Enter “Designing Your Life,” a new and wildly popular course for Stanford juniors and seniors that is grounded in design thinking concepts and techniques. The course’s lessons gave him the perspective he needed to navigate decisions about life and work post graduation.

“It really helped me understand what the concept of vocation was,” he says. “I had thought of it either as a narrowly religious concept or for a specific job. But it’s this feeling that I have true agency over my work, because I know what I stand for and I have tools to fix the things that I encounter in my life.”

He felt liberated, he says, by how the course positioned the idea of career success: “Take your work personally, but it’s not your person.”

At the time, “Designing Your Life” was still an experiment, spearheaded by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford’s design program, and Dave Evans, who led the design of Apple’s first mouse and co-founded Electronic Arts before embarking on a second career in the classroom. They launched the course in spring 2010.

“It took off in just about a heartbeat,” says Evans, who oversees instruction with help from guest lecturers and a small army of student volunteers, who lead discussion groups. Today, 17% of seniors enroll in “Designing Your Life,” and many more vie for the limited seats in each section. “We’ve had students literally teach the class on the side to their friends who weren’t enrolled,” he says.

Evans divides the course into two parts: first, he says, “We reframe the problem. That’s where dysfunctional beliefs get blown-up. Then we give them a set of tools and ideas to take steps to start building the way forward.” Each course section convenes for one quarter, two hours per week.

Here’s what they learn: gratitude; generosity; self-awareness; adaptability. All reinforced by design thinking-based tools, from a daily gratitude journal to a deck of cards featuring problem-solving techniques. In lieu of a final exam—the class is pass/fail—students present three radically different five-year plans to their peers. Alumni say they still refer back their “odyssey plans”—a term that Evans coined—and revise them as their lives and careers progress.

We’ve had students literally teach the class on the side to their friends who weren’t enrolled.
Maquebela eventually found out that he had played a role in his now-wife’s odyssey plan—but at the time, “she wouldn’t show it to me.” Today, they still reference “Designing Your Life” when making decisions together. “Building your life around somebody else, and orienting around love as part of one’s career, is part of the class,” he says.

For years, students have resisted this kind of overlap between university-sponsored programs and their private lives. After the Civil War, mandatory chapel disappeared, academics rather than ministers became university presidents, and courses like “Evidences of Christianity” vanished from the required curriculum.

“Universities didn’t think they would necessarily be abandoning the moral aspects of students’ education,” says Julie Reuben, a Harvard professor who studies the history of American higher education. “Instead, they believed that freely chosen activities were more powerful than externally forced activities.”

But, to the chagrin of university leaders, many students abandoned religion and instead embraced extracurricular outlets like athletics and fraternities, which in their own way took on the function of character-formation. In the mid-20th century, the university’s role as authority figure became even more problematic and contested, as protesters dismantled the Ivory Tower’s paternalistic structures and paved the way for increasingly diverse and inclusive institutions. The success of “Designing Your Life” suggests that students may be ready to revisit that earlier university model, with conditions—conditions that design thinking is perhaps well-suited to address.

“In the early academy it was all about moral formation. These days you can’t do that,” Burnett says. “Design doesn’t speak to ethics and spirituality and all those things, but they work within its frameworks. Our only bias is, hey, we can make the future better.”

The goal of “Designing Your Life,” he says, is to change higher education—not by returning to religion, but by reintroducing methods of “forming you into the person that will go out into the world, effect change, and be a leader.”

That message resonates with Stanford students. They are filled with a sense of purpose and determined to solve the world’s problems—but ill-equipped, in our secular society, to make sense of what they value.

Our only bias is, hey, we can make the future better.
Karen Wright, a management science major with a wry sense of humor, says the odyssey plan exercise better prepared her to live out her commitment to making a difference in the world. “I felt a lot of pressure before the odyssey plan: I need to pick a career,” says the California native. At the course end, she presented three starkly divergent scenarios to Evans and her classmates: working in health care and going to business school; joining the Peace Corps; and competing on American Ninja Warrior (surely an odyssey-plan first). “Your eyes light up when you talk about the Peace Corps,” her classmates said—so for now, she’s focused on door number 2.

