Best Teams

 Potholes vs. Peak Experiences

“I don't want the public to see the world they live in while they're in the Park. I want them to feel they're in another world.” - Walt Disney

Truths
One of our favorite books is The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. In the book, the authors talk about our tendency as leaders to fix potholes instead of creating peak moments.  

The people you serve expect far more than bad face to face practice online. We often see this as textbook outlines on an LMS, lecture training over zoom, or a digital checklist to pave over the potholes of learning or training gaps. Our challenge to you this week is to go beyond these pothole fixes in working with others and strive to create peak moments for those in your charge. 

For a primer on the concept of potholes and peak moments, this video is useful in explaining how education and organization leaders are trained to solve problems or potholes. Instead, we encourage as the book does to create peak moments for teams, students, faculty, and online communities so that participants can remember wow experiences as they reimagine organizational culture.

The following are some additional ideas to create peak moments and wow experiences for your people:

Principal dancing at a pep rally - Imagine how you could replicate over zoom.

The Privilege Race - Consider this hosted as a webquest or as a social media challenge.

It is your ship - Ask the three questions from this video over Slack or MS Teams this week to make your organization better.

Invite the community - Adapt this My Ways video to invite your community into your work through parent feedback over Polleverywhere, live chat on Facebook, or through virtual coffees over video conference.

Know your why - Understand the importance of knowing your "why" and "what" when deciding why you do what you do. This is an inspirational video for teams and faculty to watch and unpack together.

Unthink school to rethink learning - Get new ideas with multiple examples to engage students and faculty in better learning experiences from this Tedx talk from our CEO Bryan Setser.

Rejection therapy - Create peak moments and embrace excellent customer service for people based on simple requests.

Virtual Jeffersonian Dinner - Whether hosting a virtual Jeffersonian dinner or preparing a special chef menu online, food and conversation menus matter where appetizers are a key question, the entree is a set of meaningful pictures, and the desert is a charge to change the world this week.

Tools for Wow Experiences

Digital experiences can be engaging and deeply meaningful to create peak moments and wow experiences - see below for some of the tools that we use as well as tools our clients love! 

Remo - We serve as an expert advisor in the Catalyst Network, and they are using Remo to host virtual tableside talks. This is a great way to offer smaller conversations within a large group. 

Mursion - used by our friends at East Carolina University to leverage virtual scenarios and simulations for powerful online learning experiences. 

iThrive Sim - iThrive Sim scenarios are content-rich role-playing simulations that make civics, media literacy, and history come alive for high school students. We’ve enjoyed working with their team this year on serving students to and through COVID.

Kajabi - Platforms are vital components of digital experiences. They set the scaffolding while you build the experience. We continue to support New Tech Network this year as they continue to provide peak moments and wow experiences to their students through tools like Kajabi.

Arist - This platform for providing content via text message is one of the most accessible ways to deliver content. It is simple, engaging and we are excited to learn more about it with our clients. 

Triumphs 
​Read this article on the 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2020. Excerpt below.
A Secret to High-Performing Virtual Classrooms
In 2020, a team at Georgia State University compiled a report on virtual learning best practices. While evidence in the field is "sparse" and "inconsistent," the report noted that logistical issues like accessing materials—and not content-specific problems like failures of comprehension—were often among the most significant obstacles to online learning. It wasn’t that students didn’t understand photosynthesis in a virtual setting, in other words—it was that they didn’t find (or simply didn't access) the lesson on photosynthesis at all.
Learn about the work our Setser Board Advisory Board Member and Tanjo CEO, Richard Boyd is doing in animated personas. Tanjo Animated Personas (TAP) allow businesses to gain insight into potential customers. This is a powerful experience for marketers and product managers to take the business to the next level. 

Explore tools like Dreambox and Headsprout in the K-8 space. Time and time again they have been proven to increase engagement online and produce remarkable results.

Watch Setser Group friend and colleague Michelle Weise on her new book Long Life Learning: Preparing For Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet. Check out the Getting Smart Video here.

Celebrate Hanukkah! We want to wish those of you who celebrate, a Happy Hannukkah!

Do You Put People First

“Of all the things that sustain a leader over time, love is the most lasting. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its work.” - James Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge.

This week our team read this article from Jobs for the Future on ways businesses can ease their employees’ caregiving burdens during (and after) the COVID-19 crisis. A few compelling statistics jump out at us. Seventy-four percent of employers say that supporting working parents is a top priority, and corporate leaders across the country are advancing employee-centered talent practices. However, only 39 percent said they feel their programs and policies are effective. To help employer partners, they identified seven promising new approaches to supporting working parents. Below are some truths, tools, and triumphs for education and organization leaders to put people first.

Truths

Do you host physical or virtual coffees with the principal? Have you considered asking students what key campus problems need to be solved? Hosting a hack-a-thon in person or digitally for their answers? How do you think about taking care of your staff? Can you hire a masseuse for a lunch hour? What could you do to set up a cover-a-teacher rotation? These are just some fundamental truths about how we put people first in our charge. Check out 11 Themes of Servant Leadership for other truths you find inspirational. 1. Calling – do people believe you are willing to sacrifice self-interest for the good of the group? 2. Listening – do people believe that you want to hear their ideas? 3. Empathy – do people believe you will understand what’s happening in their lives and how it affects them? 4. Healing – do people come to you when the chips are down or when something traumatic has happened to them? 5. Awareness – do others believe you have a strong awareness for what is going on? 6. Persuasion – do others follow your request because they want to as opposed to because they have to? 7. Foresight – do others have confidence in your ability to anticipate the future and consequences? 8. Conceptualization – do others communicate their ideas and vision for the organization when you are around? 9. Stewardship – do others believe you are preparing the organization to make a positive difference? 10. Growth – do people believe you are committed to helping them grow and develop? 11. Community Building – do people feel a strong sense of community in the organization you lead? Tools OpenSmartEdu.org is a free resource developed as a collaborative project of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), and Tuscany Strategy Consulting (TSC). OpenSmartEdu understands the challenges of putting people first in COVID-19 reopening plans. This website helps institutions in their operating strategies for near- and long-term plans. 

