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elevating and amplifying women's voices and issues in higher ed.
the uplift
Sidneyeve Matrix on Empathy, Learning, & Leading
Successful teachers, like successful leaders, know how to engage people's hearts. Sidneyeve Matrix is one of my favorite people to talk about this with. A marketing professor and graphic designer with a Harvard credential in Instructional Design, Sidneyeve devotes I'm guessing most of her waking moments to thinking about how to help people learn by surrounding them with beauty.
Sidneyeve joins us to today to share her insights into how design can stimulate empathy, facilitate learning, and act as a catalyst for entrepreneurs. We talk about how visual cues prompt our brains to fire, and how color, curiosity, and empathy keep us engaged in what we're learning. Sidneyeve shares examples from her college teaching, the coaching she does with entrepreneurs, and from her own design shop, Valentine Course Design.
In higher ed we talk a fair bit about how visuals support teaching -- the visual syllabus is nothing new -- but I'm struck by the analog to leadership. Imagine how joyful it would be to attend meetings where documents were actually enticing to look at, or where visualizations were used to engage our hearts and minds and prompt rich conversation. Sidneyeve makes even basic ideas -- like using color-coding to help cue people to where they are, or creating simple leaderboards with eye-catching graphics -- begin to feel not only manageable but desirable.
No matter where you are in your leadership journey there's something in here for you. And maybe you'll come out on the other side not just with ideas for using color and images in your LMS, but possibly with an idea or two for creating pretty agendas and event programs to bring life to your administrative docs.
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I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.
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Hey there, I am so excited today to share my conversation with Sydney Eve Matrix. Sydney Eve is an associate professor of media and film at Queen's University in Ontario, canada. She researches and teaches about digital communication and consumer culture, entrepreneurship and innovation, creativity and design and tech forward teaching. She's kind of amazing. I met Sydney Eve not through higher ed, but through the world of entrepreneurship and coaching, where she's known for developing stunning teaching materials that pull people into a deeper learning experience. Sydney Eve runs her own business at Valentine Course Design, where you can see her beautiful templates for teaching, and she's also both a gifted coach and an incredibly generous spirit and a dog mom. I love having Sydney Eve in my universe and I'm thrilled to introduce her to yours. Let's go. Hey there.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Uplift podcast, where we talk all things leadership for women in higher ed. I'm Carol Shabryus and I want to help make your leadership path a little easier, a bit brighter and a hell of a lot more fun. Here at the Uplift, we mash up real stories, real feelings, real theory and occasional f*** balls, all to help you become the kind of believing, awesome leader you would love to follow. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump in. Sydney Eve. I'm super glad you're here. Welcome to the podcast my pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the invitation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So let's jump in, shall we? Yes, okay. So I only know you virtually up until today. Sydney Eve, we know each other through some work we've well, for me it's learning, I think for you it's coaching as well, but with Amy Porter Fields' work on online marketing and digital courses. But, aside from you and me, can you tell us a little bit about who you are in the world, what it is you do? Yeah, who?
Speaker 2:you are and what you do. Yeah, well, I'm an academic in my nine to five and I teach marketing at Queen's University in Canada, and also courses on entrepreneurship and innovation and creativity. So when the pandemic happened and everybody was online, there was a lot of innovation happening, and that's when I discovered Amy Porter Field and all the ways that she was supporting people to launch another revenue stream in their business in the form of a digital course, and I thought this should be a perfect fit for me, because I'm an academic who does courses. And then I quickly became fascinated with how much of a challenge it is to do online marketing. So teaching online is one challenge, but I think academics are probably okay with that one, because we have to do that nine to five. But the online marketing of those courses that we might create or those coaching programs is such an amazing creative challenge.
