A Surprise Curriculum Design Step

I spent last week out-of-state with a new client who hired me to rewrite a curriculum that had been originally written in 1985, but adapted through the years by the skilled professional development trainers who were delivering it.

While the trainers had been effective in making the curriculum relevant for recent times, no one had really written anything down, instead adapting on the fly out of their rich depth of experience and knowledge. While this was seviceable, there was a desire to capture and standardize what was being delivered, as well as to build in some new material that reflected the latest research on the topic. As always, I began with an affinity process in order to get my hands around the scope of the project by identifying the rest-of-life outcomes, the skills necessary to perform them, and the concepts and issues that must be understood to effectively apply the skills to meet the outcomes in the curriculum's targeted audience. My goal was to create the product at the end of an affinity process known as a Training Outcome Guide (TOG), the one-page roadmap that would tell me where I needed to go and what I needed to do in the four months before the first draft would be due.

I've written previously about how to facilitate an affinity process with SMEs in order to create a TOG so I won't repeat that here. What I want to share in this post is equally as important as the above two steps but isn't documented in any of the literature I've seen. However, it has happened regularly enough as I work on my own and with clients to bear mentioning as a critical step in the curriculum design process. I'll call it the "give up and let go step." Here's how it happened last week...

I worked two and a half days with my client, running through the affinity process, asking her to respond to the outcomes, skills, and concepts and issues questions for her agency's initiative. We worked steadily and productively through brainstorm, categorization and labeling. We identified priorities and the order of each of the categories and were ready to record everything on a TOG by the close of Day 2, yet I was stopped by the pensive and distracted look on my client's face. I told her what I was observing saying, "Your face seems to say that we aren't quite there yet. Is that how you are feeling?" She answered yes, that was what she was feeling. I assured her that her gut reaction was a very good indication that even though we thought we were finished, or had listed all we could list, that we were indeed not done, even if she couldn't identify what was missing. I suggested that we end for the day, leave our work hanging on the wall, and that she let it go until the morning. I suggested this because in every creative project I've ever worked on, I've hit this very same wall-that vague but undeniable feeling that something is missing, or not quite right. While there is a disciplined, human part of us that wants to keep at it until we can make the feeling go away, I have found over and over again, to NOT do that, but instead, drop it and go away from it, allowing whatever it is to ferment at the back of one's subconscious, unresolved and nagging while doing something completely unrelated to the abandoned task.

We returned the next morning and she eagerly told me that while she was doing something completely unrelated to our project, she had figured out what was bothering her and what was missing. I listened to her share the missing piece, jotting her ideas on post-its to as she talked, adding them to our work on the wall. As she shared the missing pieces, I watched her entire face change from the pensive, distracted look of the day before to a look of satisfied, confident relief. She had arrived where she needed to be by walking away and allowing her subconscious mind to chew on it while she occupied herself with the rest of her life. I laughingly told her that I knew I couldn't get on the plane until I saw the face that said, "We've nailed it!" While that is true, I've now made a mental note that a part of my affinity process with SMEs will be insisting we stop when they feel frustrated, even if we aren't done and I have a plane to catch, because I trust the creative process that works despite our meddling interference! Even if I have to leave, I can check in by phone a day or so later to see what miracles their subconscious has worked out while they weren't noticing. My job is to reassure them that it will come, while encouraging them to go do something else, and then to call a day or two later in anticipation of the epiphany that has never failed to show up when given time and space to do so!