 Rhaid? I think a theme that is very much emerging today is in reach. If anyone was at panel eight, they'll know what we're talking about. I'm self-plagiarising there because I think I put it quite well and I thought well, why not? I think there's a real issue, there always has been with special collection services not being well enough known and understood and connected internally. It was ever thus. Rwyf i wneud i ddim yn siarad gweithio ymyliau yn y cysylltu'r 90s. Mae'n wedi bod nesaf eu cyllid ar ôl ffn dechrau pa hwn, ond byddwn cael yr ysgrifennu i chi ddweud iawn, ond byddwn cael yma sy'n meddwl yng Nghymru. Mae'r odd o'r llyfr sydd wedi bod cymdeithasiedig. Rydym wedi bod, y dyma yna allwch, ac mae'n hawdd i fi'n arweithio,ౌwn, felly, y mor gwaith yw'r byd yn edrychwch yn gweithio'r gwahanol? Mae'n gwyprobl yn gweithio'r gwahanol, felly y festiwch gweithio sy'n gweithio leol o'r llefyn o'r ei wneud, yw'r rysg. Nid oedd yn fawr gyda'r gweithio i'r ffor МиF. Yn cyfwyrnau'r gweithio, mawryn yn defnyddio i'r gyfreithio'r gweithio, ac mae fawr o'r dyfanc, os gall Ilein Panl Qeidwynhau, a chydrwch chi mwylo'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Felly, mae'r perff joinso gyda'r adnod o'ch gweld i gael y glendid wasau i chi! Mae'r gweithio yma, ond dyw'n gwybod i adnod o'r add еi iddo, a fyddwn ni'n ffordd am eich saith. Mae'r unrhyw o'r adnod y ddod o'r adnod o'r adnod i gael eich saith i gael i ddechrau eich llunio cereddol yma, cyhoedd wedi bod hynny rhaid i gael eich parfrwyddiol, rydym eich cymdeithasol. Ynny'n mynd o'r chyfl. Wythda'n ddweud, dyna'n ddweud. Felly, rydyn ni'n gwybod yn eich ddweud o bwysig yn ddiddordeb yn ei ddweud. Roedd yna heddiw gydig o'r trofnodol o'r trofnodol o'r trofnodol o'r trofnodol o'r trofnodol. Roedd mae'n edrych yn gyflaenio, roedd yna amser wedi wneud o gyfnodol o'r trofnodol, o'r trofnodol o'r trofnodol o'r trofnodol o'r trofnodol. Fe bod y gwybod llunion llawer yn ddefnyddio'n gwelladd a mae'n ddefnyddio'n ddechrau a'ch ddefnyddio'n ddefnyddio, mae'n ddefnyddio'n ddefnyddio. Mae'r ddechrau'n ddefnyddio'n ddefnyddio, ac mae'n ddelchots ar yr yifi a'r ddefnyddio am y sciences, oedd yn cyfrifiadau yn ddefnyddio'ch sciences, oedd mae'n ddefnyddio'n ddefnyddio. Yn gyfryd, gallwn i'r ddynnu peol yn ddefnyddio'n ddefnyddio'n ddechrau, efallai eich bod'na fydd A wrth gwrs, unigfawr, y lle fydd ei ffordd anhygot ar gyfer y dailgu. Rhywb i'r gweithio allai gael i maeson iawn, ac mae'r gweithio allai gael i gael gweithio. Yn y gweithio sefydliad am têl iawn, ac yn y pannau nad y gael, dyma'r cymryd yn ei fflaen fyddod i'w dymian iddyn nhw i'r ddam a'r ffrind ymlaen. Felly, rwy'n wedi chefnod am ymdyn nhw i'r gweithio. Fydden nhw'n wedi chefnod am ei gael, yma'r gweithio lle fyddcheering. Everyone... I don't know about you whether in universities or not, but I bet you're super busy and I bet all your colleagues are super busy, email, email, email... Everything is a big rush. There isn't time to go and explore something that might be awesome just because it might be awesome. You just get through the day. You just do what you've got to do. I think that gives us what I've pointed to at the bottom which is a tangle It's bit of a tangle. How do we untangle it? I don't have all the answers, but I wanted to tell you about a thing I've been involved with in the past year that has really helped my service and me connecting internally. Bradford leader. It's a leadership programme developed by the University of Bradford because the university recognises that these are really, really difficult and turbulent times in higher education. I don't think anyone wants to disagree with that, do they? No. Really, we don't know what's going to happen. We know it's going to be difficult. Student numbers under pressure, finance under pressure, leaders are needed. The definition in this project of leaders is not just the person who stands up at the front and is the big boss. It's anyone who has influence over others. You don't have to be a line manager or a budget holder. You're just somebody who's trying to influence others to do things. I think that probably everybody here is a leader. You have a role to play in encouraging certain behaviours and certain things to go on. Bradford leader. It's a very classical leadership programme. It involves you're split into cohorts for new managers, experienced managers and senior managers. There are overnight sessions in the university's beautiful heat and mount premises, which you can see that's a picture of the door. It's lovely. It's off the main campus. It's a beautiful Victorian villa with a beautiful garden. You can take a deep breath because no one can find you. You do a lot of workshops, a lot of overnight stays, a lot of very traditional leadership training. I'm not here to talk about that because leadership training is what leadership training is. That's not kind of the point I'm making here. There was a massive incidental bonus of being involved in this programme that was not to do strictly speaking with the content of the programme. I was involved in the developing, which I've underlined to help you see it. That is kind of the middle managers. It's full of basically middle aged people who've been around since forever and who know what's what. Most of us were very cynical and we had a lot of laughs about things you can imagine. It was quite a nice mixture of people, but we were all of a certain age, shall we say, with a few younger folk there. It was very much the backbone of the university in a way. It was a very, very interesting experience. The thing that really stood out about the programme was a thing called SIGS, which I'll keep saying SIG, Strategic Impact Group. Our cohort consisted of, I think, about 16 people and we were split into two SIGS of about eight. We see I can do maths. We had to all choose what's described