The vision of the SAIL ecosystem is an educational environment that prepares students for a world in which they will likely reinvent themselves professionally multiple times, requiring knowledge as yet unimagined for roles that do not yet exist, Thriving in such an environment requires resilience, flexibility, and the set of design thinking mindsets defined by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in Designing Your Life. In the design thinking process, “ideating” means generating multiple possibilities to solve a problem, because, as Burnett and Evans say, “You choose better when you have lot of good ideas to choose from.” In this workshop, you will experience ideation techniques to generate visions for professional roles based on what engages and energizes you.

1. IDEATING FOR LIFE DESIGN
sail.northeastern.edu
sail@northeastern.edu
Laurie Poklop & Dave Merry

2. WHAT IS IDEATING?
Why ideate?
“You choose better when you have lots of good ideas to
choose from.”
“You never choose your first solution to any problem.”
To form an idea, to imagine, to conceive….

3. MAPPING TO SAIL
Characteristics -- Continually reflect
on and align behavior with personal
values, beliefs, meaning and purpose
Characteristics -- Generate, analyze and
implement novel solutions to problems
Skill: Design Thinking
Professional and Personal Effectiveness:
Learners develop the confidence, skills, behaviors
and values to effectively discern life goals, form
relationships and shape their personal and
professional identities to achieve fulfillment.

4. AGENDA
1. Warm Up: “Yes…and…”
2. Creating Your Compass
3. Good-Time Journal
4. Mind-mapping
5. Envisioning Jobs To Engage and Energize You
6. Alignment Check

5. WARM-UP: “YES…AND…”
Your task: Plan a graduation party
Your process:
Person 1: Make a declarative statement, like “We can get a big cake!”
Person 2: Say “Yes, and….” add an idea, like “We can invite Sam!”
2 Rules:
• Say “Yes, and….” to everything
• Don’t stop until told
2 minutes

6. CREATING YOUR COMPASS
WORKVIEW
✚
LIFEVIEW

7. 5 minutes
QUICK & DIRTY WORKVIEW
Why work? What’s work for? What does work mean?
How does it relate to the individual, others, society?
What defines good or worthwhile work?
What does money have to do with it?
What do experience, growth, and fulfillment have to do with it?
Develop your Workview for

8. QUICK & DIRTY LIFEVIEW
Develop your
Lifeview for
Discuss with a
partner for
Why are we here? What is the meaning or purpose of life?
What is the relationship between the individual and others?
Where do family, country, and the rest of the world fit in?
What is good and what is evil?
Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact
does this have on you life?
What is the role of joy, sorrow, justice, injustice, love, peace, and strife in life?
5 minutes 5 minutes

9. FINDING YOUR JOY
Engagement: Feeling excited, focused, or like you are having
a good time while doing an activity.
Energy: Activities can sustain our energy or drain it.
Flow: “Engagement on steroids”

11. Continue this for
GOOD-TIME JOURNAL
1. Record 2-4 peak work experiences and 2-4 peak out-of-work experiences.
2. Rate them in terms of how they impacted your engagement and energy.
3. Indicate if you achieved a state of flow
8 minutes

12. GOOD-TIME JOURNAL
Try to get more specific:
A
E
I
O
U
Activities: What were you actually doing?
Environments: Where were you?
Interactions: What or whom were you interacting with?
Objects: Any objects that supported feeling engaged?
Users: Who else was there? What role did they play?
Continue this for 3 minutes

13. MIND MAPPING
Robots
Retirement
Sci-Fi
Blog
Mars
YouTube
Self-Development
Conferences
Prestige
Monk
Integration
Bob Ross
Peace
Post-
Scarcity
Climate
Change
My Kids
Holism
Speed
Legacy
Coding
Efficiency
Future
Painting
Writing
Learning
Expertise
Structure
Wisdom
Next
Generation
Learning
Technology Creativity
Research
Organizing
Ideas
Students
High Engagement
Activity
Designing a New
Course

14. MIND MAPPING
High Engagement
Mind Map
High Energy
Mind Map
Place an experience with a HIGH ENGAGEMENT rating in the center
of your paper and create a mind map with 3-4 layers.
Place an experience with a HIGH ENERGY rating in the center of
your paper and create a mind map with 3-4 layers.
7 minutes 5 minutes

15. Future
Prestige
Climate
Change
YouTube

16. 1. Working with a partner, look at the circled words on each mind map individually
and imagine a job that is a mash-up of these words.
2. Work separately with each map. The job doesn’t have to be realistic, but may reveal
new and interesting ideas. Each person should end up with a napkin sketch of 2
newly imagined jobs.
ENVISIONING JOBS TO
ENGAGE & ENERGIZE YOU
Talk together in pairs to
create 4 napkin sketches
High
Energy
Mind Map
High
Engagement
Mind Map
Partner 1 Partner 2
15 minutes

17. AWARD NOMINATIONS!
Did anyone have a partner whose imagined job was…..
• inspiring
• exciting
• radically different
• just plain cool

18. ALIGNMENT CHECK
1. Place your napkin sketches
next to your Workview &
Lifeview notes and look for any
connections or incongruities
2. Discuss these connections or
incongruities with a partner
2 minutes 2 minutes

19. WHAT’S NEXT?
The “Ideation” step is meant to be bold, creative, inventive, and not
always realistic or practical.
Future steps in the Design process draw upon insights gained
during ideation, and encourage prototyping and testing these more
practical applications and ideas.

20. Things to consider:
• Did you come up with anything that was crazy, but had a nugget of
something that might be fruitful or worth exploring?
• What insights did you get from this experience that you weren’t
expecting?
• Are there any other places where the process of ideation might be
beneficial in your personal or professional life?

21. #SAILatNU
#LearningEverywhere
l.poklop@northeastern.edu
d.merry@northeastern.edu
sail@northeastern.edu