Delight and Disrupt–Through Experience Management
Pivot Point
Daniel Dunworth, Director, Learning Experience
Welcome to Delight and Disrupt
But let’s go ahead and bring it on up. Appreciate again everybody being here. Thank you so much for being a part of today’s session. Let’s see if we can get things set there. Again, welcome to Delight and Disrupt. Really, really excited to be here trying something even a bit new with you all and I’m hoping that everybody here is ready to really kick the day off with some participation and really join me over these next 30 minutes or so to play a part in what it really means to delight, have some great experiences, create moments with impacted meaning, and to disrupt our learning processes and even create some new opportunities to engage our community, build culture, and to think about our own experiences and how they lend to these concepts of delight and disrupt.
I’m going to ask you to act quickly with me for times so we can keep everything on track, I want you to grab your phones and grab your most smartphones today. You can fire up your camera and get your QR reader ready to go. What I’m going to ask is that you scan this QR code that I’m going to bring up on screen here for us and join me in this presentation. I’m going to ask you to take about maybe 30, 60 seconds top to be quick. Grab those phones. Yeah, I’m asking you to get your phones out here and play a part. Scan this QR code. I’m going to give you about another 45 seconds left here and join me in today’s presentation.
I’ll tell you a little bit more about this tool later on, but I see we’ve got our number up and growing over a hundred already popping in here. I see a lot of people sending some hearts. Have some fun with this. If you’ve never had an opportunity to play along in this tool, I hope you enjoy it today. Take a look at the bottom of your screen once you join this presentation and use those emojis throughout the presentation to let me know how you are feeling as we go throughout it.
I see this number climbing, but I’m going to go ahead and just bring us back. And again, I’ll pop this out here and there as a reminder, but keep it handy. Stay connected ’cause I want to ask you, though, right off the gate to answer a question for me.
What Was Your Last Memorable Moment?
I want you to think, I want you to think about one of your most recent experiences that you’ve had. What I mean by an experience is something that really left that moment as something memorable for you. Maybe it’s stuck with you because it happened just yesterday. Maybe it was even grabbing your cup of coffee this morning or somewhere that you went. What I’d love you to do is share in your presentation, share what was that experience, where was it? What made that moment memorable?
I see a couple coming in here. I’m going to just shout out as we come through. I see Disney, becoming a national educator. Congratulations on that. Someone just passed their inspection so they can open their school. That is awesome. Congratulations. Hopefully I get an opportunity to come by and visit sometime. A field of poppies at the beach, graduating, camping, the first car accident. Now, that’s a memorable experience. Most recent ABS here, right? I think that was just only a couple of days ago, a trip to Cancun, horses in Ireland. I definitely need to go on some trips with more of you because those sound absolutely fascinating. But I see a lot of great things here, “Telling my son that you bought him floor tickets to Drake.” The coffee shop this morning because you got your delicious coffee. Someone’s celebrating moving.
Again, I do want to go ahead and throw out one more time if you didn’t get a chance, let’s go ahead and grab that QR code one more time. Give you 15 bonus seconds here to scan and join along. But thank you to everyone that’s sharing these moments in here. If you also don’t have a phone handy, you can pop up another tab on your browser and join ahaslides.com/oozlexm if you want to join along there, too. But with that, again, thank you for sharing these experiences and we’re going to talk about these a little bit more. But I was really fascinated to see a couple of these in here. Again, many, many positive moments, but also, some interesting ones that may not be on the most positive side depending on how you look at it and what your perception of it is. But the car accident, that was an experience. That something was definitely memorable you probably won’t forget about.
Think About the Expereince
That’s what I want you to really think about as we go through our delight and disrupt session today is I want you to think about that word “experience,” as of course, we’re going to talk about experience mindset, but how to use experiences to delight and also disrupt in great ways.
But you also have to be mindful that experiences can be both positive, and well, let’s say not so positive, but those moments can create rippling effects through our lifetime that we recall.
We also kind of start to shed light on the way we look at new situations using those experiences we’ve gained, like that trip to Ireland. That is something that will probably stick with you for a lifetime and always make you think about that and make you want to look forward to future opportunities like that, where a car accident, maybe you only want to experience that once.
