So in terms of what we’re looking at today then, so strategic academic leadership, embracing adaptation and innovation. Um, the ideas that I’m presenting today really come from systems thinking, which is an area that I have been investigating lately in terms of leadership. And one of the key kind of ideas in systems thinking is about not moving away from kind of traditional leadership skills, I guess, and thinking about a more holistic perspective of what is the leader and what does it mean.

So that’s what this session is really about exploring. So this idea of holistic leadership, what does it mean? Secondly, how does it apply or how does it not apply to academic settings? How could it be useful to you in terms of your own professional development and also in terms of the development of the people around you and your teams and your research. And so finally it’s about thinking about what strategies could you take from these examples, or could you take and apply to your own work? We will be looking at a couple of real life examples to see actually how does this work in practice? How might it work and how might it disrupt things and how can we emerge new approaches? Um, so that’s the kind of aim of the session today.

So a little bit more about the concept of holistic leadership. What does it actually mean? Well, it’s a comprehensive approach that considers the interconnectedness of various dimensions within an organization or a community. So of course, as I’m sure you are all aware, research and academic institutions are complex ecosystems with diverse, uh, and multiple stakeholders often. Um, so holistic leadership recognizes the importance of understanding and addressing the diverse needs and challenges of the stakeholders. And so it’s about trying to prioritize the development of individuals, both yourself and your teams, and also the broader ecosystem. And there are many different aspects to this kind of perspective. And I would say like it’s an interesting area to look into that’s quite easy to kind of like find publications on and so, if you are interested in researching it further or finding out more. But today I’ve decided to hone in on three these components to academic environments as well. So this is, this is why particularly I’m focusing on these.

So first of all, of course is adaptability. I’m sure you are all aware of rapidly changing worlds, and people are talking about these ideas about the kind of world, that there are many things changing at the moment, and there’s a myriad of challenges about that. So technological advancement, changing student demographics, the changing fortunes of, of he institutions at the moment. So leaders who can really adapt to these shifts are better equipped to navigate the continual kind of uncertainty that’s going on. It’s also about kind of prospecting and looking forwards and seizing opportunities to ensure the long term success, not only of, you know, the institutions that support research, but of your own career as well. Being able to evidence that kind of adaptability is becoming more and more important.

So secondly, innovation. You know, it’s a, it’s a kind of a buzzword in research and academia. But it is true that academic excellence thrives on innovation. So the ability to generate new ideas, approaches and potential solutions to complex problems. And more and more as well in terms of growth, in terms of where is funding going, we see that, um, interdisciplinary collaboration is likely to become more and more important as we move forwards as well. So being able to kind of innovate across boundaries is really important as well. Being able to draw communities of diverse people together, of diverse expertise is becoming more and more important.

So that kind of brings me onto the third point about convening skills and that leaders can harness the collective wisdom and expertise of their communities and network to tackle shared challenges and to drive meaningful change becomes more and more important. So, my hypothesis, I guess, is saying let’s have a look at systems thinking. Let’s think about these qualities and think about how they could be applied in your particular setting. And a little more, a little more kind of definition of detail about each of these just before I get you to do some thinking about yourself and how these might apply in your environment.

So adaptability, what is it? It’s about our ability to respond to unexpected things, to, uh, adapt and think about reflectively as well. What has happened, you know, and how might we need to adapt things to avoid rigidity? And this is crucial in many research landscapes because actually things happen iteratively and things change quite frequently. So how might we need to adjust our project goals? Secondly, innovation, as I said, the ability to generate novel ideas, but not just yourself. It’s not just about you, it’s the ability to kind of like bring people together who might be able to develop new perspectives or new techniques because of the combination of their different skillsets or perspectives. So this is important of course, for fostering knowledge and then convening. So how can we get people to talk across boundaries? How can we get people to really work well together? What ways of working and methods do we have, um, for helping people to get through things like confirmation bias? You know, we all kind of have, um, a territorial reality around our own domains and our subjects. And we’re often used to working in a kind of siloed way where this kind of domain perspective or kind of territorialness exists around our subject. And when we meet someone else from a different domain, we might inherently think that their perspectives are disruptive or wrong. So it’s about thinking about how can we develop structures within our teams and within our groups that kind of disrupt this inherent bias that often is born out of ways that we’ve worked already. So how can we foster those kind of environments?