What’s more, her parents are more supportive than they were before; Wright presented her odyssey plan to them, too. “My family is all from one area,” she says. “Ultimately, after graduation, I plan on not being around. I think I was able to convey to my parents more effectively why I want to travel and what I want to get out of it.”

As Burnett sees it, the course is also a neat fit for the mercurial economy that students are graduating into. “The thing that’s true about design problems is that you don’t know what the solution is going to look like. You don’t start with the problem; you start with people,” he says. “You create a point of view about what a better consumer experience would be. Then you prototype, you test, and you constantly change your point of view. That’s perfect for your ‘Designing Your Life.’ You can’t know the future, but you can know what’s available and you can prototype different versions of the you that you might become.”

Photo: Flickr user Esparta Palma
That approach stands in contrast to the habit of “accumulating accolades” that Burnett sees many students exhibiting at Stanford. Indeed, pressure to succeed is very much top of mind for Stanford students like Nick Xu, an architecture major from Sydney, Australia. He pauses for a moment from his Aussie-accented praise of Evans’s course (“freaking awesome!”) to reflect in a more serious way on the campus climate he and his peers inhabit. “Here, you’ve got to be viewed as successful,” he says. “There’s a very empty pursuit of money—money’s a big part of it—but also fame and perception, how other people view you.” “Duck syndrome” is a common malady: “You look like you’re floating on the surface, but you’re paddling furiously underneath.”

“I was a total duck,” he adds. “I really needed this class.”

Stanford administrators have taken notice of reactions like Xu’s. “It’s a model, as an administrator, that is not cheap, because it’s hands-on and requires small groups,” says Harry Elam, vice provost of undergraduate education. Nonetheless, he has asked Evans to develop a pared-down version of “Designing Your Life” for freshmen and sophomores as a complement to their academic advising. The resulting program, “Designing Your Stanford,” launched with its first cohort last fall.

Elam views both offerings as an answer to the prominent skeptics, like Peter Thiel, who question whether the traditional four-year college experience is worth the investment. “It’s very important that we reclaim what it means to get a liberal arts education,” he says. “College is not just a means to an end, but an end in itself.”

Buttressing that philosophy has taken on new urgency as “college” migrates online; in 2013, over 5 million U.S. college students, out of roughly 20 million, enrolled in at least one web-based course, according to the Babson Survey Research Group. American universities—today an unwieldy mix of liberal arts, professional training, and research—may have to focus in order to compete, education writer Kevin Carey argues in his new book, The End Of College. At a recent New America Foundation event, he pointed to the University of Minnesota-Rochester, located near the Mayo Clinic, as emblematic of the new model; the school offers only two majors, health sciences and health sciences administration, resulting in a cost structure that is is “a million times better than that of a typical second-tier institution.”

Stanford is very much a first-tier institution. Last year, it admitted just 5.7% of the students who applied. But as a residential college, it’s not immune from the vagaries of the shifting digital landscape.

“As online education becomes more appealing, residential colleges are thinking, what are the things you can only do face to face?” Reuben says. “Colleges never dropped the ‘we’re about the whole person, we’re about character’ from their rhetoric. In reality, it’s been easy for them to talk about that but do academic content and skills. That’s what they spend big resources on, and that’s how they select students.”

As online education becomes more appealing, residential colleges are thinking, what are the things you can only do face to face?
If online learning provides one backdrop for “Designing Your Life,” new research on the role of character in students’ long-term success provides another. Qualities like grit and curiosity are as important as spelling and long division, according to research conducted by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work has inspired organizations as varied as KIPP, a network of public charter schools, and Riverdale, one of New York’s most prestigious private schools, to take on the challenge of defining and evaluating “good character,” an undertaking detailed by Paul Tough in The New York Times Magazine.

On the surface, it’s hard to object to these initiatives, or to the very idea of designing your life. “We’re an invitation to have more and different ideas,” Evans says. “There’s more than one person running around in you, and they’re all you. Creating multiple solutions empowers the one you ultimately decide on.” He views the course as a continuation of Thomas Jefferson’s description of the University of Virginia as a “learning community to form citizen leaders.”

