Check in with my manager and leadership

In a professional setting it’s always a good idea to have regular check-in with leadership. When it comes to planning your life, however, you are the manager. But unfortunately, we often don’t have moments to pause and check in with ourselves (or empathize with ourselves- the first step of the design thinking process). 

For this reason, we spent a lot of the Annual Self-Review session working on activities by ourselves, including asking students to use some design tools to assess their current situation. For example, we asked students to mind-map highlights of the year, and to  “mine the mountaintop” to determine what they enjoyed. 

Review the data There has been a push in recent years to quantify everything, and collect data to measure your outcomes. While this might be harder to do when assessing your personal life, it’s not impossible. Empathizing also means to understand, and one way to gain a deeper understanding of who you are is to review your data. In the Annual Self-Review we asked students to hold their own personal retrospectives (a process used in many businesses), where students had the chance to analyze their “data” for the year including their phone photos, calendars, journals, and course assignments. After reviewing their data, students were asked to reflect on what went well (and not so well) this year, what they learned, how they grew, and what they were excited about in the here and now.

Think Strategically vs. Tactically
It’s easy to get lost in the day to day, and in routines, but sometimes it's nice to span out and think of the big picture. A critical step in the design thinking process is to define and ideate next steps. Students were invited to think critically about highlights, and low points of the year and to define areas of areas of growth and what they wanted to try next. They then came up with a broad list (ideated) about next steps both individually and in a collaborative way.

Keep me accountable

A professional annual performance review process, when done well, yields action. My own annual review helped me to keep accountable to the SMART goals I set for myself the previous year. Similarly, the design thinking process calls on designers to prototype and test their ideas. It’s easy to have lofty plans, but unless we put those plans into action we’ll accomplish very little. We ended the Annual Self- Review session by asking students to design small prototypes to move forward with their goals. When considering these next steps and future plans, we asked our students to reflect on how they wanted to keep themselves accountable. Since peer accountability is effective for many, we invited students who were interested in creating accountability groups to stay on to be randomly grouped with others. Several accountability groups formed in this way.