Tag: design thinking

Responsive Leadership – leading from the back to the front

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I recently stumbled upon a new label for the behaviours we associate with leadership. In this short clip Nipun Mehta explains a “different paradigm of leadership, which he calls “laddership””.

After rolling the idea around a little I thought I would share some thoughts on how it relates to my experience of leadership and development in schools and beyond.

Laddership refers to the role of the leader. The ladder being like the leader. So that others may climb rungs we might create and reach new heights above us. It reminds me of servant leadership.

This way of thinking is placed in contrast to the “lead from the front” type of ideology, that some might consider to be a traditional leadership paradigm.

In education we can be lulled into thinking that leadership only occurs at the upper echelons of a school administration or in those roles with “leader” in them. The career path is set out in front of many aspiring young leaders and it often only looks like a pyramid. This reflects the typical paradigm of a hierarchy in schools and school systems.

My teaching experience was similar. I was tapped on the shoulder for middle leadership within my first year out of university and the steps up were pretty clear. Maybe you have been presented with a similar direction: “If you want to be a leader follow this traditional path.”

The idea of a ladder for others to progress sits well with me. I now know that such an idea is relevant to anyone aspiring to lead. There are different ways to lead, and many different paths to help others rise above you. Education needs to offer more paths through leadership and not just those that point upwards.

Ultimately we need to put energy into redefining leadership in schools so that more educators understand the impact they can have on others.

I started a blog that shared my ideas, my thinking and my classroom experiences. That helped me understand the impact I could have on others. I realised I could lead in a different way – fast forward a decade and I still keep that idea at the heart of my work. I am leading by creating the conditions for others to progress and develop. It might not say Principal or Headteacher on the office door (I don’t actually have an office door) but I know my work is leadership.

Leadership can be defined in multiple ways depending on the sector or domain it sits within. But also defining leadership within a sector has great contextual dependency too. Education is no different.

The leadership that needs to be shown in the emergency services during the bushfire seasons, here in Australia, is very different to the leadership needed at a K-12 school to develop an innovative culture.

In our attempts to seek out the fundemental truths about leadership perhaps we polarise our thinking too much. We might covet the entrepreneurial mindset in schools and look to business for ideas on development, but we should never forego the intimate understanding of the educational context we work in. Cookie cutters are not a leadership tool.

When we setup Laddership Vs Leadership and suggest a shifting of paradigms, or systems of thought, we create these false dichotomies. So although the idea of creating ladders resonates, I think it is unrealistic to set up competing concepts in this way – a choice we have to make, a move we have to make.

In the Design of Business Roger Martin explains a series of ideas related to design thinking and leadership, for example: exploration Vs exploitation; analysis Vs intuition; originality Vs mastery. You can see the others in the image I have added. But the choice is not “either or”. Creative problem solving requires a range and mixture of different thinking modes at different times. It reminds me to consider the balance of different types of thinking rather than such polarised choices.

Design Thinking.005

Adaptive and responsive leadership perhaps describes this best. In certain situations in schools a “lead from the front” style of leadership is the most appropriate. When there is high urgency for change or important processes that need to be modelled and established. Or when we are attempting to shift ingrained habits and behaviours to something different, maybe “follow me” works best.

That same leadership approach should adapt and respond to the context it is in. As Nipun Mehta explains, shifting to the back and allowing others to push ahead and lead the way. Developmental work in schools often needs people to buy in and have ownership. These are good opportunities for intentional and thoughtful design leadership. The best possible conditions for progress and development are (co)created.

When I am working with teams I am attempting to create these conditions. I use a range of protocols that help establish the expectations for the time together. One of them is about how we each need to take responsibility to balance our participation in the session.

Step up and step back is a protocol about session participation but it also has a strong likeness to the idea of responsive leadership. You don’t have to make a solitary choice, you don’t need to operate under a fixed ideaology. Adapt, change and respond to what is in front of you. Increase your awareness of this balancing act.

Nelson Mandela refers to a balance:

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.

I have presented similar ideas in the past about teaching and learning. Perhaps the true art of leadership is in the complex balancing act between these paradigms. It is not in the extremes.

  • Strike a balance
  • Respond and adapt to what is in front of you
  • Step up and step back
  • Leverage your empathy

The leaders I work with every week wrestle with the tension and complexity of real situations. These constantly demand both the subtle art of nudging others to move ahead, with pointing the direction and inviting others to follow.