So this is my first sort of challenge to you, a quick warmup brainstorm. So I’m going to ask you a mental question in a moment. What are some practical examples from your own experiences or your own environment that show adaptability, innovation or convening skills in your leadership? So here you go. So thank you for that. I can see some really interesting examples there, and I think Covid is a really, there’s many great examples in covid times of how rapidly people actually adapted things like teaching and supervising. And it’s really interesting, I think looking back at that period, actually, because personally I think it’s not something that we maybe imagined would’ve happened, you know, in terms of how fast systems and people were able to adapt. And so I think a positive from that, though it was a horrible period for many people, there are many negatives, is actually thinking that maybe our capability for adaptation and innovation is greater than we kind of imagined in peace times. So thank you for doing that. Some really good examples there.

Thinking a little bit more deeply about yourselves, um, you were given a self-assessment prior to this workshop. There’s also a link to the document. I’m just gone post that in the chat as well. So just in case you have not had access to that, you should be able to access this document here. And I’m going to give you kind of 10 quiet minutes to read the self-assessment and go through it kind of quickly assessing for yourself, what examples have you got in your own practice or in your own capabilities of innovation, adaptability and being okay.

Hello everyone, welcome back. So that’s been about 10 minutes or so for you to reflect a little bit on your own experiences, I hope, and to kind of give you a bit of time. You obviously might want to do that more comprehensively at another time, but I think it’s always quite nice if you can meet people at these kind of events as well. So I’m going to suggest that, well, I’m going to offer you the opportunity to break out now. So I do understand, of course, that not everybody can break out. It depends on what kind of space you’re in and so on. But I’m going to suggest we have a short breakout where you all get to meet someone, you introduce yourselves to each other a little bit and perhaps share a little bit if you want to of course, you don’t have to share anything about your self-assessment, but share something that’s come up for you, or share one of your strengths, perhaps an area where you’ve identified that you are doing well, and then possibly share an area that you would like to improve on. So I’m going to invite you to join a breakout group, and you’ll spend about seven minutes talking to some other people.

Hello everyone. So welcome back. I hope you had an opportunity, those of you that broke out to speak to someone, um, and that, that was good. I’m just going to put this link in the chat, hopefully that does work. So we’re going to look into an example, now that I think exemplifies holistic leadership in an academic setting. One of the brilliant things about working on the project that I’m working on at the moment is that we get to meet lots of really fascinating, um, uh, exploratory kind of projects and people and, and find out about things like this. So we had the privilege of talking to some of the people on this project and interviewing them for the Thrive Project. And it was really interesting and really great to see how they had been successful in really disrupting some of the things that we hold as norms really within this environment. So the Living with Machines project, um, is often abbreviated as LWM, and it’s an exploration of the impact of the industrial revolution on British society and culture. The primary goal of the project is to understand how technological advancements during the 19th and 20th centuries transformed various aspects of daily life, such as work, health, transportation, and leisure. And it’s a particularly interdisciplinary project, so it is a very diverse team of backgrounds within it. So they’ve got history, computer science, and data science. So this is spanning obviously quite a wide range of domains. And the aim of it was really to uncover the societal and cultural dynamics of the industrial Revolution through a combination of historical research and, um, computational methods. So, so they really had to kind of build a new methodology working across these different domains. So it’s a really, and they’ve also written a really short and very readable and very kind of transferrable summary of what happened in their collaboration, which I’ve linked in to the in the chat, which is a pdf that’s publicly available.

