My Subversive Pathway: Designing My Path of Authority — Madeleine Olson
Voices
“I don’t know what I want to major in, but I know what I want to do with my life.” I wrote this the last week of my senior year in high school.
Before attending college, I was already breaking away from any expression of locking myself into a fixed pathway or following the process as it existed. My feathers were already ruffled in high school when it seemed everyone in my town wanted to know where I was going to college and what I wanted to study. I get it—typical curiosity. This was part of the culture of a traditional New England-esque community where parents seemed to have a short list of the ‘acceptable’ colleges in their heads when asking the proverbial, “So where are you going next year?” I found myself withdrawing and dreading the toxic, elitist banter which became an implicit comparison game about who could get into the most “prestigious” universities.
Sometimes we measure life like a ruler as if we are supposed to make certain decisions at predictable times across the span of our developing years. I believed my college decision defined me and where I stood on the scale of academic prestige. Sometimes others assign labels to us based on our decisions, namely where we go to college as if it represents some core truth about us.
But these questions were loaded with pressure for me to know supposedly important life decisions I did not know yet. These questions constrict those like me, who are ambitious and driven in an array of multiple endeavors and who simply can’t be put in single identities. This restrictive feeling was the same one I experienced in college when everyone around me was declaring their majors.
By my senior year of high school, I had withdrawn from this game of labeling. There were two classes that were most helpful in teaching me how to do this.
One was an acting class with my teacher, Sean Harris. For me, acting was about making decisions, but unlike the world outside the black box theater, this world was full of constantly changing power dynamics among characters. I learned how, in acting scenes, characters have objectives or goals to pursue, which makes up a scene and drives the action. I learned how to pursue my objectives in a scene relentlessly. To do this, the actor must not head down one fixed pathway but must pursue multiple actions to get there. As an actor, you learn how to constantly react in the truth of the moment based on the decisions (movements, actions, and tactics) your scene partners are pursuing and adapt within your scripted role. Acting forced me to find my edges of risk-taking because it called for full commitment to action in any given scene.
The second class was a hybrid English and theater course called “Voices of Inspiration and Rebellion,” co-taught by Sean Harris and my English teacher, Carol Blejwas. Everything about this course was about breaking against any conditioning that has hardened us not to speak, assert, and claim our voice. That class could have upset any system that wanted us to behave, pass tests, and focus in proctored ways. My voice was awakened in the narrative and spoken word assignments in this class. For each unit, we wrote a creative piece that had to be performed for the entire class.
Blejwas and Harris explained how they structured the course as a community. The course relied on the trust and participation of every student to be vulnerable, take risks, and develop a sense of authority over what they believed through personal storytelling.
I witnessed personal stories from my peers that removed intimate layers and social statuses. I realized these students—students I had never really “seen” until this class, even though I had been sitting in classrooms with them for years—were just like me. We all were navigating what we believed to be true and what kinds of humans we wanted to be as young adults now graduating into the world.
“We don’t look at our AP lit classes as ensembles. The heart of the idea really came from space to speak truth. It’s the heterogeneity of the class that creates the power,” Blejwas told me. In this class, I broke away from having to describe myself in a narrow, labeled way. Instead of describing myself in terms of where I was going to school and what I was going to major in, I was asked to write about my truths and own my own complexities while finally being given an actual platform to write and speak. I felt so vibrant and powerful. I felt fluid and exploratory. The class gave me a way to embrace my authenticity and that of others, which I never even knew we needed.
As individuals, we are too dynamic to fully fit into any mold, and awakening to this realization is a journey. When we do, we begin embracing, rather than abandoning, the parts of ourselves that never belonged to traditional templates in the first place.
Designing our Path
Fast forward to college, I handed the Registrar’s Office a piece of paper that would sentence me to the unorthodox course of the next three years. I had decided to embark on the tenacity and dedication to blaze my own trail by creating my own major called ‘Critical Studies in Media Arts.’ ‘It won’t work’ many academics said. I did it anyway.
My story became about what it means to break against constraints collapsing our personal abilities to succeed by designing what hasn’t been conceived yet. Underlying this process, I could map out that my curriculum wasn’t just a plan of study, but the design of what quality learning and integrity looked like to me – interdisciplinary, iterative, revisionary, and deeply personal. All of this had to be self-directed. It all had to be self-designed. I soon began realizing what I was doing for my created major in my undergraduate years was design, yet I didn’t know this at the time.
Once I began my graduate studies, I learned that I was not alone, and there was a legit name and discipline for what I was doing called ‘design-thinking’ and that I wasn’t alone in my practice, but thousands of creatives, educators, and consultants have used this approach. As designers, we learn to get out of our assumptions, listen to the world, test things, fail early, re-prototype, and adapt intelligently. This realization empowered me to recognize there was merit in what I was doing as I began cultivating the professionalism as a ‘learning designer’ and could finally acknowledge my life’s work as transformative design.
Following this pathway led me to extraordinary outcomes once I pursued my M. A. in Learning, Design, and Technology, engaging in projects based in human-centered design in higher education. I have been fortunate to work at institutions including Georgetown University and Harvard University as well Desklight, a design thinking consulting agency, committed to combining learning, design, and technology to intersect around transformative education within higher education.
I have come to believe that design becomes our path toward self leadership and authority.
Experiences aligned with our identities and values build the blocks of legacy for ourselves.
Perhaps we should start being more intentional about our own experimentations, rather than achievements.
Why Thought Leadership
I had to find out if embracing unorthodoxy wasn’t just unique to me but part of a larger impulse. I began researching and interviewing some of the most influential thought leaders in entrepreneurship, life coaching, and creative design whose stories have become some of my greatest inspirations. I have been fortunate to have had conversations with some of today’s most inspiring modern path forgers Emmy Award winners, Forbes Influential Speakers, conscious leadership coaches, and countless others who have inspired tenants of my thought leadership.
What I have found is that several others have life pathways that resonate with my own confrontations, vulnerabilities, and setbacks. We lead lives of paradox, self-alignment, and radical imagination. Our journeys are the threads that weave together the fabric of my message - that we can reframe problems into design opportunities and connect ideas that matter.
I wrote a book all about this called Subversive Pathways: Your Life as Transformative Design on applying design-thinking to everyday life. While design thinking work often happens in organizational contexts, we can also use it to transform our own lives. I believe it is how we manage to blaze our own trails – that the root of being a designer is understanding how to work systemically and fruitfully out of a series of conditions. That limitations and constraints make us creative, and our originality is what brings us back to our humanity. This is perhaps the richest experience I know of.
Today, as a design-thinker and thought leader, I am committed to helping people think like a designer to solve challenges like a leader.
