Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organisation: 3 Lessons from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education)
This article is part of a series profiling innovative organisations from various industries. Find all of the articles here: Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organisation: 3 Things We Learned During COVID-19.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders with free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during this crisis.
Dr. Angèle Beausoleil is the Assistant Professor of Business Design and Innovation at Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. She is a ‘pracademic’ who teaches design methodologies for business innovation and leads research on organizational innovation process design, navigation, and management. A former communications designer, senior strategist and innovation lab executive, she applies her extensive industry experience to crafting high impact student-centred learning experiences. At Rotman, Dr. Beausoleil is the Academic Director of the Business Design Initiative, an emerging education and research centre focused on design-led innovation leadership. She also teaches human-centred design, innovative leadership, and creativity to executives, MBA and Commerce students.
Dr. Beausoleil is Canada’s first PhD to focus on innovation literacy (innovative leadership) using design processes and methods, receiving her PhD in Design Innovation Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia.
Prior to graduate studies, she held executive positions in marketing, strategy, and innovation for Canadian, North American and global agencies and corporations (such as Starbucks, McDonalds, Sony, The Gap). During her 25 years in industry, she garnered over 20 international awards for educational products, service design and digital platforms.
3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education)
The abrupt shift from in-person to online classes meant that Dr. Beausoleil had 2 days to take in-person studio-based business design, innovation, and design thinking classes and rethink how to offer the same learning outcomes digitally. As a designer and innovator first, and an educator second, she felt energized by the new parameters, and what it could mean for traditional education. The needs of students and professors have completely changed, and neither side was prepared.
#1 This is a human experience problem, not a technology solution
Dr. Beausoleil has made a career of training students and executives alike how to turn negative situations into innovative business solutions. Not surprisingly, she’s seen that higher education’s response has been similar to that of leading organizations: adapt quickly and assume that a sweeping response will be enough. What this fails to consider though is that just like businesses, each course and professor offers a different experience, and each type of student has a different set of needs.
At its core, taking classes that are in-person and just moving them online isn’t the solution. It doesn’t take into account what students were actually getting out of the classroom experience. She recommends approaching this situation similarly to how she would approach any innovation challenge: watch, listen, and engage with students. document what they say and do, how they respond to different situations and contexts, and look for ways to build and integrate empathy.
Embrace experimentation. Gather your best insights, look for themes and make educated guesses about the base experience that your students need to feel engaged and receive the same learning outcomes. Test, and keep testing, until you find the right way to integrate technology into your courses. This is the best way to ensure your course content adapts to flexible learning situations and is accessible and useful — considering we’re still uncertain how long it will take to get back to in-person classes.
#2 This is an opportunity to lead the conversation about transparency and value
Universities are being faced with a never-before-seen challenge: the question of value and return. For all university students, but in particular MBA (and all professional) students who are paying a high price tag for the network and in-person experiences.
For better or worse, students value in-person learning and discount online learning as they view it today. There are two things that come out of this:
We need to create legitimate value through virtual and hybrid learning that is worth investing in. This is done by innovating on curriculum design to incorporate different ways to teach and to learn. A webinar has no value beyond when it happens, so how do you get to the root of how students learn and offer that. This is what we talk about in lesson #1.
But beyond that, there needs to be evidence that is clearly articulated that online education is different than just learning through video (asynchronous learning). You can create a course that is groundbreaking, but if students don’t believe in the value, it’s worthless. There needs to be a communication effort, a new story being shared across institutions about the importance of re-thinking education and empowering students to be a part of that. For example a consortium of universities to show the greater value of online vs. old institutional ideas of in-person being the best. Rebranding “education” not institutions.
#3 Use this uncertain time to mentor and train students to better face adversity
One of the starkest realities that she noticed through this transition was how unprepared students were to make the transition to online learning. The traditional education model has not prepared students to navigate uncertainty. But these students aren’t just facing adversity and changes to their education, this will continue after they graduate.
She believes that this is the time to use this pandemic as a great life lesson. She has already shifted her summer semester MBA student case study project to focus on the question of ‘how do we get people back to work in a safe and productive way.’ By facing their fears of an uncertain future head on, using tools they are not-yet-comfortable with (virtual collaboration), they have the opportunity to gain more than the old curriculum may have offered.
Being adaptive and resilient needs to be a two-way relationship: your students (/customers) are being asked to be equally adaptive, so how can you engage and empathize with them and develop a better understanding of their fears?
Register for the May 20th webinar How COVID is changing education: addressing the CX & EX challenges to learn directly from Dr. Beausoleil and other higher education leaders.
More lessons from this series:
- 3 Lessons from Zahra Ebrahim (Civic Engagement): Their solution required no technical background and it helps communities precisely because of its simplicity. They wanted to create a resource that made it extremely easy to connect people needing help to resources offering help.
- 3 Lessons from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity): This crisis forced the charity to quickly re-think their entire model. The needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents all changed and the charity had to adapt to deliver support in new ways.
- 3 Lessons from CityStudio (Education): CityStudio brings innovation, engagement, and experimentation to Vancouver’s City Hall by uniting city staff with post-secondary students, faculty, and community.
- 3 Lessons from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education): The abrupt shift from in-person to online classes meant that Dr. Beausoleil had 2 days to take in-person lab-based business design, innovation, and design thinking classes and rethink how to offer the same learning outcomes digitally.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity/ Technology): As a technology platform which has the primary goal of making giving easy, he has had the privilege of being able to study topics such as why donors stop giving and what makes them comfortable to give to a charity for the first time.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Innovation/Anthropology): Having a renewed sense of purpose in spite of this uncertainty can help teams move through these moments of change. We’re no longer what we used to be and we’re not sure what we will become.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Tyson Villeneuve (Events/Hospitality): Events as an industry effectively flatlined and we were the first to get hit: Large sports events, festivals, gatherings. The entire industry was shut down two weeks before restaurants.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dianne Dredge, Ph.D (Tourism / Community Engagement): Her lens from the perspective of regions and tourism ecosystems that had to completely rebuild provide lessons on how industries can become adaptive and resilient.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during the COVID-19 crisis.