Photo: Flickr user Southern Arkansas University
But in my conversations with “DYL” students, both past and present, I was sometimes struck by how exhausting their pursuit of “flow,” “leadership,” and “positivity” had the potential to become. It was as if Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism had been re-staged in Palo Alto, California, circa 2015. Self-improvement, after all, can serve as a stand-in for salvation.

One phrase in particular—”being intentional”—was what caught my ear. I’d only ever heard it in church, where pastors often talk about “intentionality” in prayer, giving, or other behaviors.

“I’m now thinking about how to live my life with an intentionality that I didn’t have before. It’s in my hands,” Wright, the aspiring Peace Corps volunteer/American Ninja Warrior, told me.

I asked Nadia Mufti, a social entrepreneur who graduated from Stanford in 2011, what the phrase meant to her, after she used it several times. In all of her odyssey plans, she says, there was one common theme: “I wanted to take care of myself.”

She went on to describe how she has followed through on that goal: each morning she meditates for 30 minutes; she eats lots of green smoothies and vegetables; she has gone gluten-free. “I’ve done experiments on my body, and that’s when I feel best.” She tries to work out everyday, rotating between swimming, running, and yoga. She invests in relationships. “I have been really intentional in cultivating and maintaining close friendships, even when I’m really stressed.” She tries to read at least a book a month. “At one point, this is kind of taking it to an extreme, but I had this chart on my wall with habits that I wanted to create. Did you eat healthy today? Did you not drink today? Did you see friends outside of work today? How do you feel, on a scale on 1-10? I try to track if the things that I thought would make me happy really worked, at the end of the day.” She recognizes the importance of gratitude. “My boyfriend and I, before we go to bed, say at least three things that we’re grateful for.” For her 25th birthday, she spent 25 days in the service of friends and family. It went so well, she extended the project to 50 days. “I’d read a lot about servant leadership,” she says. “I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do that if I hadn’t taken the ‘Designing Your Life’ course.”

Her example left me feeling both inadequate and exhausted by association. I began mentally calculating whether I had time after work to bring a green smoothie to a friend I hadn’t seen in months—relationships, service, and nutrients, all accomplished in one efficient calendar block. Maybe I could bike there, for some added exercise.

But at the same time, it was hard to argue with Mufti’s choices. In her case, “Designing Your Life” had truly fulfilled its mission: she was happy, healthy, and making the world a better place.

This fall Mufti is returning to Stanford, where she’ll begin working toward her MBA at the Graduate School of Business. “Designing Your Life” has found a warm welcome there, too.

Photo: Flickr user VFS Digital Design
Carly Janson, a director in the business school’s career management center, has been been adapting the course for incoming students. “It’s not always easy to connect the dots between the legacy you want to leave on the world and the career decisions you need to make today,” she says. Design thinking, values-based but practical, provides a bridge.

“Career services, as a field, could totally change the way that we think about careers by applying design thinking,” she says. Students today are doing “careers design, plural,” and schools need to catch up to that reality.

We invite people to live intentionally, in a generative, thoughtful way, and we give them a bunch of tools.
The course’s success stories have started to attract attention outside of Stanford’s lush campus, and now plans to expand are in the works. Evans and Burnett are raising funds from Stanford donors, expanding their team, talking with other universities, and even working with Google to develop a new version of the program for working professionals. A book based on the course is due to hit shelves next spring.

Finding a way to replicate the avuncular Evans, the charismatic heart of the course, will be one of their primary challenges. Students gush about his intelligence and warmth. “An amazing, amazing, amazing human,” says one. “He is just the man,” says another.

“We started this as a thing on the side, and now we’ve got some stuff we have to build,” says Evans. But at the core, the program remains the same: “We invite people to live intentionally, in a generative, thoughtful way, and we give them a bunch of tools.” What happens next is up to the students.

Our conversation this afternoon is what I aspire to for our Tuesday evening sessions. That may be happening, but to the degree that it’s not, maybe we’re too attached to some of our old pedagogical methods and doing what Wheatley says is impossible–use a highly structured process to reach predetermined outcomes.