Speaker 1:I could not agree more. I took Amy's course, digital course academy last fall and I felt like the materials about course design were solid. They're strong. She uses a backward design framework. I mean, I was totally in it and also it wasn't new to me. But it was all the stuff around the marketing where my head just exploded and I feel like I'm still wrapping my head around the immense amounts of learning about how to market in a way that's ethical and comes from your values and also really communicates not just the content you're offering but the purpose and the value and the kind of the reason people might want to learn with you. It's just, it's a very different world than higher ed marketing. I find it fascinating.
Speaker 2:It really is, and I'll just go out on a limb here and say that I don't think that most of the academics I've ever met are really good at self marketing and we have professional marketers on all of our campuses that sell our university and college brands. So it's not like we are engaged in selling our courses and things like that often. So we're a little bit insulated sometimes from that part of the promotion and the branding that goes on for the organizations that we're affiliated with. And but you'd think that somebody who teaches it would find it easy peasy, but I totally didn't, because I think that the velocity of how, of innovation online is it's amazing. You get whiplash.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. The thing that I feel like is the biggest mind switch for me is that my experience I've been in higher ed for 25 years and my experience is that we talk about our majors or our courses or even our institutions as giving you something you need, and we know what the thing is that you need. And here it is. And marketing flips that on its head by speaking to what the person in the audience is telling you they need. And I feel like there's so much we could learn as academics. I'm sure marketing colleagues understand this, but as an academic I was like oh wow, it's not me telling you you need something, it's you telling me what you need and me responding by giving it to you. It's a really different way of thinking about teaching.
Speaker 2:And I think, on top of that, it can cause this real crisis of confidence for subject matter experts of all stripes Because, like you said, it's suddenly my expertise and my credentials and certifications. It's not enough. I also have to figure out how to promote this, and that can be challenged for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, suneet, tell us about this other thing you do, where you are a creative designer in your not nine to five, or maybe in your nine to five to two, but tell us about this other business you've got going.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm an instructional designer, but one of my favorite thing to do in the world is graphic design, so I've been trying to bring those to.
Speaker 2:You know, interests and passions together and serve the same kind of target market that we were just talking about. That Amy Porterfield is attracting, so folks who would like to have an online business revenue stream, and they have to promote it. So I've been helping them to create marketing materials that stand out visually amidst all the noise. And you know, just, I've been trying to help people get more confident when they have a brand that like brand colors that they really love, because they spend so much time with these logos and digital, you know, streams of information and slides, and I have found over the last few years that when somebody has a brand that they they're really proud of and they really enjoy, then that does make them feel more confident and there is kind of an extension. When you show up with that confidence, it helps people learn. You know it draws people to you. So that's just. I think there's a good little feedback loop there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about how you came to be a professor teaching marketing and entrepreneurship and also an instructional designer and also someone who loves graphic design. Like what was happening in your life or what was maybe a pivotal point for you where you started to like, how did you know that you were interested in instructional design? How did these things kind of come together for you?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that on on campuses, we, you know, over the last oh, I don't know well, less than 10 years, we've witnessed the rise of the instructional designer, you know, as a professionalization, and prior to that, you know, faculty, we designed our own courses and we had, you know, curriculum committees to vet them and we weren't talking about the language of learning objectives.
Speaker 2:And you know this, this is all about an innovation within you know, curriculum design and delivery, and so I think it's, you know, a lot, of, a lot of faculty are interested in how can we increase student outcomes, you know, and how can we standardize our programs so that they're more consistent and specialized, like, there's lots of really cool things that we can do when we think about instructional design. So I went and did a specialization, like a postgraduate certification, in that, so that I could just immerse myself in, you know, that body of literature and see how it might be used for entrepreneurs who are trying to design their first digital course or online coaching program. Did you do that before the pandemic? I did it right at the beginning of the pandemic, actually, okay, fascinating.
