Thoughts
Building A Curriculum
5 minute read
As creativity grows in your organization, creative teams gain responsibility, and “non-creative” teams start to become curious and energized by what they see. There's a swarming of activity around creativity, as people can literally see the value of artifacts. Once they see diagrams and beautiful sketches and new ideas, they want some of that creative goodness. They want to be associated with that type of thinking, and they want to leverage those artifacts in their own groups.
This popularity broadens the team's responsibilities on a project. In addition to making the work, individual contributors are responsible for shepherding it through the organization. By gaining cultural capital, they've gained the “meta” responsibilities around creative work and have joined the ranks of creative direction. Their duties start to include stakeholder management, and timing, budgeting, and ownership of the result. They stop doing the work and start managing it.
This management is about teaching—and building a curriculum.
Teaching is a natural evolution. As creative teams start to flourish, members of the team become responsible for advocating for the work and giving the organization the context it needs to evaluate and consume it. Individual designers become leaders, not just practitioners.
The development of leadership in directing the creative process comes from experience. This creative leadership is based on knowing the right balance of hands-on and motivational guidance. It's similar to other forms of mentorship, but the differences lie in the production of an artifact. As a creative director, the expectation is that you know how to guide the team, but that you don't actually do the work yourself. When that line is crossed —when you start doing the work, or redoing your teams' work—your leadership degrades.
What specifically happens when that line is crossed is that junior employees grow into creative directors and, because they don't have rich experience to draw from, their creative direction is unsubstantiated. They compensate for their lack of experience with an anxious form of micromanaging, and their stress becomes contagious. This derails momentum for the team and erodes the trust the team has in their leadership.
Managing a creative staff requires a formal educational plan to teach method and process. I mean actually teaching, in a model that looks very similar to how a college might teach and college students might learn. With a formal curriculum developed, you can quickly grow junior talent, onboard large groups, and empower senior staff to gain leadership skills. You can help that newly minted creative director to gain the skills needed to succeed as a leader. This is similar to the teaching philosophy and methodology that Stephanie Wade pursued through government's Office of Personal Management: Her team didn't just do creative work, they also formally taught their process to other team members.
When I started teaching, I had no idea how to write a course plan, craft a syllabus, or create teaching materials. A former colleague (and a much more experienced professor) gave me some great teaching advice. He told me to treat education like a creative problem itself, and to leverage all of my design techniques to create a curriculum. For me, this meant sketching with a marker on a big sheet of paper, working through mind mapping, getting critique on my work, and iterating.
First, I framed the problem by identifying opportunities, building a value promise, and structuring a view of course goals. Next, I iterated on the curriculum by having other educators review the work and critique it, cycling through a process of ideation. In a somewhat meta- fashion, I used the creative process to develop a curriculum to teach the creative process.
When I started sketching out my course plan, it was easy to get wrapped up in the breadth of content I needed to disseminate and to emphasize all the principles, theories, skills and methods I knew and wanted my teams to know. The sheer amount of content was intimidating, making it hard to actually get started.
So instead of focusing on the amount of content, my first problem frame was to think of the content as a means to an end, where my goal was immediate applicability. For each piece of content or method that I considered teaching, I asked, “why is this important to you? When will it be important to you? What are the circumstances in which you'll use this skill or consider this theory?” In emphasized relevance as a criterion to determine whether something should be in the curriculum.
When you craft a curriculum for your team, also visualize the end state—describe what you want your team to learn. In academia, end states are called “learning outcomes.” These are the stuffy statements that say things like, “Achieved proficiency in…” or “Demonstrated a sound ability to….” But it's less important to write formal outcomes, and more important to consider what you want the team to learn on an achievable level. This forces you to shift from a broad view (“I want them to learn design”) to a detailed one (“I want them to learn how to analyze complex problems”) and then to an assessable one (“My creative teams will be able to analyze complex problems”).
By starting at the end-state, you can envision how the team will change after experiencing your curricula: how they'll see the world differently, and how they'll act differently as a result of this new perspective. This is your opportunity statement and problem frame.
Takeaway: Establish a learning culture that focuses on a real curriculum centered around applicability.
