Program Design: Art with a Purpose

Press the play button below to hear Executive Director Bob Reinheimer discuss our design process in detail.

The Program Design Process

Designing a custom program revolves around answers to three deceptively simple questions:

  • What do you want your people to know, as a result of this learning experience, that they don’t know now?
  • What do you want them to do that they don’t do now?
  • What do you want them to believe about themselves, their business, their customers, their world and their future, that they don’t believe now?

Understanding the outcomes you are trying to achieve, we follow these steps:

  • Strategy – We collaboratively explore the strategic business issues driving the need for change in your people. Because successful design depends on our understanding your business well, diagnostic interviews with potential participants and senior executives may help.
  • Objectives – Together we determine the educational needs that follow from the strategic challenge. The focus here is on identifying concrete and specific learning objectives arising from the business objectives.  What has to change?
  • Design – We select the mix of methods and modalities that best meet the culture and objectives of your company. When and where does it make sense to use traditional approaches or more leading-edge approaches?  What will be done face-to-face and what will be mediated by technology?
  • Educators – With a shared understanding of the design, it is time to select educators. With a network of more than 1500 educators, our flexible model of corporate education delivers the right specialists for the learning methods you’ve chosen, and we optimize the selection to your budget or other constraints.
  • Integration – All elements of the program must work together to deliver the outcome. A key part of our development approach is the timing, placement and integration of each segment of the program in the context of its goals.
  • Delivery – We can either provide full on-site management when a program runs, or work collaboratively with your staff. Since we own no delivery facilities, our only interest is in helping you choose a venue suited to your goals. Typically we go where participants are rather than bringing them to where we are.
  • Evaluate – Custom programs usually run repeatedly for a given client. If any part of the program needs to be improved, it gets improved.