But again, today in Delight and Disrupt, we’re going to talk about why those experiences really matter. What I want to share with you is what we’re going to really start positioning is this concept of an experienced mindset and how each and every one of us in every single role that we play in life, but really going to focus, of course, with the beauty school space today, whether you are in the salon space, the shop space, the spa space, whatever it may be. We all create experiences and if we go into them with an experienced mindset, we really can create experiences with more purpose and intention.
Expereince Mindset
Let’s talk about what an experience mindset is first. An experience mindset is one that focuses on the experiences we create and the impact those experiences have on people. Now, again, in our roles, those people might be fellow educators, they might be fellow owners, they might be other staff members that work in admissions, financial aid. We also might have our learners in our learning environments, whether they’re with us face-to-face, they might be joining us through remote tools, but we all are responsible for experiences to some degree and different types of experiences that other people play a part of, so what we want to do is we want to have a mindset where we consider those experiences. We really think about what is that interaction we have with those around us.
Why Does the Expereince Matter?
The reason why this matters, I want to just set this off really quickly, is by creating experiences that have positive, powerful impacts, we can create a sense of belonging for other members to want to join our community, be a part of our tribe, really work on creating a culture within our community that we’re really fond of, proud of, and we want to share with others, and of course, as that grows, then others want to join with us, they want to belong. Our experiences also shape our perceptions, and I’ll definitely talk about perceptions a bit later, but there’s a lot of power behind our perceptions. We also know, as we’ve already mentioned, that experiences ripple through a lifetime. Whether they stay with us consciously or maybe even subconsciously, they influence the way we go about future experiences, what we want to be a part of, and what we might not want to be a part of. Who do we want to experience those moments with again versus maybe who we might not want to?
Again, in our world of beauty, school spaces, education or even admissions in financial aid, we’re all responsible for experiences that impact those people around us.
Let’s talk about this just a little bit further. I want you to think back to a recent experience that many of us probably all had and went through not that long ago, but think about that very first virtual or video experience that you had, and even more specifically, let’s just rewind a couple of years to the start of the pandemic and when we all had to make some switches relatively overnight. I want to ask you, how did you feel going into that experience? Were you maybe excited and eager? Were you nervous and anxious or maybe a bit hesitant and unsure?
What I want to ask you to do one more time is to let me know right here in your tool, so I’m going to ask you to just go ahead and scan that QR code one more time. I’ll pop it up on screen. I’d love to hear how you felt going into that very first virtual experience. I’m seeing these bars toggle here. We’re getting up, again, over a hundred people starting to submit their votes, so thank you very much. Nervous and anxious has taken the lead here with nearly double the amount of votes as the next runner-up of excited and eager. We had a handful, well, two handfuls of us so far that were even a bit hesitant and unsure. View the image, see that number ticking up. A couple more seconds to go ahead and just submit your vote and we’re going to keep moving along here.
But I want you to just think about that, this experience that we all went through together, and these are just three very simple bucket choices of what that was like, and I’m sure that if we ask for a little bit more detail, we’d probably get a few different types of responses throughout there. But looking at how many people alone were in there in that nervous and anxious bar, I mean, again, we have now nearly double even the next runner-up, sorry, on that side here of excited and eager, and then again, we’re now up to about three handfuls of hesitant and unsure.
Now, looking at this, what led us into this type of behavior, maybe why we were nervous and anxious? I’d love to know. Again, please share with everyone in the chat, what was it that made you feel a bit more nervous or anxious about going into that first virtual experience? Just because that one has a pretty good number that I’d love to know, what is it that made us a bit more nervous and experience? I’m going to grab my chat right down below here so I can take a peek. I see the unknown, using some new tech. Just reading off the chat here as well, “Not knowing how things were.” All right. Again, even more people saying, “Just the unknown.” It’s all about the unknown. It was a brave new world for us to kind of venture into that maybe we dabbled with a little bit, but maybe not so much.
