Great Place to Learn: Future Scoping Workshop with Pearl Academy
A 'Great Place To Learn’ was an enquiry-based workshop for the staff and educators of Pearl Academy of Design to co-create a vision for the future of their organisation.
Role: Researcher, Learning Designer, Facilitator
Client: Pearl Academy, New Delhi, India
Lead Organisation: Flow India
Learners: Faculty, administrative staff, and management staff from across Pearl Academy campuses.
Sector: Higher Education, Business Development
The Brief
The results of a recently concluded internal staff survey conducted by Pearl Academy, India, found that there was a misalignment between the Management’s strategic growth plans and the expectations from their place of work by the faculty and staff.
Recognising the need to bring all stakeholders to one platform and co-create a strategy for the future, Pearl Academy hired Flow India in December 2018 to craft an engagement for their staff and educators to ideate on a shared vision of what the lifelong learning ecosystem of the future may look like.
My Design Process
As a Learning Design Consultant, I worked with Flow to research, design, and facilitate this workshop.
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After extensive desk research on models developed by various institutions on the future of work such as Deloitte and PwC, design thinking strategies for education and business design, systems and futures thinking exercises, and in-depth discussions with the Pearl Academy HR team, we designed an interactive workshop for our participants.
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The workshop was designed to ensure participant interaction through games, discussions, and co-creation activities.
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Here is some of the research we referenced:
- Workforce of the Future (PwC, 2018)
- Beyond Discipline: Design Practice & Design Education in the 21st Century (Furniss, 2015)
Putting our desk research on the Future of Work together.
We then created a prioritisation activity based on the Future of Work models for participants to dive into the process.
Outcome
'A Great Place To Learn’ was a 3-hour long enquiry-based workshop for the staff and educators of Pearl Academy of Design, India, in December 2018.
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It addressed professionals from diverse fields to collectively probe our present and potential environments of existence, create a shared understanding of what this complex future of learning and work looks like, and co-create a vision of how individuals-professionals, learners-facilitators of this dynamic future can find agency to define these new settings.
Impact
In a survey conducted at the end of the workshop, 60% of the responding participants identified the future projection exercise to be valuable to their work. Overall, more than 70% of the respondents gave the session a 4 or 5 out of 5 on the usefulness of the workshop.
An exciting impact for me personally, was that more than 70% of the respondents felt the session was a great exercise to stimulate open-communication, collaboration, and reflection among members of a team.
Teams create models of what their place of work & learning of the future looks like.
Teams created priority maps highlighting the ‘People’, ‘Places, and ‘Contexts’ that are most important in their future.
Facilitating the workshop.
Using the Innovator's Compass to co-create an action plan for future visions.