Lumina Spark’s Journey to Composure – Finalist in Excellence in Technical Innovation

 Creating People Solutions with a virtual twist

Here at Lumina Learning, we equip organisations with the right tools to empower people to take ownership of their own development in a highly accurate, inclusive and  easily memorable way. Journey to Composure is Lumina Spark’s latest powerful virtual feature designed to help organisations unleash the full potential of their people, giving them actionable self-development skills that build self-awareness to last a lifetime.

Our new digital tool has earned us a finalist position in Excellence in Technical Innovation at the upcoming ABP Awards. We hope for good news on the 24^th of March when the results will be announced.

An interactive development experience that helps manage challenges, pressure and stress

JTC-Digital builds on our personality psychometric, Lumina Spark, and offers an additional coaching experience. JTC-Digital is a practical five-step coaching exercise to help people remain composed under pressure and stress, supporting them to be more adaptable and resilient. It is designed for Lumina Practitioners to coach clients and employees within client organisations, who want to build their resilience.

This innovative digital tool uses Storyline360 to create a highly interactive, animated and engaging addition to our personality psychometric. JTC-Digital raises self-awareness, increasing communication, collaboration, inclusivity and productivity.

The Big Challenge For Organisations

Year on year, our stakeholders have requested more digital solutions. Digital delivery and remote access have been significant blockers to personal development for organisations worldwide. These blockers have only increased since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Our stakeholders wanted digital delivery of our personal development solutions using the Big5 model brought to life through animation, colour, and interactivity by users, making learning more sustainable, scalable and effortlessly virtual than ever before.

We knew this project would meet stakeholder requirements to introduce new ways of exploring the Lumina Spark model, with more interactive, engaging and user-driven experiences that visually appealed to learners. The increased animation and interactivity were the perfect platform to show learners their strengths, development areas, and hidden potential in a genuinely easy way to understand, and stimulate learners, new and old, in their personal development. Going digital also helps create more sustainable, lifelong learning that is easily applicable beyond workshops or any other development experience.

The Solution

Many organisations have implemented slick interactive eLearning, whilst others have made practical use of rich, personalised psychometric data.  However, the technical challenge cracked in this project has created an interactive, personalised eLearning experience based on in-depth knowledge of personality.

We knew this project would be far more than just building on our Journey to Composure activity from face-to-face workshops into the digital space. It was an opportunity to introduce a new interactive, engaging and user-driven experience that visually appealed to learners and could be repeated post-workshop/virtual classroom. The digital animation and interactivity were the perfect platform to support learners to explore their Overextensions (how they overplay strengths or behave under pressure) and work on regaining composure.

JTC-Digital, although using a similar process to the classroom version differs by bringing in personalised psychometric scores to enable the participant to view their Overextensions and their Effective Qualities in one product.

JTC-Digital is more straightforward for learners and can be repeated even without a facilitator or coach, making the learning more sustainable.

JTC-Digital has five key steps, starting by providing an overview of the process:

Figure 1 Journey to Composure Overview

The learner is asked to identify an Overextension and identify what triggers the behaviour and its impact.

Learners can easily be reminded of their ‘top-5’ Overextensions and see scores for all 24 Overextended Qualities to help inform their decision (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Step 1 Identifying the Overextension to work on

The learner then answers some coaching questions around the impact of this Overextension on their self-talk, body reactions, and exhibited behaviours.

After a stop/pause, they select two Effective Qualities that will most help them move from Overextension and into composure (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Step 3 Selecting a Quality to help regain composure

Learners record their thoughts about how to engage this Quality, with coaching questions to help them avoid this Overextension in the future (Figure 4).

Figure 4 Step 5 Avoiding the Overextension in future

Learners are shown a summary of their Journey to Composure which they can print/save as a PDF (Figure 5).

Figure 5 Summary Journey to Composure

A comprehensively debriefed portrait can be enormously compelling, but sustainability can be short-lived when the day job gets in the way of personal development.

Using a digitally enabled product that can be accessed, not only through a browser but also on mobile devices, ensures that when an Overextension is triggered, the participant has a tool at their fingertips. (Managing potential Big5 maladaptive traits) They can plan how to maintain their composure by drawing on the simple 5 step model in JTC-Digital to help them.

JTC-Digital interacts with personalised psychometric scores, pulling in their individual Effective and Overextended scores to enable them to work with personalised data rather than hypothetical data or from memory.

JTC-Digital has been designed from the ground up and delivered using Storyline360, an industry-standard e-learning authoring tool. JTC renders content within a modern player allowing a user to interact with responsive content on any platform. Personalised data sets, visualised through a learner’s Spark Portrait and Splash, provide a framework for the JTC interaction. Data manipulated and annotated by the learner are saved on the fly and can be resumed from session to session or reset, ready for a new experience.

To support organisations and independent Practitioners using JTC-Digital with their employees and clients, we developed user guides, video walkthroughs, and live ‘experience sessions’ showcasing how to deliver the activity using the digital tool.  JTC-Digital can be used by the participant alone, in a facilitated workshop, or in a one-to-one coaching conversation.  Therefore, the learning achieved from exploring Overextensions and managing the way back to composure can be facilitated by a coach or self-driven, enhancing the experience and making the learning stickier.

Once enabled, JTC-Digital can be used multiple times, in the moment, to support ongoing development.

The success of the project was to be measured based on usage and feedback from Practitioners and participants.

Outcome Evaluation

Since its launch in March 2021, feedback from our Practitioners and learners has been overwhelmingly positive, which is reflected in the usage statistics (Figure 6).

Figure 6 Journey to Composure Usage

Achieving a slight percentage increase in performance of individuals out of the 19% performance enhancement from managing Overextensions identified in the research above will significantly impact individuals, teams, and organisations.

Practitioners value having a tool that enriches their coaching sessions. One of the key benefits identified is how simple it is to use compared to flipping back and forth through a PDF or worksheet.

Learners appreciate that it’s personalised to them, making the benefits of the Journey to Composure process much more powerful and ‘sticky’, ensuring their learning outcomes during coaching and workshops are translated into real change at work. Above all, both Practitioners and learners appreciate that it’s a highly practical, easy to use tool that can be accessed when it’s needed most.

I am still having plenty of stressful triggers at work; however, I am bouncing back twice as quickly and getting back to my normal productive state – Lumina Participant

Reflecting on what triggers me at work has allowed me to create new strategies for nipping these situations in the bud, so I am much less likely to get stressed in the first place – Lumina Participant

The least successful aspect of this work was ensuring that JTC-Digital could be translated into multiple languages.  Left-to-right languages were relatively easy to do, but right-to-left languages such as Hebrew are still a challenge. We learnt from this work that we need to ensure that the rollout is well planned, and translations thought through at the beginning.

Journey to Composure can still be delivered in a face-to-face format. However, the high usage figures are testament to the enthusiasm with which our stakeholders welcomed JTC-Digital.  JTC-Digital was launched in the middle of the pandemic when face-to-face coaching was challenging. It is reasonable to assume that the high usage was a direct result of the pandemic rather than JTC-Digital being the cause. However, usage figures have continued to rise as we come out of the pandemic, which, we believe, indicates that it was not simply due to the lack of opportunity to deliver face-to-face.

Start your Journey to Composure here 

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