Tag Archives: design thinking

General, Institutional Flexibility

What’s in your wallet?

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The Dining Hall was buzzing, as 125 employees at Cary Academy shared stories with one another about one of their most personal of objects — their wallets. Then, with one short phrase from workshop facilitator and Dean of Faculty Martina Greene — “OK, everybody, you have 20 minutes to build your prototypes” — the din of voices was replaced with the hum of working hands.

“Can you hear that?” asked Director of Diversity and Inclusion Jason Franklin. “This is what happens when folks get engaged in the creative process. Language turns off as other parts of the brain engage.” Jason would know, as an accomplished artist and teacher who was trained in art and design at NC State.

And so it went during the opening week of employee preparation for the 2015-2016 school year. A good deal of our time during these planning days is spent getting people and spaces ready for the arrival of students and meeting to review schedules, curriculum, or goals for the year.

As a kick-off to the new Cary Academy Strategic Plan, all employees went through an introduction to design thinking as a way to lay a foundation for future conversations about innovation and creativity in our work together. This isn’t a new concept to us, as all CA 9th and 10th graders are exposed to this mindset as part of their required art and design courses. However, we believe that design thinking also can help us unlock some of the goals in our strategic plan.

The protocol we used this past week came from the Institute of Design at Stanford University. Using a hands-on project to design the ideal wallet for a partner, our employees were exposed to the five core steps in the process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

“Building the wallet was a fun way to put the concept [of design thinking] into practice,” said one employee in a post-session survey. “Listening to my partner and then trying to design to her needs made me think about how much my students want to give their input regarding how we approach learning in our classroom. I hope that the students are ready to ENGAGE because I am ready!”

We were excited to use a design thinking workshop as a kickoff for the implementation phase of our strategic plan, which was developed over the course of last year involving input from the full community. A core planning committee comprised of board members, faculty, staff, parents, students, and alumni drove the process.

Our strategic vision is to create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant — cultivating self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

Among some of the first tasks at hand as we start this school year:

  • To create operational structures and language to promote deeper innovation at Cary Academy. The design thinking workshop was our first step.
  • To implement a formal, cross-divisional curriculum review cycle. We will begin with an evaluation of our mathematics, science, and health curriculum this year.
  • To assess and improve our communication structure and flow. We have solicited proposals from outside experts to help facilitate this process.
  • To strengthen community by showcasing the breadth of creativity and innovation currently in practice at Cary Academy. We will do this through a full-day program on November 6, 2015. More information to come soon.

I will be sharing more information about the school’s Strategic Plan at the grade-level PTAA coffees held on campus during mornings throughout the fall. Dates and times can be found on the CA website.

In the meantime, you can check out what we’ve been up to by visiting a display of some of our prototype wallets in the library. Design thinking stresses the importance of sharing unfinished work, and I think you’ll see exactly what that means if you stop for a visit.

Appropriate Resources, General, Institutional Flexibility, Strong Connections

Innovation by Design

Recently I asked all our employees to describe a time in which they felt most alive and engaged in the life of the school. Many reflected on the school’s start up days, when they were collaborating to execute on the founding vision and build something new and exciting.

The product of that labor of love is the Cary Academy we know today, and by nearly every metric we have available, Cary Academy has reached the top tier of independent schools in less than 20 years.

With the upcoming launch of the Cary Academy 2020 Strategic Plan, we will no longer need to reflect backwards to capture that entrepreneurial, can-do spirit of our founding. We soon expect to unlock the next wave of big thinking and creative energy within our community.

An understanding of the importance of innovation and collaboration is much more widely shared than in 1996, when Cary Academy was founded as “a learning community committed to discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence.” In the short time since our founding, the internet and mobile technology have transformed industries and upended the ways we communicate and learn. Scholars like Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and John Kotter have studied these disruptions and worked to help organizations understand how to survive and thrive in a fast moving world.

In the language of our strategic plan, we have chosen to highlight the phrase “institutional flexibility” to signal our purposeful desire to design systems that can unlock innovation. The first goal of our draft plan reads: “We will create institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.”

John Kotter has called such a setup a “dual operating system” — where smaller-scale improvements can be encouraged from everywhere within an organization and institutional might can be harnessed to do big things with the most relevant and proven concepts. Ultimately, the system itself can be transformed rather than be rendered obsolete.

At Cary Academy, we may take this one step further and ultimately organize around three important aspects of innovation:

  • Sustaining,
  • Disrupting,
  • Diffusing.

Sustaining innovation at Cary Academy means focusing on the core of what we are all about: excellent teaching and learning. Sustaining innovation means having a portrait of an ideal teacher and student, an articulated view of learning, processes for holistic curriculum review, a strong assessment philosophy, and robust methods of for professional evaluation and development.

Disruptive innovation at Cary Academy means having a system to allow for smaller-scale research and development and the willpower to allow new ideas room to grow. To foster meaningful disruptive innovation, we need some common language around process, access to additional resources and talent, and a way to feed back promising ideas into the core of the institution.

Finally, diffusing innovation hits at a core founding vision for Cary Academy: to be a lighthouse school that collaborates with our wider communities. To foster this we need renewed platforms for connecting with constituents and peers locally, nationally, and globally. We need communication systems that share what we are working on and methods to bring people together for meaningful conversations, through short-term methods like meetings and conferences and long-term relationships such as partnerships and exchanges.

In this structure, I hope that you can feel a bit of regular and a bit of radical. Our strategic plan is both a process for continual improvement and path to an even brighter future — but to be effective there needs to be a strong connection between the two. While we might not quite be able to see the future, it is important that we can imagine taking a road that leads us there.

I look forward to sharing more with the community after our Board of Directors endorses the plan at their next meeting.