Humans Must Maslow Before they can Bloom

"If my students or team is not well fed, don't feel safe, and are badly in need of connection and hugs, they don't care where my questions or tasks land on Blooms. We must meet the basic needs of those we serve first."

Alan Beck, Maslow before Blooms

Truths

This week, Setser Group CEO Bryan Setser sat down with Winston-Salem State University Associate Provost Erin Lynch and they discussed the importance of empirical data during the pandemic of misinformation. And while we - as innovators - are wired to push through, we recognize the only way forward includes time for healing and listening at a pace that works for the organization and its people. How are you being intentional in your own organization about creating opportunities and balancing what your team actually needs in terms of understanding and empathy?

Listen in on this one-minute excerpt from their conversation that will air live at the premiere event on June 23, 2021, at 2 p.m. EST.

Tools

Next:

We know inequity exists in designing a data-informed culture - in HBCUs and in many organizations. How are you designing for a future that helps solve these problems? Do you have a digital playbook, and how do you make sure it’s a living asset that gets better the more you build, measure, and learn with the people who matter in your organization? See below for how we are building products and services in the digital age to impact the triple bottom line of how our work impacts people, profit, and the planet. Setser Group Builds Products Plus Service Lines. Here is our list:  Master Class Series Digital Products Professional Learning or Training Master Mind Groups Events Subscription Services Revenue Partnerships Playbooks or Kits Micro-Schools Micro-Credentials Pods Human Libraries Skillshares Study Visits Prizes and Challenges Virtual Accelerators e-Tutoring and e-Coaching Mighty Networks DEI Tactics and Online Experiences www.setsergroup.com How Do Your Create Peak Moments and Experiences for Your Team? "I don't want people to see their world while in our park. I want them to feel like they are in another world." - Walt Disney Truths After reading The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, our team at Setser Group reflected on this concept, and - in particular - how it relates to leaders in education - those whom we know are creating remarkable experiences for their teams as they re-enter the physical workspace as well as those who spend way too much time fixing potholes without being intentional in building peak moment experiences. For a primer on how and why this is important, check out Dan Heath: Build Peaks, Don’t Fix Potholes. In this four minute video, he explains how our minds don’t actively remember the average of our experience; rather, we remember snippets, scenes, and moments - specifically the peak and the ending. As we think together about reimagining the story of an organization’s culture, let’s talk about ways we can build these peak moments for our teams - moments that will positively impact our students, faculty, and community. Tools Principal Dancing at Pep Rally - A minute into a step routine at a school pep rally, the school's new principal, Dr. Donna "Mickey" Reynolds, 49, ran out wearing the signature uniform pants, a senior class T-shirt, and black athletic shoes. She joined in, nailing the rest of the step routine and bringing the house down in the process. The Privilege Race - This video went viral when a college teacher conducted an exercise with his students in a schoolyard. They were going to have a race where the winner would get $100, but the teacher had in store more than a contest of athleticism - he had a profound message they would likely remember for the rest of their lives. It is Your Ship - Applying design thinking to your school in terms of how to turn your ship around with what your team loves, hates, and would change in the first 90 days. Invite the Community - A My Ways video of three approaches to invite the community into your school or organization. Unthink School to Rethink Learning - Tedx talk from our CEO, Bryan Setser, with multiple examples to engage students and faculty in better learning experiences. Rejection Therapy - A great example of customer service and creating peak moments for people based on simple requests. Conversations off the Cell Phone - Technology is great, and there is never a substitute for peak moments over a meal. Take the time to connect with your squad or team by invoking this rule below. Human Machine - A great game to create light and collaborative moments with your team. More than the traditional ice breakers, these activities give you a glimpse of your leaders, contributors, and creators. Learn-Cycle Innovation - The Cell Phone Challenge Challenge: Build a human cell phone machine where either arms or legs and cell phones are connected with two people using only the tools of sound, video, images, etc. found on your cell phones. Prototype: The machine must be human and digital and move across the room using at least one sound and one image or video. The machine must be 1 discernible to the group. | Desired Outcomes): The machine will function and the audience will be able to guess what it is. I Next Steps: Ask the audience what clues gave away the machine's identity. Ask the audience what design inputs could have been different. Learn from other prototypes in the room. Return to your table to improve and refine.

Triumphs

While the examples above serve to inspire the mind and challenge the heart, the real question is what will leaders do with them. Will they embed them into meetings? Will they consider using them at staff training events? Will they task others with creating design challenges? Can they be formalized, informal, or ritualized into your culture? While many experiences in your day or underwhelming or whelming, as the Heath brothers would say, your job as a leader is to make moments remarkable. It is an awesome task, but it is what separates you - don't ever forget that - many managers often do.

What triumphs will you create as you open the year at staff retreats, meetings, and institutes?