Part 2: The process — find your tribe to ride the rollercoaster with!
CAST/Catalyst Definition programme blog from Brathay Trust
In Part 1: “The concept”, we detailed how we narrowed the scope of wanting to develop digital delivery in our blended approach to Brathay’s experiential learning offer. The process of focusing on a particular part of digital delivery to test (MVP) reminded us of the importance of staying user-led in this process.
This process of focusing on the ‘right thing’, also helped us realise the ‘right group’ to test with. Whilst we considered multiple areas of Brathay’s broad work, the same group who worked on the CAST Explore programme, were deemed to be best to test with again. This team of trainers work with apprentice, pre-apprentice, and graduates, within Brathay’s Emerging Talent work strand. The team had moved a lot of their delivery online through the pandemic and had been on a steep learning curve! They were enthusiastic and motivated to develop digital delivery, from a response to the pandemic, into a longer-term blended offer alongside residential and local delivery.
It is important at this point to state that this enthusiasm was not representative across the board, as some people, understandably so, believe their practice should stay focused on our USP of the Brathay Hall estate where we have run our residential provision from for 75 years. Surveys also showed a lack of confidence, capability, and resource. For example,
“I can see the benefits, but am not really sure that we have the true capability or resource to fully do it, especially with the estate and our accommodation/ facilitation being our main asset”
“My honest answer is that my computer & digital skills are not very effective at all unfortunately. I will endeavour to improve these but my heart & soul does not live in ‘gamification’ and I wonder if I will ever have passion to deliver programmes using this as a medium (…or perhaps it’s the word ‘gamification’ that is off-putting!!)”.
In contrast, the majority of responses from the Emerging Talent team showed a different perspective, thus reinforcing them as a test group:
“A learning platform is essential to support learning around the intensive intervention of a digital or on site programme”
“I’ve already delivered live facilitated sessions, and use a learning platform… as part of my programme. I don’t have the coding skills to digitally gamify content”
“I think that the live facilitated sessions are and will continue to be valuable”.
Based on this, we developed two sets of user needs statements, one to represent end users (participants) and one to represent users (Trainers):
As a …young person at the start of my employability training (e.g. apprenticeship, pre-apprenticeship, etc.)
When I …engage with my programme, which has mainly been online and I’m managed by someone remotely, I have little social contact with colleagues, which makes me feel isolated and disengaged and I am digitally fatigued…
I need …it to be an engaging and interactive experience; that is meaningful and not just another online meeting or webinar
So that …I feel socially connected with others and achieve deeper, more meaningful learning that makes a real difference in my personal development.
As a …Trainer
When I …am trying to create blended programmes for a client, where the learners are digitally fatigued, because all of their learning and social interaction with colleagues is online
I need …the tools, skills and confidence to digitise my facilitation capabilities
So that …participants show increased engagement, social connection and deeper more meaningful learning experiences.
And we worked on the following hypothesis:
We believe that …..we should develop a suite of digital tools for live facilitated sessions that trainers can embed within their programming
This will result in …… the first stage of a blended digital offer that can be quickly implemented and will increase engagement
We can measure our success by ……surveying and interviewing trainers, clients and participants
The least amount of work we could do to learn or prove this is ……to showcase and sandpit digital tools with trainers to go on to test with participants.
Having surveyed the team and understood that their more immediate needs were in live facilitated online sessions, we worked with our digital partners @erica and @ped to showcase a variety of digital tools and the training team started an ongoing process of testing them on each other and eventually end users.
What we gained from running retrospectives and re-surveying showed an increase in confidence and vision, e.g. “We’re already doing this and it is adding scope to our programmes to be more embedded and improving accessibility”…OMG! We were proving our hypothesis!
However, with this came a problem… The team could see how they could immediately implement and enhance their design and delivery, however at the same time, organisationally we were working towards our cyber essentials and NHS toolkit. A checklist process was needed to ensure any new digital delivery tools were compliant with the above. And thus, we came to a screeching halt (understandably so — we want to be just as safe online as we do on a high ropes course, as we do in detached youth work).
And so the process gave us our most significant learning — transformation projects are a looping rollercoaster! The double diamond model of design thinking, used in Blog 1, is often critiqued for being too linear and not representative enough of the iterative cycles. Other models are perhaps more helpful; we like the one above, as it looks a little more like the rollercoaster reality of transformation projects!