Speaker 1:Wow, then how did the graphic design piece come in for you?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, because I've been teaching marketing, I know that in order to capture attention, the visuals, multimedia, the audio it all matters. The copy, but especially the visuals, matter so much. I've always been interested in graphic design for learning and graphic design for marketing. So when we saw the rise of Canva, also within the last 10 years, and the democratization of graphic design, I'm fascinated by that. We saw it with photography and we saw it with video. Just around the same time, More and more people are picking up their phones and creating beautiful things. So I'm interested in how that creativity is linked to not only pleasure but also wellness. It just seems like a really fertile ground for research. I'm interested in not just publishing on it, but actually doing research in the field with people.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 1:You seem to be really well positioned for that because you've got academics as campus colleagues. You've got entrepreneurs as colleagues. I know you also coach, so you've got clients. You've got a lot of people you can talk to about that. I want to read that research when you're ready to share it. So the moment that really made me realize I wanted to talk to you on this podcast was when I saw you post something about the ways that design creates empathy and that helps learning.
Speaker 1:I really love in Amy Porterfield's world. I love that there is genuine attention to learning. I think there are some entrepreneurs who are comfortable just presenting information and recording it and sharing it and calling that teaching. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you have to demonstrate something or you have something to show.
Speaker 1:But there's this other sense in that world that there are more ways to keep the people who are learning from you engaged. I don't mean just the amount of time they spend on the screen or the amount of time they spend watching a video, but the ways that they are motivated and moved to be intellectually challenged and emotionally present so that the learning is richer and deeper and more authentic. So I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about how you see the design of learning materials actually eliciting emotions. I'm curious about what the research says. I'm curious about what you might see this when you teach on your campus. I'm curious about what you see this with your clients. However, you want to take this, but how does the design of the actual learning materials get people emotionally engaged and emotionally present?
Speaker 2:When we look at what Amy Porterfield is doing, she's actually using something that we might consider design thinking, because she teaches or she suggests that we build our courses and businesses from a human-centered perspective and we start with having a really, really clear understanding of what our clients or coaches or learners or customers need, as you mentioned earlier. So anybody who's like the least bit familiar with design thinking will start to hear this sort of experience deja vu when she starts asking people. Rather than going to market with your fabulous idea, why don't you spend a lot of time up close and personal with your people and make sure that you're responding to them in a deeply empathic way? So empathic design, and that slows down a lot of innovators and entrepreneurs. We would rather just market with our fabulous precious idea.
Speaker 2:We don't want to be held back by those pesky users who may not understand what we're trying to say, or they say they don't need it or they won't buy it. So they don't understand how important it is. Users can slow you down and Amy is encouraging us strongly to validate our ideas by listening, creative listening. So I think what happens there is, if we do that kind of work, then when we design materials with empathy that are human-centered, people are going to immediately find that they're more relevant, it's easier to remember, it feels like it's more customized and personalized and that makes them feel a sense of self-efficacy Like I can do this. They'll feel like it's significant to them in this kind of. You know it's not a prefabricated way. It may not be one-to-one, it may still be one-to-many, but it's designed with lots of opportunities for feedback. So when you go to market with a course like that, you know it's purpose-built for emotional connection, positive emotional connection, and you'll find that people will lean in and they will find it easier to engage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's more than it's just pretty right. It's like easy on the eyes. That's not really the point.
Speaker 2:You know, I always say like the pretty really does matter to the learners and also to the person who's delivering the program. So I think the focus on let's make things pretty is not just this kind of trait. You know, decoration, it really can help people to start to trust your brand. That consistency, it helps them to follow along and quickly at a glance see where they're at In the curriculum. It helps them to recognize and remember you and your course and all of those things are so important to learning Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I want to come back to this in a minute because I'm immediately thinking about and I say this with great love and great affection for the institutions where I've worked but in general, teaching materials are ugly right, they're just dull. Yeah, they are white pieces of paper with black text, sometimes 10 point font, so that everybody can fit it in. We use standard templates for agendas. We have all this stuff that's just really boring to look at, and hearing you and looking at learning from you online has really prompted me to think about the daily life of folks on campus in terms of aesthetics and engagement, which I think, if I had ever said that as a college administrator, I would have been laughed out of the room for focusing on something so cosmetic and superficial. But you're really taking us to the human level, which is the opposite of cosmetic and superficial.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the power of aesthetics is something that younger students on campus will sort of intuitively understand a little bit more readily than their professors, and that has everything to do with the visual culture of the web. Our undergraduate students know that stopping the scroll is a thing Like and getting engagement matters. It translates into influence, it translates into dollars. This is the economy of the web. When they get to campus, I think what we're seeing is that a lot of those undergraduates, when given the opportunity to wow us with their PowerPoints or mock-ups for some kind of flowchart or prototype, they really do have this aesthetic intelligence that we can capitalize on for sure and encourage, because that creative confidence is gold. A lot of us who are of a different generation are still trying to achieve that creative confidence, and it's not easy.