Randy

I agree that figuring out a way to sort this kind of thing out with a group is what I am after as well . . . I like these email exchanges / dialogues like this, though my sense is they don’t necessarily change anyone’s identity or image or behavior, let alone be applicable broadly to say, a group of ICA staff or execs or board members or ToP leadership, or all of them together.

and I can’t say what would . . . Margaret seems to focus on the “person at the top” and getting them to do something . . . she had 3 items in that video clip, a personal practice, focus on relationships and . . . I forgot the third one . . .

Steve Harrington has expressed interest in some better way of doing this sort of thing. GORDON — any thoughts from you?

Jim Wiegel

Just getting in —

Near midnight here as I get home, first chance to catch up on my load of emails today and this conversation. One accomplishment this afternoon, though–got several colleagues out here to contribute to Terry’s send off in some rather delightful ways.

I find I like a fair amount of what Meg says, and much of that is by way of reminding me of things rather than breaking new ground. She’s sharing her discernment of contemporary global trends and finding them very bleak indeed. Good bit of truth in the dark picture she paints. My old friend, Thomas Hardy, comes to mind: “If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.”

It also strikes me as good to challenge the belief that we should expect what we do to change large systems for the better–though even she seems to leave room for the possibility that our small actions may somehow participate in what she calls emergence. Just not something whose nature we can predict or pin our hopes to. She’s with Kaz on conquering hope.

Where I experience irritation is in what you call her “either/or” way of putting things, Jim. She seems to feel (and I have to confess I haven’t finished the book yet) that we have to choose, either on the one hand to go after transforming organizations or addressing systems of oppression and injustice–and thereby wind up in despair and failure–or on the other hand to work pretty much exclusively at the individual, inner and interpersonal levels. I guess I see this as a false dichotomy, but I’m still keen to see where she winds up in the book.

Liked the piece you linked to, Randy; I think people in the study group would appreciate it.

I have some scratchy thoughts on how we might support these conversations beyond email exchanges, but it’s a little late tonight to get into that. We’re heading off for a long weekend with friends and colleagues in Portland, our excuse being the memorial service for Marcus Borg on Sunday, so I’m hitting the sack at this point.

Let’s keep it going —
Gordon Harper

Gordon,
Just a quick thought on Wheatley’s either/or dilemma–I don’t think she’s saying you couldn’t take a run at both systems and individuals at the same time. I think what she is saying is that, after 22 years of disappointment, she has discerned that systems cannot be changed and therefore she no longer intends to try. That’s a bitter pill for us “structural revolutionaries” and is likely to be our main point of contention as a group. If we were to get into it with her she would probably just ask us to share what our track record has been. That might be a great inventory for us to take. I can readily point to the individual lives that have been changed, starting with my own, but when the focus shifts to systems and structures the going gets a little tougher. Example–in 1972 we proclaimed “the church has been renewed.” I still don’t know what we did or would point to in the institutional church to justify that claim. I understand the old cliche about how revolutionaries always define winning on there own terms and therefore they never lose, but in today’s environment that’s a little harder to get by with.
Randy

As for me I’m getting impatient with 2 things in the study:

Each session is organized as a 1 time season, no thought to re-use, sharing the model with a different group, Doesn’t work like a research PSU with an outcome to accomplish. The inquiry serves no stated or shared intention or vision like: What addre we trying to accomplish with this study and who is the “we”.

It feels like I’m going to class like a student to “get a good set of class notes” from the teacher who studied the chapter, constructed the chart, manages the questions and my contribution is by comparison, is incidental. The pedagogical approach is teacher oriented not learner oriented.

Steve Harrington

What do you think?

A few thoughts:

If I focus only on the nightly news and the newspaper chatter then this is true. Reading the news is painful and so I pay attention to the gossip as it is more easily understood. We are unable to read editorials because of the weight of the change that is required.

It is also true where mob thinking is operative. It is true in entrenched political systems that wil lnot allow change and will not sit in dialogue for the new to be created.

How ever, it is counterbalanced by so many changes that are taking place much faster than we can think.

1. Science is available to a larger population. My father was unable to talk to me about evolution even though he was a physician and had Western education, probably because he was a Orthodox Syrian Christian and was not challenged to think differently about such matters. A student of class 12 who came from a rural background was told about evolution by her farther. I am 68. She is 17.