In my experience leadership is as much about creating the conditions for others to develop as it is helping to direct that progress.

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Photo by Daryan Shamkhali

4 Ways to Apply Design Thinking in Your School

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Design thinking is a process for developing new ideas and solving problems. It is a series of “design-specific cognitive activities that designers apply during the process of designing” (Visser, W. 2006).

It normally involves:

  1. Empathising
  2. Synthesising
  3. Generating and judging ideas
  4. Prototyping
  5. Implementing and testing

A key part of my work over the last 6 years has been to help educators, and those involved with learning, explore the ways they might utilise this process in their organisations. In addition to understanding the “thinking like a designer” part.

Commonly we cite the use of design thinking as a problem-solving process that students participate in and regularly see students making and designing products or ideas.

However in the school environment the process and principles of design thinking can be applied to a number of different relevant domains:

  • Inquiry Learning Process (student)
  • School Improvement (leadership/teacher)
  • Teacher Inquiry (leadership/teacher)
  • Learning Design (teacher)

As an overview, I want to share with you, in brief, some of my own understandings from facilitating design thinking in these four different ways.

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Inquiry Learning Process

As a problem solving process design thinking has the structure and potential for scaffolding an inquiry process. After all it is commonly used as a way to tackle complex or wicked problems.

A design thinking inquiry or learning process helps students develop empathy for other people who may be at the heart of an issue or topic. Empathy leads to a much deeper more authentic level of connection with what is being explored.

The latter parts of the process, testing and prototyping, emphasise an iterative approach. You may have heard this in relation to product design. The key thing for me is that this is about increasing the opportunities for critique and feedback.

School Improvement

For many school leaders and administration teams design thinking offers a fresh approach to complex school improvement issues.

Appropriately the process puts the learner (old or young) at the heart of everything. How well we understand the learner dictates the efficacy of the process to generate new ideas.

When working with school leadership teams I often start by exploring the assumptions they might have about the school development topic. By challenging assumptions early on in the process we are immediately moving to a more open mode of thinking or mindset.

An additional value when using design thinking is the imperative to release ideas early. Iterative development demands we involve others to gain feedback. A leadership team may develop an interesting solution to a complex problem and share it quickly with colleagues, even in a rough form.

We shouldn’t be locking ourselves away, to build perfectly transitioned slideshows, too soon.

Teacher Inquiry

This is about educators exploring problem areas within their own practice and working through a formalised process to learn and address them.

These might include a wide range of topics from implementing new technologies, to engaging reluctant writers, to creating an agentic learning space.

The process of design thinking scaffolds this teacher led inquiry extremely well and can be structured to support a variety of school improvement topics.

The opening phase of a practitioner inquiry would include gathering information:

  • Empathy: who is at the heart of this issue and how might I better understand the perspective they have? What assumptions might I have about the key stakeholders?
  • Data: what different forms of data do I have access to? What new data will I need to generate?
  • Observation: how can I directly observe this issue? How can I observe without bias?

This works well if educators are working in teams attached to a similar topic. They may well be teaching different age groups but coalesce for various parts of the process, sharing insights and ideas.

Learning Design

The role of the teacher is being recast as a designer of learning. When using a design thinking process our emphasis, once more, is on how well we understand the learner.

When we are designing a unit of learning, or a sequence of our curriculum, we can utilise the design thinking process to help structure our thinking and planning.

  1. Empathising — What do we know about our students? What data and assessment information do we have that might inform our design? What are our curriculum constraints? What are the key capabilities we need to focus on? What is happening in the world?
  2. Synthesising — narrow the focus of the learning design, identify key priorities and potential inquiry questions to follow. Key resources identified and shortlisted. Strong curriculum connections are forged.
  3. Generating and judging ideas — sequences of learning are explored and developed. New ideas and concepts for lessons and learning experiences are shared and filtered.
  4. Prototyping — learning designs are sketched out so that others can understand them and offer feedback. Different permutations are explored, with possibly multiple prototypes shared. Feedback gained from students and colleagues.
  5. Implementing and testing — new lesson sequences are implemented. Further feedback is sought from observation and planning review. Critique outcomes are shared and fed back into the design process.

