A blog for the CCA community

The 2010-15 Strategic Plan is nearing its final draft. Recent meetings with staff, faculty, and trustees have produced further refinements to the first draft. President Steve Beal and a small team of editors–Susan Avila, Chris Bliss, and Melanie Corn–have been meeting regularly to review the suggested edits and refinements and make changes.

The plan is now ready to go to the Board of Trustees for ratification. This will take place on November 12 at the the board’s annual retreat. Assuming the plan is approved, we will then work on “marketing” the plan and communicating to the community. Ideas ranges from a pocket guide and a large scale print piece to Keynote presentations, website, and video. We welcome you ideas. For now, here is a pdf of the text: strategic-plan-11-02-09

Thank you to the hundreds of students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, and parents who have contributed to the strategic planning process. Your participation has been vital to the creation of this plan!

Eleven months later–after research projects, brainstorming sessions, visioning events, and countless meetings, the first draft of the plan is now ready for the CCA community to review.

We want your feedback!

Please note that, in keeping with the spirit of the new plan, we intend to present the final version in a more interactive format through the web and by other media, but for now we thought the pdf outline format would be easiest for reviewing content.

We hope to compile the feedback in the next month so that we can finaize the plan by November. Thanks for your participation.

strategic-plan-draft-9-18-09-logo

We started the strategic planning process last October and are now nearly ready to post a first draft of the plan. The Core Team met yesterday to take another look at the goals and objectives. A few more days of editing and it will be ready to post here. Please check back in a few days. We want–NEED–your input.

Below is a summary of the strategic planning process to date.

October 2008, after interviewing a range of planning consultants, CCA contracted with the innovation and design firm IDEO to facilitate the development of its new five-year plan. IDEO’s human-centered, design-based approach helped the college engage a broad sector of the CCA community—alumni, donors, faculty, staff, students, parents, and trustees—in envisioning the future of the college. The IDEO style relies on emergent strategies, rather than top-down planning, eliciting the best ideas, insights, and strategies from the network of participants.

IDEO designed a highly collaborative 17-week project structure, beginning in October 2008. Core planning teams from CCA and IDEO (see below) were joined by members of the CCA community and a larger group of IDEO designers. There were many opportunities for members of the CCA community to participate, including facilitated visioning sessions, meetings, and interviews. The college established a project blog to help spark conversation among the participants. Research took place from October through November with IDEO conducting stakeholder interviews, campus and studio visits, and facilitating a special partnership with CCA graduate students who created and implemented key research projects. Synthesis of the research data took place in December. Several key visioning sessions occurred in January, including all-staff and all-faculty meetings and a community-wide retreat led by IDEO staff and the CCA core planning team. In the end, over 650 members of the CCA community were involved in the process.

With the conclusion of the IDEO partnership in March 2009, the CCA core planning team continued its work by poring over all the feedback and ideas generated by the many participants and used them to refine the major themes of the plan and to prioritize specific initiatives. The trustees and senior cabinet department heads were convened during the summer to give feedback on early draft plans and were asked to develop their own sections of the plan. The first full draft will be presented to all CCA staff, faculty, and trustees in September 2009. Feedback will be solicited September through November, with hopes that the plan will be finalized and adopted at the November 17, 2009 board retreat.

On Saturday, January 23, many of us participated in the Visioning Extravaganza. This exciting event culminated months of work conducted by our strategic plan consultant firm IDEO; a CCA Core Team comprised of faculty, staff, and students; and group of our graduate students in design. In addition to this large event, various smaller events such as faculty meetings, staff meetings, and a board retreat took place during the last months.

Since our Extravaganza, many of you have asked members of the Core Team questions such as: What will happen to the great ideas generated at the meetings? Will anyone really look at all this “stuff”? How will all this translate into the Strategic Plan? How will some of these ideas translate into action?

In response, we’d like to report to you on the recent work of the Core Team. On Friday, January 31, the Core Team held a 3 hour meeting (photos below). During that meeting, we worked in groups of two to “mine” all the materials collected at the various events, including the Visioning Extravaganza, for tangible, specific IDEAS that we could consider putting into effect.

In order to do this, we used the idea sheet developed by IDEO  in order to describe the idea and define it given a range of critieria. The teams then took these “idea sheets” to our judges Steve Beal and Sheri McKenzie. The judges assessed the ideas presented, stamping all ideas that were indeed specific, do-able actions. (For example, “making everyone at CCA more environmentally-conscious” is not a do-able action, but instituting a more robust recycling program is.)

At the end of the meeting, we spent about half an hour brainstorming on how to move forward with implementing some of these ideas. We discussed creating working groups around the themes and initiatives, and we will post these on the blog as they come into being. We also hope to post the ideas we culled in our meeting on the blog—about 50-70 tangible ideas in total! We will continue to explore ways to implement the ideas at our next meeting. In the meantime, it’s not too late to submit more great ideas to the Form blog! The team is considering all ideas, big and small.

–The Core Team

2,000 balloons, 10 spray painted crates, 30 pounds of dry ice, 180 people, delightful wall installations, crafty name tags, inspiring challenges and prototyping kits, thoughtful speeches, expert facilitation of small groups, a wide range of creative ideas - and a whole lot of fun.  That pretty much summarizes the Project Form Visioning Extravaganza that happened on Saturday…Thanks to all who came!  The energy was positive, playful, collaborative, and inspiring.

The Project Form team has been hard at work since Saturday, synthesizing the results from the event and extracting insights and nuggets on which to build solutions.  The big question is now, “what’s next?”, and once the team has had a chance to sit down, consolidate, and digest all the ideas from Saturday, we’ll share next steps with you all on the blog.

