 Good afternoon colleagues. I'm very privileged to be here representing the unique and wonderful partnership which is changing the learning landscape, which has had a fair billing so far today already. What I would like to do is focus specifically on two aspects really to draw out the points about leadership and transformation. Firstly, I'd like to have a look at what we mean by the transformational potential of leadership and how we can enable this. I'd like to open up a little bit more of a generic set of ideas around leadership, how leadership can help to catalyze and enhance innovation. And then secondly, I'd like to focus specifically on learning from changing the learning landscape so far. The program is around a year old and we have another year yet to run. And particularly what we're going to do about applying that learning into what's coming up during the course of this year. So it's great to be with you. It kind of goes against the grain for me not to try and do something interactive in a session, but somehow in the time we've got available. I went through a few possibilities. I thought perhaps we can have silent interaction. I thought, you know, that would be with yourself. And then I thought, well, maybe what we'll do I think is a compromise is have three brief moments of 20 second contemplation slots at key points. And I'll highlight those when we get to them. I'd like to just begin with a kind of story which is part of my own personal leadership journey in higher education. And it takes me back to a particular kind of turning point incident that was from the mid 1990s. When I first became a head of department, we had a teaching quality assessment visit. And it was a kind of very interesting test for me in that role. I'd been six months in the head of department role. And it was a really interesting experience to learn about my own leadership, to learn about leading a team towards what we hoped would be a successful outcome. And indeed after four grueling days of very extensive observation visits, group discussions, etc. We came out with a pretty positive outcome that the university was delighted with. And I had the opportunity to reflect on that and to think what are the lessons about leadership that I can take forward into what I do in future. At the same time, I got a phone call on the afternoon when we got our kind of score result from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, who said, I'd like to see the whole department tomorrow morning come round to the directorate suite. We'll have champagne on hand to celebrate. 11 o'clock tomorrow morning, don't miss it. And I remember coming in the next morning feeling elated, sharing a sense of celebration with the team that I worked with. And then I went off to teach a two hour session and I got a bit carried away with the session. And I ended up arriving in the directorate suite five minutes later or so. And the Deputy Vice-Chancellor was there with a whole series of colleagues, all the rest of my colleagues were there. The champagne was lined up and he said, where have you been? I said, well, sorry, I'm slightly late. I've just went off and I've been teaching the last two hours. He said, ah, you can forget all that now. And I thought, hmm, gave me course for thought at the time. I thought, you know, have I succeeded in some kind of rite of passage, which has given me an entitlement no longer to have to teach? Or did he think that I was only teaching in order to look good in the in the observation? But it made an interesting kind of statement to me about what some of the expectations were in that institution about about my leadership role and what kind of priorities there were around that. And what it made me really realise and I think think about in all sorts of subsequent engagements, meetings, et cetera, that I've been involved in ever since, is to what extent is there really alignment between what we believe about the educational principles of what works successfully in learning and teaching and indeed what works successfully in making technological innovation and change happen. How much alignment is there between those principles and what we do in our practices of leading and managing activity in universities and colleges? And that then opened up a kind of lifelong investigation for me since then in terms of trying to wonder what kind of potential there might be in trying to bring about a greater sense of alignment. Because in a way, one of those great ironies I think about higher education and further education is that we are clearly working in organisations which are fundamentally about learning. Learning is the core of their activity, if you like. But the question is always there in my mind about whether they are genuinely what you might call learning organisations. So what's the transfer of some of those principles about what make engagement and successful and deep learning work that we can apply to our practices as leaders, wherever those leaders might be found. And I think that behind that there's an opportunity to kind of challenge democratic organisational principles which I find quite fascinating. And I think as long as there is that lack of alignment, technological innovation will always be constrained, it won't work fully. So I'd just like to quickly ask you to do one of those 20 second contemplations now. And can I invite you to picture in your mind some of the most engaged professional conversations that you've had in your career. What did they feel like? Where did they take place? What was it that was engaging about them? 20 seconds. And then the next 20 seconds is another of those moments of contemplation. But just to think for yourself, in those engaged conversations, what part did leadership play? OK, thanks for that. And I guess ideally it would be wonderful to explore with you what some of the meanings around leadership and your views on that were. I suspect that there would be around the room as many meanings and multiple layers of interpretations of leadership as there are individuals here. But I'm particularly, I guess that depending on how you interpret and how you understand and how you live out leadership, there are all sorts of extents to which going with that baggage will be a whole set of behaviours which are both potentially enabling and which potentially might act as barriers to really getting innovation and change to be successful. So what I'd like to do is just walk you through a kind of rethinking of a classic in many ways. The seven principles of pedagogic practice in undergraduate education, which come from the 1980s, I'd like to kind of translate