My Reflection – Design Thinking

Challenge:

I am currently serving as President of Alumni association of my alma mater, a leading Management  education institute in India. It is a relatively young institute and has completed only a decade since  inception. I am a graduate from the 3rd batch.  Every year, we are joined by Young Professionals aspiring  to become future managers and leaders across our MBA and Executive MBA programs. Since last three  years, we have witnessed a decline in the emotional and cultural connect students have with the institute  during and after the course. Entrepreneurship and socially responsibility are key tenets of our culture  which was inculcated in pioneer batches. The shift was due to multiple factors; we moved to new  permanent campus and lost the heritage of old one which was further augmented by sharp increase in  student enrolments. We, as alumni group was a little worried. We wanted to ensure that students imbibe  cultural heritage and struggles of the institute to the incoming students along with the force which binds  it together.

Selection & Application:

I brainstormed with my team and selected two good methods through which we can pass on right  message and also have student’s attention for a longer duration. Due to pandemic, we could only interact  with the students virtually. One is through visualization, where we can show, pictures and videos of our  journey from Day-1 and tell upcoming students how we have evolved in last one decade. What we did  right and what we learnt so far and course corrected. The other method was storytelling which required  passing on the message through personal stories of time we have spent on campus and how it has helped  us do better in subsequent years so far.  We finally decided to use “Story Telling” and the biggest reason  was the fact that through stories we can tell students how those learning have benefited us.  This will also  ensure we don’t bore students and leave them without any clear take away.

We decided to have two dedicated sessions for incoming students. I selected six high performing alumni  who are doing very well in their post MBA journey and are well-connected with the institute as well since  they graduated. Each alumnus was tasked to come prepared and focus on different aspects of our culture  and heritage We had multiple dry runs to iterate and refine our key story points.

Insights & Approach:

During both the sessions, alumni seal the deal. They presented the messages with their own student life  anecdotes and also covered how that helped. I started and presented my thoughts with below points

  Build and nurture relationships – Be it personal or professions on both fronts, relationships  should be nurtured continuously and why we shouldn’t wait for a time to come to start thinking  about them. I told how our institute have very inclusive culture built on mutual respect

  Work on at least one of your weakness in next 2 years – For me it was Written and Oral  communication in English. I am good orator since childhood but when it came to English as  medium of communication, I struggled. I told students what how our institute helped me

  Learn to Prioritize and strengthen one of your existing strength – I told them how I nurtured my  leadership’s skills by taking multiple positions of responsibilities along with becoming President  of Student council. I discussed what avenues available are and how it can be leveraged. I told  them funny stories and sleepless nights I have spent

After we completed both the sessions, we asked students for a detailed feedback. We found that  students loved the sessions and understood what as an institute we stand for and what we aspire to  become. After their first term was over, we asked Professors about it and to our surprise we were told  that students do quote learning from the Alumni sessions during class discussions and are more aligned  with our values and culture.

Approach - Due to pandemic, we did these two sessions virtually this year but after initial success, we  have decided that next year, we will ask alumni to come to campus in person and rather than a class  room session. Alumni will walk through the students to the campus down the memory lane with nuggets  of wisdom, they acquired.

