This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

It’s natural to think — “It must be an edtech thing” — when you first hear about Michigan State University’s Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology. But, as the Hub’s Director, Jeff Grabill, shares: “What surprises people is how little of our work focuses on, or leads, with technologies.”

The Hub’s mission is to help MSU reinvent itself as a learning institution. The mechanisms that Jeff’s team employs to collaborate with the school and faculty for this reinvention take many forms, including, yes, technology, but also strategies like organizational design and classroom learning methodologies.

Origins of the Hub

Now in its third year, the Hub was formed as part of MSU’s student success initiative. Student success initiatives — which focus on student retention and graduation rates — are a hot topic in higher education right now. As Jeff shared, that’s because of low graduation rates at institutions across the board: “Only about half of students graduate in six years, which is the federal standard. At Michigan State, our graduation rate just got to 80%, which is good. But we still have some persistence issues, and we still have some gaps for students of color and first-generation students.”

The Hub is helping the university transform itself and the student experience by partnering with faculty and departments within the university on critical projects. In the three years since they formed, Jeff’s been working on building the Hub’s project portfolio. The need for innovative thinking and transformation could be endless at such a large state school.

Therefore, Jeff has concentrated on finding projects that will have a considerable impact: “We partner with our colleagues that we think have impact because they touch a core operating system of the institution, or they impact large numbers of students. Or, they’re compelling enough as a model that it’s worth doing because the model can be shared around campus for others to replicate.”

Innovation is a Four Letter Word

One of the fascinating threads throughout our conversation was how innovation is perceived in higher education today. “Innovation in higher education is kind of a dirty word,” Jeff said. Because of that, the Hub’s team approaches things from a different angle. And, that angle is definitely not about bringing cookie-cutter start-up culture and innovation cliches to East Lansing. “We think about innovation not as a bright and shiny thing or from Silicon Valley, but as a sustainable change in behavior or practice.”

“We to think about innovation not as a bright and shiny thing or from Silicon Valley, but as a sustainable change in behavior or practice.”

Phrases like “disruptive innovation” can be off-putting for faculty and may distract from the less flashy ways that meaningful change happens at universities: “There are certain things that we do at MSU and in higher education that deserve to be disrupted. We look for those things, but maybe in more mundane ways. We’re very interested in things that may not be seen as disruptive, but really will have a substantial change in how students experience the institution.”

At the Hub, it’s not about innovation or technology for the sake of turning things on their head or keeping up. Change is something that authentically benefits MSU students. That might be as deceptively simple as redesigning the student orientation or the first-year experience.

The Benefits of Slowness

We dug a little deeper into why innovation and talks of disruption may meet with skepticism on campus. First, Jeff talked about “cultural fatigue.” The faculty has seen it before. They’ve witnessed both good and bad ideas come and go. They’ve been involved with design consultants who have tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to facilitate design thinking or innovation at the university.

More intriguingly, Jeff thinks there is an upside to the fact that universities are often slow-moving. There is a “virtue” in this slowness, which stands in stark contrast to our current obsession with speed. That’s part of why their insider’s approach to innovation is working at the Hub. They know the culture and how it operates. It’s about being open, rather than resistant, to how faculty work and think. Sometimes important change takes time, and often for good reason.

“Slowness is both a virtue and a vice of higher education.”

“If you’re going to get involved in the innovation business in higher education, you have to know what you’re talking about. You have to be able to marshal a fair amount of evidence to help faculty learn to trust you and listen and participate in the process,” Jeff said. “Slowness is both a virtue and a vice of higher education. We can be very slow. But one of the virtues of being slow is we tend not to jump on bandwagons very quickly. And faculty know that sometimes going slow means that they make the right decision.”

