Experience University Podcast

S5E7: Design for Change

September 14, 2021 Extraordinary Events Season 5 Episode 7
Experience University Podcast
S5E7: Design for Change
Show Notes Transcript

I had the honor to be on the Event Design Collective Podcast with Ruud Janssen and Anthony Vade!! We had a conversation about my experience utilizing the Event Design Canvas with my students! Be sure to check out more of Ruud and Anthony’s Design to Change series!! They have many different perspectives to have these types of conversations!

Event Design Collective Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/eventdesigncollective

Event Design Website: https://edco.global/

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Dr.K:  Hello, hello, all of my wonderful, beautiful, fantastic listeners. I hope you are all having a wonderful day today. Today's podcast or Tuesday podcast is going to be just a little bit different. We always like to shake things up around here. Normally on Tuesdays, we cover things such as lessons and some life coaching and some storytelling, some different things along those nature's and I was asked to moderate and lead a faculty meeting a PCMA faculty webinar last week.

 And it was such an engaging and epic conversation. I was on the call with Ruud from the event design collective. And Anthony Vade, also with the same organization, and we were talking about designing to change. And they actually recorded the session as a podcast, certain sections of it, they had about 10 to 15 minutes in what's called an on stage and 10 to 15 minutes in a behind the scenes kind of backstage performance. And we're going to post both of those in our show notes.

But I had recorded the entire hour. And what I've done specific to our audience and target market, which is a little different than theirs. I have gone ahead and edited down things that I think would be really, really beneficial and useful for all of you listening today. So what you're going to hear, which is totally different than our normal Tuesday podcast, is you're going to hear a conversation between me and Ruud about designing to change. And I hope that you all enjoy our conversation. Try to think through the answers yourself in a reflective format, and how you would have answered his questions as he's asking them to me. I say that I was moderating, but you will find out in here very quickly that I definitely was not the one in charge of this conversation. I hope you all enjoy your conversation. And I will talk with you soon.

Ruud: All right, welcome Kristin Malek to this design to change podcast, which is embedded into the PCMA faculty forum that we're having right now. On the second of December, September 2021. Welcome to the onstage podcast recording. How are you feeling? Kristin?

Dr.K:  I'm feeling excited and nervous. And thanks for having me. 

Ruud: So exploring what we're going to do. I think this is typically what all faculty members, I hope do is they get their students to come up with the right questions. What the industry needs more than ever and any industry needs is the ability to find the right questions, and then coming up collectively or collaboratively with the answers, but mostly have a positive attitude or an attitude towards the question that's going to make you ponder the question even deeper. And this is what design thinking is all about. See, because we have so many topics, rabbit holes, we can go down into, right, but let's let's what what topic we're going to address today. Putting design on the agenda. 

So is it on the agenda or not? So what I'd like to do is, is give you an idea of, we're going to prompt some questions to you. The first question, Kristin is the following. How can you comfort your event owner? That not having clarity with the initial ask is okay.

Dr. K: I definitely can translate this into education for sure. I think in my capstone class, I'm constantly dealing with this in terms of everyone wants to know all the information all the time before you start the design and planning process. And I always give this staircase example in the staircase talk of you don't know everything on the staircase, you can't always see the entire staircase, think of a spiral staircase or a staircase that's multiple levels with the landing, that you just have to take it one step at a time and know that you're going to get to that end product. And normally by talking through the staircase of visualization and example, then that helps to comfort whether it's the students or the event owner, but then also doing it with confidence. Not necessarily confidence in your knowledge but confidence in your process and your skillset in the process that you're all going to get there together.

Ruud: Love that. Are you willing and able to open the design kind of worms, because of what it's going to do to you, or to the organization that you're serving at that very moment. So I love that, take it one step at a time, the stair metaphor works. It's almost as if you had a predictive power as to what the next question would be. Because the metaphor actually goes on. And just so you know, for those that are listening, Dr. K had no idea of knowing what these questions are right? She doesn't have a copy of the book yet. And she doesn't know what the ordered sequence of the questions is. So the second question here. What guardrails do you offer to allow event owners to feel comfortable to say yes to you for event design?

Dr. K: That's a great question. I think the fact that we always offer check in processes, and when we're doing something structured, like the Event Design Canvas process, we always invite the owner and/or stakeholders depending on the event to come in and kind of see each step of the process, or at least send them our overview video. And I think a lot of times event owners, or in our case, as teachers as students, the students, they're just, they, they get nervous when there's not communication. And so I'm a person who's always hashtag over-communicating everything, which does get me in trouble, by the way, but I'm such an over communicator, that I think that people just naturally feel comfortable because I've lowered those guardrails because they know I'm going to communicate every step of the process.

