors assumptions, 25 being secretive, 65

implementation risk factors—(continued) data overload, 84 defining the wrong need, 84 exclusivity, 25 getting stuck, 63 lack of clear purpose, 119 lack of connection, 65 narrow focus, 41 overload, 41 rushing the process, 25, 102, 119, 132 self-doubt, 41 small thinking, 101 improv, build a culture through, 86–89 information sharing, 26 synthesizing, 57 inner child, reconnecting with, 35, 36 inspiration phase (IDEO), 16 intention/intentionality, art of, 18–20 journey mapping, 73–74 language of possibility, 68–71 listening, 45–55, 87 mastery, seeking out, 34 need finding, 19f notice strategy, 17, 28–32 observe element empathize phase, 55–57 shadow someone, 56–58 trying a new viewpoint, 56 1,000 Uses exercise, 91 organizational culture, changing, 21–22 Personas (Tool 12), 64 personas, 63 perspective, 30, 77 point of view framing, 73–82 reversing, 79 Portrait of Your Inner Kid (Tool 3), 36 possibility, language of, 68–71

159

160

POV statement action orientation, 76–77 guidelines, 75–77, 79 how might we? translating to invitation, 79–81 multiple perspectives, considering, 77 purpose of, 75 reverse points of view, 79 size and scope, 76 POV Statement Template (Tool 14), 78 powerlessness, culture of, 68–69 power pieces, 17 prioritization Bug List (Tool 2), 32 fear-management strategy of, 3 problem identification space, 19–20, 19f problem-solving innovative, 20 inside-out method, 13 outside-in method, 14 problem space, 19 solution space, 19 wicked problems, 3–4, 13 produce power piece, 17 Prototype Feedback Sheet (tool 23), 126 Prototype Log (Tool 21), 117 prototype phase basics, 105–108 defined, 15–16 design thinking sprint, 139, 145 examples, 104–107 frustrations, 106 ideas, 97–101 insight to action, 120 iteration in the, 123 process, 123f prototype phase process elements develop a 60-second story, 116 generate ideas, 112, 114–115 identify pain points, 112 learn from others, 115 learn from success and failure, 115–116 rapidity, 108 reframing failure, 107–108 relevance, 108

prototype phase process elements— (continued) remember the three Rs, 108 roughness, 108 start small, 111–112 prototype phase risk factors falling in love with your prototype, 119 having a murky purpose, 119 not knowing the landscape, 119 prototype phase stages creating, 109–111 playing around, 116–119 ready, set, prototype, 111–116 prototype phase tools Prototype Log (Tool 21), 117 Prototype Sketch Sheet (Tool 20), 113 60-Second Story (Tool 22), 118 prototypes, types of experiential, 111 physical, 109–110 virtual, 110–111 Prototype Sketch Sheet (Tool 20), 113 Putting It All Together (Tool 13), 66 question strategy, 17, 36–41 radical collaboration, 20–21, 47 reflection design thinking process, 6f design thinking sprint, 139 test phase stages, 127, 129 reframing annoyances, 32 design thinking sprint, 138, 142 failure, 107–108 reverse point of view, 79 risk, embracing, 3 Rose, Thorn, Bud (Tool 5), 42 school design, historically, 1–2 senses, developing, 28 60-Second Story (Tool 22), 118 slowing down, 29 Squiggle Birds exercise, 89 status quo, 23, 68

Index

story mapping, 73–74 Story Share-and-Capture (Tool 10), 59, 60 storytelling, 3, 17, 35 strangers, talking to, 47–48 SWOT analysis, 99, 101 teacher education, 11–12 tension, design thinking in creating, 23 test phase defined, 16 examples, 121 insight to action, 134 purpose of, 122–123 test phase risk factors getting it right, right away, 132 not having a story, 132 rushing the process, 132 test phase stages feedback, 122, 124–127 implementation/action plans, 130–131, 133 reflection, 127, 129 sharing your story/presentation, 124, 129–130 test phase tools Feedback Capture Grid (Tool 24), 128 Implementation Action Plan (Tool 25), 133

test phase tools—(continued) Prototype Feedback Sheet (tool 23), 126 thinking, divergent, 20 30 Circles warm-up exercise (Tool 16), 89–90 T-shaped thinkers, 20–21 Two Buckets exercise, 91 unpredictability, 22 users/end users defined, 24 extreme, 51 viable solutions, 18 Wacky Introductions activity, 88 Warm-Up: 30 Circles (Tool 16), 90 what if? 69 Who Are Your Extreme Users? (Tool 7), 51 wicked problems, 3–4, 13 wonder strategy, 17, 32–36 yes, and, 69–70 Yes, and… versus yes, but… activity, 88 yes days, 34 Zip, Zap, Zop activity, 87

161

About the Authors Alyssa Gallagher is an experienced public school educator, school and district administrator, facilitator,

and

educational

consultant.

She has successfully led school leadership teams through the process of using design thinking to solve wicked problems, launched strategic plans using design thinking, and coached leaders (at all levels of an organization) to embrace the habits and mindsets of designers to lead more creatively. Having worked in a variety of roles from school principal to assistant superintendent of schools, Alyssa understands firsthand the complexity of education leadership and is passionate about improving the learning experiences created in schools. She is constantly exploring “What if . . .?” with school leaders and works to support radical change in education. You can contact her at alyssalagllagher@gmail. com, follow her on Twitter @am_gallagher, and learn more about her work at www.leadlikeadesigner.com.

