Mornings can be painful, whether you're managing a family, or just your own life, so I’ve found this to be a topic from professionals to preschoolers.

Caustan DeRiggs, a single professional, chose making mornings work as the topic to work through in this Compass example (full video here, or highlights here in this Compass overview video). And my own preschooler’s morning dropoff challenge can be seen later in the same video.

Ari Yares blogged about using the Compass to help his family with older kids co-design a way through the chaos of family mornings and lunch packing.

We also used a compass with our 5-year-old whose Kindergarten mornings and bedtimes were rough. We learned she wasn't enjoying them any more than we were, and getting through them on time and "with fun" mattered most. The experiment we chose was for her to draw the steps in her mornings and evenings, and a little clock next to each one. We put it next to the family wall clock. It was great being able to point to her own writing. It took a few iterations to get the timing right though!

Our family started using a compass to plan each vacation together so we’d feel it was as special for of all of us as it could be.

With the COVID-19 school closure, we had a whole different kind of downtime to design. Here’s a short video about that experience.

Even small changes can be hard on small people.  When my (Ela's) older daughter Maia kept saying "I don't want my sister Dalia to come to preschool with me", we spontaneously used our first physical compass together.  What was happening? She was worried they'd both get teased. She started drawing—and drew them happy together.  What mattered to her was that Dalia likes being the youngest there. Among her ideas were getting help from teachers and parents, talking to the kids themselves. As an experiment, she suggested bringing the compass (well, the part that was portable) in to talk to her teachers, who were really enthusiastic.  We didn't hear her complain again. We asked her what happened at the end of the Dalia's first week—and they didn't get teased.  

This is another story from my own family. Though I’d spent years creating “design principles” for organizations, it took me awhile to realize our family should name some principles that apply at all times. My girls, then just 2 and 4, loved the experience of making these together on the computer, and the fun “C’s” that came out.

After a few months, my older daughter said “Another principle is FUN!” Sure enough, whenever we were stuck as a family (e.g. a bedtime battle), throwing some fun or humor into the mix—and it was usually my husband’s good intuition to do that—was a big step to making things better. So we added it as a sticky note.

Audrey O'Clair has engaged her family with Compasses at important transitions—including the "cardinal sin" of moving her family with a 7th grade daughter:

"We wrote everyone who was involved—housekeeper, neighbors, friends, us, pets... We—all ages—were all contributing...It was sloppy and messy...We kept it. My favorite section to go back to is the dreaming big. I’ll never throw it out, I'll carry it to my grave. I know to my core that it shaped our whole experience. From that point on—it wasn't that we weren't working together before, but moving forward blindly—but this helped us move together, move forward in a more meaningful way. I just can't believe it but every one of the dream bigs has happened.”

(Image credit: Mark Moz, Flickr)

Whine:  She's pushing me. My _____ broke. I have a headache. 

It started one day when my then-3-year-old daughter's cereal fell on the floor. I said "Great observation—got any ideas?"  She got out of her chair and picked them up, saying "We should do things for ourselves." "Great principle!" I replied. 

As we've continued doing this, I've found our kids' ideas are just as often often to ask us nicely for help as to do things themselves; we're fine with that.

Often when kids are just frustrated, they're lacking the observation that would make everything clear to them.  We've got a phrase in our house: "When something's not working, what do you do? Look at it!". So if a child is frustrated with something is stuck or broken, we start with "Let's look at it" or "What's happening?"  Often they'll quickly see what's wrong, and how to fix it. If a total fix isn't obvious, it can help to clarify a principle before offering ideas—"Does it matter to you if it's still able to move all the way?"

And, both my kids and husband have used this on me...which is also great!

What might your journey be next year? Audrey O'Clair engaged her family in exploring their New Year's resolutions a bit with Compasses—to help them dream bigger, and yet get to smaller, do-able experiments.

She inspired our family—we started a family compass at New Year’s—and then found ourselves wanting one at the beginning of the school year in late August as well. That makes a great transition from the summer, and then the New Year’s one comes in nicely after all the school transitions have passed. Here’s a clip from a couple of these. And here’s a resulting new-school-year compass.