And particularly the chapter about radical collaborate collaboration, has lots and lots of potentially transferable ideas and lessons, and it’s not written in an inaccessible way. So I’d say it’s a really great wound as well. So promote their publication that they have made. But the things that I think are really interesting, and the fundamental kind of shift that they made was that they moved from a traditional kind of lab model where decision making authority and leadership roles are concentrated at the top, often with a principal investigator or co-investigators holding all the kind of primary responsibility to a distributed model of decision making and authority, which was decentralized. And leadership responsibilities were shared out across the team. So this empowered various members with various disciplinary backgrounds to lead various strands of the project. So in their book, they call this a shift from labs to strands. And each strand operated as a semi-autonomous unit within the larger project framework. So this structure really encouraged collaboration and knowledge sharing, but it also allowed greater flexibility and adaptability in responding to this kind of iterative and challenging new novel approach that they were trying to develop so they could respond more quickly to opportunities and also kind of respond to bottlenecks and challenges more quickly too. So by embracing this kind of model, they challenged conventional hierarchical structures and fostered a culture of inclusivity, collaboration, and also shared ownership for the team members. So team members feel that their contribution and their unique expertise and perspectives leading all collectively to more innovative solutions and a better outcome for the project as a whole.

So I think that’s a really interesting example of what they call radical collaboration, that I think it also exemplifies this idea of holistic leadership. So we are thinking about how the whole collaboration and the whole collective works, how does it work for everyone in it? And, and how are all of the parts really important in this kind of collaboration? I think some of the advantages of this and the ideas behind this are that it empowers everyone in the collaboration. So there is no kind of privileged knowledge about whose knowledge stands above anyone else’s in the hierarchy. And of course, this can lead to better problem solving. If we give equality to the diverse perspectives, potentially we can, we can come up with better solutions. They also manage to navigate hierarchical structures. Obviously there are realities in our system about funding and about how structures dictate who is responsible. But there are some ways around that, um, in the sense that they demonstrated that they could steer a middle way between top-down hierarchy and a kind of agile methodology where they could adapt the projects, feedback loops and so on, and delegate aspects of leadership to other people in a distributed network rather than having all of the decisions reside at the top. And so there real, there are ways potentially to reshape these things, to foster more collaboration in terms of decision making. In terms of continuous communication and adaptation. The project recognized that effective collaboration requires ongoing communication. And they had this kind of concept of contact languages or trading zones that there kind of needs to be a buffer zone between disciplines to help the cross disciplinary communication throughout the whole collaboration.

So there needs to be some kind of understanding of how the perspectives differ, and some kind of shared land where we can trade the different things flexibility and recognition. So holistic leadership was demonstrated by their willingness to adapt and restructure as needed. So they did begin as a traditional research project, but they recognized that this was not agile enough and was too rigid and was not, um, getting the best out of everyone there in terms of the project. And then finally, of course, bold moves. So really being prepared to question and disrupt usual ways of working. The kind of changing of the rhythm of work really exemplifies the idea of system thinking. So how is the system working and what holistic ways do we need potentially to change the system to drive forward interdisciplinary research endeavours? And so that’s a quick example there. Just a quick, not a deep dive, but obviously feel, I would really encourage you to kind of have a deep dive and look into that and look into their publications more, because it’s really interesting, if you’re interested in that.

But I think what’s interesting is like, what kind of ideas could we take from this? How can we transfer lessons into our own practice? And I think one of the things we probably don’t do enough is actually talking and making spaces for interdisciplinary conversations. Recently I was asked to do, to facilitate a research kind of sun pit, which, um, aimed to bring researchers together from different disciplines, um, to talk just in detail about what they were researching, what they were doing, and to think about are there any societal issues where they could potentially collaborate. And the feedback from that session was really, was really interesting and really good. People said things like, like, you know, it reminded me, talking to other people who feel passionate about research and who understand the ins and outs of research, though not in my discipline, really reminded me why I love research, why I do this. Um, someone else said, you know, now that I know what all of these people in detail do, when I go back to my office, um, and someone says, do you know someone who does something about this? I’ll be like, no, but I know someone who knows someone who knows something about this. So, thinking about that holistic perspective of feeding the whole ecosystem as well.

