Innovation is a process, not an event.
Your team has the capacity to innovate, but a clear, human-centered process helps give that work structure and purpose.
Our program redesign services help your community make big decisions thoughtfully, creatively, and inclusively. By experiencing a creative process together, you also build the habits, mindsets, and tools to help your community keep moving forward.
Schedule and Calendar Redesign
Does your school calendar or schedule come up in every conversation as a barrier to living your mission? If so, it is time to re-design time with Leadership + Design.
We’ve worked with schools across the country to re-design time. Our process is different. By coupling our experience in schools with a designer’s toolkit, mindset, and openness to possibility, Leadership+Design can help your school community build a relationship with time that puts the people at your school at the heart of your schedule.
Our process builds capacity among your team, creates a community conversation about time, and helps school connect their goals, vision, and hopes to the limited time we all share.
Design for Retention
It is easier to keep a customer than to find a new one.
Customers are making decisions about re-enrollment based on the experience they’re having every day. So, what's it like to be a family at your school this year?
Design for Retention is a program for schools tackling this question.
Using the principles of customer experience design, we will help school teams map customer journeys this fall. We'll help you leverage that insight to understand what to tweak and what to cut. We'll also help you prototype and implement new touchpoints to build loyalty. By starting this fall, you'll be in the position to nudge re-enrollment in the right direction.
Read our article: “COVID, Retention, and Customer Experience Design”
Designing for Culture
Talking about school culture can be a bit like wrestling with a shadow. It’s ambiguous and hard to grasp, as these ever-so-common scenarios demonstrate. Still, it’s there, lurking behind everything we do. And it is this—the way that schools talk about their cultures—that both defines and distinguishes them and keeps them stuck.
In our work, we often witness schools grappling with their culture and reckoning with their cultural barriers. Their own culture is getting in the way. But perhaps the greatest obstacle for schools when it comes to the healthy evolution of their culture is the inability to honestly see it—or to clearly articulate it.
CultureLab is an experience for school teams who are ready to do the hard work of shaping their culture. Over three days, we will guide you through a design process to see their culture more clearly, articulate a set of cultural aspirations, and then design the pathways to move your culture in that direction.
Design for Next Year
A lot can happen in a year. How will you use it to get better? “Design for Next Year” is designed to carve out the time your team needs to be thoughtful about what’s next, while making it manageable for you to do so.
Each participating school will select a team of 4-8 people (either a leadership team or a cross-functional group of faculty and staff) to guide this work: reflecting on the current school year and applying those lessons to the next. We’ll facilitate the design team’s process, while providing ready-made tools each team can use to engage their broader communities. It’s a great fit for spring or summer, and after years that have seen challenges or rapid change.
Participating teams will lead reflection on their school’s experiences over the last year, document what the school has learned, and identify specific changes that will lead them in the direction of their aspirations.
Next Q
Next Q is designed for those schools and districts who want to build teacher skills, mindsets, and language while also answering their Next Question (“Next Q.”)
Possible Next Q's include any big question or problem your community is facing, like reimagining assessment, designing school culture, developing a new program, or designing curriculum.
Once you’ve declared your school’s Next Q, L+D will design and deliver four a year-long, transformative series of experiences for faculty and/or staff. They will help you find your way to new answers, while building skills and enthusiasm among everyone involved.
Next Q is perfect for bold and daring school communities getting ready to take on the future of teaching and learning.
“[L+D Associate] Tara has been working for the last year with my fledgling school on our (many) Big Q's. Like every experience I have had working with L+D, working with Tara has been helpful, restorative, and fun.”
— Jan Harris, Compass Community Collaborative School