 Welcome everyone, last parallel session of a three day conference in a very big and quite warm room, so I think, you know, points for being here, it's like conferencing as an endurance sport to a certain extent at this point, isn't it? Depending on how late you were out last night, I've still got my globe ring on here so you know that might tell you something. Glowstick. Okay, so let's get started. This is useful to know that this is a leading people kind of welcome. We're just being super prompt. This is a leading people chunk of the programme. Two 30 minute sessions. We'll try and have time for a bit of Q&A. We'll do what we can to be engaging. So I'm going to hand over to Matt who's talking about, I'm going to read it off your slides, leading with direction and uncertainty, not in uncertainty. Okay, leading with direction and uncertainty, change with an online education team and you're based at Leeds. Okay, brilliant, over to you. Thank you very much. Can I just say thank you very much for everyone who's joined today. I know it's the end of the second day. First of all, can I just ask you all to do your Vvox please. I would really like a little bit of participation. If you go to Vvox.app and the meeting ID, as it has always been in this room, 113-812-368, if you're joining online as well. So leading people in a time of complexity, this is such an apt theme for the Ault conference. And I hope it's one that can actually resonate with all of us, regardless of the role that we actually have. I'm Matt Cawlock. I'm the head of online learning in the digital education service at the University of Leeds. This is a reflective practice session. It marks a stage in my own personal learning. So this isn't an institutional lecture to say. This is about me and my journey as a leader of the team. We are working towards solving a complex and difficult challenge that of scaling up online learning, building capacity and setting a clear agenda for advancing online education in our institution and beyond. We are very much in the middle of this change, which I think is quite unusual for a presentation to be at this point. So I just want to acknowledge that as well. And we're also emerging from the most challenging period where the scale of change is actually now being fully understood, roles are being redefined and we're entering that messy phase of implementation. This is actually quite an exposing talk to present. So I'm thankful for you being here and the moral support of my team who are lurking in the audience as well. I'm very grateful also for the feedback that I receive from my team colleagues, Luke Maurer and Alice Clayton, who kindly sat through this presentation with me last week and gave their feedback to help pitch this presentation sensitively in the context of the change process in my team. So I'd like to just switch over to the VVox if we can. The first question I've got for you, which is what does change mean to you in one word? If you think of what change means to you in one word. And these are the words that I am fully anticipating. There's a balance here always of pain, but also opportunity. The positives and the negatives. And as leaders we have to navigate our way through these. So these are really useful words to see. And it is important to recognize that yes there is going to be discomfort, yes there is going to be uncertainty, but opportunity is what we can do through change. Thank you. I'm going to move back onto my slides please. So in terms of context, a brief overview. This is an extra form of document from the university. It's really a pleasure. But essentially we're embarking on a new phase of significant growth outlined back in 2021. We're now at the point where we're moving at pace with our strategy for online education. We're not the only institution who are moving forward this way and we're not the only institution to recognize a global shift in how online education can actually further social missions and provide opportunities for lifelong professional learning and career development. Over the last year the scale of ambition has been defined and my role is to develop my team to provide the capability and capacity for design and development of online programmes and courses at scale. With accessibility at the forefront of our approach. I'm very privileged to be in a position to be leading a large team of over 25 learning designers, instructional designers, course developers and managers. They are an excellent team of specialists with a passion for online education complemented by specialist teams in learning technologies, media production and digital design. Except for graphic design, as you might tell from these slides, I have no experience in graphic design, but I am able to relate to each of the other roles having done them previously one way or another in my career, but I've never operated in a team of this size and this scale of ambition. I think I'll obviously introduce students about smaller teams, may have had experience of similar to this, but we are operating in a way that we're working across different platforms, we're working across Blackboard, Coursera, Future Learn, using the platform tools but also creating things bespoke and evolve. We are trying to create programmes, microcredential short courses and my team have to work across all of those within their specialist roles. That's just a bit more context for you. So how do I lead this team? How do I enable our success through individuals' expertise? As a leader, I'm setting out to find the best ways to maximise the opportunities for the team, to contribute towards our objectives and strategy, but I'm also there to create an environment that not just has a common goal, but as Marlene Lee Kang says, a common desire in the direction of online education at Leeds. Now it's been previously discussed before and again at this conference recently how learning design, academic development, learning technologists, they all adopt bridging roles. I think that's such an important description of what we do. My role bridges two spheres of influence. That's a university strategy and the institutional leadership of online learning led by the Dean for Online and Digital Education, sponsored by the DVC and Pro Vice-Chancellor. The other is at the team level, that operational detail, that specialist knowledge. In the middle, there are decisions that have to be made about how the intended learning experience is going to play out, how we work with academic faculties and our own design and development approach. So I work across these zones, influencing strategy with a deep understanding of implementation and my own experience and that of the team, whilst also influencing what happens in my team, my team's practice with knowledge of the university's intentions, knowledge of the budget constraints and the expectations demanded of us. And trying to bring those two perspectives together in decision making, that middle column. This does bring tensions and as I represent the professional identities and personal motivations