This more measured stance also translates to how the Hub approaches their projects and partnerships. Jeff talked about how they spend a fair amount of time in the upfront stages of their project, or what they call the chartering process. “The charter is not that interesting, but the chartering that we do with people is very interesting. That’s where we make sure we get to know each other. We make sure that we’re using the same language, that we have the same understanding of the words we use, and that we have the same goals. Having these fundamentals in place and solid from the get-go has been key to success.”

Education Not Transmission

The Hub has several ways to engage with university groups, including assessments and educational technology engagements. But, one of the most “tricky” aspects, according to Jeff, has been the work they do with learning design. Learning design is essentially how classes or courses are taught — i.e., are they interactive lectures, a talk accompanied by a PowerPoint, or purely conversational? In the age of technology and online education, there is an opportunity to rethink how learning happens both in the digital and physical classrooms. And, as Jeff has found, learning design is an emerging discipline: “It’s something that a lot of institutions are inventing.”

One of the recent trends in the so-called disruption of higher education was the arrival of MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses. (Think: Khan Academy or EdX.) “When they first started, the proponents thought that they were going to disrupt higher education absolutely.” Yet, the radical dissolution of the university and college model has not happened, despite the explosion of free, or inexpensive, online courses and training.

According to Jeff, that’s because much of the edtech industry has misunderstood how education works as a business. “They want to apply business practices to universities, but education is a business, and it has values. It has a political economy.”

Part of that misunderstanding has been assuming that education is simply the transmission of information. In other words, if you make a lecture available on an online platform, we have made it possible to successfully transmit information between teacher and student. Jeff continued: “They think that the way humans learn is a function of a professor transmitting content via a lecture or a video to a student, and the student will consume that content and learn. That’s not how education works.”

“If that’s really what education is, and that’s how simple it is, then the television really would have transformed everything about how we learn.”

He went on: “If that’s really what education is, then the television would have transformed everything about education and how we learn. The fact is, television hasn’t disrupted anything about education or how we learn. Neither will computers or computer networks if that’s how people understand education and how they understand learning.”

“Learning is complex and humans learn in different ways. Humans often learn best in conversation with each other. This is why the Socratic method has been a persistent method, because it’s a method that’s grounded in conversation and questioning.”

Relationships and Conversations

Jeff has found that conversations and strong personal relationships have been fundamental to success at the Hub. It’s what he says has allowed them to do meaningful work: “The best work that we do is grounded in effective relationships. Being an internal design group, that’s also advantageous to us because we know our colleagues well.”

They’re building these relationships by, “designing conversations. That’s fundamentally what our design practice is.” By this, Jeff means that, as designers, they facilitate ways for colleagues to talk, think, and decide. They create the circumstances for important debate: “If we’re doing our job well, we design ways for our colleagues to have conversations with each other. Conversations that they wouldn’t have without us. Conversations that they couldn’t have imagined having, conversations which are (and I’m going to use a word that I said is ‘bad’) disruptive, which are creative, which change the context in which they thought they were working. We reframe the conversation, and we reframe the problem for them, and it opens up new possibilities.”

“We reframe the conversation and we reframe the problem for them, and it opens up new possibilities.”

Additionally, it’s important to note — for Jeff, these conversations are about listening, not talking. “Part of designing conversations is making sure that we are expert listeners. One of the areas of expertise that we have to bring to our design practice is listening. Listening is hard, particularly the nuance. Listening to engineering faculty members, for example, is very different from listening to French faculty members. We have to figure out how to listen. And we’re trying to figure that out. The biggest failures come when we don’t listen. And when we fail to appreciate the cultural dynamics of the university fully. They are complex and run deep.”

“The biggest failures come when we don’t listen.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Don’t Call It Disruption appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

One of Heather Bryant’s favorite innovations is a song about the brain’s amygdala. “When I think of an innovation success story, I always think of our Pre-K3 teacher Juanita Cabralas. We teach our students about their brains, how their brains control their emotions, and how to use mindful breathing to settle emotions… Juanita invented a brain hat, songs and poems, so now our 3-year-olds can tell you about their amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. Juanita’s way of working with those 3-year-olds completely sets them up for success in their later school years.”

