🗣️ Transcript
Hello there! Good to see you again. You’re making great progress! This lesson is called: The Cascade: My Go-to Mapping Tool.
So here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why the cascade is like an organisation chart
- A small example revisiting a familiar scenario
- A simple notation you can use to map your territory
So let’s jump in!
The Cascade is one of the core tools I use when planning my own courses and helping other people with theirs.
I’ll explain why it’s called the Cascade later in the lesson but let’s set a little context first.
Remember how I said earlier in the module that it’s your job to tell students what work is required to get their result: both doing and learning?
Well, the cascade helps you get clear on what that work looks like before you try to turn it into a course curriculum.
The cascade itself is really just a structured description of how all that work breaks down.
Like all new concepts you might find the Cascade takes a little time to wrap your head around, but it should soon become a powerful tool for planning your course.
So here’s the best way I’ve found to introduce it.
Imagine the organisation chart for a company.
At the top you have a single box – the CEO or President.
Underneath, you have the next most senior people in the business, usually the board: the sales director, finance director and so on.
Then under each of those you have the people running the different teams and departments each director is responsible for.
Now the people in those teams and departments would probably say that’s where the real work happens, right?
Nevertheless, it’s the CEO’s job to set the overall direction for the company, the directors jobs to translate that mission to their different areas, and for those lower-level teams and departments to determine and complete the work that’s required to execute it.
So we essentially have a three-level hierarchy. CEO at the top, then the company directors, then the people running the teams or department where the work happens.
So now let’s switch to the cascade.
The cascade has a similar three-level structure. But instead of showing how a company is organised it shows how the work required to produce a particular result is organised.
So at the top of the chart, instead of the CEO, you have the result that your course will deliver. We’ve already talked a lot about that.
And just as the CEO drives the overall direction of the company, the result drives the overall direction of your course.
At the next level, instead of those director boxes, you have the individual achievements required to make the result happen. We’ve talked about those too.
And just as the directors are responsible for delivering specific parts of the company mission, the achievements represent specific parts of the overall result.
In the final layer, instead of the team and department heads, you have the specific chunks of work that lie behind each achievement, categorised as either doing work or learning work.
To show the cascade in action, let’s revisit a previous example: the team-building game where one person gives another instructions to draw an object.
So let’s see how you’d create a cascade for the result called: drawing of a flower.
(By the way, we’ll go left to right instead of top to bottom to fit everything on the page.)
So at the top (or in this case on the left) you’ve got the result, which is a drawing of a flower.
Next you have the four essential achievements required for that result to happen. We’ll call them:
- Draw the head
- Draw the stem
- Draw the petals
- Draw the leaves
Now, in the team-building example, the person receiving the instructions didn’t know that they were drawing these different parts of a flower. They just thought they were drawing a circle, then two vertical lines, and so on. But we don’t need to be so cryptic here.
Under each of these achievements you have the chunks of work required to make them happen. Because this is a simple example, only one of the achievements has more than one chunk of work underneath, but let’s break them all down:
- To draw the head, you need to do the work called: draw a circle.
- To draw the stem, you need to do the work called: draw two vertical lines.
- To draw the petals, you need to do the work called: draw 10 petal shapes.
- But FIRST, you need to learn: what’s a petal look like?
- Finally, to draw the leaves, you need to do the work called: draw two more petal shapes.
Which of course, because of where they’re positioned are actually the leaves.
And that’s a very simple version of the cascade creation process:
- Start with the top-level result
- Reduce it to its essential achievements
- Break each achievement into its doing and learning chunks of work
You won’t go to such a fine level of detail with your course as we did with the flower drawing, this is just an exaggerated example to help you understand the process.
So how do you create your cascade? Well, it’s up to you what tools you use. I’ll link to some of my favourites in the resources section.
You can use a fancy diagramming tool or you can use a simple text notation.
This one just uses nested bullet points for the structure and prefixes like “RESULT” and “ACHIEVE” to call out the different types of labels.
So that’s the cascade. In the next lesson I’ll give you some more help to break down those lower level chunks of work.
Oh, and I promised I’d tell you why it’s called the cascade. Well I like to imagine students pouring their time and attention into that top-level result and it “cascading” down into all those lower-level areas where the work needs to happen.
Check out the video in the resources section to see that idea brought to life.
See you in the next lesson!
🛠️ Resources
Here’s the puzzle that inspired the name of the Cascade: