COMPLEXITY AT SCALE

OVERVIEW

Georgia FLEX (Foundational Leadership & Entrepreneur X-perience) teaches high school students how to start and launch a business and had found tremendous success as a pilot program. But when the organization’s leaders and funders sought to expand their impact across the state, they quickly ran into obstacles.

Participants in the FLEX program—which involves not only the student-entrepreneurs but also teacher-advisors and local business mentors—must follow a 30-week process with detailed steps and hard deadlines. When limited to a small group of participants, this process could be memorized by a few key individuals who walked them through each step. But expanding the program statewide, even nationwide, meant developing solutions that could function at scale without additional labor from the core FLEX team.

Contributions

User Journey Mapping
Curriculum Planning
Website Design & Development
Content Development
Script Editing
Video Editing
Animation
Collateral Design

Strategy

Our team developed an e-course-style digital checklist for each key participant role, which we called “journeys.” These journeys break down the whole 30-week process into simple milestones, then further into bite-sized tasks. All of the necessary steps—including video walkthroughs we produced, written tips we helped write, and downloadable resources we designed—is presented in a user-friendly web app, right when and where it is needed. The completed journeys help busy FLEX participants focus on manageable short-term progress, without information bottlenecks and unnecessary handholding.

Now in its fourth year, the Georgia FLEX program and its Shark Tank-inspired championship tournament is primed for exponential growth powered by this new learning platform.

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OUR FAVORITE PART

One drawback of traditional e-courses is when they’re used in the learning process: before application and not during. Inspired by Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto, we “chunkified” info for teacher-advisors and FLEX team leaders into a series of easy-to-follow steps that don’t require them to retain knowledge for months on end. Users instead are prompted with helpful tips and guidance when they need it, neither burdened with irrelevant context nor dependent on intensive micromanagement byFLEX staff—a time-saver and win-win for everyone.

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