Powerful collaborating—in-person or online (with video)
After using a Compass for the first time with a group of school leaders in her district, Dawn McWilliams commented "The time felt really productive and collaborative for the first time with this group." As she's generously shared on Twitter, she invites that group, as well as her own teachers, to use it frequently when they meet. They've used it from observing and supporting risk-taking by students and teachers in classroom, to redesigning professional learning and alternative education. She shares a set of actual Compasses from a session to create a shared vision and tackle shared challenges in this video.
Catherine Stines shares staff collaboration experiences at the Darrow School in this clip—and how using the Compass has led them to see problems differently: “There are solutions, and everyone has a voice.”
The free online app icompas.me has become very popular for remote collaboration—but also for in-person workshops with many people, as Jon Nordmeyer shares on Twitter and Audrey shows in this video.
Design professional Kyle Savage describes being able to brainstorm more productively with his corporate clients in this video.
In the photos above, a group of administrators used Compasses as a large group, and in small groups, to deeply understand pressing issues—and get to actions to try.
Product design & development, design sprints (with video)
Innovators’ Compass has its roots in product design—and has made its way back there.
In this video at a cafe on a busy street in Boston’s Innovation District, Kyle Savage talks about using Innovators' Compass in a user interface design firm—to offer a usable design process for the team, scaffold client meetings and brainstorms, and support his individual creative process.
For longer design projects, I’ve used the compass as a framework within which to teach/use other design tools (like Empathy Maps). For design sprints I’ve done with companies, the Compass alone makes a lean framework for rapidly understanding product users, experimenting with them, and iterating the design.
Community development and capacity building (with videos)
Garrett Mason coordinates training in Human-Centered Design and Community-Led Development for PACT and other organizations like CorpsAfrica and YES that work directly with local volunteers in their community challenges. As he describes in this video, he uses the compass as a direct tool to complement, and contain, all the other Design Thinking tools he teaches, so that they're extra portable when these people work in their communities.
In this collection of videos, YES alumni walk through their actual community-development Compasses. in this video and these videos, CorpsAfrica volunteers talk about the program and give kind shout-outs to the Compass for its role.
Garrett facilitated a meeting among NGO leaders in Liberia who are starting a chapter for the Movement for Community-Led Development using a Compass-question-led discussion, and his colleague Ann Hendrix-Jenkins captured the main points in this Compass.
Sue Borchardt uses the Compass in church-basement-based change-making conversations with her Baltimore community.
Nicola Chin is another rock star in empowering communities. Here she profiles the Compass on her site, UpWithCommunity.org—among many wonderful tools she offers.
Convenings and conferences to solve challenges (with video)
As shown in this video, participants at the United States and California Conferences on AIDS dug into ways they can support people with very different strengths and challenges in the HIV+ and HIV- community in AIDS prevention and care. The video continues to show participants at the Front End of Innovation conference working in coaching pairs on their individual business challenges.
As they’ve depicted on Twitter, Audrey O’Clair, Tanya Avrith, Hillary Goldthwait-Fowles, Michael Hernandez, Jon Nordmeyer, Johanna Prince, and Matt Drewette-Card have all used the Compass (often digitally) to enable large groups at education conferences to share observations, principles, and ideas around common educational challenges, from how to support learners with adaptive technology to how to navigate challenging administration.
The compass has been used for many other conferences, as diverse as the National Science Teachers Association to the Alliance for Community Media.
On a somewhat smaller scale, working in subteams, the New York Community Trust brought together members of 50 different arts organizations—which usually compete for funding— inviting them to tackle shared challenges together over two days. They did a first compass as an entire group to identify challenges, including helping diverse new artists find sustainable work; connecting arts policy to wider social policy; re-imagining cultural funding; fostering community planning that nurtures culture. They "voted with their feet" and formed groups to explore these more deeply with dedicated compasses. They paused for a "gallery walk"—walking around to leave thoughts and questions on sticky notes on each others' work. They worked through to concrete experiments.
The Massachusetts Health Quality Partnership recently convened groups of patients, physicians, and insurers to similarly identify issues most critical to them, and explore how MHQP might make a difference.
Family Therapy and Support
In this writing, Jean Ross explains how she trains nurses in using the Compass to coach overwhelmed family caregivers of the elderly find sustainable ways to support their loved ones.
Dvora Kravitz uses the Compass to help problem-solve and develop solutions together with learners of all ages and their families.
Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Design Thinking workshops & training (with video)
This journey began as a way to let people immediately see and use Design Thinking—so they can learn by doing rather than lots of lecturing.
Entrepreneurship programs like 4.0 Schools, MIT DesignX, and Latinos For Education have used the compass as a core tool for training and supporting budding entrepreneurs.
At the Front End of Innovation conference workshop above, my co-facilitator Dan Coleman introduced the compass very briefly. The participants used it in 4 ways in pairs: quickly, without writing, to make their workspace more creative and comfortable; to improve the next time they walk in the door at home; (the longest) to tackle a present work problem on their mind, and to reflect on their experience. Dan made sure they got to real experiments, with real accountability! A short video overview of this experience is in this video.
These are full-length videos from workshops for students, staff, and community at Grand Valley State University. These both involve participants working on individual challenges in pairs or small groups; a third workshop, not filmed, enabled teams to work on shared challenges of interest.
I and others have used the Compass to teach design thinking at educational conferences like SXSWedu, Computer-Using Educators, DesignCamp, 4.0 Schools, Big Picture Learning Big Bang, Head Start National Learning Communities meeting, and the Accenture Boston International Women’s Day Event.
High schoolers have learned design thinking with the compass at entrepreneurship summer programs at Berklee School of Music and Northeastern University.
It's also been used in ongoing coaching programs for educators, administrators, corporate leaders and consultants.
In this video, Audrey O’Claire shares how she uses the icompass.me app to get groups collaborating and creative.
Productive Twitter chats
The Compass questions are an easy go-to for Twitter chats on any topic. Here are some I’ve done with Erin Quinn on designing your summer, Kathy Fritz on project-based learning, Michelle Blanchet on working with parents, David Coffey on lesson/learning planning, Ashley White on questions that push our [design] thinking, and on my own about designing your decade (in Jan 2020). Tara Martin, Hillary Goldthwaith-Fowles, and others have done this as well.
Seeing your career path for yourself
Our career is a critical things we navigate. The Compass have given people space to pause, reflect and dream, like Wendy Fairon of High Tech High here as she embarked on her first administrative position.
Or, space to prep more meaningfully for a job interview like Kyle Pace. He actually shared his Compass with the staff interviewing him—and feels it played an important role. He did get the position as Director of Technology for his Missouri school district!
Coaching others in careers and more (with videos)
Ela Ben-Ur developed the Compass initially for her coaching. You can see her coach an entrepreneur/leadership development professional as he works through a personal challenge with the Innovators' Compass in these videos.
As an instructional coach, Tara Martin fused Innovators’ Compass with her R.E.A.L. approach to help individuals to see and support their personal and professional goals. She passionately shows her approach in this video, and in her recent book.
Team forming and checkups (with video)
A team’s results are only as good as the quality of their teamwork. I ask both professional and student teams I coach to consciously design their teamwork experience.
As shown at 2:18 in this video with students at Olin College, students begin with a “Team Formation Compass” that enables them them draw on their experiences together, and in other teams, to set starting team principles, ideas and experiments for working together well.
The team returns to this compass any time they observe that their teamwork could use some work.
Solo prep for team work
In my days as an IDEO team leader, I'd invite my team to explore a challenge a bit on their own before getting together—even just one or two observations, principles, ideas, or experiments.
If that issue involves their team, they'll have productive thoughts to share. If it doesn't, they'll know they've taken steps to deal with the issue so they can focus on their team and teamwork.
I do this with my students as well. In the design course pictured above, especially later in the semester as deadlines and stress add up, my co-professor and I invite students to spend 5 minutes solo before jumping into their team work. They dump out what's on their mind onto sticky notes. Then they take the thing that's got them most worried and, on a sticky note, do a little compass about it. We talk about this at the beginning of this video.
Active reflection ("reflACTION") on experiences
Every ending is a new beginning—if we can make use of the experience we just had. Groups like Kari Ratka's teachers shown here have used a Compass to capture their observations after a shared experience, like a week in professional development or a conference, or something that just went very well or badly. And then, they’re able to get the most out of those experiences by turning them into into principles, ideas, and experiments to move forward. It’s a bit cheesy but I like to call this reflACTION.
Note-taking during obervations
This educational product company used (an earlier version of) the Compass to capture observations and thoughts during early edtech co-design sessions with elementary school children.
Progress updates
When this group of NJ Public School administrators came together for a retreat, they were able to quickly create a “Compass Gallery” to share their experiments, learnings, and achievements over the last year. [Note this earlier Compass format didn’t have the People circle yet].