I want to now ask you this question, if you had to go back into this situation where you were to jump in online, would you feel the same? Would you still feel nervous and anxious? Or do you feel that over time and through different experiences it’s even changed your mindset and changed your approach to it? Now, I see someone that, “Now? Now I would welcome it.” All right, now you’re really ready for it. You feel excited. That’s the other thing is that our perceptions can certainly change even based off of the influences and the experiences that we have. Keeping that in mind, what’s really important to know is that those experiences definitely have an influence on us and for anyone that maybe had a little bit of a rocky road navigating that virtual world today may go, “I’m really still not too eager about going into it. I might be a little more hesitant. Again, I’d look back at what are those different types of experiences we had.
The Culture and Learning Expereince
When we talk about experiences that really have an impact on us, there’s two main ones that I want to focus on with us today and that’s the culture experience and the learning experience. To start out with culture, experience, culture experience is all about the shared beliefs and behaviors that we have with the community around us. Again, fellow staff members, our learners. What is it that we all believe in that we there we show up every day for? What are those behaviors that we all anticipate and contribute and we are all a part of?
When we think about the learning experiences that we’ll talk a little bit more in detail in a moment is really about those specific interactions that can transform our knowledge, our emotion, and our skills.
This is one, just piggybacking off of that question I just asked is, if I were to probably tell you today to rate yourself on how you perform on Zoom or maybe Google Class or any of your virtual LMS platforms, your skillset is probably a bit higher than it might have been three years ago when you first jumped into virtual learning. Your knowledge of tools and resources that are available and maybe again even how you feel about it, those are all moments that you might not be a traditional learner, but we’re all learners in life, #LearnForward, so when we think about learning experiences, they apply to all of us, but especially those of us in the roles of leadership like owners and educators, I want you to start thinking about those interactions you have with your learners.
The Culture Expereince
Now, let’s start out diving a bit deeper into our culture experience. Culture experience is building an environment, as we’ve mentioned, that community where individuals feel a part of, again, that tribe where they have this connection to the goals of everyone around them. They all feel like they’re adding value and helping to achieve something in common. What’s that impact they’re looking to make? What’s the purpose? Why are they there? Why do they walk through that door? Where is it that they’re a part of it and who else is there with them?
That culture experience is all about building that community and community again really helps create this sense of belonging. Everyone wants to really find their people. They want to create an authentic connection to the place around them and the people that they associate with. While we all come from different walks of life, we all are looking for people that share those common goals or a purpose. It’s a big thing, of course, that makes our school cultures unique and every single school has its unique and special secret sauce, so to say, and your learners gravitate to your communities because of that secret sauce. What is it about that overall feeling when they walk in the door all the way down to how they interact with the people, the greeting, that first experience they have to connect? What was it even like when they first called you on the phone or even explored your website?
As Chris mentioned, the $11,000, which is fantastic, Oozle Media website. That is the very first experience that many of our early learners will have with our school environments. Are you creating a sense of community and culture right there on your website? Is there excitement to communicate and talk with those new prospective learners on the phone? Are they really creating those unique bonds and finding that interest early on? And if they come in for those tours, are they really getting a sense of what that culture has to offer, really getting a chance to connect with some of the people around them. Again, learners are really looking for that sense of belonging, especially on that school side.
But even us as owners, as educators, as other administrative staff, financial aid, we’re also looking for a sense of belonging with the community we build, so do keep in mind that community has all different sides to it from top to bottom within your organization. That community has a lot of impact and really helps people get a sense of do they feel like they belong.
Are You Being Intentional With Your Schools Culutre?
Now, I’m going to give you a couple of tools of what I want you to just walk right out of here today with when you think about your culture and your community and your school. It starts with this question, ask yourself, “Are you being intentional with your school’s culture? Are you creating an environment where people want to be a part of it, where they feel that they belong?”
Here’s two things you can really look for. If you have a few phrases around your school of, “Well, this is how we do things,” or, “This is the way it’s always been, this is how we’ve always done it,” those types of phrases have a tendency to be a little bit more resistant to a real community aspect and it creates more of this standards of policies that set the culture when we’re really looking for that community sense, the ability for other people to belong, contribute, to be a part of, have a relationship to the common goals.