Speaker 1:I've thought a lot about what it means to be a digital native or not. I've got teenage kids and have watched them their entire lives navigate technology with great confidence. I used to joke that if I got a new device I would hand it to my six-year-old so he could set it up, because it would take him two minutes instead of the two hours it would take me. Even now, those kids use Canva. My daughter manages one of her team's Instagram accounts for her high school and she's in Canva creating posts, and the kids are really fluent in a variety of different platforms. This is a total tangent, but they have very clear thoughts and ideas about chat.
Speaker 1:Gbt. Kids are just coming to college campuses with a different level of awareness. That is beyond. As I'm thinking about this for the first time. I've always thought of it as being a digital native, but, to your point, there's actually a whole bunch of skills involved in being a digital native. There's a mindset, there's an ability to understand visual impact and to expect to navigate things, but they just have a whole different set of expectations and brand new knowledge. That right for those of us, especially in my generation. We're like wow, you're so different.
Speaker 2:You're not like me at all, I wonder. It's always kind of well. I teach in the business school in a program on entrepreneurship, and so we have teams and the teams will pitch their ideas, sometimes for venture capital, sometimes for practice. It's always interesting how the professors have been presenting slides and we've been using the same slides maybe for a few years, and then the students come out with their pitch decks and they blow us out of the water with their awesome, beautiful, snazzy, smart, slick, animated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's amazing. Can you give us if we come back to empathy for a minute can you give us an example from any of your worlds as a coach or an entrepreneur, or as a faculty member a specific example of this practice at work? Can you tell us about a time when you could tell, as the instructor, that design was contributing to and I mean not just instructional design, but kind of the graphic design component was contributing to somebody's deeper engagement and deeper learning? You know what?
Speaker 2:comes to mind is this concept that we've been kicking around for a long time on campus, which is gamification, because that's, you know, gamification of the curriculum has been happening forever, but it's a lively area of research. The reason I mention it is because there's a lot of gamers there's generations of gamers now, and there's generations of game genres and a really sophisticated understanding of game mechanics. By that I mean things like leaderboards or certificates of achievement or unlocking surprise bonuses. You know there's and those are just some really basic examples of gamification that translate really well to a learning environment.
Speaker 2:And so the reason I mention that is that when you are thinking about all of your learners, we know that we all have different learning preferences and styles and affordances and constraints, and so when we're designing, you know, our curriculum and our learning experiences, we're probably trying to be, you know, flexible, thinking about things like universal design and trying to be thinking deeply about accessibility and just trying to give people the maximum amount of opportunities to succeed.
Speaker 2:And so gamification is, it comes in right at that moment, because some people, you know, are very, very motivated by getting a little success badge. They feel seen, they feel like they belong, they're motivated and they're encouraged and you know other people feel really excited about you know hearing that they have been the top you know commenter in the discussion forums. And the reason I say this is that you need to have a clear understanding of what you know. Who's in the room, virtual or otherwise, how do they learn you know what matters to them in order to do gamification right. But when you do have that in place, people will feel you know really highly engaged, let's say highly engaged.