An additional application, that is often overlooked, is the use of different phases of the process of design thinking in isolation.

Yes, the process has a mild interdependence to make the most of it. However there has been many occasions when I have facilitated a group to use a single phase along with the associated tools, skills and mindsets.

Adopting a flexible approach to the utility of the design thinking process is an important stance. This also leads to elaborating and extending the phases with what we already know or have been already implementing successfully.

That said when there is a common process shared amongst staff and students you see a powerful shift in practice and in the learning experience.

I recall accompanying a leadership team on an impromptu walk through school to punctuate some facilitated time. We sat with some Kindergarten students participating in a similar activity that we had just explored ourselves. The common language and shared process was an ongoing, tangible, and binding experience for the school community.

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

How to Strike a Balance when Generating Ideas

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When you use an activity to generate ideas it typically comes with a standard pace setting. The way I see it, the pace dial is usually set between Incubate/Slow OR Force/Fast. This is also the intensity with which we are working or generating ideas.

Force

One idea generation activity is 100 Ideas in 10 Minutes. It is really effective at generating lots of potential ideas for a problem in a short space of time. From the name you can tell the pace is high. Another activity I have written about recently is the Crazy 8s, in which you draw 1 idea every 40 seconds for 5 minutes. This sets a similarly intense creative pace for those involved.

As much as the higher pace, higher intensity tasks tangibly increase the creative energy in the room, they also force the hand of that creative thinking. There are limits and constraints and higher pace. As a result, you create pressure, for some participants (and students) they love that edge. For others, it becomes harder and actually works counter to the general mindset we need for generating ideas: divergence. Too much pressure and pace can be a block to creativity. So we have to handle this carefully and create opportunities for a balance in speed settings if we can.

Incubate

When we incubate ideas we are taking our time to mull and ponder them over. We cogitate on them and allow ideas to be twisted and turned at a more leisurely pace. No time limits, no facilitator telling you, “Next one, move on!” When we incubate ideas we actively create conditions for our brain to slowly generate new connections and new ideas.

When you look through these brainstorming routines from Melanie Pinola, for example, you will see that the majority of them require the pace-setting to be quite low. Take a walk; in the shower; take a nap. The slower pace allows our brain to continue to work the connections. I have written before about Purposeful Napping, the deliberate use of sleep inertia to unlock our creativity. Take Edison’s lead on this one.

Suffice it to say that when we are engaged and motivated around a meaningful problem, we can guarantee our subconscious brain will continue to work hard. It has evolved to make connections from stimuli and will continue to work away at developing ideas or trying to break open a problem. We just need to give it deliberate time to work and create simple methods for capturing those ideas and connections if and when they are generated. Notebook in the shower type stuff.

Strike a Balance

A way to combine the power of these different pace settings is to seek out a balance, not only in the pace but the style of activity too. Here are a few ideas for you to takeaway:

  1. Combine activities so that they complement each other, go fast and slow.
  2. Provide time after an intense activity to go for a walk or work on something else, deliberately choosing to switch off.
  3. Arrange for these Force activities to happen at the end of the day so that the pace shifts overnight.
  4. You may even ask your students or participants to not think about the task anymore. Invariably new ideas are created and developed.
  5. Plan for downtime. Don’t overfill time with your students or colleagues that is for idea generation. Plan for deliberate Incubate style sessions.
  6. Talk explicitly with your team about the pace settings of the different tasks. Build up a picture of the pace settings for each tool in your creative toolset, share that understanding.
  7. Differentiate. This comes straight out of Teaching 101. Each team member or student will respond to the pace and intensity of an idea generation task differently. Talk about how they feel after different sessions and plan for the most appropriate combination of tasks for teams in the future.
  8. Increase your awareness of the pace-setting for tasks. When you debrief about different activities consider the intensity and pace. By staying aware of how others respond to them you are better equipped to choose suitable tasks. Understand the task design and the expected pace and observe how this impacts on those involved.

I find the Force Vs Incubate spectrum to be a really effective way to design idea generation tasks for any group. Just ask any group about when they generate their best ideas and it typically is not during a set-piece task. Strike the pace balance and we are much more likely to be utilising the best creative activities from our toolset.

As ever, let me know what resonates by sharing a comment below.