as a wicked issue. I don't know if you've come across the term wicked issue. It's like a big mess. Climate change is one, apparently. It's something that is a problem that you can't even quite define the problem, let alone work out how you're going to deal with it. There's all sorts of threads and strands and things going on. It's big and messy. Many things in universities are big and messy like that. The wool, I think, illustrates it nicely. The point being made about picking one of these issues was that these are the things we need to tackle and you can't do it in a traditional problem-solving way. You've kind of got to have a dip into it and try things and do new stuff. The one we chose was bridging the gap between town and gown. I must draw your attention to that, which is a pie that I made. That is the coat of arms of Bradford. Its work overcomes all, which I think I agree with. It's actually a bake roll tart, but it's sort of Bradford-y-flavoured. It came third in our bake-off at work. You should have seen the winner. It was awesome. I think it made a plastic. The reason we chose this issue was that the group felt that people at the university were not enough connected with the city. A lot of people, particularly on higher grades, are not necessarily going to be staying all that long. They've got several years at the university and they might go somewhere else. They drive in, they park their car, they go to work, they go home, they work at home. The public transport users are a bit more engaged because we walk through the city to get to work, but most people are not. We felt there was a huge issue there. What I think was interesting is that when we found out what all the other SIGs and all the other cohorts had chosen, everybody either was looking at this issue or they were looking at internal communications in the university. We agreed on the fact that there are these big problems for our university and I suspect most other universities have similar ones. The SIGs were totally up to us. They weren't programmed. It was like we had to get together and decide how we were going to tackle these things. We had various meetings and we tried some stuff. That looks like the seaside, doesn't it? That is Bradford. We have a big pool and people go there in the summer and it's like the sea. It's so beautiful. This is one of the really lovely things that we now have. It's a real attraction for people. We tried various things. We did a bit of... This was me. I wanted to do a sort of something quite strategic so we did a bit of investigating about volunteering and what the university support for volunteering was. We arranged a meet-up in town but the take-up wasn't huge. It was nice. It was a nice event. I didn't go because I'd broken my shoulder so I have an excuse but it didn't attract that many people. Some people tried to volunteer at the local food bank but they had far too many volunteers and they said we didn't need any more volunteers so that didn't work out. So we kept sort of nibbling away at different stuff like what are we going to do? We've got to do a thing. Then we found some new friends and I think it's all about collaboration. We found out that the Bradford Council has a very similar scheme of Bradford Council leader type people which I thought was rather exciting. The things that these leaders have got up to, they do all sorts of things. They organise a dragon boat festival. They're the long sort of narrow boats you see on Chinese rivers with dragons on their fronts so they organised that and they also organised a thing where there's apparently a record for doing that in a great big line of people. You do sort of like a heart shape and we did the biggest and we got the record for it. So the entire square was full of people doing that which was lovely, love Bradford. So that's the kind of thing the council group were doing so they were pretty impressive. They've organised a lot. So we got together and we did an unconference. Now I don't know if you can actually read any of the things that we've got on our unconference plan but it's all talking about the sort of issues that we face in the city like tidiness and behaviour and social isolation all the sorts of things we've been talking about all day and what we did is a load of people from the university and a load of people from the council got together and we had a really good chat about all these issues and people pitched ideas and we all bought into it and I think some really interesting connections were made because the university and the council have never had that kind of meeting before so I thought that was pretty good felt really really positive about that. My special role in that was I provided lots of pictures of Bradford of Yor which was nice so we sort of put it into a little bit of historical context because I expect you were thinking where did the collections come into this they don't hugely but that's okay they're kind of there when they're needed so the other thing that we've kind of ended up with is a sense of community within the university and to some extent with our council colleagues there's a sense that there's a group of people who are Bradford leaders and we connect with each other through various digital and real life spaces for instance I cannot walk around campers without seeing one of my Bradford leader chums which is brilliant and we know we know a lot more people individually and collectively. We have a Yammer collaborating thing we have a various other collaborating things we have a Slack channel we have all sorts and people pop in and out of these things and connect with each other and the university also uses a way to tap into different groups of people like I've just been invited to as a Bradford leader to go and speak to new staff inductions and I'm like yeah because of course what I do there is I'm