This story is different than many we typically hear when talking about product design and innovation because Heather is an educational innovator. She is the Director of Innovation and Impact at Momentous Institute. Owned and operated by Salesmanship Club of Dallas, Momentous Institute has been building and repairing social emotional health in kids since 1920. Each year, the organization serves 6,000 children and family members through innovative education and therapeutic services. The organization also invests in research and training to reach far more children than could ever be served directly, including the annual Changing the Odds Conference. The combined support of Salesmanship Club of Dallas, the AT&T Byron Nelson (primary fundraiser), corporations, individuals and foundations enables these efforts and truly changes the odds for kids in the community and beyond.

Heather is a cowgirl at heart (she loves to spend free-time on her family’s ranch) and a dedicated educator for the past 30 years. She’s been with Momentous Institute for 22 years where she currently oversees their training programs and content creation. Additionally, Heather speaks nationally on the topics such as the importance of social-emotional health, what children need to succeed, the impact of trauma and toxic stress on children and the intersection of mental health and education.

Cause, Passion, and Mission

Of course, there are many overlaps, as well as differences, when we look at corporate innovation versus educational innovation. And, after talking to Heather, I think corporate innovation could take a few cues from the way she talks about how a mission is central to innovation work: “Any successful innovation program should be structured around a cause rather than a thing.” At Momentous, that cause is social-emotional health for all kids. “Everything we do is in service to that cause. Innovation flows from that. It’s at the forefront of everything we do.”

“Any successful innovation program should be structured around a cause rather than a thing.”

In comparison, she talked about how some schools have a “cause” centered around test scores. “You have to think about— what does it take to get those test scores? And anyway, everything always comes back to social-emotional health.”

“Our premise is— you will never get the test scores you want if you are not attending to children’s emotional well-being.”

Research, Research, Research

With that mission at the center of everything she does, Heather is also deeply committed to the importance of research in order to fulfill that mission. “I define innovation as mining, creating, testing — and that loop never ends. I’m always advocating for legit research. Otherwise, how do you know if it works?”

The primacy of research at Momentous is something that she believes sets them apart and one reason why “people listen to us.” She explained: “We’ve done longitudinal research that really backs up what we’re doing. We have legs to stand on when we talk about our model for education. Too often, people hear something that sounds super-cool and they jump in with both feet without knowing if it’s truly been tested or not.”

The school’s investment—both time and money—in research gives them credibility. But, it also means they have to be patient and not scale their learnings too soon. Heather shared an example of a curriculum she’s working on: “[Schools] have found out about it and they’re knocking on our door saying: ‘Will you sell it to us?’ My response is: ‘We’re still gathering research on it and how effective it is. Give us a couple more years and then it’ll be ready for widespread release.’”

“You have to take the time so you can confidently say ‘Yes if you use this curriculum with fidelity, these are the outcomes for children and teachers that you should see.’”

A Chorus of Perspectives

As well as research, Heather spoke of the importance of talking to diverse groups of people. “I think innovation fails when a group of fairly homogeneous folks thinks stuff up, without understanding the complexities and cultures of the end users.”

Once, she worked with a funder who wanted to support a certain school intervention: “And so, we sat around and thought up what we decided was going to be a great intervention, without really getting to know the schools we were going to be working in first. When we got into these schools, we began to see different perspectives on what was working for them already and what wasn’t. It was a bumpy ride.”

This loops back to research and hearing from the end-user. “It’s so important to get to know the folks that are going to benefit from the innovation. It has to be much more collaborative— more of a partnership and a co-creation.”

Hard, but Worth It

One unique thing about the Momentous team is how cross-disciplinary it is; it includes traditional educators as well as mental health experts. “I advocate for a cross-disciplinary team. Many of our intractable problems don’t get solved within a single discipline. When you involve more than one discipline, chances for innovation and success increase.”

