Nord Anglia
What was the challenge?
Over the last couple of years we’ve been working on an exciting digital learning project with Nord Anglia Education - the world’s leading premium international education organisation. It has been a great opportunity to work with many parts of the organisation at the same time and to go on an incredible journey of discovery and invention around the future of digitally supported teaching and learning.
They were looking for an agency they could work with that could deliver support across a wide range of digital activity and luckily that is exactly how we have been developing the team over the last few years. We started the project by doing a piece of extensive market research which helped frame a number of critical project decisions for the senior team. It was important that we looked at the developing world of Learner Data and tried to understand how NAE could do something distinctive and important that aligned with their culture.
Nord Anglia studentInvaluable, dedicated, brilliant. Put simply, collaborating with Unthinkable is a joy. Their breadth of expertise and strategic counsel, coupled with their constant encouragement to consider what ‘could be’ and not just ‘what is’, has added to our programme of work in ways I couldn’t have imagined or hoped. Despite their vast amounts of experience, everything is approached with an understated humility that only adds to the pleasure of working together.
Emma Jones, EdTech Programme Lead
How did we approach it?
From this inception point we then delivered strategic support around product development, guidance on digital transformation, a range of design services from the development of design principles and global visual language to a more ‘design futures’ approach that created a set of artefacts to describe the user experience a few years out. We provided a production team to support the development of engaging well designed digital learning resources - working closely with NAE’s education experts. We have also provided expertise on data ethics and how to embed that thinking into critical product and service design activity. As part of that process of integrating digital ways of working we helped the organisation strengthen its capabilities around R&D - something that is essential when the aim is to build something groundbreaking and take the organisation along on the journey.
This holistic, multidisciplinary and multifaceted approach has meant that we have been able to offer a wide range of different kinds of value to Nord Anglia.
It is this kind of broad partnership model that we feel really proud of and is something we have focused on for the last few years as we can see the kind of impact it has. Making bold ambitious digital products and services is a difficult business. Our approach is to help incubate, protect and grow the ideas, processes and capabilities that an organisation needs to do something new and distinctive. NAE has been amazing to work with - they have been open to new ways of working and have a phenomenal smart and open team that are keen to collaborate and discover new ways of working together.
