ReDesign Aurora
ReDesign Aurora is a place for educators, designers and future thinkers to learn more about our work as a team committed to transforming student learning. We are learning how to work in an authentic 21st Century space that features the guiding principles of design thinking. This will be a weekly collaborative communication for our team members and for educators who are committed to doing something different in service to our students. This space will feature a regular design opportunity for ideas…brainstorms…possibilities. We hope you’ll join the conversation!
Pushing the Boulder…How to keep creative when it feels like you can’t get traction…
Here’s what you DON’T get to see in the Ideo videos and the 100s of features on Design Thinking — The Stuck. That part where the team is pushing hard to find users…or when it seems like the team is way ahead of the rest of the system and you just can’t seem to make inroads…or when the whirlwind of tasks and emergencies and exhaustion seduce attention and energy elsewhere. The Stuck.
Changing the mindset of a system…shifting the culture…inviting new thinking that may have little to do with the “way we used to do things around here” is just hard work. Nothing else to say about that. It doesn’t feel creative. It can tear into a team’s creativity and spark and sense of purpose quickly if you aren’t ready. Design and innovation and creativity and courage can shrivel in small spaces within the team community if you aren’t careful to keep perspective…keep momentum…keep trying…one more step forward.
What to do when you’re pushing the boulder:
- Look for the Beautiful Constraints
Morgan & Mark Barden’s A Beautiful Constraint challenge the leader’s mindset when faced with The Stuck. Rather than seeing The Stuck as a constraint the size of a boulder, what if it was a gift that opened up a completely new level of possibilities? What if the team saw a constraint as a bold invitation to do something daring?
Leading change, especially that is focused on ReDesigning and transforming learning for every single student in a district, is daunting work. We have to become the kind of designers who go into “YES mode” when they see a constraint or challenge in the work. Here’s what Morgan & Barden say, “We are living in an era of extraordinary people rewriting our sense of what is possible. They make an unarguable case that a constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change — we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough. Not in spite of the constraint, but because of it.”
Leading a team through The Stuck means creating energy and ambition that invites the constraint as a way to increase creativity and possibility. To satsify the constraint is exhausting and debilitating work. A team can get to “licking their chops” when they start seeing constraints piling in…but someone has to lead the way with open-minded,open-hearted thinking!
Here’s the process described in Morgan & Barden’s handbook for the ReDesign team. It won’t make full sense without the text in your hands, but consider some of the strategic moves a team makes when creating beauty out of constraints:
Go Play!
ReDesigning is challenging work. There is a tendency to “hunker down” and survive rather than taking time out to play…laugh…get perspective…get into your right brain.
In APS, we are launching Brown Bag Genius. It’s just 30 minutes on a Friday afernoon to invite everyone who works with us to come dabble in their right brain. Improv exercises…Disruptus game…Juggling…we aren’t sure yet what we will be doing with team mates, but you can be sure we will be committed to 30 minutes of playing in order to give ourselves a moment away from pushing the boulder.
Listen to Ideo’s Tim Brown’s TED Talk on Creativity and Play:
Here’s the link to the 30 Circle Test: http://www.theglobalday.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Worksheet-30-Circles-Bernstein-Maya.pdf
The Power of TRY
Our best creative consultant is Hi Howard, the Executive Director of the Front Range BOCES . Hi continues to inspire, push and stimulate our ReDesign thinking. His mantra, “Try”, is a courage-building theme for our team and those who are daring to think differently in service to student learning and system challenge.
“Try” means we commit to being a bit more vulnerable today than we were yesterday. “Try” means we put our toes in the water instead of standing at the ocean’s edge discussing the many excuses why it just doesn’t make sense to go swimming. Leading in a culture of “Try” means that we applaud courage and failure and initiative and crazy thinking in a world where everyone else may be clinging to the side wishing that things would just get easier.
Amy Poehler exalts the culture of “Try”: “Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before the know they can do it. Doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that — that is what life is. You might be really good. You might find out something about yourself that’s really special and if you’re not good, who cares? You tried something. Now you know something about yourself.” (Thanks Dawn McWilliams for sharing the poster above your desk!)
Extreme Self Care
Pushing the boulder up the hill and finding the beauty in that action necessitates self care for the leader and the team. ReDesign can only stay fresh and productive and inspiring to the extent that those who are shifting the culture are taking care of their needs.
ReDesign culture supports self care in service to caring for others. Article after article in HBR about effective leadership highlights the essential nature of time to reflect, rest, invest in nourishing relationships and prioritize the things that matter. This is counterintuitive in a culture that pressures us to work 16 hour days and deny health and humanity until the job is done. HINT: the job is NEVER done. Take time …and bring someone along with you who needs a walk, a deep breath, something that nurtures the ingredients of creativity and ReDesign!