Speaker 1:I like that a lot, and one of the things that that implies and you didn't say this, but I'm pretty sure that it's part of your thinking is that you have to know what your end game is in design. Right, it's not. I'm not talking about slapping a pretty image on a slide and saying, oh well, now it looks nice and so now it's more. You know, now it's better, but there's, there's got to be some, and this is part of instructional design. You have to know where you're going and what you're trying to ultimately create and then design for that, and that's exactly what gamification is. You can't just randomly add badges, because that actually is not the logic of a game. It's nothing's random. It may be surprising, but everything is intentional in there for a reason Exactly.
Speaker 2:And I think that that's when we turn to our courses, when we're doing a course outline or syllabus, you know everything is on there for a reason. And then when we turn to you know our, our slides or our content management systems, portals, you know, again, it's this. It's like this Gordian knot where you're trying so hard to make it clear, concise, attractive, engaging, but you know users needs evolve, their sensibilities evolve, and you know it's, it's, it's alive. Right, it's not one and done design, instructional or graphic or otherwise, it's alive.
Speaker 1:So I'm putting myself in the shoes of someone listening to this thinking well, I've never done anything like that in my teaching, and if I have to know where I'm going and understand the purpose and then figure out how design gets me there, that sounds really overwhelming and so I'm like nice idea, carol, but I'm going to go back to my regular syllabus or back to my regular presentations because I don't know where to start. So if somebody's listening and they're interested and also potentially overwhelmed, what would you say is maybe a good starting point for a faculty member who wants to teach by using design in some way to engage students and keep their attention and focus so that their learning goes deeper? Where could they begin?
Speaker 2:I've had other instructors do a contest in their course to ask students, if not a contest, then maybe an optional bonus point assignment where they ask students to reflect on what kind of competencies and behaviors do we want to encourage in this class, in this, as part of this experience on this campus? And how could we recognize those with badges? So could you pitch a badge that you think it would be excellent because it would encourage somebody to reflect on the fact that they achieved that? And it's amazing to see what students will come up with when you ask them, like what matters to you, what makes a good learning experience? What do people do that you think is excellent? What do you wish that you could do? And we've been asking them these things for a long time. What are your goals for this course? Things like that.
Speaker 2:But pinning that to design can sometimes be just really fun and enchanting, and it's really easy to share those kinds of graphics in a discussion forum if we have a content management system that supports multimedia. So that's one example. To just think about what colors are the most intelligent colors for your course and are you using them consistently so that people would be able to consume your content or orient themselves in your course curriculum at a glance. And so sometimes we get slide decks that we have no choice over the colors whatsoever. We're coming down from above for consistency. But is there some other way that we should be thinking about the psychology of color? Does that appeal at all? And if it does, a couple of quick Googles will indicate that color is just really really powerful in terms of the emotional connection.
Speaker 1:And then even something like if you're in your LMS and your course is set up by modules, then to say each module has a color, so that at a glance the student has a visual cue about where they are in the course. They're still in module two, oh no, now I've moved ahead to module three. Yeah, and even learning how to change colors in an LMS is not hard. That's a really easy thing. Anybody can pick that up in a couple of minutes. And I love your idea about the badges, because what you've done is take the onus of purpose off the faculty member. It's not my job to decide and it's not my job to design. It's my job as the faculty member to get close to the humans again and ask them what they want and what would be meaningful, and in this case, even have them do the work right. I know the students designed the badges, but it's that human-centric component again that I really love.
Speaker 2:And I've had students. Well, you know, teaching about accessibility is sometimes, sometimes there's still some resistance to that and it can feel like it's a little bit dry. So if I teach about the psychology of color, people are really interested because it's like what color should you paint your dorm room? You know just what colors make you feel better. You know things like that. You know why should we go outside and look at trees, you know? And so we like thinking about color. And then there's a really short hop to thinking about contrast and accessibility. It's a really short hop.
