The making of: Team Essentials for AI
An inside, and mostly unfiltered, look at how our team turned a framework into an interactive online course in 14 weeks
We made a thing. If you’re a frequent user of the Enterprise Design Thinking Learning Platform you might have seen it. If you’re a social media follower of some badass IBM Design leadership you might have seen it, too. I’m talking about the Team Essentials for AI Course, of course. This spring (May 31st to be exact) we launched a new learning experience on our platform. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out. (Seriously, I’ll wait.)
February
Sometime around the end of February, my design director, Joni Saylor, asked if I had a minute to chat. When you hear that from your design director, not to mention one as amazing as Joni, you certainly don’t say no. Especially when, at the time, I absolutely had a minute. I had many minutes. About two weeks before, our team had released an updated Practitioner Course. It was a whirlwind of a project. But we’d done it and were now in one of those weird lulls where you’re grateful for the little break but also unsure of what’s to come — which makes planners like me very anxious.
We went to the kitchen. Sitting across from each other at the counter height table, Joni asked if I’d be interested in co-leading a project about artificial intelligence and design thinking (of course I was). That was the first hint of this, the first glimpse at what this course became. Well, really at the moment my main thought was: “crap, I don’t know anything about AI.”
March
My teammate, Rob Williams, and I had some experience with courses. We helped launch the Co-Creator Course in September, and we launched the updated Practitioner Course in February. We weren’t total rookies to the online learning game. In fact, Rob was involved in the creation of the very first Enterprise Design Thinking course (back in the days when it was called IBM Design Thinking). We collected a lot of ideas and theories and principles for effective online learning. The difference this time, for the first time, was that the content wasn’t ours.
I want to pause for a second and talk a little bit about this dream team that formed in March:
Rob Williams
Co-lead
Pedagogical expert
Serious Playback wizard
Rob hails from Ohio and brings his love of the outdoors and adventure into the office. He’s our Magellan — fearlessly leading us to explore possibilities and think about the meaning they have. If you see him around, he’s probably wearing a hat that says, “only you can prevent wildfires.” He’s also probably working really hard on something brilliant that he won’t brag about or even really mention as anything more than a passing, “oh I made this thing.” And if you’re in a pinch, he’s your go-to guy for hilarious GIFs, slightly off-the-rails metaphors, and killer curriculum ideas sometimes based on video games.
Aubrey O’Neal
Content designer
AI secret weapon
Script writing genius
Originally from Michigan, Aubrey joined our team this March and brought her depth of hidden talents with her — and her stories of growing up in a tiny town with only 4 television channels. She writes, she edits videos, she makes chatbots, she questions the status quo, she plays cello, she sort of almost once beat Rob in a swimming contest (he’s tall, it wasn’t exactly a fair fight). Seriously, is there anything this renaissance woman can’t do? I guess those years of barely any TV helped cultivate the endless curiosity and brilliance that shines through Aubrey — don’t watch too many shows, kids!
David Avila
Filmmaker
World’s fastest editor
Storyteller extraordinaire
One of the few original Austinites, David had to put up with us crazy young kids coming into his town and pushing him around. Luckily for us, he’s probably the most patient and laid back dude in the world. I guess moving 67 times in your life means you have to stay calm under pressure. It doesn’t hurt that he’s got some seriously adorable granddaughters and a really great house for parties. Get David talking for a minute and you’ll find yourself on a winding adventure through the history of Austin and his interesting life. He had us spellbound with stories for most of the project (when he wasn’t in a bunker editing 15 videos in 2 weeks, that is).
Through the magical powers of these teammates and our own special brand of trust, hard work, and some serious goofing off, this team made the course possible.
Early in March the 4 of us joined forces with the IBM Design for AI team. Adam Cutler, Milena Pribić, and Lawrence Humphrey shared the work they’d been doing for the past 3 years. They’d run workshops, built frameworks, iterated, seen success, and now needed a way to scale. We were the way.
If you’ve followed the design thinking journey at IBM, this will sound familiar. Our platform and badges were an answer to scaling design thinking, so it was easy to imagine the happy marriage between their Design for AI content and our Enterprise Design Thinking platform.
Now, I’m not married, so I can only follow the tropes I’ve seen everywhere. But it seems to me that this was a typical marriage — filled with challenges, compromise, frustration, and joy.
Throughout March, we were trying to understand one another. We asked questions, walked through their curriculum in a workshop, interviewed participants, came up with ideas, aligned on shared goals, held some Playbacks, threw away some concepts we really liked, prototyped and tested some things, realized we only had a little over a month until our mid-May deadline, and had a panic attack or 2 (or maybe that last one was just me). Little by little I went from “I don’t know anything about AI” to “I know a couple things about AI.”
April
By the second day of April, we were at Playback 0: a milestone moment for us to align on what we were going to make. And we really needed to decide what we were going to make, because at this point we were about 5 weeks from our planned launch date — not a lot of time when you consider that just pre-production for some types of videos can take up to 6 weeks.
If I were to summarize what April was about, I’d say it was the video month. We knew that we wanted to have a narrative thread through the course. Good storytelling is how things stick, after all — and this content lent itself well to a learn-by-example model. This course offered a new opportunity for attempting a video style we hadn’t before. We wanted it to be authentic and useful and entertaining. We decided to make The Office. Well, not exactly, but we did have some fun watching it for inspiration.