Peek also at Tara Martin's work under "Teams and Work" below—it's great for New Year's too!

Entrepreneur and leadership professional Caustan De Riggs used Innovators' Compass to explore work-life balance—how to support his creative work along with his sleep and wellness—in this video.

In the image above, teacher Kevin Day used the Pocket Compass to explore how to be more at his best on a school trip. Observing that his "To Do" list was more on his mind than his "To Be" list, and setting a principle that "All here" matters more than "All done",  he tried making his "To Be" list a real thing in his notebook.

Says Kevin "I'm compass-ing my way through my anxiety.  I'm finding the compass to be a tool that helps me slow down, get oriented -- and try something."  

The Woodrow Wilson Graduate School of Teaching and Learning, the new graduate school of education in partnership with MIT, has chosen to use design, practiced using Innovators' Compass, as a central competency. In this video, see Dan Coleman, former Chief Learning Officer, and their cohort of teaching students in action!

Also see this video, in which one of their Teacher Candidates, Xheni Mucelli, talks about her experiences with the Compass to help mentor her students, as well as to help herself develop student-centered teaching and design her classroom.

Chelsea Ridge, of Grand Valley State University’s Regional Math & Science Center, and her student Sue Lenard iterated on “Energizing our World,” a summer camp for middle-schoolers scaffolded on Innovators’ Compass—from observations at community agriculture, energy, and recycling facilities to experimental prototypes and a “shark tank” review with energy professionals. They wrote a fantastic article for the Michigan Science Teachers Association quarterly publication about it!

Computer teacher Caroline Meeks’ class used the compass in many different ways almost daily to design apps, gather observations and ideas to iterate them, and give feedback on their project experience. More details and pictures here.

Middle school science teacher Valeria Rodriguez shares how her students use Innovators’ Compass to develop, iterate, communicate, and reflect on STEM projects at 5:00 in this video for the National Science Teachers Association.

English teacher Dan Ryder (Maine) and Melissa Foley-Procko (Massachusetts) have their English students create a Compass around a book character to launch a design project. Dan wrote wrote a Medium piece about his class’ project that led his students to a working Little Bits prototype!

In a course I co-teach with anthropologist Caitrin Lynch at Olin College students design a real working product to help an older adult in the community. A complete website dedicated to sharing this course, including lots of real student work, is here, and starts with a great, short overview video that’s also here.

Drew Zachary, Morgan Muschamp, and Blake St. Louis, who adapted the resources to create a course at Beaver Country Day School that encourages high school students working with senior-living residents to "Focus on the people—and design with them at the center." More in their blog, here and here.  

Rosita Darden describes a similar design project for older adults, but with younger students, in this tweet. And here her students explore different design projects.

Many colleges are opening centers for innovation or design thinking to nurture creative problem solvers across campus. They’re often looking for accessible, powerful tools to unleash the creativity and change-making of students, faculty, and staff on campus or community challenges without a lot of training.

David Coffey, Director of the Grand Valley State Design Thinking Academy (GVSUDTA) wrote a beautiful, short story for Getting Smart about how the Compass has been “a tool that enables students to make an immediate impact.” For example, the Compass was the tool the GVSUDTA used when the university President invited students to co-design the future of the school.

Other college and university centers using the Compass include

Smith College’s Design Thinking Initiative, Elon University’s Center for Design Thinking, and Florida International University’s Startup FIU. Emily Gresham has shared some photos on Twitter, and shared thoughts with me:

“For us it was the thing we were looking for in terms of accessibility. We don’t believe it’s fair you that need to read, to have access to affordable housing, in order to begin to think about solving your problem. And those problems are so big, so why can’t we just break them down? And so I feel like our using it for as many audiences—from HR to entrepreneurs, to students who are confused—that’s earth-shatterting to me...”