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Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels

How To Generate More Ideas With The Deliberate Debate Technique

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Conflict, controversy and debate might improve your idea generation

According to research by Charlan Nemeth, and her team, a degree of conflict can increase the number of ideas we generate.

This research is fascinating as it runs counter to commonly held beliefs about the best conditions for generating ideas. These beliefs centre on withholding criticism and feedback.

In this post we explore why more criticism might lead to more ideas; when to explore this in your design process; the importance of your team relationships; practical strategies and protocols you can use to implement this approach.

Permission to Criticise

In my facilitation experience, I present the importance of not judging ideas too soon; I still think this is important. It is not a lack of critique, it is more about the timing of feedback.

Importantly this study explored the impact of providing permission to criticise and judge ideas. In this way, critique is explicitly playing a role in the process.

Here is a little detail about the studies taken from the abstract:

In this experimental study, traditional brainstorming instructions, including the advice of not criticizing, were compared with instructions encouraging people to debate—even criticize. A third condition served as a control. This study was conducted both in the United States and in France. Results show the value of both types of instruction, but, in general, debate instructions were superior to traditional brainstorming instructions. Further, these findings hold across both cultures.[1]

Nemeth, Charlan & Personnaz, Bernard & Personnaz, Marie & Goncalo, Jack. (2004). The liberating role of conflict in group creativity: A study in two countries. European Journal of Social Psychology – EUR J SOC PSYCHOL. 34. 365-374. 10.1002/ejsp.210.

I have often found that when criticism is not expected, it is counterproductive to the process. I suppose setting clear expectations such as: “critique is allowed” provides clear boundaries for everyone.

My effort to “Not judge ideas too soon” could be reframed around clear expectations, or “not judging ideas unexpectedly”. With clear boundaries, feedback and filtering are welcome and not a surprise.

Why does conflict, controversy and debate generate more ideas?

Nemeth et al describe a 25% increase in ideas generated from the debate and critique approach compared to straightforward brainstorming tasks.

Also, participants developed more ideas after the activity as those taking part in the debate mulled over potential solutions.

Even though they may have generated new ideas, I still think this task falls into the idea exploration category, the second in the three steps of creativity.

The authors posit that an environment where debate is normal creates freedom.

framing criticism in terms of its potential for group creativity would both liberate individuals to be relatively free of evaluation apprehension and stimulate them to express ideas more freely.

This connects with my understanding of self-critic and how we need to filter less when we are generating ideas. If criticism and feedback are normal we can say what we want, without fear or angst.

Nemeth et al go on to explain how this freedom improves the conditions for idea generation on two different levels.

One is at the level of permitting discourse that would otherwise be monitored. A second is at the level of stimulating additional thought via the expression of competing views. If what brainstorming attempts to achieve is quantity of ideas without regard for their quality (Osborn, 1957), the freedom to express thoughts without worrying whether they constitute a criticism of another’s ideas may be well suited to idea generation.

By opening up unmonitored discourse we encourage more criticism, as well as, more sharing of ideas. We circumvent the filters and the second-guessing that limit our contributions.

How to generate more ideas through the debate and critique approach

A couple of things spring to mind about how this research and the deliberate debate and critique approach, runs counter to commonly held beliefs.

Team Trust Improves Idea Generation

The first is about the necessary team environment for this type of approach to thrive. In a friendly team, where co-construction is high, and competition is relatively low, I would imagine it would work well.

A team with lots of shared creative experiences and plenty of successful reference points can explore higher levels of conflict with more confidence.

The levels of trust are high between the team. They can enter into the deliberate debate space trusting in the relationships around the table. Relationships are crucial to team idea generation.

We can summarise these elements as follows:

  • Co-construction – we make stuff together (HIGH)
  • Shared experiences – we have been through a lot together (HIGH)
  • Trust – I have got your back (HIGH)
  • Competition – we are not trying to beat each other (LOW)
  • Successful creative reference points – we have developed ideas together before (HIGH)

When the opposite is true, criticism can often be a downward spiral of assumed personal attacks.

Mindset Matters

That leads me to my second thought about the makeup of the idea generation experience. If the critique is commonplace the disposition and mindset of participants become even more critical.

By sharing expectations, you signal that a specific type of thinking is needed. By debating ideas and testing them through dialogue, you are exploring them.