2. Information is available in great abundance on so many matters so easily and we are forced to take notice.
(Arab Spring, the move for democracy in Hong Kong and China, the Wall Street folks being challenged)

Yes, we need to make more space available for clarity on information that is available and for us to dialogue.

3. More tools are available now for keeping things transparent.

4. In my life I am not so prejudiced by class and caste structure as my mother was. This was probably because of our work in the ICA

Yet my son, while at work, struggles with leadership who are not for the greater good and are using systems ( that attempted to be democratic, objective and for the greater good) for personal, ego related greed. Here the paradigms people live out of seem to be from the industrialized era.

5. There are some great movies being made that are asking great questions…. Good books are being written, great art is being created..
Mary K. D’Souza

Texas probably has the highest tower….much work being done to “go home”, but oh so much yet to be done to arrive!

Wanda Holcombe

With great sorrow, I have to agree with Wheatley. It is not 100% so – but these behaviors and approaches dominate both in reports of events in the news and on social media.

Zoe Barley

I agree that much of this is happening, some more than others. The one that disturbs me the most is the inability to distinguish between facts and opinions. I think this is at the core of critical thinking. It is both a cause and an outcome.

The things that used to be normal are now being taken to a higher level. I was just having a conversation today that “excessive” force seems to be the norm. Our fears are causing our emotions/reactions to heighten.
Fears are running rampant in our society. People used to worry about real things that could kill them, like floods, tornadoes and famines. Now they fear ISIS will open fire in their mall, Ebola will spread through their doctor offices, and roaming gangs will invade their suburbs.

When desired outcomes can be based on purchased facts, arguments are reduced to the political perpetuation of distrust where any compromise is thought to be a complete failure…and both sides are guilty of this. Logical progress is the real looser as it is crushed under the weight of constant and uncompromising discourse. We didn’t get here overnight and we won’t get back to temperance any time soon, or not at least until we recognize that differences in opinioned facts are not faults in one’s character.

If I have an opinion that I fully believe, I can ‘find’ enough facts to support it. Some can even buy research to validate their opinions. The ‘other side’ can do that too – thus the endless argument where progress is little, slow and not nearly as comprehensive as it could be if some level of compromise is reached. There are so many examples of this.

I can’t say that I can easily distinguish the two. Part of the confusing ness for me is that someone chose to bring up or send out some particular fact

Well, Bob and James, I think that is precisely Wheatley’s point. All her points seem finally to be indicating something that lies beneath. Do you agree, and if so, what is it?

With 24 hour news (firetruck news mostly) and talking heads mistaken for news, with science going deeper which only few can grasp, with politics becoming even more farcical than ever, clarity has become whatever you believe. There is not a large constituency for searching for “what is,” we’re mostly working 80 hours a week and looking for a little relief (fun) around the edges.

Apocalyptic times. The centre can not hold. Things fall a part. Here in Canada, the fossil fuel-mining interest oligarchy owns our federal government. In the interests of defending against jihadists, new laws allowing government agencies to spy on anyone are about to be passed. The real target is aboriginals and environmentalists protesting pipelines that would disrupt the income flow of the very rich. It is becoming a polarizing ‘fight to the finish’. In our Canada, far more folks are killed in car crashes with moose on the loose, than with 2-3 so-called jihadists, who so far, are more likely to be mentally disturbed and drug affected marginal citizens. All this focus on fear hides the real questions about the economy and jobs which is now in the tank with $30 a barrel oil in Alberta. And now, we are going to invade Syria. I am talking about Canada !!! ‘I hate the bastards.’

i agree 100%.

Leslie, read this book, but read the whole thing. Otherwise you may come away in despair.

Randy, I love Margaret Wheatley!! this is so true and an astute observation.