“When you involve more than one discipline, chances for innovation and success increase.”

But Heather doesn’t pretend that this way of working is necessarily easy. In fact, it’s actually harder: “It takes a ton of communication. It takes putting structure into place that forces those two groups together to solve problems. But the pay off is so worth it when you began to take the best of each other and come up with something new…It’s rich, but it’s hard.”

“In life, the things that are hard are often what give you the best results.”

Be Nimble

Being nimble is a trait that the team at Momentous has had to work at cultivating. “Being nimble is really hard for schools in general, particularly public schools. If something’s not working, they tend to just keep doing it because it takes a while to get consensus…”

Heather feels that this inability to shift quickly is holding back innovation in education. That’s why, at Momentous, they encourage what Heather calls a “growth mindset.”

We learn as much from our partners as they learn from us. If something we’re trying is not working, then we need to quit. Give it a go, but when it’s time to quit—quit and adjust, and change direction. I think that’s really hard for public schools…”

Because of this, she thinks more schools could study change theory so they can understand what teachers and administrators go through when faced with newness. “There are typical stages of change that people go through any time you try to do anything new. Change is hard for anybody, and especially for teachers who have been doing things a certain way for a long time.”

Collaboration, Not Reinvention

Momentous shares its programs and initiatives with other schools who want to learn from them. When partnering with new schools, Heather has found that it’s not always about reinvention. In fact, that might backfire.

She gave an example from a school they worked with. They had an idea to track students who were having behavior challenges with monthly meetings. But, instead of coming to the school and simply implementing these new meetings, they first asked what the school was already doing to meet the needs of students who were not performing.

“By starting with a question, versus a solution, we found out that the school already had bi-weekly meetings, but they were only focused on academics. So we asked about how they would feel about bringing in the piece that looks at children’s behavior needs and merge those with their academic needs. The school administration was able to accept that was so much more seamlessly.”

This story illustrates the benefits of building on what is already there and the benefits of starting small. “Sometimes you have to look for the quick and easy win.” For example, in one middle school, they started by biting off a very small chunk— introducing mindful breathing breaks school-wide. Heather has found that even “little” innovations like these can have a big impact and can put schools on the road to bigger change.

You Need Buy-In

What else has Heather learned about why things don’t go well when schools try a new way of working? “They fail for a variety of reasons: too many new initiatives at once, too little training for staff, administrators don’t fully support the initiative, teacher turnover, administrator turnover, or it is not a fit for the context of a particular school.”

But, she thinks that two big barriers to success are lack of buy-in from staff and overly ambitious deadlines. “There’s many initiatives that fail in schools because people are super gung-ho for one year about a new intervention, but no one’s asked the teachers if they think it’s a good idea…”

“We lose so much when we’re just focused on efficiency and
timelines. Without spending the time to really listen to teachers and hear their thoughts about how it might work, I think that’s when you don’t get buy-in.”

“Speed is the biggest deterrent to getting true buy-in.”

People Are Finally Paying Attention

Our conversation ended back with the school’s mission. Right now, Heather is happy to see that there is an increasing interest in the importance of children’s mental health. She sees a huge need to get school counselors back to actually counseling students, instead of pushing paper. Because of the high poverty rate in Texas, there are many, many children who need the services that school counselors can provide. But, there is a shortage of them, so as Heather says, “teachers are really that first line of defense.”

But, people are starting to pay more attention: “It’s sad that it took a series of tragedies to get us to this point, but when the Texas legislature starts asking questions about it, you know we’ve reached a tipping point. I’m hopeful that we will begin to see some innovative resources to support children, their families and their teachers around mental health in schools.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Believe in a Cause, Not a Thing appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

“There’s an unprecedented demand for design thinking right now,” says Dr. Julie Schell. And during this exciting moment, Julie is at the center of one university’s quest to teach this powerful toolkit to the next generation of learners.

