Design Thinking in Nature with Rod Taylor Part 1 (of 2)
“The heart of everything I do centers on trying to figure out how we can grow, learn, reflect, and become and grow closer to who we know we want to be, and who we are at our core”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM Rod Taylor
Rod Taylor, Ph.D. is an award-winning educator, scholar, author, and musician who’s been active in teaching and training for over twenty-five years. He’s the Founder and CEO of Performance Learning Concepts, a training and development company whose clients include Fortune 500 companies like Deloitte, Nissan North America, and DCI-Artform. Advance degrees in education, literature, writing, and philosophy have influenced his approach to working with leaders, teachers, and those in the business world, and he has published, presented, written, and taught in all of these areas over the last two decades.
Rod has taught at Stanford, Indiana University, and the Honors College at Tennessee State University and has served as a Design Fellow in the D. School in Paris, France and an Artist-in-Residence at Lipscomb University in Nashville. From academic publications like Oxford University Press, to college textbooks, to popular press magazines like Bass Magazine, Rod has published on the topics of literature, music, creativity, education, and cooperative learning, and his interdisciplinary approach to the arts and business has led to him traveling internationally to offer keynotes and workshops on these topics. Rod lives in Nashville, TN, where he has also long been involved in music as a performer, educator, and writer and has been fortunate enough to play and/or record with Krista Detor, Jenee Fleenor, Victor Wooten, Cindy Morgan, Chuck Rainey, and a variety of other great musicians.
an educator at heart
“My background is in education, it’s a centerpiece for just about everything I do. I can't leave learning alone. I was a first generation college student and my senior year of high school I had an epiphany that learning could be experienced differently than how I was experiencing it. I had a horrible time in schools, so I joke with people that I've always been complicit in a system that I think is ultimately flawed, which is formal education. That started me on a journey. I got an education degree in English, taught junior high for several years, that was a blast, I love those seventh graders. Then I went back and got a master's, and then went got back got a doctorate at Indiana University. And the centerpiece of all that was kind of epistemology, how knowledge works, how we gain it, and its connection to the arts. I focused a lot on Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, the modernist writers who are really disrupting education. In fact, the my dissertation topic was called Modernism in the Realm of Education, and is basically how art was allowing us to see how education is broken.
So my passion has always been bound up in the arts, whether it's music or literary or theater, film, and what we can learn from it, and how it's to me a better teacher than most other things. So started out teaching, finished my doctorate and took a position at Stanford teaching in the rhetoric and writing program. But somewhere along the way, I got involved with design-thinking at Stanford in different ways, because that's where the the school was originally founded. And David Kelly, who founded that gave me some advice one time, he said, “You've got some ideas, that if you wait for academics to kind of catch up with it, you're going to be dead. So why don't you start your own company and if it's good, it'll be successful. And if it's not, you'll know that.” That's kind of what I did.
And so I started Performance Learning Concepts as a training and development company that approaches leadership training very differently, with innovation, creativity, and communication. And it's been an absolute blast. It just kind of hit the ground running. I did that back in 2014-2015. And I've been doing that ever since.
Of course, as you know, I play bass and play for variety of artists. At the heart of it, about everything I do centers on trying to figure out how we can grow, learn, and reflect and become and grow closer to who we know who we want to be and who we are. I'm big into finding out who we are at our core, and then seeking to do things that match that. For me, I'm always an educator at the heart. And so everything I do kind of comes back to that.”
design thinking
“There's not one kind of definition of design thinking. If you talk to engineers, or material scientists, they'll say it starts with Thomas Edison. If you talked to people in the philosophy field, like me, I'll say, it goes back to Plato in the sense of community, and kind of cooperative learning. But at the core of design thinking, it's a very purposeful discipline method of approaching creative solutions to problems. And I don't mean problems here in the negative sense, right? It could be.. I want to write a song. It can be I want to design the bottle that you're drinking from right now. I want to do that better.
And so it provides a five step approach that provides a method of attempting that it's not the only method of problem solving, of course, but
When I was at Stanford, my wife was teaching, my wife was working in the mechanical engineering department there. You'll hear these engineers, they're talking about these creative, thoughtful processes in the philosophy of thought, and epistemology and pedagogy and all these things are going on, I'm like these, these are kind of my people in there.
I'm in humanities at Stanford. They called me a fuzzy, and my wife, a techie, because she's in engineering, and I'm in the humanities. And so together, they call this a tizzy, because here's the engineering. Here's a tech kind of fuzzy that got together, but I loved it. And basically, I'll give you the five steps, because I think we can unpack them as we go through, especially with nature. But basically, a lot of times, if you approach something you want to do, and you say, I want to do this, then we begin to operate in trying to solve that problem. And again, I'm using problem in a broad sense, we go toward that goal, assuming that we have a correct understanding of it. So it starts off with backing up and doing what's called abductive thinking, which is basically assuming we don't have all necessary information. So you begin with a with the stage of empathy. And after you do some empathy work, which itself is quite interesting, then you can go back and define the problem, or this is defining the goals. Then you move to ideation, then you move to prototyping, and then you move to implementation. And all of that is built in kind of trying to understand and explore something very reflectively.
And one of the common sayings in design thinking we slow down to speed up, meaning that if you slow down that initial process, then you will be faster on the end of it. If you just take your time and that’s when I discovered that methodology, I realized, that's kind of how I live my life. I don't mind taking time at the beginning if it will save me time at the end. When I write, I outline extensively before I start drafting and prose, but then when I draft in prose, I don't have to go back. I've just done so much work in advance if that makes sense. And that's how I write, it's how I do things. And so it gels well with me. And so design thinking just gives us a methodology that we can agree on. At the core, it's collaborative. And it's diverse in the makeup of a team. I don't want to be solving a problem with six other people with my degree. You know, I want it to be an engineer and anthropologists, a psychologist, a linguist, maybe mechanical engineer, because everyone's going to bring a different approach to it. And that's at the root of design thinking too, is that you have design teams.”
leading from the back
“It's leading from the back. And I think that that is an important thing for leaders to realize. The bass is the foundation, the heart, the merging of rhythm and harmony. My wife pointed out to me. One day she goes, “everything you do is about digging into the foundation of stuff.” So it does kind of make sense that you picked an instrument that is just underneath it all, kind of holding things up. But not the glitz on the top. And I'm glad that lead singers are doing what they're doing. But I think from a leadership perspective, you need to get out of the way sometimes, and let people take what you've done and go forward with it, and kind of sit in the back and be there.
But also remembering what it's like to just support other leaders and to me good leaders are not afraid of good leaders.”
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