College “Life Design” courses are exploding to help students navigate their choices at and after college. Smith College uses an adapted Compass as the center of their “Getting Unstuck When You Don’t Know What’s Next” workshops, as highlighted in this Christian Science Monitor cover article.

This long-term view is the focus for the second half of my “life design studio” co-curricular at Olin College. In the picture above, sophomore Mikhaela Dietch explores her potential professional interests and what courses and experiences might support them, and Senior Emily Wang offers her extra ideas.

On the school-year scale, James Campbell invited each of his 6th grade students to design a successful year for themselves.

As she details in the second part of this video, Valeria Rodriguez uses the compass to scaffold Parent-Teacher conversations.

Hillary Goldthwait-Fowles has pioneered using the Compass app, along with the SETT framework, to help parents and support teams (teachers, mental health, occupational therapy, other administrators) develop and evolve Adaptive Technology, Universal Design For Learning approaches for individual learners.

As she's shared here and here on Twitter, Aurora, CO principal Dawn McWilliams uses the Compass in meetings about students with parents and support teams as well. As she described in one case, “it helped identify his strengths. By the time we ideated, we built from assets."

Dawn has also draw in her international parent community as a whole—in this picture, to share their experiences of inclusion to-date in the school, and to explore ways to share their culture. She reached out to me to re-include visual icons on the compass to help bridge language barriers.

Students (of all ages) have no shortage of challenges to navigate in their own lives. Seeing how our observations, ideas, etc. serve us from academics to our lives and social-emotional learning is very powerful.

In this great clip, Catherine Stines demonstrates how she invites students to first help her with a challenge so they’ll dig into their own.

Caroline Meeks gave her 9th grade class was given 10 minutes to "Compass" on anything on their mind. Nearly half the class focused on stress around an upcoming math test, as shown in the image above. Other topics students explored: how to find time for a haircut, how to approach a girl, how to earn money, and how to improve a project.

Melissa Foley-Procko shared some of her students “unsticking” challenges, like managing their own screen time, using compasses in this tweet.

I’ve long had a “life studio” co-curricular at Olin College—an hour per week students where use the compass, complementary tools, and their peers to make anything better in their lives for the first half, and explore life pathways in the second half. Students have tackled time management, teammate and roommate conflicts, how to be better teaching assistants, feelings of Imposter’s Syndrome, and other topics.

Principal Dawn McWilliams has used a compass in coaching conversations with individual students who are struggling. She took notes in this compass with a student struggling to focus in math class. The observations revealed how people around him are affected, and affect him—and how much his teacher believes in him. And, why he fails to focus in math, whereas he's successful in other subjects. He identified how much it matters to him to have "support" from his peers so that he can focus in math and reach his longer goals. That principle led to an idea and experiment for him that was successful and grew bigger: "The teacher now has her students talk to and state their intentions daily in a class meeting so that they can support each other with their intentions."

This 1-minute video shows how Valeria Rodriguez’ middle school class in Miami used the Compass individually and together to process their Hurricane Irma experience.

I got to join Mary Marotta, Melissa Foley-Procko, and Taryn Grigas as they invited students at Nashoba Regional High School to “Make things better!” Students chose to focus on issues like keeping focus during long classes when they’re hungry. They shared some of the students’ reflections here: “fun, made me think different, efficient, collaborative.”

Across the country in San Diego, Shelby Fuentes’ classes have worked together how to improve substitute teacher days, read more, help caterpillars cross the street, save their Arugula plants, and clean their class more efficiently.

As Valeria Rodriguez tweeted from Miami, and Erin Quinn shared in this video and wrote in a Medium piece from Calgary, Canada, the Compass can help classrooms create their own social contracts and culture.

Dan Wise at Prospect Hill Academy Charter school envisioned a final creative experience for his seniors: to create a "commencement" address—in writing, video, or any way they please—capturing their experiences and learning to this point in their lives. He guided them with a compass and lots of inspiring commencement speech examples.  They shared their work frequently with one another, as experiments to test how this "voice" and message felt for them, as well as how it felt to others.

