Skydiving to unique solutions: a gratitude retrospective
During Spring Semester 2022, I led Loyola University Chicago’s first-ever undergraduate course in Design Thinking. This Skydiving to unique solutions archive piece, from the Quinlan School of Business communications team, starts to tell the story of our semester. Here, I aim to pick-up where that story lands, through what my students and I designed as “Gratitude Retrospectives.”
Retrospectives combine with Jesuit education
Thankfully, collaborative teams routinely encounter retrospectives. During retrospectives, cross-functional teams and relevant stakeholders reflect on how and why a design-oriented, problem-solving experience unfolded as it did. In order to explain the highlights and misses of our actions, retrospectives help us to examine the processes and people involved. Retrospectives, therefore, generate “actionable experiments” where new perspectives will be tested during upcoming iterations.
In context of Ignatian Design Thinking, the objectives of retrospectives match practices grounded in Jesuit teaching and learning. Pillars of Jesuit education — including experience, reflection, and action — square with industry methods of retrospectives. In order to create meaning from what we, as learners, experience, we pause to reflect. We look back at what happened in order to move forward through intentional action. In this way, retrospectives resemble Ignatian course design.
Additionally, framing Design Thinking through an Ignatian lens encouraged us to enrich our course culture with whole person values. Gratitude represented one of these values. So, we combined our retrospective practice with a gratitude practice.
Grateful for Co-Design
During our fourteen-week semester, design practitioners regularly visited our class sessions. These visits always aligned learning outcomes organized within the standard design thinking process. Some visits emphasized design research methods and mindsets. Other visits focused on solution critiques.
In order to lock-in our learning journeys, we took to Miro. Using a 2 x 2 grid after each class visit, reflection questions guided what we shared via sticky notes on Gratitude Retrospective frames.
In retrospection, our collective Miro frames portray a co-designed ecosystem that also values reciprocity. Student-designers, our client sponsor, and community stakeholders served each others’ learning. The patterns of grateful sticky notes extended beyond what’s expected of active co-creators: we not only asked “how can I contribute?” but intuitively engaged as stewards. Through shared bias to action, we implicitly asked, “how can I serve?”
With gratitude, I attempt to answer “how can I serve?” in the next sections, organized by stakeholder categories. The italicized text represents content from students’ Miro sticky notes, edited for clarity and to de-identify.
Grateful for Industry Co-Designers
Slalom: We now know we make an impact and to follow through on ideas regardless of our fears.
AbbVie: First we create, then critique: we can’t do both at the same time. We also need to be mindful of how something will be perceived by a diverse audience.
dscout: Research does not have to be precious; integrate an iterative mindset.
PinPoint Collective: Include images with people, so the client can better imagine the design concepts for humans.
Doblin, a Deloitte business: Attempt to “suspend disbelief” when something doesn’t totally make sense.
Grateful for Community Co-Designers
Helix Chicago: Think of teachers as people.
Beverly Castle: Kids appreciate when their educators are as creative as they are.
New Trier High School Applied Arts Department: Stop thinking too small or too one dimensional.
Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship: Bring an element of hope into every step.
Grateful for Sponsor Co-Designers
Zev Salomon: There aren’t enough sticky notes in the world to properly express gratitude for your support and care for all of our discoveries!
Duo Development: Your vision to connect like-minded people who are inspired to impact our world is boundless. Thank you.
Grateful for Design Magic . . . or Magis
Our semester was never about skydiving. It was, however, about a leap-of-faith willingness to co-design with uncertainty. In doing so, we experienced the magic of magis. Magis, an Ignatian term for “the more” embodies how our ecosystem of co-designers transformed what learning should look and feel like.
Although timing of this course appears fortuitous — graduating seniors during a sustained moment for in-demand design skills — the need for the deliberate integration of design thinking in undergraduate business education has been a long time coming. Hopeful, ongoing updates from design leaders saturated Spring 2022: McKinsey released Redesigning the design department. Salesforce launched its Strategy Designer certification. Design Council shared its Design Value Framework. More design needs more designers, magis.
In the spirit of magis — more retrospectives, more gratitude, more co-design — I cheer on the inaugural Ignatian Design Thinking students and know our world will benefit from more citizen designers ready for action. For that, I am grateful.