Another point is about thinking about how you can potentially implement agile methodologies that actually plan in things like feedback groups that mean that some decisions can be delegated. Of course, in reality, we can’t wipe out the need for kind of like governance and hierarchy, but actually perhaps we can distribute some, uh, decisions and some parts of our project so that team members can have more autonomy. So holding regular kind of thinking about meetings, I think, is important as well. So holding regular review sessions, not just meetings to plan what happened next and to plan workload, but reflective meetings that ask what has happened and what challenges, what improvements could we make based on what we’ve learned so far. So that’s a similar point to number four about actually making structured opportunities to ask about adaptation based on what we’ve learned so far. Other things you could potentially do is have idea type sessions, which are structured ways for team members to propose new ideas based on the knowledge we’ve got so far, or based on things that have come up.

So those are a few ideas of things that you could potentially do. I think, it’s over to you now, really. So what do you think about this case study? What insights could you draw from this? Would you consider applying any of these things in your environment or would you not? So I’ve just got a board here for you to kind of express any thoughts or ideas that you have in relation to that case study. Thank you for that. So, yeah, some interesting responses there. So we considered living with machines. Thank you for your responses to that.

And as an example of holistic leadership, now I’m going to spend a little bit of time introducing the project that I’m working on at the moment, which is similar in the sense that it aims to co-design a model of team led research, which will be prototyped, which is being prototyped, and then will be tested in a, in a live funding call, um, in the arts and humanities disciplines. And of course, our job is to evaluate that and to see what happens. So it’s not really saying that it, there’s solution A is over here and solution B is over there. What we’re actually doing is trying to disrupt the current system and see what kind of emerges. So we are not saying this is the solution particularly, but it may be, uh, one of the mutations that leads to the solution. And we are really genuinely committed to that experimental approach. So with that in mind, I’m going to ask you, invite you rather, to give your opinions a little bit. I will show you our prototype and show you what stage it’s at. And you’ll have the option to answer some questions about that to fill in a very short sort of feedback survey. But participation is completely voluntary. Um, so that’s really important to stress and you don’t need to feedback at all or input anything into the project. If you don’t want to, the University of Liverpool will protect your anonymity, and nobody will know what you individually have said. Um, we will only use your information for this project, and we will destroy that information after three years. So that’s my kind of riot act. That’s what I need to tell you. And so onto a little bit about how we created the prototype.

So before we delve into it, it’s important to understand how it has been built. So the principles that we’ve come up with have been meticulously co-designed through collaborative efforts and conversations with many different groups of people. And that’s really important because they represent a culmination of the insights and experiences from diverse stakeholders. So each principle is crafted to try to address a specific challenge and opportunity within research collaboration. So really they represent the collective aspirations of a lot of people in the research ecosystem. So this is the prototype. First of all, we have identifying appropriate expertise. So this is about the idea of thinking what skills, what capabilities do we need in this potential collaboration, um, to succeed in the project. It’s also about addressing the idea of expertise and broadening that out beyond the traditional idea of academic as being expert technician as not, for example. This is one divide that’s obvious in our landscape. Um, so the second thing is about establishing a collective leadership structure of some sort, so distributing leadership across the team and then having that work together in some way. And the third is about designing inclusive governance.

It’s interesting, this is a point that we’ve all wobbled over because originally, the co-design kind of thing was about the inclusivity of decision making, but actually further kind of research with funders and so on and other stakeholders, made us realize that we need to allow, we can’t be so specific because governance structures vary so much in collaborations and are so diverse across the research landscape, that actually we can’t specify, in terms of scalability, how it should be, um, embrace development for all. So this is a principle about how this is addressing the idea that really development can be very patchy, for researchers and for people in research collaborations in various roles. So actually within that project, there needs to be an embedded development goal or strand for each individual collaborator. And then finally, to engage in reflexive practice to think about that adaptation, that agility and the kind of innovation and how you can change and prevent bottlenecks, et cetera. How you can actually make the collaboration and the project work better.

So that’s the kind of prototype that we’ve got at the moment. We are also still, refining this, as I say, as a prototype. So we are user testing it, um, at the moment. So this is your opportunity to feed into this a little bit. And I think one of the things we’ve been asking people, well, all different from all different role points of view is what are the most common misconceptions about your role as a research leader or as an ECR or as a technician in research collaborations. How do you think your role would change if you were working in a team led collaboration like this? What additional support or resources do you think you might need, um, to actually fulfil that role? Well, so over to you. I’m going to give you a few minutes, and you can answer those questions if you want to.