Ruud: How will you sketch the outcomes of event design? and involve the event owner? And the way forward? I know that you've done this for the student competition before and so you have examples, but how do you sketch the outcomes of the event design and evolve event owner and the way forward? How do you do that?

Dr. K: I think it's really important to know the event owner and their objectives and expectations. And then in the classroom, when I'm designing these experiences for the students to understand the level of awareness that they need or want, because I think that that outcome will look very different depending on who that stakeholder or the event owner is you're presenting to. Sometimes you might just need a vision board or graphic and then you talk through it. Sometimes you need a 200-page proposal. Depending on who that owner or that stakeholder is. And so I think just accurately knowing who your owner or your stakeholder or the student is. So that way you can again, hashtag over-communicate to them, to get them to see that vision, whether that's a visual or auditory or written format is beneficial. I don't know that that directly answered your question. But that's my answer. 

Ruud: But what I would do is, because I found it fascinating to meet your group of students, remember at PCMA in Pittsburgh, I think it was your student team had, I think won the competition, then that a convening leaders in Pittsburgh, we had the opportunity to have lunch with them and actually meet them face to face and see what kind of questions they were asking. And I think that's fascinating, right? So the fact that you as a faculty, encourage your students to do something in a specific way. And what I distinctly remember, is a Facebook post. I saw a snippet of how the students presented the event design from various stakeholder perspectives. And each of them took on a role in the narrative in how they told the story of the event. And I was extremely blown away by that concept, because none of the other practitioners that we have in the pool of 20,000 people have done that before, it was completely new. And so you are able to identify with the story of a stakeholder specifically, if it represents a person literally walking into the screen and walking back out of the screen telling the story, one by one, I thought it was very, very powerful. So that I think the creativity of the students is, I think it's second to none, but you have to trigger it. Right, like let's say the outcome sketching in a very auditory, but also creative video way or visual way. And then being able to share it on social media or in different places to your event owner is super powerful, right? Because it does change behavior. 

Dr.K: When I would also say one thing that I do that the people always tend to comment on is I just asked a ton of questions. Not just the quantity, of questions, but the quality of questions as well, I frequently get comments of Wow, you asked really great questions. So I tell the students at the beginning of the semester, and I also tell the colleagues/partners that I work with and events, I say, I'm going to ask questions, but it's not because I doubt you. It's not because I have an ulterior objective. It's not because I'm trying to get you to an answer. It's not because I think you're wrong. It's because I want you to be able to justify your answer, to see that you've put thoughts behind it. And so I set the stage all the time with that, and it's kind of a classroom culture, now in class of, I'm asking you a question, not because you're wrong, but because I want to know that you've thought about it, and that you have justification for why you're doing something the way that you're doing it. And so that's actually kind of what led to that video of, you know, well, why are you doing it this way? How, what are you thinking about when you're doing this, etc, etc.

Ruud: I love that, I think an event or sorry, your classroom is almost like a simulation of an event, right? I mean, you are hosting events every single day when you put on a class. And so you have a lot of space to prototype different things and experiment with the students together.

And I think it's a very conducive environment to, you already have design on the agenda, right without asking the permission, because you are the event owner. And if you start looking at your classrooms much more through that lens, I think you will see an enormous opportunity to, to use that time, which is so precious, right for doing that same thing. Fourth question, how does getting design on the agenda help the event owner in other parts of the organization to achieve strategic goals?

Dr. K: That's such a great question. And I know I've talked to Ruud about this before in the past, is that I truly believe I'm, I'm a great educator, because of my event design background, because I treat every single classroom like an event. Every classroom has its own objectives and I design that experience around it. If we're talking about site selection, I'm not going to give a PowerPoint on site selection, we're going to go out and do a site selection and a walkthrough. And because of that, that actually really helps a lot of the different areas of the university, because it's really great for recruitment and enrollment. And actually, UNL has had an increase in enrollment every single semester, even throughout COVID and a lot of that I truly feel is because of some of the event design things that we do, because they're creating videos, I share videos all the time. I actually send out a box to my online classes, that is constantly taken pictures of. We that class, the intro to events class increased enrollment by 209%, from fall of 2020, to spring of 2021. So in the middle of COVID, and it was online both semesters, and we had a 39% increase in variety of majors. And we had a lot of students who came in either double majored or added the minor. And all of that was just because of how I designed that class experience. 

Dr. K: I frequently tell my students at the beginning of the semester, I say, anybody can Google anything. So why are you paying $60,000 for a degree in this area? And I specifically emphasize that part of what our curriculum is, is helping students learn what questions to ask are the right questions to ask. Because that's a mindset. And so teaching that mindset and teaching that process, anybody can go out and Google anything. But if you don't know the question to ask, or if this organization even exists, or this sector of the industry even exists, you're never going to ask it.  