of the team, their desire, their passion, that's also very sometimes deeply connected to their role. But I'm also there to represent the institutional direction and the expectations for different forms of online learning and design and development and process it at scale. More objective approaches which may challenge established team culture. So when looking towards that interface of strategy and implementation, we achieve this not in isolation but symbolically with other teams and academic colleagues. To give a bit more insight into who I am, I have this statement at the top of my personal website and it says, sustaining the growth in digital education is about centring the discussion on what we can achieve together. That statement links to a blog post which is called Why I Have a Problem with Hero Rhetoric. It tells you a little bit more about me. The language I have used in my team is around partnership working. It's distinct from that transactional service, client-supplier language or one-sided relationship that's perhaps prevalent between academic and professional services. Instead it's more dialogical based on productive relationships, influence, mutual respect and importantly that empathetic understanding that every single person in the room has something to contribute and has a distinct background. It's about people partnership and that itself is complex. Now Steve White, Sue White and Kate Borthwick in the context of learning designers for MOOCs suggested that learning designers may fall into multiple roles of controller, broker, trainer neither academic nor fully non-academic, we adopt this weird third space of academic related. We facilitate, we guide based on our knowledge of appropriate pedagogies and tools, we bring insights, we bring evidence and research into educational decisions and we try to do this creatively. The level we do so is very much dependent on the partnership model that's established in the institution. Indeed the team experiences themselves uncertainty of their own role in different projects as different faculty have different expectations and embrace partnership in varying degrees. To me this raises the question of how do we equip ourselves to be, as a large team, to be flexible and adaptable working with others whilst also scaling efficiently and providing consistent and quality online education. How can we as White and Colleagues there imply to draw upon that flexibility and unspoken authority to drive forward online learning in partnership? So that's the context, that's my background thinking. Here's the change. We had made a number of incremental changes but almost a year ago it became apparent to me from the strategic expectations that we had to make a significant and potentially uncomfortable step change in how we worked. This led to a change programme which would be informed by other institutions. I'm very grateful for the conversations I had with other heads of online learning. My own prior experience and that of the dean and our team's input and the agenda is to build upon the success of our short course portfolio and our current learning from doing online degree programmes and aim to increase that capacity within our team for sustainable growth of fully online education. That means, in practice, we review our design development approach, we review our processes and responsibilities and we review our roles and that itself leads us into a formal HR consultation process. There were certain elements that, in leading the team, I wanted to reinforce anyway and indeed the clarity and importance of these aspects became stronger through the consultation process. However, at a strategic level we were still some way off a year ago defining a specific model, a specific operational model and there was much to understand and unpick about the constraints and opportunities that scaling up would bring. I did not share a precise model at the start of this change programme and the whole point of consultation was to invite that engagement and be open to ideas. But there were three areas I felt led to a long-term vision that captured what a shift in approach would bring and the first is to be design-led. Think about active learning, authentic assessment, meaningful interaction, designing for student success, designing for reuse and this is based upon a design philosophy that the teams established previously and something that represents the very best of where we're coming from as the foundation of where we're going to be going to. Accessibility and innovation is an ambition that taps into a team passion and an affordance that online education can bring and through this also, through this shift we should be able to find our space for innovation. Finally, something I'm really quite keen on is that bridging role of discipline and online pedagogy is reflecting our important role in preparing for a range of online experiences bringing the best from everyone in the room. So we embarked on a substantial consultation process setting a very open agenda with a number of exploratory workshops. This was in tandem with and above and beyond formal HR and change processes at the university. The intention here is to provide a structure of consultation and dialogue to really explore what the potential of scaling up online education could really mean at Work Cloud, what the opportunities that we have. It started with a review of our current approach before moving to evaluate scenarios that I'd formed by speaking to other institutions. Team responses and solutions then formed a proposal and contributed towards a proposal but essentially the finalisation came to me, the director and the dean. And these activities were supported through a range of communication and feedback channels, meetings, group Q&A, anonymous forms, provision of all presentations, recording, feedback and formal responses. Ongoing, we have a commitment to continue the dialogue through representatives from each sub-team as change engagement facilitators and that will be facilitated by specialists in people in change. To give a sense of scale with over 70 colleagues contributing across both my team and all related teams, this is a snapshot of Mirabord deliberately without the detail collated for your purposes but the detail was shared with everyone else, collated near the very end of formal consultation which captures every piece of feedback. It shows how those ideas were either carried forward or unable to proceed with the reason. Some of those ideas were planned for supporting activities that we'll be picking up later. At the very start of this, there were some aims tied to institutional ambition and then through consultation activities, surface feedback and team values and this led me to learn to reframe the narrative of change away from those strategic organisational ambitions and focus more on a positive shift on practice, our collective desire and our ambition for online education. Now we've concluded the formal consultation and are at the point of implementation but the change process