Speaker 2:So having students create like a mood board where they have swatches of color and, you know, maybe some stock photos and some keywords, that is it's aligned to one of the aspects of the course and then just helping them articulate, you know it's like a picture in a thousand words. Those kinds of assignments, not only do students love to do them and they get to, you know, exercise all kinds of multimedia literacies, but then the instructor can actually reflect on like what am I seeing here? You know what patterns are emerging. It's a strange question but it would be, and it's one I ask my clients a lot, which is like what is the personality of your course. If your course had a personality, what would you describe Like? What are three words that describe the personality of your course? And I think on campus, you know, we might want to think about that too and make sure that our design choices are communicating that personality, because, again, it will build trust, credibility and trust.
Speaker 1:I love that. I've been teaching college students since like 1994 maybe, and it never once occurred to me in on a college class, on a college campus, in a classroom, to think about the personality of my course. That's what an insight. Thank you for that. So let me ask you one more kind of nuts and bolts question for people who are new to this what tools do you think are easy to learn? Where can people go if they're looking for images, ideas? The web is huge. Where could people start, and I'm thinking faculty in particular?
Speaker 2:You know, if I was teaching grade school you know K to K to 12, I would check out all of the amazing creativity that's happening on teachers, pay teachers and platforms marketplace like that, because when we teach little kids we often think visual and then that kind of dissipates as we get into higher ed.
Speaker 2:But if so, teaching grade school or even if we're teaching in higher ed, taking a quick look at what's happening with teachers, pay teachers, is an amazing sort of wake up call to the creativity that's out there, some of which we've unlearned as we get focused on running the business of the university or college. So that's one place I would go is just for inspiration, and if I wanted to build some things myself, I would go to Canva, because that startup has exploded. You know, in the same way that zoom has, especially during the pandemic, and has many strategic alliances with lots of stock photos that we can use without stepping on copyright toes and lots and lots of templates that are designed by professional graphic designers that make it a lot faster for us to design things that look really, really nice and professional.
Speaker 1:There is a free version of Canva too, right.
Speaker 2:There is a free version of Canva and, I'll be honest, I always encourage people to think about if they can spring for the professional version only because it's such a time saver, because, just like any freemium product, you know you can get access to a lot of nice things. And then if you don't want to pay for the professional graphics that you find or fonts that you love or templates that you really fell for, then you waste a lot of time trying to get out from under. You know that $20 a month expense, yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you're using it regularly, I think it doesn't take very much use before that investment is really worthwhile, the trade-off of your time for the beautiful things you can create.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in terms of a list of, like, what's the ROI of Canva for a college teacher, I would suggest that you know we can certainly do all of our slides there If you would like to do your syllabus or course outline there and make it, you know, visually appealing and easy to navigate. If you think it's time for a glow-up, you know of your syllabus and you're permitted to do that. That's one place to go. It will also help you to create, if you think. You know, I wouldn't mind at the beginning and the end of my lecture, videos to have a little. You know, all rights reserved. Or you know, maybe a little video actually that says welcome to Module 4. You know, those are things that we can create in Canva in a flash. A lot of things are in there that are ready for us to use.
Speaker 1:There's a lot more than just like shapes and colors. It's a pretty rich platform.
Speaker 2:It is and it does have, you know, because it is it's for a variety of different creatives to use for our personal life and for our business. Then we're going to when we, you know, get into Canva, we're going to see a lot of wedding invitations and we're going to see a lot of birthday party flyers and you know, things like that may be not, you know, obvious about how in the world would I use this for my serious class, you know, on medical ethics, you know. But so I would encourage, if we do look at a tool like Canva, to think outside the template and to just realize that, you know, in a way it's not purpose built for educators. We would be, we would be going in there and we would be finding our way and perhaps thinking outside the templates to, you know, to use them for our own purposes.
Speaker 1:And this is one thing I love about your side business that you actually use Canva to create course related graphics, so timelines or process visuals, things that actually help you explain how something works or where somebody is at that moment in the course. Materials and the things you produce are really beautiful, so I think that your work is a great example of using some of the prefabricated content in Canva and adapting it to a teaching mindset.