We really think about this phrase here can sometimes deter people from being a part of it because they’re looking for an opportunity to personalize it, make theirs contribute and add to the culture, so instead of maybe looking for phrases of, “This is how we’ve always done it,” we can say, “Well, that’s a great way that we can explore doing it. I’d love to hear more so we can look at maybe changing how we do things.
Culture evolves, and those in our school community, we need to evolve with it as we get different learners in our community that play a part and look for different experiences from us.
The other thing I want you to be mindful of and think about is what do you recognize and celebrate within your school? Now, just to throw it out there, some of the most common ones that we see are usually the highest attendance, the highest academic scores, really looking at those end results.
I’m going to tell you just a quick story here about the recognition of results and the impact that that can have on learners as well. Many decades ago, a research was done where two groups of student body were divided and they were recognized differently throughout the course of the year. One group was recognized based off of their results and they were always celebrated for perfection or near perfection. The other group, group B, they were recognized and celebrated for their efforts, so in other words, even if they might not have gotten a perfect 100%, they were recognized if their overall percentage might have been 1% higher than it was last time.
Throughout the year, those groups were recognized and celebrated, again, group A on their results, always the great job. “That’s what I expected from you. That’s the result I was looking for. That perfect score is what we want.” Where group B was all about the effort, “I really see the effort you’re putting into it. I see the amount of time you’re spending on that. I see the attention to detail. I really see what you’re putting in and that’s going to get you places.”
Now, at the end of the year, both groups were given an opportunity to choose an assessment of how they were reviewed and group A had a tendency to choose an assessment that was more reflective of what they had already done throughout the year. In other words, playing it safe so they can get the same results, where group B, they majority chose to take on a new challenge, something they had never been presented throughout the year because they were looking for opportunities to continue putting in new effort, so think about that when you recognize and celebrate. It’s great to call out some of those great results, but it’s also great to call out the effort of our learners and everybody has different levels of effort and different ways they’re putting it forward. How can you recognize that to draw everybody in, and again, help everybody feel like they belong? A few things that you can immediately walk back into your environments today and start thinking about culture.
But the other thing I want you to keep in mind is even if you go, “Maybe my culture is not where I want. That community is not where I want it.” Take this idea here, this quote from Malala Yousafzai.
“Start with something and it will lead to change.”- Malala Yousafzai
If you want to change the culture of your community and just again, be more mindful of it now, don’t try to make a change overnight. Start with something. Start with something small like a little bit of extra recognition to effort for a student that maybe changed the garbages that wasn’t asked, maybe to that one student who they might not be your perfect shining star as we’d traditionally call it, but you can see them putting effort in day in and day out. Recognize the effort that student that may not have perfect attendance, but they’re showing up every moment they can despite the three jobs and self-led homeowner that they are with a family that they’re putting in all the effort they really can. Start with something and it will lead to change within your community cultures.
With that, we’re going to keep this going. Let me know if you’re really picking up on this and if there’s already a few things you can use, just give me a quick yes in the chat and say, “Yes, I can definitely think about my culture. Yes, I could look for opportunities to recognize effort.” Let me see that chat start moving and I see the yeses. Awesome. Thank you for that.
The Learning Expereince
Well, let’s jump in and talk about the second topic here that I mentioned to be able to help us delight and disrupt our environments and that’s the learning experiences. Learning experiences are just as unique as the culture. There’s this other approach we have to focus on things we need to look at. Now, one more time, I’m going to ask you to look at something. I want you to take a look at this glass and let me know, is this half full or half empty? I’m going to throw that QR code up one more time so you can scan and jump on in. Is this glass half full or half empty? We’re getting up to over a hundred people jumped in there again, too. We’re climbing in the results. I’m going to let that go about another 10 seconds. 94 and climbing percent of us say, “This glass is half full.” 5% of us say, “Well, this glass is half empty.” Neither answer is going to be right or wrong here for us.
The Power of Perception
But it’s all about our perception and when we think about perception, it really, as I mentioned earlier, it has quite a bit of power and influence over us. The power of perception is so valuable when we think about that from a learning perspective and overall environment because it really sets the precedent for what we’re going to maybe get out of someone any individual when they join us on a journey of learning or being even a part of our community culture.