A deliberate debate and critique approach to idea generation require an emergent or exploratory thinking mindset. We explore possibilities and potential. We respond to critique and debate the options.

In the team environment, we want everyone to be on board with this approach and to tune into this disposition and expectation. Any misalignment or misinterpretation can slide into the downward spiral of assumed personal attacks.

In the next section, we look at how to set expectations for this type of work.

How to Use Protocols to Generate More Ideas With The Deliberate Debate Technique

I use protocols for thinking and critique all of the time with my clients. These are simple rules of engagement in a meeting or workshop. Protocols are the most direct way to share expectations.

Talk about the Talking

Rather than launching straight into the workshop outcomes, or the first thing on the agenda, I spend up to 10 minutes talking about how we are going to work together.

The sort of language I use to describe this phase is to talk about the talking. We establish some agreed expectations about how we will engage with the dialogue and the session’s work. The 10 minutes invariably pays off.

Hard on Content; Soft on People

For the debate and critique approach to idea generation, or Deliberate Idea Debate (DID)[2], the “Hard on content; Soft on people” protocol would be critical to any success.

A team should be debating the ideas or content, not the people who share them. The distinction needs to be facilitated watchfully.

This protocol is broken in the way we least expect. It is often because we are too soft on content, and not hard enough. You may recall times when your team didn’t quite get below the surface of the issue; identified the root cause; shied away from asking the hard questions, or were simply too nice.

The debate and critique approach to idea generation offer an invitation to change this dynamic.

“Hard on content; Soft on people” is an effective protocol to create clear expectations, which become the foundations for better debate.

Ringfenced Debate

Another useful facilitation technique is to ringfence the deliberate debate and critique time. Setup the activity to have time limits.

Time-limited activities enable the team to introduce new expectations or reinforce the protocols for collaboration.

When I am running new routines, like this debate approach, I set a limit on the time we spend in this mode. By using this approach I can make a clear distinction between workshop behaviours before and afterwards.

You might ringfence the activity like this:

  • 5 minutes to establish the protocols and expectations for the activity.
  • 30 minutes of debate and critique to generate more ideas.
  • 10 minutes capturing insights and reflections.
  • 5 minutes reflecting on the experience.

Use a timer to structure each part.

With more experience, you can extend the time for different elements of the process.

When to Generate More Ideas With The Deliberate Debate Technique?

Overall I was reflecting on:

  • When would I potentially use the D.I.D (Deliberate Idea Debate) activity in a longer design process?
  • When is it most helpful to slow down and explore a set of ideas through discussion and debate?

I think it would work well in the idea exploration phase, as mentioned earlier. Once you have generated a stack of ideas, the more, the merrier, the exploration and debate could help with both broadening and maturing those potential ideas.

You might start by producing the first filter, a shortlist from your collective top picks and then allow each team member the chance to present and defend a potential idea.

Your Talking Points and Next Steps

  • Evaluate the idea generation methods you have used.
  • Identify future opportunities to use the debate and critique approach.
  • Reflect on the trust and relationships in your team.
  • Outline the protocols to support this approach.

If you get a chance to use deliberate debate or dialogue, it would be great to hear how you get on.

  1. Nemeth, C. J., Personnaz, B., Personnaz, M. and Goncalo, J. A. (2004), The liberating role of conflict in group creativity: A study in two countries. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol., 34: 365–374. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.210  ↩
  2. Maybe that could be the name of the tool or activity Deliberate Idea Debate or D.I.D!  ↩

Prune Your Ideas – a visualisation by Bryan M. Mathers

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Over the last week or so I have been sharing some ideas about the process of generating and judging ideas. I was fortunate enough to receive the Tweet below from Bryan Mathers (@BryanMMathers) who shared his visualisation of the concepts.

You can take a look at a higher resolution copy of Bryan’s image below or on his blog here. Please note the creative commons licensing on it.

pruningideas

I like the idea of pruning as a representation of the way that we would judge our ideas in the latter stages of ideation. Carefully pulling away the dead wood to reveal the shoots with the most potential. Growing ideas is of course an easy representation of generating ideas too. Seeding as many as we can to see which would germinate.

Thanks to Bryan for taking the time to visualise my thinkery.

If you enjoyed this sort of thing you may also like this visualisation of a workshop I did in the US a while ago by @braddo.