Going Global and then Virtual: DYL with Alumni of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management

We sent a team of three of us from the Kellogg Career Management Center to the Life Design Studio at Stanford in June 2018. The team included Liza Kirkpatrick, who runs career services for full-time MBA students, Carla Vaccarezza Bass, who works with Executive and Evening & Weekend MBA students, and Matthew Temple, who runs Alumni Career & Professional Development. We found the studio so helpful that we sent another team of three the following year. 

We thought long and hard about how we would bring Designing Your Life back to Kellogg immediately, one year out, and five years out. Like an idiot, I blurted out that we would commit to prototyping a DYL workshop for alumni within two months. And, we did! We started with a 2.5 hour workshop that included Workview/Worldview, Mingle-Mingle-Mingle, 30 Circles, Energy-Engagement Map, Odyssey Planning, and Prototyping. The workshop went well. Unfortunately, my bias is to pack a lot in and we definitely overpacked. We were able to stay on time as long as participants only took ten second bio breaks and spoke really quickly. We streamlined the agenda for future workshops by removing the Workview/Worldview and the 30 Circles modules but added a section on Flow. And, we’ve run ever since. We have presented DYL workshops to our full-time, evening & weekend, and executive MBA students, Master’s students, undergraduates, staff, and alumni. We prototyped a one hour workshop for Kellogg Wellness Week that focused on Love-Play-Work-Health, Energy Engagement, PERMA, Flow, and Mind Mapping (yep, I overpacked again, but an hour is so short). 

We have presented over 25 DYL workshops for Kellogg alumni in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Our audiences have ranged from 25 to 95 people. We’ve presented DYL workshops at Kellogg Reunion as well as to the Kellogg Executive Women’s Network (KEWN). I had to shut my mouth and carefully nod in agreement at the KEWN workshop when a participant in a room 

of 90 women loudly suggested sex as a flow activity. The funniest suggestion for the Odyssey Plan of owning a farm in Italy was to drink red wine and smoke cigarettes. One of the best Odyssey Plans was Paul Romer’s “How might I prototype the experience of becoming a much smaller version of myself?” And, he went on to lose 40 pounds after the workshop. 

We had committed to additional DYL workshops for alumni in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Mexico City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis for the remainder of the year. 

And then the pandemic happened.

When the first Kellogg Alumni Club reached out to me about presenting a virtual Designing Your Life workshop after the pandemic had spread, I started to reply, “Hell, no.” I began my email by telling the club how it’s such an immersive experience, with networking and debriefs, music and merriment. Most of the workshops I present could get to 90% effectiveness in a virtual format, but I thought a virtual DYL might only reach 70%. As I thought more about the disruption to our lives, I realized that we probably would not be able to present an in person DYL for another 6-12 months (turns out, I may have been optimistic). And then I thought, isn’t 70% effectiveness better now than 100% effectiveness in 6-12 months? I also realized that I was forgetting all of the basic tenets of design thinking: radical collaboration, reframing, curiosity, mindfulness of process, and bias towards action. And, so I started to rewrite my email and said we should collaborate together and prototype a virtual DYL on Zoom. 

We prototyped our first virtual DYL with the Kellogg Alumni Club of Chicago – West on June 11, 2020. And, I’m proud to say I was wrong again. I think we made it to 85-90% effectiveness. We kept the same 2.5 hour workshop format and had 48 participants, including alumni who joined us from Taiwan, Japan, and Germany (it was 3:30am there when we finished). There were several tweaks that helped us in our prototype: 

Using a Virtual Course Moderator – it’s so important to have someone focused on monitoring the chat/Q&A box and running the breakout rooms so that the facilitator can focus on facilitating. Regina Wootton from our team is an all-star. She volunteered to be a Virtual Course Moderator for a class at Kellogg and knows all the best practices for keeping participants engaged. 

Leveraging seven breakout rooms – The modular design of DYL makes it suitable to a virtual delivery since we keep moving from lecture to exercise to debrief. The breakout rooms help to keep things moving and allow participants to talk to each other. We used two person breakout rooms for the Mingle, Mingle, Mingle exercise as well as Energy Engagement Map debrief. We used five person breakout rooms for discussions on examples of Flow and Prototyping. We used a ten person breakout room for Bias Towards Action. We randomly assigned people to breakout rooms since we don’t know who will actually show up and this mimics the randomness of an in person workshop. Also, it’s faster to force people into the breakout rooms rather than giving them the option to click OK. 

Going Old School when prototyping – We went back and forth and back and forth on how best to prototype. We considered using Google Docs and the whiteboard function. We decided to go Old School. We had each participant write out their prototyping question on a worksheet and then placed them into five person breakout rooms. Each person had four minutes to state the prototyping question and then solicit and write down on their worksheet the ideas. The other participants had to make at least two suggestions each. We then rotated to the next person. Regina, our Virtual Course Moderator, would message the breakout rooms at four minute intervals to rotate. 

Keeping a 15 minute break – The break becomes even more important in a virtual session. Zoom fatigue is real and participants need a break after creating their Odyssey Plans. 

Standing up when presenting – I always tell alumni to stand when doing phone or video interviews and I did as well when facilitating the virtual DYL. As a facilitator, you will have more energy, which is vital for a 2.5 hour virtual workshop, and your voice will project more strongly. 

Keeping the countdown exercise – Again, the countdown exercise is more critical in a virtual DYL with Zoom fatigue. 

Focus groups – We conducted a 15 minute focus group at the end of the DYL and even the guy from Germany stayed until the end (now 3:45am his time). We received several great suggestions. Karen, one of my former students, suggested having participants rename themselves to add in more information. Instead of Matthew Temple, I could be Matthew Temple ’93 Los Angeles so that other participants would know my graduation year and where I lived. Several said one minute was too short for the Mingle, Mingle, Mingle breakout rooms due to transition time, so we will increase this to two minutes. Another alumni suggest opening the Zoom room earlier in case people wanted to network before the workshop. We are going to insert a link to a Google Sheet so participants can write their names, email addresses, and Odyssey Plans to keep in touch. And, we need to add the music back in before we start. 

To learn more, contact Matthew Temple at m-temple@kellogg.northwestern.edu