"To boldly go where... we've been many times before."

Obviously the purpose of this website, these blogs, and my videos, are to encourage an evolution of what we do to meet the changing world of higher education. Some of that is about provoking some new thinking, about changing the culture of what we do so that we can balance technology use and long term benefit for students. Some of that is literal tips to make academic life easier. Some of that falls a little in between.

Today's is one of those in-betweeners. It's about how even when presented with a myriad of new ways of doing the most arduous, mind-numbing, and progression-slowing parts of the job, our reluctance to try new things and to engage with what others do often means that which could be improved or solved within a single academic year turns into entire academic cycles.

My issue with that, is that inaction in this case has people at the end of it who we're supposed to be responsible for the experience of. There are students at the end of every decision (or indecision) who could have benefitted while they were with us had we worked a little more continuously, collaboratively, and all enabled through digital approaches and tools.

Every university is guilty of it. There are some huge projects that of course need to wait, to be done in stages, to be carefully Gantt-charted until you run out of colours for those little bars (okay, I am clearly demonstrating I so don't understand Gantt charts - do cut me some slack though, I'm an anatomist). New buildings, demolition of old ones, estates improvements, new services; these are all big ticket items that still lend themselves to project boards and checkpoints and official sign offs at time specific intervals. But the day to day stuff that forms our core business of academia; the student experience, data collection, how we mark, how we meet, when we meet, that can all be done so much more efficiently and with more people genuinely informing the decisions if we just had more people dip their toe in the digital shoreline and take a swim in the depths of innovative practice.

So let's crack on with a few examples.

At the simplest level - meetings. I simply don't understand any meeting that exists for updating or information, and that only invites discussion through being open to questions at the end of presenting information. Sure, the information coming to you may have prompted a question that benefits the wider work by being asked and answered. But when we now have the ability to so easily share updates asynchronously, and comment, discuss, and add to on the fly, the idea that stakeholders (or even active participants or partners) have to wait for the meeting to happen to know where things are at and have any involvement in driving things forward is absolute madness. Even worse is spending the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting collectively going over the minutes from the previous meeting for accuracy before "signing them off", and having to deal with someone note that they need amending because the second page has the comma in the wrong place. If we truly want to change the way we work to reduce admin, reduce stress, reduce bureaucratic replication, increase efficiency, and create time for enhancement and innovation, we need to have minutes be accessed in real-time, commented on, and digitally signed off before the next meeting even takes place.

So tip #1: Share live documents, and work on them asynchronously. I do this with student drafts where instead of them waiting around for a week for me to get back to them with an annotated copy before doing anything further for fear of continuing down a wrong path that has not yet been highlighted (thereby losing them precious time and getting closer to the deadline without knowing what is safe to plough on with), they can see my suggestions in real-time and make changes as I advise on their work. They can even comment on those comments, ask for clarification, and so on.

When it comes to meetings, becoming agile in how we work when we must have them is to have the agenda and the papers/pack provided as live documents from a central point (depending on the nature of the meeting, this could be a SharePoint site or a Microsoft Team) beforehand to then be commented on, answered where appropriate and easy to do so, and then have a much shorter meeting to discuss any matters that are flagged for discussion that need it (because it would be too lengthy and, ultimately conversational, to keep commenting and addressing in the documents themselves). I just don't see the point in having a bunch of people get together in a room (virtual or otherwise), for half of them to say nothing at all, and the other half to speak for the sake of commenting to have their say about the work without actually offering anything to enhance or otherwise impact it. Coming to a meeting to sycophantically agree with the author's "bold approach" or to ask "and are we looking at---" is just ego masquerading as assurance seeking. We can get so much done if we work in the background as and when information becomes available and inspiration hits us, rather than the work being held up until the group can get together live to nominally approve of that which others are waiting to crack on with.

