Part 1: The concept — it’s about the future (not a knee jerk response)
CAST/Catalyst Definition programme blog from Brathay Trust
As part of Brathay Trust’s 2020–25 strategy and 2021/22 business plan, we stated that we will “develop, promote and deliver distinctive programmes containing a blend of residential, local and digital elements, which will have maximum impact and safeguard against future disruption to our ability to deliver to our clients”.
Our newly formed Capability Incubator has been working on developing the digital element of this, not just as a kneejerk reaction to the pandemic, but as part of a blended learning offer moving forward.
As part of the CAST Explore programme, we began to understand the problem area and user needs and were really at the ‘discover’ phase of design thinking.
The Catalyst Definition programme to follow, has seen this early research define and refine the problem we wanted to focus on in order to ideate and test out solutions (minimal viable products).
Brathay’s practice is broad, and we support multiple groups of young people and families, as well as emerging talent, leaders, and teams. However, we think of our work in the whole and have recently coined the term ‘One Brathay’ and social enterprise sits at the heart of our work (see more here). Our social enterprise model, is an eco-system that contains commercial areas such as our people and organisational development, our beautiful venue, and our challenge events, as well as our work with young people, families and emerging talent. This support isn’t just financial; it’s about a One Brathay learning eco-system. For example,
- What do we know about leaders that can help us working with emerging leaders in the social sector?
- What do we know about wellbeing that could help us develop support for NHS workers?
- What do we know about CSR (corporate social responsibility) that can help us with mentoring, community engagement or participating in one of our challenge events?
How can we all learn and grow together, especially in, but not limited to, times of crisis — times that have called for innovation. Times that have asked us to come together in new ways. At Brathay, we blend the social, commercial and corporate worlds to try and improve. Too often they are separate, or the use of the latter two are thought of as simply an approach to raising money.
We were looking for solutions across the board, which as we came to find out, is tricky when design thinking is looking to narrow the scope in order to test and prototype (MVP). There are multiple design thinking analogies that are helpful here. Starting simply, with a skateboard, or my preference; the cupcake, birthday cake and wedding cap analogy, albeit we might need multiple cupcakes to start with!
So, the first important part to this was understanding a blended digital approach within our blended overall approach — and not be confused by this! This was important because we had been throwing around the term ‘digital’, as a one size fits all solution. The nuances are significant, for example, synchronous (group work online training) and asynchronous (individually at you own pace) learning.
Learning through the Definition programme helped us divide this overall concept into three digital areas:
- Led by someone: Live online facilitated sessions
- Independent: A learning platform
- With others: gamification for team challenge
Initially we thought area 2 would be the most useful across a broad range of our work. This may be so, but two critical factors moved us away from this: firstly, we needed to test simply, quickly and easily (the skateboard/cupcake!) and whilst we had done some work in this area, it seemed too big an ask in our 10-week Definition programme. Secondly, was the importance of revisiting user needs — our trainers were telling us that area 1 (live online facilitated sessions) were (a) much further developed, and thus people were feeling much more confident about them, and (b) there was greater need and ease of integrating digital tools within current design and delivery — and thus easier to test. We would more quickly arrive at an MVP and this was felt to be a great foundation to build from.
Moral of the story: continuously check in with users and be willing to pivot!