4 days after our Playback 0, we had a first prototype of this new video style (I’m convinced David is a magician). Through that prototype, we uncovered a few things: some of our co-workers were secretly really good actors, the style would work provided we got the scripting and editing right, and we needed to start moving… fast!
We wrote scripts, edited scripts, gathered props, scouted locations, bullied (kindly) some people into being our actors, tested a few shots, took some calming substances — just kidding, we’re professionals. It was around this time that we decided our actual launch date would be May 31st. It was 2 weeks later than our original plan, but it was necessary.
By some miracle, on April 17th we were filming. And we filmed for many days after that. Through about 50 hours of filming, we ended up with 12hrs of footage. Those 12 hours would ultimately get edited into about 27 minutes worth of videos.
Meanwhile — sometime in between all of the video work — we wrote the course content. We created a full prototype of it. We put it on the wall and ripped it apart a few times. And let me tell you, if you ever need to learn something, build your own course about it. You’ll realize just how much you don’t know… and hopefully you’ll start to catch on.
May
On May 14th, we played back our current state of the course to Adam, Milena, and Lawrence. Now, this isn’t to say that we didn’t work closely with them throughout April — they’re in almost all of the course videos, and our desks were all next to each other — but this was the moment when it became really clear, really quickly that we should have been sharing more with each other, and sooner. In the rush of daily work on both of our ends, we slightly lost touch. It was like we were so worried about the kids and our housework that we forgot about date night. (Is this marriage metaphor still working?)
The challenge wasn’t new to any of us. We’ve all practiced (and taught) Enterprise Design Thinking for years, and still sometimes we can get swept away with the work and forget some important things. The important thing we forgot this time: make sure we were all aware and aligned on every part of the work.
At the end of that Playback, we regrouped — restructured some things, rewrote some things, and kept making.
Here are the 2 things I want you to take from this story. I’m telling you them now because I like to spoil endings, and because this was the biggest of the small defining moments that made the project successful:
1. No one, no team, no project is ever “perfect” when it comes to design thinking. If you don’t have that etched in your brain and haven’t truly adopted that in your heart, you’ll find all of the excuses in the world to not practice design thinking at all or give up at the first sign of challenge.
2. Bad Playbacks make good outcomes. I’m not saying that you should try to get the worst feedback you can from people you share your work with (we all want to do good work, right?). I am saying that if you hit that moment where you go in thinking you have a great thing to share and come out feeling like you got punched in the stomach — that’s not a bad thing; it’s just a sign that you can do better. Your team can shift and adjust, change timelines, or do something differently to reach an even greater result. It WILL make all the difference. We hear this all the time, to get back up and keep going, but it’s always harder to do than say.
Now, that was May 14th. Like I said, we launched on May 31st. Those 13 work days were like all the ones before. We held our stand ups in the morning. David kept editing videos. Rob wrote Toolkit activities, made a workbook, and created GIFs and images. I updated our course content, reviewed videos, made checklists, and input the goods into JSON. And Aubrey… went on vacation. Just kidding! I mean, not about the vacation part: she really did go to the Philippines for 2 weeks in May, but she also helped edit videos, tested everything, and made last-minute fixes before our launch.
Normally that would be the end of the story, right? I mean, we launched. We were done! We did celebrate a little. But we also didn’t settle.
June
After a nice long weekend, we came back together on Tuesday and looked again at what we built. Everyone was good with it. It deployed just fine. All the changes we made at the end were minor. But we weren’t satisfied. There were problems with how we structured the content that we didn’t notice until we could see the whole picture and had a chance to breathe and reflect (and maybe only we saw them as problems). In hindsight, we probably could have and should have brought it up earlier. But without being able to change the past, we were able to restlessly reinvent. We made a quick prototype of our new idea, discussed all the reasons why we needed to make the structural change, played it back to our stakeholders, and dove in again.
By June 14th, the update launched. Also by June 14th, 301 people took the course and earned their Team Essentials for AI Badge.
Today
I don’t know about you, but I think the end of projects always feel less climactic than expected. They happen, and you hopefully celebrate a little and hold a retrospective to learn everything you can from them. Then, you move on to the next thing. (Thank you, next!) Getting a chance to look back on it now and write about everything we did (15 videos, 74 pages of content, 202 GitHub issues) in about 14 weeks, brings me new pride and excitement for everything this team of people is capable of—seriously, keep your eye on Rob, Aubrey, and David. They’ll probably run the world soon.
I’m also increasingly grateful for every bit of this experience and what it taught me. I learned a little bit more about curriculum design, a little bit more about leading a team, a little bit more about AI, and even a little bit more about design thinking. There’s always more to learn and experiences like this project are the best way to do that.
At the time of publishing this article, over 2,000 people have earned their Team Essentials for AI Badge. Are you one of them?
Special thanks to:
Amanda Booth for fearlessly editing not only all of the course content, but also this monolith of a post.
Rob Williams for being the best co-lead and sounding board through all of this work.
Aubrey O’Neal and David Avila for paddling the canoe upstream with us. Adam Cutler, Milena Pribić, and Lawrence Humphrey for trusting us with your baby.
Rafa Nogueras, Matt Brothers, Ricardo Henriquez, and Andrea Cardona for being the most engaged and helpful dev team around—the platform actually wouldn’t exist without you.
Gabe Delgado, Haidy Francis, Maui Francis, Alisha Moore, Beth Rudden, Andrea Cardona, and Alex Katz for Golden Globe-worthy performances.
Keep a look out for more new courses on ibm.com/design/thinking, and let us know what you think!