And that brings me to how we meet and how we provide, organise, and access information and actually do things together. The world has spent the better part of the last two years working and meeting remotely, digitally, and more collaboratively than ever before. In some places and spaces this has been done exceptionally well, and work has progressed so much more efficiently and with more positive impact than one could have imagined. But this has tended to be where those involved were already agile in the old digital department. In other areas though, the practices of pre-2020 simply moved online. Meetings were conducted via Zoom or Teams, and people opened pdfs rather than dragged 150 page paper stacks around with them. But the meetings still existed solely as calendar invites that sat separately from anything else. The paperwork came as full-on attachments to e-mails, or occasionally as updates to the calendar invite that someone would mistake as a change to the meeting that they would then re-confirm their attendance (and sometimes as a nice reply-all to raise the blood pressure of the most zen of colleagues). And despite the chat persisting in its existence once the meeting had ended, the meeting was considered dead and done the moment the last person typed in the chat, "thanks all, bye!". Which reminds me - in a physical meeting, did you ever go around the room waving like a mad person and saying goodbye to everyone like you were seeing them off on the cruise of a lifetime? Or did you simply subtly nod when the chair thanked everyone on behalf of everyone, stand up, and leave the room with maybe a brief pause to chat to the person next to you? Why it takes ten minutes for the chat in an online meeting to die down from pinging us as we wait for everyone's emoji laden goodbyes to cease is beyond me. I have to admit, some of the ways of old still have some merit.

Tip #2: Keep talk going. I've posted before about the importance of people. People help drive decisions, and the commentary of a few people in a meeting should not inform the best route to take any more than a workshop of carefully selected colleagues or a panel of your keenest students. There may be questions that pop into people's heads after the meeting has ended as they download the session into their brains and reflect. There may be relevant discussions that arise after the meeting between colleagues, only one of which "represents" on the group the meeting was held in. People may fear speaking in the meeting when they have the requisite knowledge and skills needed, simply because the majority of those present are senior to them and are there because of their title or area of responsibility, not necessarily their skillset or experience. All of these situations help make the voice of what drives the processes and decisions open, and honest. And not limiting commentary and discussion to the meeting itself but encouraging it after the fact through digital means should leave the decision makers genuinely reassured that they are full informed, not partially informed by the two-pager they got given.

So, back to digital. In some cases as almost a gesture of digital acceptance by a well-meaning colleague, a Microsoft Team might be created. A step in the right direction! But more often than not the meetings associated with that Team or the shared purpose of its members would still be sent round outside of the Team, sit outside of the Team, and the Team became simply a storage facility for the agenda before the fact, or the minutes after the fact. And this is not what Teams is supposed to be for. And in fact all that does is create yet another Team in an employee's already bursting at the seams plethora of Teams; creating another reason to actually not engage with the platform at all because it has become intrusive (more often than not simply due to a simple lack of engagement with the easily customisable notifications functionality leading to a claim that "I just get too many messages coming through"). Teams is in fact (when used properly and in the right hands) an amazing platform for productivity, collaboration, shared leadership, and transparency. When used correctly it can decimate e-mail chains, keep work moving, keep people informed without making them sit around listening to the latest rhetoric, and hold people accountable for their responsibilities by having tasks and timelines assigned to keep the work moving, and the interaction continuous. But more often than not, the Teams, the channels, the well intentioned posts and shares just sit there idle, waiting for the next meeting for anyone to say or do anything with them. One Team I'm in is just excruciating, as one member tries really hard to get the rest of the membership to engage with it by adding items of interest and inviting discussion outside of the formal meetings. Yet nothing happens, and those posts of such rich potential fall into the chasm of nothingness, unengaged with (even at the next meeting because surely if it were worth discussing it would have been added to the agenda and therefore we shall leave such mundane musings to one side, untouched and unresolved). So much more could be achieved if more people could shift their work brains out of the ways or working of the first half of the last century.

