The Origins

An Interview with Dick Hayne P’08, P’11, GP’26, GP’28, GP’29, GP’31, GP’33

Q: WHAT WERE THE ORIGINS OF THE CEL PROGRAM? WHY WAS IT CREATED? DH: Priscilla Sands and I would sit down regularly and talk about school issues—what was going right and what we could do better. At one point I said to her, I really think we should have a course of study on entrepreneurism. I think it would be very beneficial for the students to learn about entrepreneurship and have an opportunity to start a business. I have learned more from having and growing a business than any other thing I've ever done, and I said I think that other people would have a similar reaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s some simple business like a lemonade stand and someone is eight years old. You learn an awful lot from the very beginning. With my own kids I saw how their eyes got big when

Chairman and CEO, Urban Outfitters Former Board Chair, Springside School and Springside Chestnut Hill Academy they made $10 or $12. From that, you can teach Stanford d.school and design thinking, I realized, them just about anything there is to know about yes, there is a lot of application for a broader way business. At first they’re going to think this is great, of thinking about entrepreneurship. And so we they just made $12. You can say, well, did you really discussed it in more detail and, credit to her, she make $12? Who bought the lemonade? Who bought did it. She came up with a program that combined the cups? And you can see their enthusiasm quickly what she was thinking with some of the things that turn to almost dejection when they find out they I was thinking. actually lost $12. But that is okay. They have to figure it out—how are they going to turn that $12 Q: HOW CLOSELY DOES DESIGN THINKING ALIGN loss into a $12 gain? An awful lot of people don’t WITH ENTREPRENEURSHIP? get to engage in this way of thinking, and I think it’s DH: I think it overlaps enormously. Design to their deficit. thinking is a very useful tool for going about solving problems, and that’s what we do every day I give Priscilla an awful lot of credit because she as business people. When we’re confronted with took my idea, let it percolate for maybe a month, problems, we can’t just throw up our hands; we and, after I’d actually forgotten our discussion, she have to dig down and think, how am I going to came back and said I’ve worked on it and here’s solve this? Design thinking actually works in real what I’ve come up with. What she then described life. Businesses use it constantly, whether they was something more far reaching than what I know it or not. And, as I said, it’s quite effective. had originally envisioned. She applied the idea of entrepreneurship across a much broader range of activities. At first I thought, well, that’s not really what I had in mind. I was more focused on the business end of it, but as she started describing the

DESIGN THINKING IS A VERY USEFUL TOOL FOR GOING ABOUT SOLVING PROBLEMS, AND THAT’S WHAT WE DO EVERY DAY AS BUSINESS PEOPLE.

Q: WERE THERE CHALLENGES IN GETTING PEOPLE’S BUY-IN AROUND CEL?

DH: Yes, there were a number of groups that had to be convinced. I can remember some board

DESIGN THINKING IN ACTION

At the sophomore Capstone Showcase, a student displays his prototype for a project developed through the design thinking process.

members scratching their heads and thinking, “What is this thing called CEL? Why are we spending money on this?” I think that probably was because I wasn’t as eloquent a speaker as I could have been in explaining why I thought it was important, but obviously I’ve always been supportive of it and very enthusiastic about it, and I think this sort of carried the day.

My biggest concern at the time was not being able to convince many of the parents and faculty that this was indeed a worthwhile endeavor. There’s a certain amount of caution in the academic mind compared to the business mind, so I was concerned that the academic groups, particularly the humanities faculty, wouldn't accept the idea of design thinking. And I do think it is more difficult for them to Incorporate it into what they do on a daily basis, but not impossible.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how so many of the faculty have come around to appreciating the importance of the design way of thinking and, to some degree, integrating it into what they do. I don’t think it’ll ever be totally like “this is the way we do everything,” but I think it’s a meaningful part of most of the course material that is offered at SCH, and so I think it’s been wildly successful.

From the parents’ point of view, I think it's been even more successful. When I would come in for CEL Demo Days, the moms and dads would just be amazed—”My son or my daughter does that? They’re programming a computer?” When they see something like that they’re completely sold on the idea of CEL because they intuitively know that that's what kids are going to have to do and learn when they grow up and go out into the world and get a job. No matter what the job, that kind of background is going to really help them. Q: WERE THERE SPECIFIC GOALS OR OUTCOMES YOU WERE LOOKING FOR? DH: From my point of view, I was hoping that we could get to the point where every student, no matter what grade or what point of development, would have an opportunity to start their own business and be able to learn from that. I didn’t care if it was an Internet company that someone in 11th grade was starting or, as I said, a lemonade stand that somebody in 3rd grade was starting. The level of the business didn’t matter to me. What mattered was that they could start it, develop it, and be taught how it really functions, how it really works. I thought that that would be very important for them to understand throughout their entire life.

So that was my goal, and, as I said, hats off to Priscilla; she had a much broader goal of how to use design thinking in just about everything one does. She was a very big advocate of its applicability across all activities.

Q: AFTER 10 YEARS, DO YOU FEEL THAT INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY—THE WHOLE CEL GESTALT—HAS BEEN WORKING IN EDUCATION? DH: The foundations of education were religion, and there’s precious little change when it comes to religion. And for good reason. Institutions of education are therefore not usually particularly active in the world of innovation and change. Most educational institutions don’t like change; they like constancy. And I think they do that at their own peril. Now, there’s change that is wild and totally chaotic and then there’s change that is a little bit more methodical, even though there’s always an element of chaos. I think that, particularly in the era in which we live, if you’re not changing, you’re not going to be relevant for very long. There’s no reason to think that education isn’t impacted by this as well. The ability to use design thinking is one of those step functions that really allows people to tame the crazy changes that are happening. It’s a process and a way of thinking that allows people to adapt. So I think it’s very important that education does change, does innovate, that we educate for students’ future, not our past. Q: AS YOU LOOK BACK, WHAT ARE YOU MOST PLEASED ABOUT OR PROUD OF ABOUT THE PROGRAM?

DH: The thing I’m most pleased about is that the students like it and have responded. They understand the relevance of it intuitively. They’re in the middle of it. I remember going into one session where the students were in small groups in the auditorium working on solving a problem. They were so engrossed in what they were doing, and having such a good time doing it, that I was basically invisible to them as I walked among them. In the end, isn’t that what learning should be? So that’s what I’m most pleased about. And of course I’m pleased that the whole thing has worked out, at each level, from the board to the parents to the faculty and students.

Today, CEL has a life of its own, where, if we were to say we’re not going to do this anymore, I think a whole bunch of people would go, “Are you kidding? Why would you stop doing this? It’s so important to the school”—important from every aspect—from enrollment to the kind of education that the kids get, to students getting into the college of their choice, to positive feedback from alumni. So I can’t imagine it not being there now.

I’m very proud of what the team has been able to do. I think it’s helped SCH in its standing, the way people look at the institution. Now the question is—and this is for better minds than my own—what’s the next step? What is the continuation of this, how can we do more things with it, and how can it be a better learning tool?