So I’m going to suggest that we do some reflective writing, about wherever we are in our own leadership journey. I like to use a technique called free writing that you may have heard of. And the person who introduced this to me, or rather the book that introduced this to me was by Julia Margaret Cameron, and it’s called The Artist’s Way. And she says that in order to do freewriting, you have to warm up. So it’s a bit like exercise. So, hopefully you may have a, you’ve got a pen and a piece of paper handy or something that you can write with. And first of all, just before I give you a prompt that I’d like you to respond to, I’m just going to set a timer and, what you do is you just write for one minute, and if you are not sure what to write, you write and not sure what to write, and you write continuously. So, I’m going to start timing. One minute writing now.

Okay. Time to stop writing. So hopefully you are warmed up, um, and ready to, to do a bit of reflective writing about your own leadership. So I think this is about trying to think about, well, I think for me this is about trying to think about a moment in your leadership journey where you encountered a significant moment that really helped you in some way to adapt or evolve a fork in the road moment. So maybe something that challenged your assumptions, stretched your capabilities, or prompted you to kind of rethink. A recent one from my own experience, um, in the project that I’m working in now was really, um, early on in the project when there were a lot of decisions to make, um, early on. And the direction ahead wasn’t very clear for any of us. We kind of knew what we had to do, but we didn’t really know many of the how’s, and we had to keep defining the how’s. And there was a moment early on where the leader of my project was kind of, um, we were coming up to a decision where there was a crucial trade off. You know, we had to decide what to do, um, and it would, it was critical for the project, and my expectation was that she would make the decision. Um, but what actually happened was that she felt quite overwhelmed.

So I kind of went and said, okay, so what’s the, what’s the decision? What are we going to do? Um, and they were, they were overwhelmed and unprepared to kind of make that decision. So, in that moment I really kind of questioned myself. I thought, what should I do here? Should I, uh, be proactive? Should I step up and make this decision even though, um, it’s could be perceived as a challenge to authority, um, or should I kind of allow the catastrophic things to happen to the project? Um, and of course there were other options as well. Could I go to the co-lead? Could I do all these other things? So I very carefully considered the pros and cons of all of these things. I looked inside myself and I thought, actually, you know, I am familiar with the intricacies of this project and I think that I can make this decision and I think I can steer the, the project in the right way. So I decided to make the decision, uh, and went ahead and did that and stepped across that kind of threshold. And of course it all works out well, you know, uh, I, my, my, the lead gave me sort of good feedback about the need to understand when to be proactive and to push things forward. And my assessment of my own ability to kind of, uh, assess how, um, successful that decision would be was correct. And so that gave me confidence in terms of asserting, what should happen in those kind of situations, I guess. So anyway, it’s enough about me. I’ll be quiet and I’ll give you five minutes to respond to this prompt.

So today, what did we talk about? Well, we kind of defined and looked at this idea of holistic leadership. Um, the importance of adaptability, innovation and convening skills, conflict management as was just mentioned of course, is a really important aspect of that and acknowledging people’s kind of need to be seen and seen as leaders. We looked at a couple of real life examples living with machines and the Thrive Initiative, and then you thought about how to kind of elevate your own leadership narrative.

So finally, really, um, I just wanted to ask you, what are your one more mentee question, what are your top takeaways from today’s session? And questions you might want to consider for yourself, or which areas of leadership do you feel that you need to improve on most? And what actions will you take to enhance that leadership? So thank you for doing that. Those are really interesting to see there’s two votes for I second the end of the hero PI. So that’s an interesting theme, isn’t it? That’s come up, continuous evaluation and optimization. I’m really into that. It’s really, it’s really a good strategy. It can be quite hard to kind of think about how to do that, but the idea of kind of planning in the feedback loops is a really good thing to do. And of course, don’t let things fester. I like that emotionally as well. Harvesting that stuff and the idea of journaling, um, is a great method to kind of work through that stuff. So thank you all for your participation today. Um, it’s been really interesting to hear your views and I’m glad that you’ve enjoyed talking to each other as well.