When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used the Innovation Diploma Disney Cohort as consultants for learning and integrating design thinking into their Open Idea Lab in Atlanta, the doctors and administrators there coined a hashtag at the end (because the approach created great impact): #RentAStudent
Well, iDiploma Director Meghan Cureton (@MeghanCureton) seized on that insight and started an adVenture series that the Disney Cohort named “Consultivation.” In short, an outside person spends a 90-minute session with the Cohort to work through a rapid design lab to address a challenge or opportunity he or she faces in work or business.
Today, the iDiploma Disney Cohort hosted its third consultivation. The chief engineer for NAES (North American Energy Services) joined us to share a challenge his team is facing in communication. A photo gallery of the consultivation can be found below, and a Google doc of the facilitation flow is also provided.
If you are looking for creative and productive ways to blur lines between “school” and “real world,” you may want to consider something like our consultivation. Our student learners are not only amazing future resources, but they are incredible current resources – growing designers who want to and can contribute to real-world problem solving and solution seeking.
Our client left this morning saying that he was extremely excited to explore the solutions our iDiploma Disney Cohort created – hybrid systems that combine and integrate already-available tools which work together to address the needs that our user shared with us. He also indicated that he was leaving with a “standard” against which to measure future, potential solutions because of the needfinding and prototyping that was made visible this morning… in just 90 minutes.
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Views on iDiploma Consultivation from other Angles:
- “The Future of School,” post by Meghan Cureton about Consultivation
- “An Eventful Day,” post by Anya Smith about this Consultivation
it's about learning 
Reblogged this on Craig Lambert Blog.
Wonderful update! I’d love to hear about the student reaction to the experience. Sounds like high schoolers exceeded the clients expectation. I share your passion of pursuing significance and accomplishing real results while in school – versus the mentality of we learn learn learn (through scenarios and fake problems) to then later to well in the “real world”. Bring the real world to our youth and we just might see fewer problems in the world!
Bo, this was such an exciting post for me to read. I am so thrilled and enlivened and excited about what is happening there. Yes!
Thanks, Craig! The consultivation work is truly exciting and invigorating. A real breakthrough, I think.