Julie is a faculty member at a fairly new school at the University of Texas Austin — the School of Design and Creative Technologies — where she is also the Executive Director for Learning Design, Effectiveness and Innovation. She oversees all extended and executive education offerings for the new school.

Julie is actively partnering with businesses, nonprofits, K-12, colleges, and universities to design new ways to answer this clamor for design thinking skills. In her first four months, she designed and delivered trainings and programs for several Fortune 500 companies and the Boys and Girls Club of the Austin Area that are transforming business and social change.

Julie’s resume is impressively long, but here are some of the highlights: she’s an academic researcher as well as a prominent learning experience designer who draws on over 20 years of experience in higher education. She has held positions at the nation’s top research universities, including Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard. In 2014, Teachers College at Columbia University identified her as an Early Riser in Higher Education for her original contributions to the field. Her scholarship focuses on incorporating the science of learning into the practice of learning experience design, and therefore teaching and pedagogy.

I recently interviewed Julie and I loved hearing her energetic and unique perspective, which bridges both higher education and corporate innovation.

A beginner’s mind
One memorable fact I learned about Julie upfront is that she loves power and Olympic weightlifting. Part of the reason she is drawn to this pastime is her job: “As an educator, it is crucial for me to remember what it feels like to learn something complex and, as a new learner, to not get it. Most of my students are brand new to design thinking or have minimal experience with it.”

She continued on how these two worlds intersect: “Doing technical lifts well requires a lot of knowledge and skill, not just strength. I am disappointed almost every single time I lift, but I always learn something. I need to remember what it is like to learn something that is new, elusive, and that takes extensive practice to master.”

“I always tell my students to pay very close attention to the moment when they want to give up because that is the moment when the most intense amount of learning is occurring.”

She brings this “beginner’s mindset” to her students. “I always tell my design thinking students to pay very close attention to the moment when they want to give up because that is the moment when the most intense amount of learning is occurring.”

“When I get frustrated when I miss a lift, I try to eat my own dog food. When I’m trying to lift something extremely heavy and my brain says ‘No, I just can’t.’ I ask myself, ‘What would you tell your students if they said that?’”

This is an intriguing notion to noodle on — how can we push and challenge ourselves outside of our work-life to enrich our work? How can our hobbies or passions bring new outlooks on what we do?

Outmoded educational models

As mentioned up front, Julie is part of a significant shift happening in higher education; universities are trying to catch up and teach the skills needed in our new world of startups, entrepreneurship, design, and innovation. In many ways, this shift is in its infancy — higher education is still fairly old-fashioned in its methodologies.

Julie explained: “There are some things that have changed a lot in higher education, but there are other things that have stayed relatively the same. I once heard this analogy: if a physician from the 1600s walked into a surgery right now and tried to use the tools, they would be disoriented. But, if a teacher walked into a classroom, on even our most innovative higher education campuses, they’d know exactly what to do. Our approaches to teaching are very similar to what they were 400 years ago.”

“Our approaches to teaching are very similar to what they were 400 years ago.”

Historically, lectures have been considered the most efficient way to educate masses of people: “It’s an archaic model that focuses on the transmission of information. That’s very transactional. Then, we’re going to send [students] out in the world and they’re going to have to think and they’re going have to figure out problems that they’ve never seen before. We’re not really setting them up to do that.”

In response, programs like Julie’s at UT’s School of Design and Creative Technologies are experimenting with more immersive approaches to teaching: “I’m enamored by how a colleague of mine at the School of Architecture, Professor Tamie Glass, is teaching a studio class that I think exemplifies the power of experiential learning. Her students are matched with an organization trying to solve a living, breathing design problem. I think that kind of model — where students experience what they will face when they go out into the world — is the future of higher education and we should be doing more of it. I am focused on bringing the rigor of the academic experience our undergraduates receive to our corporate learners as well.”