162

About the Authors

Kami Thordarson has worked in many roles as a public educator, from classroom teacher to professional development and curriculum designer. She enjoys engaging students and teachers with learning experiences that focus on authenticity and relevance. Kami is involved with the design thinking movement in K–12 education; in her current role as an administrator, she works to lead a district in integrating not only technology but also innovative practices that fully move students into more personalized learning experiences. She values the challenge of helping school leaders develop real-world classrooms in which teachers facilitate and lead students through work that empowers them to have an effect on the world. You can contact Kami at [email protected], follow her on Twitter at @kamithor, and learn more about her work at www.leadlikeadesigner.com. Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson are the coauthors of Design Think-ing for School Leaders: Five Roles and Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change, pub-lished by ASCD.

163

Related ASCD Resources At the time of publication, the following resources were available (ASCD stock numbers in parentheses): Design Thinking for School Leaders: Five Roles and Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change by Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson (#118022) Designed to Learn: Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion to the Classroom by Lindsay Portnoy (#120026) Dream Team: A Practical Playbook to Help Innovative Leaders Change Schools by Aaron Tait and Dave Faulkner (#119022) Facilitating Teacher Teams and Authentic PLCs: The Human Side of Leading People, Protocols, and Practices by Daniel R. Venables (117004) Fighting for Change in Your School: How to Avoid Fads and Focus on Substance by Harvey Alvy (#117007) Measuring What We Do in Schools: How to Know If What We Are Doing Is Making a Difference by Victoria L. Bernhardt (#117021) For up-to-date information about ASCD resources, go to www.ascd.org. You can search the complete archives of Educational Leadership at www.ascd.org/el. ASCD myTeachSource® Download resources from a professional learning platform with hundreds of research-based best practices and tools for your classroom at http://myteachsource.ascd.org/ For more information, send an e-mail to [email protected]; call 1-800-933-2723 or 703-578-9600; send a fax to 703-575-5400; or write to Information Services, ASCD, 1703 N. Beauregard St., Alexandria, VA 22311-1714 USA.

WHOLE CHILD

TENETS 1

HEALTHY

2

SAFE

3

ENGAGED

4

SUPPORTED

5

CHALLENGED

Each student enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle.

Each student learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults.

Each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community.

The ASCD Whole Child approach is an effort to transition from a focus on narrowly defined academic achievement to one that promotes the long-term development and success of all children. Through this approach, ASCD supports educators, families, community members, and policymakers

Each student has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults.

as they move from a vision about educating the whole child to sustainable, collaborative actions.

For more about the ASCD Whole Child approach, visit www.ascd.org/wholechild.

Become an ASCD member today! Go to www.ascd.org/joinascd or call toll-free: 800-933-ASCD (2723)

Each student is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment.

D O N ’ T M I S S A S I N G L E I S S U E O F A S C D ’ S AWA R D - W I N N I N G M A G A Z I N E ,

EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP If you belong to a Professional Learning Community, you may be looking for a way to get your fellow educators’ minds around a complex topic. Why not delve into a relevant theme issue of Educational Leadership, the journal written by educators for educators. Subscribe now, or buy back issues of ASCD’s flagship publication at www.ascd.org/ELbackissues. Single issues cost $7 (for issues dated September 2006–May 2013) or $8.95 (for issues dated September 2013 and later). Buy 10 or more of the same issue, and you’ll save 10 percent. Buy 50 or more of the same issue, and you’ll save 15 percent. For discounts on purchases of 200 or more copies, contact [email protected]; 1-800-933-2723, ext. 5773. To see more details about these and other popular issues of Educational Leadership, visit www.ascd.org/ELarchive.

1703 North Beauregard Street Alexandria, VA 22311-1714 USA

www.ascd.org/el

Education

Alyssa Gallagher is an experienced public school educator, administrator, facilitator, and consultant. She leads leadership teams through the design thinking process and coaches organizational leaders to embrace creativity and the habits of designers.

Design thinking is a person-centered, problem-solving process that’s a go-to for innovative businesses and gaining traction with school leaders interested in positive change. But understanding design thinking is one thing; actually putting it in play is something else. Authors Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson offer educators a practical guide for navigating design thinking’s invigorating challenges and reaping its considerable rewards. They dig deep into the five-stage design thinking process, highlighting risk factors and recommending specific steps to keep you moving forward. The 25 downloadable and reproducible tools provide prompts and supports that will help you and your team • • • • • • • • • •

Identify change opportunities. Dig deeper into complex problems. Analyze topics to isolate specific challenges. Connect with and solve for user needs. Apply what you’ve learned about users to design challenges. Maximize brainstorming power. Create and employ solution prototypes. Pitch solutions and secure buy-in from stakeholders. Organize and analyze user feedback. Map out a solution’s specific actions and resource requirements.

Design Thinking in Play is a must-have for education leaders who are tired of waiting for someone else to solve their problems and ready to take action, have fun, and figure out what will really work for their school, their colleagues, and their students.

Kami Thordarson is a former classroom teacher and professional development and curriculum designer. A champion of the design thinking movement in K–12 education, she currently works as an administrator leading district technology integration and personalization efforts.

Browse excerpts from ASCD books: www.ascd.org/books

Alexandria, Virginia USA