ASSIGNMENT ON REFLECTION – LEARNING LAUNCH

As I advanced through this course, I came across many design thinking tools. But  the one that created a vital impact on my mindset was – Learning Launch.  Learning Launch is a carefully designed experiment designed to test the key  underlying value-generating assumptions of a potential new-growth initiative. The  attitude of learning overcomes the stigma associated with success or failure that  limits innovation and growth in many businesses.  As this particular tool is  specifically based on continuous improvement, it is able to identify the customer’s  unarticulated needs and cater to emotional sensations of the product experience.  It captures the emotional highs and lows in relation to the customer’s perception  of a new idea/product. Unlike the pilot study, used to evaluate the feasibility of  new methods and implementation of novel intervention, learning launch focuses  on continuous improvement through iterations.

Challenges that led to the selection of the tool

I am an academician and basically my workplace consists of my engineering  college campus. I work in the capacity of an HOD in the department of mechanical  engineering. The challenge was to detect the reason for absenteeism of students  from the college after the lunch breaks.

Now the reflection according to my perspective is that we, being an engineering  college are service providers of our students. In other words, it can be said that  we are offering a product of learning/knowledge to a fixed set of customers, i.e.   our students. Hence, in this particular context, our students are essentially our  customers.

It was sure that there was some dissatisfaction among the students, because of  which they were motivated to behave in a particular way. We and our team  members consistently observed that the students were not available for the  lecture and practical sessions arranged after recess time. We tried counseling the  students with positive and negative reinforcement techniques as well but this did  not work. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that the problem was more

deep-rooted and we had to tackle the young impressionable minds  EMPATHETICALLY.

Inorder to accomplish this task, we formed a group of interested faculty  members, something that we call quality circles in “Total quality Management”  and tried to resolve our challenge with a very human-centric approach.

Our college timings are from 8:45 am to 3 pm. We extended our search beyond  the college campus. We started keeping tracks of groups of students from the  nearby centres of commute like bus stops and railway stations. Going beyond the  campus and making observations led us to the conclusion that there was a lot of  students, almost 1/4th of the entire college strength belonging to all semesters  who willingly chose not to enter the college campus at all. We formed a special  team of faculty members to first observe and understand what were their  activities are. We also tried to understand the influences of peer behavior on the  student groups.

For our target audience, we had to figure out the behavior trends exhibited by  each one of them. Through careful analysis and observation, we followed first a  few most notorious ones, representative of the entire sample and then the whole  lot. By being friends with them and through ethnographic surveys and open- ended questions, we inferred that the students were not interested to attend the  practical sessions of the otherwise dull, boring and uninspiring faculty members.  Also more than 50% lot was under the influence of their peers.

We also concluded that the intrinsic motivation not to learn and the extrinsic  motivation to escape from the college campus had led many students to take up  substance abuse like smoking and tobacco consumption. We had to involve the  parents of such students in the counseling process and be cognizant with the  deeper psychologies of the teenagers.

So basically, we had to make changes in the system itself to make it more  acceptable to our set of target customers, in this case our students.

Sneha Santu

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