Opportunity in Crisis Part 2: An Argument for the Role of Intentional Design During Tumultuous Times

Design Thinking Approach

Design thinking represents an intentional, solutions-based approach to operations and management. In higher education it represents a proactive approach to better serving students by understanding and meeting their needs. Philosophically it is both iterative and organic, yet structurally it is deliberate and systematic. The seeming discontinuity is a hallmark of design thinking and, as such, takes those institutions that embark upon this course through innovation, disruption, and profound cultural and systemic evolution.

For community colleges, engaging in design thinking requires the institution to assume that all elements of the student experience must undergo a thorough evaluation and potential redesign. Traditional organizational and management approaches, even before the recent pandemic, were being challenged by community colleges who found the reactive, siloed, and often disjointed approaches and defacto, accidental business models unable to significantly improving student success. Two national efforts have supported community colleges dedicated to prioritizing student outcomes and intentionally designing for success. Achieving the Dream and the AACC Guided Pathways Project have focused on intentional student pathways, enhanced educational and student support, predictive modeling and analytics, and expanding innovation, creativity, and care. The shift to comprehensive redesign is necessarily and intentionally disruptive and, accordingly, there are many lessons that can be learned as our entire sector is now, whether by choice or by challenge, engaged in the conversations, planning, and undertaking of reinvention. What is most critical is that the redesign of business models be constructed around enhancing the student value proposition – a proposition that too few colleges understood before COVID hit and which even fewer have leveraged during the recovery period. Committing to intentional redesign is a prerequisite for survival and enhanced service to our students, workforce partners, and communities as all aspects of life have been fundamentally and irrevocably transformed.

While it may seem counterintuitive, an argument can be made that the best time for change is when resources are scarce. Creativity with greater intentionality becomes paramount in contrast to resource-rich environments where technological solutions often seek to address what are fundamentally people problems. With limited resources, more time is spent exploring the issues related to any particular challenge and teamwork moves to the forefront as people rally around creative solutions that emerge from shared constraints.

Employing tools like design thinking creates more thoughtful approaches to decision making. Knowing in advance that the outcome is not going to be perfect, but rather a prototype to be tested and refined, creates a safe space for difficult questions, conversations, and decisions. While too much or unnecessarily aggressive inquiry can cause conflict, the right amount of back and forth can create productive tension that improves the quality of decision making and yields more successful solutions.

The historical literature on culture change indicates major organizational change occurs through emergent events. These can be internally (change in president, campus uprisings, tragedies) or externally (societal shifts, political pressure, non-compliance with accreditors) driven, but it is often a catalyzing event that perpetuates the change. In each of these cases there is a certain amount of friction or heat required to get the organizational gears moving towards change. The heat required to fuel significant institutional movement is not unlike the fire used during the refinement of silver. The metaphorical fires that we are feeling right now, while not desired or welcomed, must none the less be used as an opportunity to remove the dross from our operations, managerial approaches, and business models to ensure the delivery of a refined, optimal student value proposition. This is no easy feat.?A fire that lacks heat will not remove the impurities while a fire that is too extreme can damage or destroy the final product.

One may ask what are the impurities (dross) that exist and which must be burned away to improve college effectiveness? They include outdated understandings of our students and local workforce; faulty assumptions about mission, our industry, and our sector; ineffective leadership, policies, and practices; an unwillingness from formal leadership to distribute authority, share responsibility, and provide praise; and cultures that shun bold initiatives, tolerate defensiveness, discourage courageous action, and lack conviction. So if these are examples of operational dross, what is the product that the community college develops? Rest assured that we do produce a product – it is the student’s educational experience (more to come on that). It will take steady, committed hands; a culture open to innovation, transformation, and care; and a reinvented business model to effectively make use of the current fire of mandatory transition and change. An unwillingness or inability to effectively use the fire to melt the impurities will either lead to an underdeveloped product with little worth (like silver covered in impurities) or a product that has been destroyed. The trick is to know how to use the heat so that in the end, the silver reflects the image of the smith. For us, the goal is to have a student educational experience that reflects a business model built on student learning and success.

For context, back in the 1990s as the industrial Midwest was being decimated, socially and economically, there was a community college that decided it needed to transform its academic programming to meet the needs of emerging industries and to ensure students were better equipped to compete for high wage jobs. The new president worked with local business and industry leaders, WIBs, high schools, four-year colleges, and community leaders to redesign the educational pipeline. The community college, through an intentionally designed and singularly focused change initiative became the partnership hub within the region. Faculty worked closely with college leadership and staff on industry advisory boards and with workforce providers, both existing and emerging, to redevelop engineering and other STEM programming. As a result, this College encouraged its region to become an early adopter for renewable energy, helped transform struggling industries and create new jobs, and ensured that thousands of students gained meaningful employment. This is not an invented story, but rather the true story of a community college that is to this day recognized as a sector leader and model. The key to success for this institution and all community colleges rests within the college culture.