Last week I had coffee with two friends from my days teaching and helping lead the learning and organizational change graduate program at Northwestern University.
One – Beth – is Head of School at a private Montessori school in the Boston area. Beth is an amazing leader; she gets results and creates a workplace where folks want to stay. She also is incredibly creative and driven by the power of stories.
The three of us share a deep interest in paying attention to the details of designing experiences that help folks share know-how and learn while also deepening relationships. Keeley (my other coffee friend) and I are both pretty good at this. Beth, however, takes it to a whole other level.
Commit to your design. No really. Commit.
Beth shared the story of two examples of her back-to-school events for the teaching staff – the first days when teachers return to the building before school actually begins.
One was designed as an airline flight experience. Teachers got paper tickets before the event, and homework. When they arrived they were met by other staff acting as TSA agents. If you did your homework you went through a quick TSA pre-check gate. If not, you had to go into the slow line. Folks had assigned seats when they entered the meeting room, set up with a video screen in the front which displayed an airplane cockpit. Staff dressed as flight attendants greeted you and delivered snacks on carts. Beth delivered her meeting opening (in character, fully costumed) as the pilot.
It was an immersive experience. Done cleverly and without great expense.
Another year the theme was Back to the Future (after the staff having spent the previous year heads down on re-accreditation). Yes, Beth found a Delorean to have on hand. Another year involved a sword that, as part of mission for small groups, had to be pulled from a stone (made of a cardboard box) to reveal a code to unlock a nearby chest that yielded additional activities and clues.
Props. Costumes. Folks playing (and staying in) character.
You can easily dismiss it as just a leader living out her theater-kid fantasies at the expense of her staff. Or just do an eye-roll imagining yourself in those experiences. But there is a key insight here that is worth pondering as we think about designing experiences.
Beth knows her audience deeply – how they think, what they value, what their daily work experience is like – to design something immersive that works with that specific group of people at that moment in time.
Beth was very conscious of this. Here’s what I took away from Beth describing her design reasoning:
- When teachers come back from their summer activities, they just naturally want to get back into their physical classroom to start setting up for the new year.
- Beth wanted to interrupt that dynamic and take time reflect on key ideas for the year.
- Some ideas are specific to a year. Some ideas are enduring and contribute to the success of the school.
- She knows that if she can create an experience in which relationships can be forged, it will ripple throughout the year. Example: 2nd grade teachers and 7th grade teachers in those experience moments get a rare opportunity to get to know each other or rekindle relationships. This is immensely helpful in a school where students experience their education as a journey through a long segment of childhood development (pre-K through 8th grade) in a community staffed by folks who care about that complete developmental journey. It’s an “it takes a village” mindset.
- She also knows that the best teachers do what she is doing in these events. They are committing to creating moments for their students and working within all range of constraints to be effective and creative and memorable. She wanted the teaching staff to know that she knows. And appreciates that committment.
The big lessons here are about intention (understanding the outcomes you are after) and the belief that constraints power creativity and not being afraid to commit. Beth actually recounted a lesson she learned early in her life about constraints and creativity. An art teacher made that point explicit; that the constraints of a medium are actually what enables more creative thinking. “You can be more creative within the circle,” Beth said “than outside of it.”
Finding our circles
That circle analogy, I think, applies to finding our roles within this batshit current environment in which we live. It does for me.
I realized as we continued to talk during that coffee chat that what I have been doing – focusing specifically on community listening, about environmental justice, within Evanston – is a set of constraints. It creates a circle.
There is a lot to learn within that circle. Honestly, no end. But how to do that work effectively – while also finding ways it connects to helping remedy current state affairs and/or build a world more sane – is a kind of creative endeavor.
I could work outside the circle and just continually be pulled into new efforts or activities or things-that-just-got-my-attention. Some people are good at that. I’m not. It just makes me feel like I an flailing.
But working with the circle – this location, this moment, these issues – forces me to think more deeply about how all of this is a “both/and;” both local, and not local. And pointing the needle in the right direction.
Jeff Merrell 