those into a leadership context and see what they might mean if we were able to align leadership behaviours with and how we manage institutional activity with some of those pedagogical principles. All I've done is actually changed three words in these seven principles and those words just relate to some of the agents involved. So in this first one, instead of good practice encourages student-faculty contact, I wonder what it would mean in the context of if we translated that to organisational context, staff management contact. What that might mean in practice? Well, I suspect what it would mean is an institution that was characterised by a real sense of constant engagement in what you might call learning conversations, where dialogue is deliberately facilitated in order to produce a set of outcomes which involve some kind of deep learning, in which mentoring, in which coaching styles were a key feature, where there were regular creative collaborative events, for example, to enable people to be hands-on in shaping their own institutions and where there was a genuine sense of open dialogue and I think by implication probably open strategy formulation and real open engagement in empowerment around the direction that the institution is going in and what's fundamental to how it works. Looking at the second of those principles and again translating, good practice encourages cooperation among staff rather than students in this case and I suspect this is one of the things that I've always found most challenging, I think, in higher education institutions, that sense of what would this mean in practice? It would probably translate into some sense of genuine real team working and teams which don't simply learn how to operate along particular norms, for example, but teams which genuinely develop, become interdependent and actually become what you might call real high-performing teams. In a world in which I guess it's very prevalent for individuals to be measured by the individual success of their research output, for example, some of the practices of team working can at times seem inimical, they're tough, it's difficult to work on these and difficult to get them to be successful, but again an institution in which real technological innovation could happen I think would need to be enabled by a quality of leadership in which this was a key feature. And some of the others I think flow a little bit more easily, you don't really have to translate very hard around this. If you work in a learning organization, I guess that that means you take time to work in a kind of learning centric sort of way. Time is made available for and encouraged around things like reflection. You might use processes like action learning in order to go deeper in that reflection and that sense of ongoing questioning about things and applying learning that emerges from conversations into changing and improving practice. Another one which again is probably fairly clear, or it might be worth thinking that through a little bit more, spending time on task. I think that probably means genuine engagement in leadership challenges which force questioning, which force the application of new ideas into practice. And I think it's almost the complete opposite of what we might sometimes think of as meetings. Time on task is generally not the same as what we typically interpret as time in meetings, where there's only one person speaking at any one time, the agenda is tightly controlled, etc. So all kinds of enabling possibilities I think around applying that principle to organizational working. I think this one's an absolutely crucial one and I think you'd have a total absence of leadership if this weren't a key characteristic. But all sorts of things about ways in which leaders, and again I don't mean leaders determined by their formal position or not only that kind of leader, but leaders who have a sense of equality of being able to influence others. And that sense of being able to ask and help others to answer questions around things like what is the purpose of this part of the institution that we work in? Where are we going? How do we know how we're doing? What are the criteria by which we're going to evaluate our success and our impact? And I think conversations that take place around those kind of topics are likely to be the kind of conversations that enable people to feel that the work that they're doing is meaningful and has a sense of purpose about it. And I think, again, well worth cultivating from the perspective of a kind of learning leader. There are just two other principles in these seven. So one is this one here around diversity and different talents, different ways of doing things as well. And I think I've heard quite a bit of discussion today, encouragingly, about the importance of harnessing innovators wherever they might be found. And I think particularly harnessing innovators where they're found, what you might call the margins, far away from the power base of institutions and departments. How do we really engage with and nurture talents in places like that and make them succeed? And then finally, and this one clearly in very sharp focus for people, for institutions engaging in, thinking about their NSS scores and other measures, interesting the prompt feedback bit. I suspect that it's important also to focus on the depth and the quality of feedback too. But the number of, I could count, I couldn't count the number of programs that I've facilitated with leaders from higher education institutions and asking them the question, how does feedback take place in your institution? The number of times I've heard the response back, feedback isn't an option. Feedback's out of the question. There are people in my department I cannot ask for feedback from and I cannot give feedback to for all sorts of reasons connected to, I guess, the power politics which they feel are operating where they're working. But that whole concept of conversations which involve two-way feedback which enables learning and enables development seems to me, again, particularly crucial. So what does all that mean in relation to something like the changing the learning landscape program? I think that the partners working together on this program are doing their best to ensure that these principles actually do work in practice. And there are various things that we're trying to do in the design of the program and in how we work together as partners, which I think ought to make a difference in institutions, not only in terms of strengthening their hand with technological innovation, but I think also in terms of transferable abilities, capabilities that can make a difference to institutions and how they work. The final 20-second reflection for you is just to think about those seven principles. Just think about for yourself how they might translate, how one of those might translate into your own leadership practice. Is there one note you might make to yourself about something you might want to reflect on or take back to your institution? 