The addresses are deeply inspiring—and the students were fully engaged in their last two weeks of school!

Michael Dawson had 5th grade students explore potential short-term school improvement projects with quick Compasses (an adaptation of earlier Compass language). Students went around their school for 25 minutes with a camera noticing things they might want to work on, then spent another 20 minutes exploring what it might feel like to work on four different topics.  

In this video, students in my Olin College course Engineering for Humanity do this as well, exploring three potential projects with their older adult partner before choosing one for their semester-long design project. 

For a design review, teams of Pomfret School students working on campus design projects expressed their current work with Compasses to make their thinking visual so they could get input from their peers and teachers. One of these compasses is here.

Olin College Engineering for Humanity students frequently show their projects for formal presentations (“Design Reviews” shown on the course share site) and informal presentations (“Process reviews” on the same site) using their Compass work. The image above is from one of their final presentations, highlighted in this video.

Alexandra Strong, former professor at Olin College (now at Florida International University), used a compass to write down observations students shared in a class conversation about how things are going with a design project.

The student teams were able to see similar and different challenges they were facing. They then got to offer principles, ideas, and experiments that anyone in the class could use to learn and move forward.

Every conversation with a student is a time we can engage one or more of the pieces of the Compass.  In this dialogue, shown in the final chapter of this book,  Michael Dawson and I talk a student through her homework challenges. 

Principal Dawn McWilliams and her assistant Principal Mitch Davison (seen here) have used Compasses to help groups of students work through conflicts together. Their reflections are written above...but the engaged body language of the students says just as much. They walk through a playground conflict-resolution Compass in this video.

Megan Ewanyk and Kaitlyn Curry have shared their students’ experiences independently resolving playground and cafeteria conflicts as well.

As illustrated to open this article about the Compass, the teacher of this 2nd grade at the Driscoll Public school in Brookline was relieved to have is students do a joint Compass around the social challenges they've been having at recess (instead of whining to him about them). The students tried—and evolved—their experiments right away at the next recess. Just as importantly, this revealed the challenges of one student, in a bussing program from Boston, and enabled a conversation and progress around including him more in the class.

At this preschool, the Compass found a home at the "Peace Table"—as a visual prompt to help teachers guide pairs of quarreling students find better ways forward.  Different visual versions of the Compass can be found at the Resources link. 

Sophomores in my Olin College courses sketch their "spider diagrams" — their tendencies in exploring their observations, etc—at the beginning of the semester and again at the end.  This helps them, their teachers, and their project teams see and support their goals and their growth, and see how teams might work well together. 

You can find this chart under Resources.

Educator Kevin Day printed a handful of pocket compasses to bring on his school retreat. On one he planned a powerful history project for his students—which he expanded in his notebook when he returned home. 

Valeria Rodriguez led a session at the National Science Teachers Association Stem Forum about teachers using the Compass for cross-curricular lesson planning together.

Michael Hernandez used Compasses with his students to have student voice in launching and shaping his Journalism class.  He used it again at the end of the year as a "final assessment"—actually designing next year's class!

As seen at 3:56 in this video, my own Olin College students do the same—and keep the Compass going throughout the class to capture observations, principles and ideas for improvement as they come. Some of the bigger-change ideas may have to wait till next year—but we try out as many experiments as we can!

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.

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.

Garrett Mason in Human-Centered Design and Community-Led Development for CorpsAfrica, and in the past for other organizations like PACT 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.

This is an excellent, detailed case study from CorpsAfrica about a community in Kenya iteratively developing kitchen gardens. And this is a story with schoolchildren tackling lack of funding for school. More case studies from Kenya and Malawi briefly mentioning the Compass are here, here, here, here, and here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.  

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].

Computer teacher Caroline Meeks uses the compass in many different ways almost daily as her students design apps (lower left), gather observations and ideas about them (upper left), and even give feedback on her class. 

As an English teacher Dan Ryder used a compass around a book character to launch a design project...that led his students to a working Little Bits prototype!  He wrote a Medium piece about it.