Critical thinking ought not also be biased. That’s the short version. Sorry Randy, discussions such as these cannot be brief. These are times of serious consternation – far short of apocalyptic. We can wring our hands and shout at the heavens for the great salvation. We can argue. We can curse the words and actions of those we choose to disagree with and we can do this with all the justification we can muster. This hit home for me in a backyard full of residence in a neighborhood who learned the pre-existing zoning around their homes was not to their liking. After considerable debate a young woman approached me saying, “I appreciate your honesty but I’m not going to vote for you.” The ‘something that lies beneath’ is not mysterious. The societal truths that support our beliefs and opinions can be whatever we choose them to be, as we independently define them. If you don’t believe this, re-read the initial post. The underlying current of our Tower of Babel is the lack of commonsense temperance in a world of immediate, selfish desires. I believe these times are our finest. Far short of seeking the “Finger of God”, it is better to have the faith to act wisely than to seek a wisdom we cannot yet or quite understand. It is a process – not an event. The great risk of failure should not deter those whose desire it is to seek great success. Idealistic? Perhaps. Critical thinking begins with broad idealism and ought to result in realistic expectations.

Bob, I recommend you read Wheatley’s book. Not that it will necessarily change your mind, but it will give you pause for thought, which it did for me, a good thing for all of us.

She is a friend of mine and I will be seeing her this summer! A wonderful person!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fc6xwkl0wjarh0h/So%20Far%20From%20Home-Ch%206%20Identity.ppsx?dl=0

And then, what is she really saying TO US and our role and responsibility in this world?

Here are some excerpts from Chapter 5 that I pulled out

This world did not materialize from plans, conspiracies, or randomness: it came from life’s process of creating new and more complex systems. Emergence is how change happens on this planet,

emergence, the creation of new properties that do not resemble the parts and that therefore can never be understood by dissection.

the result of multiple interactions, an emergent phenomenon.
Emergence is how life changes, never from just a single cause, but from a complexity of many causes and parts interacting.

account for the complexity of causes and contexts that came together to emerge

Anytime we focus on discrete behaviors or work to create cultural change by focusing on individuals, we’re bound to be defeated by emergence, just as geneticists were. The world does not change “one person at a time.” I’d like to abolish that phrase— now applied to just about every- thing— because it misrepresents how change happens. To understand emergence, we need to shift our attention from the one- at- a- time to the whole, to the varying dynamics and influences that are clearly visible in individuals but that do not originate in the individual.

At the beginning, each part is acting in isolation, making decisions based on its own needs. But as separate elements start to connect with one another, emergence begins. Individual actions that were insignificant start to have new consequences because they are interconnected. At some point, a system will emerge with new and surprising properties that, from that point on, will profoundly influence the behaviors of the individual parts. What emerges is always surprising because it is so different from the parts that created it.

Working this way requires a great deal of awareness, constantly curious to see how the larger system is interacting with our project, what other dynamics are in play, how people are reacting.

Emergence is a process whereby interactions create something new and different that cannot be changed. Once something has emerged, it’s here to stay. The only way to create something different is to start over, to begin again.

Emergence demands a different relationship with life, where we’re curious, open, alert. The only thing we can predict is that life will surprise us. We can’t see what is coming until it arrives, and once something has emerged, we have to work with what is. We have to be flexible and willing to adapt— we can’t keep pushing ahead, blustering on with our now outdated plans and dreams. And it doesn’t help to deny what has emerged. We need to be present and willing to accept this new reality. This is what it truly means to work with emergence.

We do notice what’s going on, with sadness and despair. But then we go back to our work, still believing that if we focus on our part, if we fix this and that one at a time, that we will be able to change the way things are. We work harder; we amplify the importance of our cause; we intensify our efforts. We know the world must change— it simply must. We renew our conviction that we will be the ones to change what has emerged.

Well, we can’t. The global culture, with all its tragedies and injustices, is an emergent phenomenon. We have to accept this terrifying fact. It came to be from the convergence of many forces and now possesses characteristics that weren’t there until it emerged. It has become a world where the values of greed, self- interest, and oppressive power emerged at a global scale and now supersede all other values. Many of us, most of us, don’t want it to be this way. We still aspire to work from values of justice, community, compassion, love. And we need to keep on with this, absolutely. But no matter how well we embody these values, no matter how important our work is, we have to hold it differently. We will not change what has emerged. We are starting over, basing our work on values and practices that are distinctively countercultural, so outside the norm that most people can’t understand what we’re doing. We need to continue to persevere in our radical work, experimenting with how we can work and live together to evoke human creativity and caring. Only time will tell whether our efforts contribute to a better future. We can’t know this, and we can’t base our work or find our motivation from expecting to change this world.

Stacey