20 seconds. So I think in short, in summary, some of these things about leadership learning and how leadership can be catalyst towards enabling behaviors, rather than setting up barriers, is likely to involve leaders who are able to create gaps, to create space and time in which new solutions can be discussed, thought through, questioned, and in which uncertainty is actually something that is welcomed and encouraged as a potential catalyst and source of learning. And I think one of the difficulties that many organizations face, not just in education, but in the wider world as well, is limits because of cultures of deference. There are all sorts of ways in which we hold back from doing what we think we ought to be doing, because there's that inbuilt sense of the deference that holds us back there and conditions people's behaviors. So changing the learning landscape you may have heard of, you may have had some involvement in your institution with already. Last year the activities that we did, that we engaged with, that we offered to institutions involved a mix of consultancy, so actually support around technical expertise or support around facilitation skills, leadership development activity, so programs of leadership development, development for students in terms of helping them to have a stronger voice in being engaged in activity and actually leading technological change in institutions as key drivers, and all sorts of ways in which we provided signposting to resources and materials that were available, really drawing on all the respective and then the combined strengths of the partners involved in the program. One thing that I think we could have been accused of is we did set up an awful lot of bidding processes, we had separate rounds of applications for getting hold of some of the resources that were available and we appealed to all sorts of different audiences in putting out the call for expressing interest. One thing that we'd like to learn from that is picking up on two key points that our evaluator astutely made during the course of last year around some of the generic challenges that emerged from her observations of changing the learning landscape work in institutions and her observations really about some of the bigger picture constraints. None of these were to do with technical details, none of these were to do with consistent platforms or use of software or anything like that, but they were fundamentally around engagement so going back to some of those leadership principles and pedagogical principles, how to engage staff in particular. It's interesting that people reported more problems engaging staff in some ways than engaging students beyond the enthusiasts and doing that in ways which modeled effective and inspirational use of technology in pedagogy and then the second one is an overall kind of observation around agility, around the speed at which higher education institutions can move to effect action. That sense of an awful lot of change was happening during the course of last year and in many cases some of the senior leaders that we were working with were overtaken by events. They thought they were working on one project in September and October and by the time the new year came many institutions had been told they had to engage in MOOCs through future learning for example and suddenly the project had changed focus. But nevertheless behind that there was a real sense of change being slowed down by due processes, by committee working etc and the institutions not really being able to operate us in an agile and swifter way as they knew they had to and I think there are all sorts of ways in which we need to work with helping institutions to build back capacity more quickly. So the key measure that we're introducing this year that you may have heard about in your institution or if not you may wish to go back and talk to your institution about this applies to institutions of higher education as well as to colleges with significant higher education provision and we so far have arranged 51 engagements in the first two months of this academic year and we're working towards a target of a further 20 or so. But we want to have a single point of engagement with each institution. We want to have what we call a strategic conversation which will take place during the course of one day in each institution and the two conditions of making this work are firstly that there must be student leaders involved in that engagement and the NUS are providing support development for student leaders so that they can make the most of those conversations. We will send in a consultant, a senior consultant from one of our partner organisations who will spend the day with that institution. Second condition is that the day must begin and end and end with engagement with a senior management team member so there must be that kind of buy-in and commitment from the executive of the university. And what happens in between, we imagine it's up to the institutions to set up their own programme for the day but what happens in between is a set of engagements, group discussions, interviews with key stakeholders in the change that the institution has in mind. In order to work with the institution on determining what its needs are and what resources we as a programme might bring to support those needs. So fascinating kind of new experimental emergent process. We're really fascinated to see how it works. I'm sure that the first conversations that we start to have in the next two or three weeks may well be quite different from where they've evolved to by the time we get to something like November. But there's a real sense of kind of partnership with the whole sector and with individual institutions around this as well as partnership with ourselves as organisations. And what a fantastic kind of fertile ground for learning. The key point is enabling strategic change around technology enhanced learning and enabling that to be really tied into fundamental learning and teaching strategy for institutions and not to be marginalised. So that's really my perspective. Those are some of the things that I wanted to share with you but I'd be very keen to open up into conversation or questions around that now. Thank you.