Until then, please enjoy some preliminary photos of the event below!  We have hundreds more that we’ll try to share once they are all collected.

 The Project Form Welcome at the CCA SF Campus

Brianna presents the concept of the day at the intro presentation

Time to work!  Crates filled with prototyping tools and a special challenge awaited each group

Working together to ideate

Creativity at work - a great mobile prototype of a inter-campus  transportation concept

Sketching out more ideas

Another active prototype - filming a newscast in 2015

The final hurrah and full group - thanks for a great afternoon!

Want to see a quick teaser for tomorrow’s event?  Click to see more…we hope to see many of you blog readers tomorrow!

As many of you know, Project Form’s Visioning Extravaganza is happening this Saturday, Jan 24th, at the Nave on the SF campus. In preparation for this event, the Space Design Team, which is comprised mostly of students, needs help constructing and installing 5 large balloon sculptures throughout the Atrium and Nave on the SF CCA campus.

1000 air filled balloons will be delivered Friday morning, and help is needed from 10am to 5pm, in 2-3 hour shifts. Food will be available for the volunteers. Please just stop by if you’d like to help!

There are also a handful of spots left for students to attend the event. Please RSVP to vp-studentaffairs [at] cca.edu with the following information if you’d like to attend:
NAME:
MAJOR or GRADUATE PROGRAM:
CLASS LEVEL:
CELL PHONE NUMBER:
DID YOU TRANSFER TO CCA?

YES! I WILL BE IN THE NAVE PROMPTLY AT 11:00 A.M. AND CAN STAY UNTIL 5:00 P.M ON JAN 24th.

The deadline to RSVP for Project Form’s Visioning Extravaganza has been extended to next Wednesday, Jan. 21, by 6:00 pm.  The event is for a limited number of CCA students, alumni, faculty, staff, trustees and administration, and there are still a significant number of student spaces available.  It is a great opportunity for the students of CCA to represent our voice and help strategize and envision what CCA can be, particularly over the next 5 years.  We hope more of you will choose to participate!

To rsvp, simply email vp-studentaffairs [at] cca.edu and provide the following information:

NAME:
MAJOR or GRADUATE PROGRAM:
CLASS LEVEL:
CELL PHONE NUMBER:
DID YOU TRANSFER TO CCA?

YES!  I WILL BE IN THE NAVE PROMPTLY AT 11:00 A.M. AND CAN STAY UNTIL 5:00 P.M ON JAN 24th.

In preparation for the Visioning Extravaganza, we’d like to present to you all the final five themes for exploration, which represent a consolidation of those that we’ve been exploring on the blog.  The plan for the Visioning Extravaganza is to dive even deeper into each of these themes, so let this be food for thought until then.  And please do feel free to share your ideas pre-event here on the blog via comments if you cannot attend or simply are dying to share some ideas - they will be considered!

Awaken a sense of promise: People are drawn to CCA because they believe it is a place that supports those that want to change the world.  So how might we…

• help people recognize and use constraints as a creative challenge?
• reward fearlessness and experimentation?
• make CCA itself an example of the change we want to see in the world?
• better connect with the energy of the Bay Area?

Cultivate Diversity: People are drawn to CCA because of the remarkable diversity of materials, techniques, and perspectives.  So how might we…

• provide authentic engagement across topics and disciplines?
• support the introduction of new cultures, styles, and ideas to CCA?
• foster diversity and cultivate many cultures at CCA?
• embrace the contradiction of rebellious and responsible?

Mind the gap: People are sometimes disappointed by the gap between their expectations and what can be realistically offered.  So how might we…

• better meet the needs of the constituencies?
• get constituencies involved in deciding which care to provide when resources are limited?
• set smart and appropriate expectations?
• leverage community members’ energy to support each other and the campuses?

Envision Greatness: People like to be a part of a school that is world-class because it motivates them to continue to reach higher. So how might we…

• show what good looks like?
• support both broad and deep educational experiences?
• encourage the full range of skills and experiences?
• utilize feedback to stimulate progress?

Build authentic connections: People are looking to forge stronger and more relevant bonds within both the close-in and extended CCA community.  So how might we…

• use technology to bring people together?
• create symbols of identity and pride for the whole community?
• create relevant connections between the close-in and extended CCA community?
• encourage unforeseen combinations of styles/materials/disciplines?

CCA and IDEO have been hard at work on Project Form in the New Year, and we can prove it!  On Jan. 6, an all-staff meeting was held in the SF Nave, and all brainstormed more ideas around the themes we’ve presented on this blog and that have actually been further refined and consolidated (to be presented in a later post).  David Meckel told the founding story of CCA and the movements in art that have impacted the CCA and are still present in our core values, while Melanie Corn presented out the now five themes and told some stories from the process, which all of the faithful blog readers already know about!

Then the whole group split into 20 teams and brainstormed off the themes using “how might we” questions to think about things CCA could do to get better in those areas.  Then we had “gallery walk” time, where groups walked around sharing their ideas.  It was a great success and we’re looking forward toward an equally good and inspiring time at the Visioning Extravaganza on Jan. 24 (get your RSVPs in!).

We’ll be posting a link to the results from the session once the document is uploaded onto the CCA server.  Until then, please enjoy the photos below:

All intently listening to the “Intro” presentation

Brainstorming on the themes in the 20 small groups

Presenting and sharing results during a “gallery walk” at the end of the day

And more ideas!