What’s unique about perception is everyone’s perception can be different even if our interactions are relatively the same. Everybody was just looking at the same glass and there was a percentage of us, again, about five to 6% that said that glass was half empty while a large majority said the glass is half full. And again, there’s no right or wrong answer to that one. It’s a matter of how you perceive it and what you maybe looked at there is that interaction might have been influenced by your journey today that you went on.
Maybe even, I’ll use an example of driving to work. We all make the journey of maybe driving to work here or there or we can think of a time that we did. Everyone makes that drive, but some of us absolutely love the drive to work. How many of us here, give me a thumbs up in the presentation right now if you love your drive to work. If you don’t love it so much, maybe even dread it a little bit, go ahead and use that laughing face reaction, let me know and go, “Yeah, that’s that drive to work. It’s not my favorite time, but you know what? It’s certainly time.”
Even though we’re all driving to work, those interactions can vary throughout that, so it’s the same overall general interaction we’re having, but the experience of, let’s say someone cuts you off in traffic, what’s that experience going to be like for you and how does that influence that interaction? Some of us might want to throw every type of inappropriate hand gesture at that person and say, “How dare you?” All right, maybe that’s glass half full for you. Some of us might go, “Wow, that person’s really got to go. They’re probably right on the edge of their seat.” I’m going to go ahead and just wave them on and say, “I hope you make it to the bathroom in time. Maybe that’s why they’re in such a hurry.”
Influencing Our Attitude
t’s that overall, those experiences that we’ve had that might lend to this perception that we go through, and that’s what we want to keep in mind is our perceptions and those experiences we have influence our attitude. Attitudes are so powerful. I have not been in a single institute across the world and spoken to owners, administrators, educators that didn’t say they want positive learners. They really wish they all had just a positive attitude and that their attitudes were really all about that work ethic and wanting to give it their most. Well, what I’d ask you to think about is, what’s influencing their perception?
When we think about that, again, thinking about these perceptions, these interactions, these experiences, I want you to think about three things we’ve mentioned earlier. What are those interactions like that influence or transform their knowledge, emotion, and skill? All right, knowledge, emotion, and skill. Or put differently, I want you to think about your learners and again, even if you’re an owner, think about your staff members. What are we doing to transform someone’s head, heart, and hands?
Influencing Head, Hearts, and Hands
Now, what that looks like, how can we actually create these experiences that influence a person’s, whether that be our learners, whether that be educators, their head, heart, and hands. I want to break this down and give you a few techniques and tactics that you could walk away with today and put into place right here, right now that should be pretty low effort on your side and hopefully keep it pretty easy.
Influencing The Head
Let’s talk about the head first. When we think about influencing and transforming someone’s headspace, right, their knowledge, what we need to do is recognize, like we did in that story earlier, the effort going in. Let’s look at our learner or staff member’s strengths, their resilience, their adaptability. What have they overcome in their life? What are they overcoming on a day-to-day basis? Let’s show that recognition that we value their experiences that they have and what they bring to our community.
What we can also do on an education side is look for ways that we can present information in more engaging ways. In the high and fast-moving world of digital technology and social media, we have a lot of type of stimuli coming our way. Well, I want to give you one that we are already using today that can help you maybe just elevate and increase the experiences that learners have when they’re gaining new information and that’s AhaSlides. I’m going to go ahead and just throw this one up a little bit larger because there’s another QR code on there. This is the presentation tool I’m using right here that’s very interactive, allowing you to be a part of it and actually customize your own experience. Maybe you’re playing along, maybe you’re loving the emojis, maybe you’re loving having this in the palm of your hand.
If you like that experience, you can scan this QR code and get yourself set up. Well, with a bonus account in AhaSlides, it costs you nothing. When I say “bonuses,” this QR code allows you to get, there’s a little bit of a head start on your first presentation, but AhaSlides is a free tool that any educator or school could bring into their classroom to engage their learners with presentations like this. Let’s meet our learners in more of that blended learning environment where we create that hybrid approach to that interaction, and again, we now create more positive perceptions of what it’s like to learn.