Tip#3. Build the right thing the right way, and they will come. Think about what you are trying to achieve as an end goal. Is it short-term, long term, a thing or an idea, a process or a project? Should it be a Teams chat, or a full-on Team, or a SharePoint site? Will you be sharing just the odd file, or will you be managing a group of people on a shared endeavour? Is it closed doors or is it open season? All of these things help tell you if you should create a community that flexes as purpose changes but the people remain the same. Or if it should be a file repository with specific people or groups accessing as necessary? Or a Team with a set purpose with tasks that need monitoring and managing, with shared discussion and formal meeting for key events to bring different arms of the project together (I have a nice little graphic that can help with those kinds of decisions - ask me about it some time).

But here is the other thing that digital working can do, if the right people with the power to "make it so" are also the people engaging with it properly in a followship sort of manner; it can solve a lot of historic problems with system, process, and sharing. Once we start embracing even the most fundamental of digital approaches, once we start playing with the simpler things and realising they aren't so hard to use and yes they do make what was previously a bane of the job a breeze, we can start to create solutions for things that have been negatively impacting our students. But doing so takes more than a few champions. More than a few beacons of "see what's possible?" It makes no odds to someone if Johnny Whizzkid starts showing off how easy work life can be when you go digital if no one who leads recognises the benefits and sets the example to follow. If the person who sets the tone and the standard sticks with old-style meetings, expects discussions to only take place in fixed and synchronous settings, or for participants in work to remain the physical few who represent an area but not necessarily a skillset, then really anyone who prefers to leave things as they are and not evolve their practice can simply say, "let Johnny crack on so long as he can't make me do it when I don't want to".

Tip#4: Pick up the baton. This one is pretty simple really. If you are in a position where your voice, by virtue of your title or standing, can influence actionable change, get involved. Start to recognise where the pressure points are in your staff and in them achieving the collective goals, and marry those up not with measures to help with strain and stress (or by throwing more people at a problem and hoping it sorts itself) but by removing the cause of the strain and the stress by looking around for positive examples that can better things for everybody and making them key tools in your own personal arsenal to help people by using them in your own work. So long as higher education works to a corporate based hierarchical structure as opposed to shared leadership with hotspots of oversight and accountability, the way in which we do things will continue to come down from those who manage us. Because the higher up you go in a university, the wider things become and the more professional, support, and corporate services overlap in the work, which means unifying some aspects of how we go about the strands of the job that are common to all no matter your discipline or area within the institution. So if the crossover areas continue to be informed by the ways of yesteryear because that's all the people at the intersections of corporate and academic know, those ways will drive how everything below it and around it gets done.

We have an awful tendency in higher education to recognise something isn't working but not actually do anything to fundamentally transform it so that it does work. It's great that we recognise that nineteen non-communicative systems doing three very similar things is not effective, that assessment by way of darkened rooms and parchment and no internet access is not authentic or useful to anyone, and that looking at data at the end of something only means that you can try to make that thing better next time. But we rarely look around at the practice, the methods, the tools that we have seen work (often in our own institutions because we're often busy "sector scanning" to take up what someone else is doing elsewhere because we're either not aware enough of our own practices to see the benefits or too risk averse to being the first to do something) and actually implement them as proven practice of efficiency, experience, or success on a scale beyond those few paragons of change. It's always "pockets of best practice". Indeed in the case of assessment being (for the most part - barring those pockets of best practice) wholly inauthentic, it took a pandemic and being locked out of the giant buildings with rickety tables and retirees pottering about to babysit to realise maybe there was another way of assessing. And this is despite some of us being years ahead of the game but having to sit in hairpulling madness as students complain that no one else is doing the thing the way you're doing it, but you're in no position to expand that beyond round after round of inarguable proof of how well it works because so many others can't figure out how to do it themselves (or simply don't want to) and no one with authority moves it any further towards becoming standard practice.

Well you know what, when practice is demonstrated over and over to be best, and yet never becomes standard through lack of getting those unwilling to change to evolve how they do what they do (in teaching, but also leadership, admin, process, business change, and so many more intertwining areas of higher education), someone somewhere needs to step up and make things happen. Because at the end of the year, and at the end of the indecision, students we have a duty of care for and a responsibility to are having to experience successive years of "it'll do for now."

Let's be bold. Let's boldly go. If we could just warm up the warp core, that'd be a start.