Speaker 2:And you know, in order to do that and thank you for saying that sometimes when I'm thinking about creating like a cheat sheet say, we're teaching vocabulary, or you know art genres or something I'll use a wedding seating plan template, you know. Or sometimes, when I want to describe a process, I'll use a restaurant menu template. And so this is the, you know, when we think about positive psychology, one of the most relaxing things for us to do is to get into, you know, a state of creative flow where we lose track of time and you know we have a creative challenge. That's it's pleasurable, but it's not easy, and I think that Canva actually affords that for educators. If we get in there and start thinking, okay, you know, I don't see a perfect cheat sheet, but I see you know a menu, but I think that's what I need, you know. And that's where you start to lose track of time and put together things that are really unique, uniquely yours, that will help your students, that you'll be proud of, and it's also good for faculty wellness.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating that you say that I have realized over the last few months that I tend I've been tending to have this impulse kind of later at night, maybe an hour or so before bedtime, I have an impulse to pick up my computer and you know, quote unquote be productive. But what I actually like doing is picking up my computer and opening Canva and playing around with my slide deck templates and I'm developing a few different, for, like, there are different moods and I hadn't really thought about that. I had been thinking to myself that I was unable to relax and feeling like I needed to be productive, but actually the impulse I'm having is to be a little bit creative and I'm having it late in the day and it does help me unwind. Yes, thank you for that epiphany.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know when we're, when we're thinking about playing around in Canva to enhance our courses so that students will succeed. You know they'll enjoy, you know, but also succeed in our courses. So we might want to start with the assignments. You know, instructional designers always say like, start with the assignments and work backwards, as you said before. So maybe our slides are ready to go and they're good enough and we don't want to mess around with them, but we might want to think about how could I make my assignments a little more creative? You know, still research based perhaps, you know, still, but a little bit more active learning. So so you know, for example, in my courses I'll do something like I want students to do, you know, market research or something, but I'll ask them to go into Canva and pick up a resume template, a visual resume, and turn it into, you know, a patient persona or you know a coachy persona or client persona and, you know, visualize some of their research and then give me a thousand words.
Speaker 2:Yeah, give me a thousand words. Give me your list of works cited, but give me that graphic as well, the persona. So that might be, if we don't want to start with, you know, renovating our curriculum because it's not broken, you know why, fix, we could start with the assignments.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I want to make kind of a hard left turn here and ask you a question that I think might sound a little bit wacky, but I really do believe in this. So I mentioned earlier that your work made me realize how many ugly documents administrators deal with, and I'm actually now that I say that I'm wondering if there's a relationship between, like, the consistent dullness of a Microsoft Word document and the consistent dullness of bureaucratic language. I'm just wondering how much the design of the end product influences the language. That, then, you know, is the content for that product.
Speaker 1:But, aside from that rumination, which I'll be thinking about for a while now, I'm wondering what your thoughts are about, how applicable any of this might be for people in leadership roles, and I'm thinking in particular. There's this idea that problem solving is really different and better when it's human-centric, right, when it's not top-down but it's focused on the people closest to the problem. There's this idea that making space for creativity can be not only productive but also calming, like good for the brain in a couple different ways, and I'm guessing that most administrators especially since March of 2020, feel like good grief. Please don't give me one more useless thing to do. I'm not going to go make my agendas pretty just for the heck of it, so ruminate with me, would you Like? What do you think? Do you think there might be any value in the things that you're describing as working for students to be adapted by leaders working with their teams?
Speaker 2:I do. I do think you know again, if we think from a design thinking perspective, if we approach this from that perspective, then we know that we can go to meeting after meeting and just talk. Everybody will nod. Things are whatever next meeting. But if somebody walks in with a prototype of whether it's a poster for a program that they're about to try to get passed through Senate, you know, or whether it's a logo for the new, you know, major donors, you know campaign anything visual like a prototype, people will immediately start engaging with in a different way. They'll have an immediate emotional response and they'll lean in and say, no, that doesn't match with our mission, vision, purpose, values, or they'll say that's not. We used to have something like that and it didn't work, and so I'm afraid to go down that route, you know. So having a visual will immediately inspire people to engage with an idea in a way that just plain talk will never do.