Influencing the Heart
Our second tactic here, focusing on and transforming the heart of those around us. We need to create that personal connection to information. Again, as I just mentioned, blended learning opportunities is what learners are really looking for. What can we also do to celebrate our learners publicly and create environments where we also collaborate with each other?
To give you a few tactics to help with that, I want to just share with you before we jump into that, this information on, here we go, blended learning and how much of a favorite of learners this is. In 2021, we did a survey and a majority, 45% of learners said that they actually prefer a blended environment. Now, you might be thinking blended means all online and it’s not. Blended means just incorporating tech. I heard this word, I’m going to give a shout-out to the Canvas Me team that I heard about a year ago, “phigital,” I believe was the word that they used. It’s the blend of physical and digital. Working with that, that’s what this blended environment is all about. A blended environment allows us to use tech to engage our learners where again, there is a percentage that enjoy it all online and many that still prefer in person.
But if we can create this interactive world that we’re all part of, we can reach everybody. Here’s a simple way you can do that. Social media. We all have it. We all use it. We might post pictures of that coffee or even our memories of that horseback riding in Ireland might be there or the poppy beach. Here’s what I want you to think about that you can put into effect today. Create a hashtag for your community. Every school should have a hashtag. Even an educator in every classroom could have their own unique hashtag. Use that to encourage that engagement and participation from your learners. Get them to share on social media or you also be active in sharing on social media.
As an example, at Pivot Point, we use the hashtag #LearnForward pretty much in every single post ’cause that’s just our motto. That’s our mantra. We want to continue learn learning forward and paying it forward to other people so they can keep their learning journey going. What can your own custom school hashtag be? It’s as easy as this. Go on social media and just put, “Hashtag, whatever you want,” and now you have your own hashtag. Make it something unique that everybody can use, and again, now you’re connecting with them on a very personal level of where your students and educators live, social media. You can also use tools like your own LMS if you use something like Pivot Point’s lab to celebrate learners in areas like custom banners and school announcements. Celebrate publicly to engage learners on that personal level right there in how they feel about it. I always like to say learning can be very personal, and when it’s personal, it becomes more permanent.
Influencing The Hands
Our very last tactic in our last chunk of time we have here is our hands. What can we do to transform the skills, the hands, the tools, the techniques that our learners are picking up and using, and even those of our staff members of the new tools, techniques and strategies they’re learning? Well, let’s support things like peer-to-peer coaching and actually challenge each other on varying levels. Sometimes we want it easy, but it’s also beneficial to take on an all-new challenge.
Here’s something I want you to consider that you can put into here of classroom immediately is what we call protege practice. With protege practice, we know that those that have the opportunity to tutor or coach other work harder to understand the concepts. They recall information more accurately and they apply information more effectively. This does not just apply to our learners, but also applies to fellow staff members. Allow other educators to coach each other, to coach even owners, take coaching and receive feedback from your staff, from your students. The more that we work together, the more beneficial it is to everybody involved to play a part there. Honestly, in today’s world, we definitely want a world of more coaches and more collaboration.
But hopefully these techniques here have helped you out with learning about how you yourself can look at the world through a different lens of experiences. What do you do to help others transform their head, their heart, their hands? How do you go about being intentional with the community that you create? This is something we all can do every day and everyone can influence. As one of my favorite quotes here from Albert Einstein,
“The only source of knowledge is experience.” – Albert Einstein
If you live a life of #LearningForward, experience is what really matters.
Have Questions? Contact Daniel at Pivot Point!
Chris Linford:
Daniel, thank you. Always world-class content presentation. We really appreciate you.
Daniel Dunworth:
Thank you.
Chris Linford:
How can get ahold of you if they have questions?
Daniel Dunworth:
Absolutely. You know what? I’ll make sure that I drop my email right there in the chat for those that may have a really good ear, it’s just ddunworth@pivot-point.com, but I’ll make sure that I drop that in the chat for everybody. Chris, thank you very much for that reminder.
Chris Linford:
Yes. ‘Kay, Daniel, again, thank you so much. I’m going to make you not a co-host. We appreciate you.
Daniel Dunworth:
I appreciate you all. Thank you again.
Chris Linford:
‘Kay, yes, everybody in the chat share some love for Daniel. What a great job.