The demand for design thinking
Just as higher education is looking at how to answer the demand for design thinking, so are organizations of all types. Julie shared: “Design thinking is having its moment in history. If you look at Google trends, it’s been at its peak in terms of popularity. The people who want it are non-designers. They’re people who aren’t going to be educated in formal design classrooms. They’re people who are in businesses.”

The people seeking design thinking training are not what might be assumed: “They’re not designers per se. We’ve got all of these nonexperts who want to learn to impact the world, and design thinking can do that — when it’s learned and then applied effectively. [It’s] people who are in nonprofits who are trying to solve really wicked problems like police brutality or campus sexual assault. Or corporate leaders who want to innovate in new and exciting ways. And if they learn design thinking, learn it well, and they’re able to apply it, they will radically transform their organizations. They’ll outperform competitors and they’ll change people’s lives.”

“We’ve got all of these nonexperts who want to learn to impact the world, and design thinking can do that — when it’s learned and then applied effectively.”

Of course, there’s not enough time, space, or funding for all the people who want design thinking skills to enroll in the School of Design and Creative Technologies’ programs at UT. Julie talked about how people want these skills and: “They want it accelerated. They want to learn how to do design thinking really quickly. They want it in their homes, on their computers, self-paced, without human interaction.”

There is not only a supply and demand issue but a gap in how to get people the right training. Julie pointed to this difficulty because design thinking is so much about hands-on activities and collaboration: “To learn human-centered design you have to be with humans. You can’t be watching a video, right?”

Structure and support, not ideas
I also picked Julie’s brain on some of the downfalls she’s seen with organizations who are entering the innovation space: “One thing that really gets in my craw is when leaders think that innovation is just coming up with a good idea. Most leaders and managers are sophisticated enough to know that innovation is more than just a good idea. But in practice, it is pretty rare to see organizations that understand that innovation happens by design, not by an apple falling on someone’s head.”

“It is pretty rare to see organizations that understand that innovation happens by design, not by an apple falling on someone’s head.”

She identifies structure and support as key to innovation. “I’ve seen some organizations where leadership states that a core value proposition is innovation or that it’s a top strategic priority, but then provide zero infrastructure for innovation.”

“The human beings in these organizations whose jobs are to ‘innovate or die’ are put in impossible positions. You have talented people who are clamoring to change the world and have an impact, but all the leashes of the current business practice hold them back.”

Heros don’t work
Another issue that Julie sees is that companies don’t have the right incentive structures for supporting innovation. “The people who are responsible for innovation are measured by ROI and not by the number of things that they’ve tried. I think there should be a structure that rewards people for coming up with ideas, trying them, prototyping them, and being experimental.”

“That’s not how innovation works. A hero can’t fight the performance engine.”

Additionally, Julie believes that innovation can not be done alone or by one “superstar”: “I can’t stand when [organizations] pick a hero to come in. That’s the surefire way to know that an organization is not ready to innovate. That’s not how innovation works. A hero can’t fight the performance engine.”

Are you ready?
The need for cultural change is huge for companies who want to innovate: “Culturally, organizations don’t know how to collaborate. They don’t know how to get people to give feedback, or take feedback in a way that can be heard.”

Because of some of these cultural gaps, Julie has been thinking about the idea of ways to gauge “innovation readiness.” Can we assess if a company is ready to work in this new way?

“I think people need to assess their innovation readiness before they start doing an innovation project. We’re setting people up for failure because the organization doesn’t have the infrastructure to support innovation.” She shared some of the questions she would ask: “How good are your employees with dealing with ambiguity? How much are your employees teaching themselves? Are there hierarchies?”

*

Julie is changing the way students and organizations are working here in my hometown of Austin and it’s super exciting. As a parting gift, I’ll leave you with Julie’s short-and-sweet innovation ‘silver bullets’: “Empathy and project management.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post What Power Lifting Taught This Innovator appeared first on Voltage Control.