Speaker 1:We have a friend who is trained as a geographer and he did a postdoc program and now does a lot of data visualization work and he told me in a very early conversation about on a project that I asked for his help with. He told me that the way you know a visualization is working is that it prompts questions. And I think even I never thought of carrying that idea into general administrative work. I thought about it in terms of, you know, board presentations or dashboards or something that is meant to be visual. But I love this idea of interrupting the verbal status quo by bringing in an image in order to prompt better conversation, better curiosity.
Speaker 2:And the people who would have nodded all through us talking about our idea for an initiative will lean forward and say no way, I hate that, carol, sit me. No way, you know? Like no, no, no, no, I hate that. That's wrong and we need to hear that feedback so that we can make sure that you know we're progressing and getting like input from all stakeholders and all publics and you know the leadership needs that feedback. So, whatever we can get, however, we can get it, we need it and prototypes will do that.
Speaker 1:One of the things I love, and what you just said, is that it's so important that we be open to hearing what's not working and if images can help people respond with I love this or I hate that, or you've got me thinking like all of those responses are all helpful.
Speaker 2:They really are. And you know to push that just one inch further. We all know if somebody shows us their, their, their beautiful thing, whether it's a garden or their lunch or anything, you know and ask us what do you think? We want to be nice and say, well, that's nice. But if they show us two lunches or two gardens or two pictures and say I don't know which one, I mean I'm really not sure it's so much easier for people to engage and give us their feedback.
Speaker 2:So in the classroom, you know, giving us, giving students options and then helping them to think through and navigate. Or in the boardroom, you know, showing someone two versions and saying what do you think of these? Do either one of these, you know, capture where we're going? Do you know? Is one better than the other? Like what people will lean in? So I know I'm asking a lot going in with the two prototypes, not just one. But people will fear that if you bring in something like a brochure you know poster, or a slide, a visualization that you put up on the screen, they might think that's your precious thing that you spent all year creating and they'll be very reluctant to say anything about it Because of power relationships or just not wanting to be a meanie. But if you show them two things and say this is in progress, this is a work in progress, I do need your feedback to move this forward I could be going in the wrong direction. I don't know it, won't you're sort of supporting them to engage?
Speaker 1:The phrase that came to mind listening to you was contrast brings clarity. Yeah yeah, awesome, yeah. Well, thank you for talking about that. So I think I am not going to be the only person who listens to you talk and thinks oh my God, I need to know more about her, I want to see her work, I want to see this in action. If people are interested in learning more about what you do, where can they?
Speaker 2:find you. My side hustle is called ValentineCoursedesign. That's where my website lives and my visuals and my research and everything else ValentineCoursedesign.
Speaker 1:Thank you, so that's where we'll come track you down. I am so grateful for this conversation. I have learned so much and also, after talking to you through a keyboard for months, I'm really happy to hear your voice.
Speaker 2:Likewise thanks for the opportunity.
Speaker 1:All right, my friend, now that we're done, I want you to do two things for me. First, choose one thing that came to mind while you were listening. Maybe it was something we talked about, or maybe it was something that occurred to you while you were listening, it doesn't matter, just put it into practice. This week, I want you to take action. It can be imperfect action, inspired action, scared to do this new thing. Action, I don't care, just take action. Don't overthink it, don't talk yourself about it, just do it. And then, second, tell me how it goes. Dm me on LinkedIn or Instagram or shoot me an old fashioned email at carol at theatheriogroupcom, and once you tell me what you've tried, you'll be entered into a monthly drawing for a $20 gift certificate to bookshoporg.
Speaker 1:You'll get to expand your learning and I'll get to help you build your library. It's a win for both of us. So that's it. Try something out and then tell me how it went. I can't wait to hear from you.