Ruud: Do you have any examples of like a recent experience that stuck to your head that would be good to share. 

Dr.K: So one thing that I love to do in my classes, especially when I'm, I'm re envisioning them is I like to invite the students to co create the classes with me. And what I'll do is I will, whether it's online or in-person, I'll invite students in small groups to meet with me once a week. So I'll meet with a group of two to three students this week to talk about class next Wednesday, and I will lay out the objectives and nothing else. I'll say these are the learning objectives for the day. And then they helped me to create that experience which has led to absolutely incredible classes I would have never thought to do before and to include TikTok. I'm on TikTok, now. The students forced me and we did like a Snapchat class channel, which actually extended beyond just that one class. And it was a great way to engage with everybody in the class. We've had just incredible activities that I would have never thought about. And the students have some ownership of that because they get to help lead that. So it's the easiest, hour and a half to two hours of my week because it actually takes the workload off me helps to increase creativity allows students to be engaged and it's just a fantastic experience.


Anthony: So you're about to get a new follower on TikTok. Not that I TikTokedeither, but it's interesting that tik tok, we all see it as that, you know, dance craze thing and the music side of it. But I'm seeing more and more people using it for content delivery and for expanding networks. And really, it's about looking at the different ecosystems that these students are living in and then coming at them from multiple directions and multiple angles. Have they explored these kind of omni channel experiences and podcasts versus in person versus webinars? Have you explored other alternatives? 


Dr. K: One thing that I have been quite passionate about is allowing students to interact with the content in the modality that they feel comfortable with. And one way that I've really encouraged that is I've created the short video clip, it's of the key objective. So if I have three to five objectives today, I'll create a five-minute you know, three to seven-minute video. And when you record that on zoom, it actually downloads a sound file as well. And then we upload our stuff to the grid, which you can get a text output. And I put all three options in my canvas, or some might use Blackboard or their learning management system. And so students have the opportunity to watch the video to listen to the podcast, which is literally I just uploaded the sound file that's already there, or to read the text. And the statistics have actually been really interesting on that, because about 60% of students watch the video, about 30 to 35% of students actually listen to the sound that listens to the podcast, and five to 10%, depending on the lecture will read the text. And so it's really been enlightening for me as a teacher to see how students are interacting with the content.

Ruud: When do you see tipping points of creativity in the opening discussions of designing differently?

Dr. K: So I start my class by asking everyone to raise their hand, too. And I asked the question, do you think you're creative, I stole this from Ruud a couple years ago, in his college of extraordinary experience lecture, I say, how many of you think you're creative, and everyone doesn't raise their hand, maybe I'll have one or two if I have some theater students in there. And and then I will lead them through this activity to show them that everybody's creative. But actually, the best way to show your creativity is when you have some parameters around it. And it just changes your thinking that one to two degrees. And then I actually do many creativity activities at the beginning of all my classes that are three minutes, which takes the concept of the day and applies it to their life, before I jump into the content as it applies to events. And then by the end of the semester, I'll ask the same question. I'll say how many of you all believe that your creative, and everyone will raise their hand and I know I have 30 seconds? So in advanced events, when I asked everyone the same question, I'll say how many of you all believe that your creative, every single person that had me for intro to events will raise their hand, and every single person who did not have me for intro to events does not raise their hand. And I think that's fascinating and I'm going to write a case study on it.

Ruud: You've proven that you've changed behavior, let's pretend this is your class, right? That you just had, if you are able to decode where it is that you, as an event owner want to bring these students, you know, four years down the line, or whatever it is that they're having in that program? How do you decode the behaviors that they have in your class, in the next class, and then the class after that? And what's the behavior change in between the classes? And so one of the things that we encourage people to do is to go up the staircase and to articulate the change from entry to exit to add a lot of design restrictions, which rocket fuel the creativity. And then actually, what can you actually come out with on this side is that hourglass in the middle, right, the hourglass in the middle, is the time they spend with you.

In the experience, journey and instructional design of your class, what happens inside the tent, and inside that tent, and inside that tent, but actually the biggest change should be here in the middle? What happens in between the classes, and how do they apply what they do? And I think you've proven the point there, Kristin, to show how that's done in practice. So thank you for elevating our ability to look and act beyond Now one last favor before we rolled the closing credits. One year from today, we'd like to pick up this conversation and ask you about your horizon of change a year from today and how you look back at the origin of change. You stated in the beginning. Would you be willing to accept that challenge?

Dr. K: Absolutely! 

Ruud: Thank you for inviting us and we enjoyed recording this podcast with you. If you're not familiar with PCMA Google them because students get access for free.