giving out me postcards and saying come see us because we've got old staff so you know suddenly that's a it's a really good in into things that you wouldn't necessarily get through any other routes so it's very very productive so I've already touched on a lot of the benefits of this scheme that I've found the one that really stands out for me is the connecting in a deep and rich way because being involved in this programme gave us permission to talk to people and engage with them and some of the exercises in the leadership programme were quite challenging there was one where you had to turn your back on the group you had to tell the group your problem and then turn your back on them and they had a bit of a chat about what you could do and then turn around and they'd suggest some ways that you could progress and it was actually very moving because people expose their deepest pain but I exaggerate but not much you know and you've got a real insight into people's problems and you could try and offer them ways forward and to encourage a sort of and I think you start to get a sense of them as as whole people and a sense of what the problems they have so because so often it's just transactional you know have you got a picture of a thing yes here it is you know I need this doing because it's broken fix that you know it's all and it's just a rich relationship which at one time you probably got by just hanging out with people but there isn't really time now so this exercise gave us that connection it also gave us a lot of other things which we've popped up there the flags are because there was an idea that you pick up a flag you see a thing that's a problem and you choose to pick up the flag and deal with it even though it's not your job or you might go I don't want to pick up that flag I've got too much on that's not me and it's kind of having permission to act or not act because I think our environment is so turbulent that if we don't give people permission to act even if it's not their job nothing will ever get done because your job structures lag behind the reality of what's going on and I think having that kind of permission was very useful one really really useful thing is that one of the people in my cohort is a very major person in estates to do with roof projects so we're now having our extension re-roofed because it leaks and I know very well the person who's in charge so he understands our concerns and I understand his concerns and we understand each other's words so we have a very very good connection and I'm really happy with how this project is going because we're all communicating effectively and I think the Bradford leader thing has really helped with that I could go on there are many more examples of how this is directly beneficial to our service and our collections but it's not all easy at all there are many things that make this a difficult thing to do for example it's an expensive thing for the university to offer and it's very very time consuming I put in six days of the formal programme plus a lot of time on the sig and I do feel that other aspects of the job struggled in that respect so I think it's not something it's not easy you know there is a lot to do I think also it's personally very challenging in terms of some of the the content of the course you know you have to sort of put yourself into positions you're not comfortable with which is a challenge the little wavy person is because there's quite a high attrition rate a couple of people have moved on somebody was made redundant which was very sad so you know eventually the the groups will diminish and hopefully the university will keep offering this kind of programme and will keep recruiting you Bradford leaders but it may not it's an expensive thing to do and I don't know how sustainable it is we were hoping to do another conference this autumn but I'm afraid we haven't so it might be in the spring or maybe we'll do something different maybe the connections we have are sufficient but I think even if we don't do anything else I think we've still made a load of really exciting connections and thoughts that we can take forward into the future so what are you what can you take forward from this you know what what would I like to share with you I think it's about being creative about in reach it's about taking opportunities even if it doesn't look you know obvious what the connection is it isn't all about the connections particularly in a small institution sometimes it's about getting to know you and your team if you have a team and what you're about because I think if people know you personally they see the context of your problems oh that will be a problem for Alison because because of this and they'll kind of see it as a human thing rather than just some kind of weird different thing that's going to cause them problems and I think it's also about a little you know without doing huge amounts of work for nothing it's about putting a little bit in to get more out and work trying to work together taking every opportunity to boost what the university is doing and boost what colleagues are doing to support each other because I think these are very difficult times and I think genuinely working together and offering support wherever you can is so important and I think it's that sort of it's all the things we've been saying in all the sessions you know proactive opportunistic risk management and being open to new ideas as much as possible and that I think I hope you can see that I said Bradford I wear that little badge all the time and I wave it at people because I do I think it's a fantastic place to work and I'm very proud of it and hopefully we're all helping to make things a little bit better for everybody and thank you to the kind people with the clip art and thank you to all of you for listening and I hope you found that engaging