is far from over and leading this change so far has certainly needed to draw on my own resilience and that change was being receptive to often critical but highly valuable feedback and I found Anne-Marie Scott's presentation on Tuesday quite reassuring actually and that it's probably something I should have expected all along. That awareness of my own position comes with the sensitivity to the impact of changes on the roles and the ways of working that are affecting each and every member of my team. These changes have long-term opportunities but they also have long-term consequences for some people and this relates back to a point I made earlier about the strong relationship between personal and professional identities with roles. So to help my reflections at this point in time I felt I needed a framework to ground me and many leadership frameworks present vague actions like enable participation or gain buy-in make sure everyone's got a voice what does that actually mean in practice? I've come to a point now where I create a reference point for people-centred decisions and decided to use the old framework for ethical learning technology as a basis. So reframing the prompts that are in that framework into questions about my own leadership and a blog post on my website that I published on Tuesday goes into a bit more detail about that approach but also more questions that I'm asking myself. I've selected just four here today the first on awareness in terms of how do I ensure I'm bringing external ideas or context sensitively on professionalism how will I demonstrate accountability alongside autonomy caring community how do I enable change through open dialogue and mutual understanding and values how have I positioned learners as the focus of change so the approach I used was highly consultative and in reflecting on my experience of leading change in terms of the positive outputs from my perspective we were able to reinforce the value of learning design philosophy and partnership the evaluation of different scenarios about our ways of working gave really detailed ideas generation from team expertise and it also surfaced different and sometimes conflicting perspectives in the evaluation of responsibilities I presented responsibilities lifted from other institutions and other teams and our own team and that highlighted overlap between roles gaps and opportunities it highlighted how the teams that cross the service are actually dependent on each other in different ways and it also reflected a consideration of faculty responsibilities and one of those common ones which is getting content from academic colleagues on time was and still is a big barrier but I had to reframe the discussions on what was within our remit for change how do we prepare and adapt ourselves for that likely scenario relating back to what my right and colleagues said of the third space for learning designers the evaluation of responsibilities also provide an opportunity to clarify the teams potential for authority using elevators pitch style descriptions of ourselves to highlight the range of expertise and the experience we can bring and finally I really valued the opportunity to revisit shared responsibilities and values and this is feeding into our team development plan it also forms the basis of a team focus an approach in common attributes expected of all roles but such an open and consultative approach does bring leadership challenges and as head of the team I'm accountable to the dean to deliver quality and set up the working environment to deliver strategy within the budget provided I'm also accountable to about the decisions that are made by my team in terms of how we design and develop online courses in partnership with academic colleagues and I'm accountable to my team to ensure that I provide an environment for their success and well-being I found a tension between creating space for contributions and that long-time goal of empowering the team with that weight of accountability I've captured that then in the question how will I demonstrate accountability alongside autonomy my personal aim is to reduce hierarchy to have more open conversations with everyone in the team invite feedback contributions contradict contradicts with other people contradicts with my experience contributes with the sector now Del Holt and colleagues identify this as some sort of balancing act of decision making and accountability which these types of distributed or perhaps democratic leadership approaches but it gives that potential for richer outcomes and that's certainly what we've achieved through this process but I think this approach needs trust trust in the team's ability but also needing to engender trust in me as a leader in how we change Holt and colleagues talk of explaining decisions but I have learnt that without the trust there actions such as providing explanations may not go fully towards resolving differences and forming that collective direction this leads me on to my more critical reflections based on the challenges resulting from the decisions I made and took about how to communicate and guide the change consultation I found it difficult to build trust within an open agenda there's a balance between providing something to work from and it feeling a bit predetermined versus something that's much more open-ended but that invites a sense of uncertainty over the future now benchmarking is an approach that I'd used previously drawing upon evidence from other institutions however instead of saying what was achievable what could be achieved I made the mistake my focus was on numerical evidence of budget implying something was not working in my team and whilst this intention was to create a sense of urgency Cotter caused this false urgency based on failure rather than generating a sense of true urgency that focuses on great opportunities so this prompts me to ask the question how do I bring external evidence sensitively besides the team different perspectives ways of working identity also play a part here and at the very start of my change narrative it was far too institutional focused focusing on ambition and numbers I talked about scaling up in the context of opportunities for learners but not necessarily focusing on our agency to influence that student experience so through discussion with my team and talking about their values trying to do as Marlene Lycan described to bring that individual expertise into that institutional direction I was able to relate to the team a lot more reframe my language knowing the core values of my team and what I want to be I will keep asking myself the question how will I position learners as the focus of change and there are challenges in communicating to a diverse team differences in preferences at times I felt I hadn't invested in building trust indeed it probably was a sense of not zero trust but negative trust a combination of an unknown outcome overwhelming volume of feedback yes there was a structure to this consultation but opportunities for both individual but I felt I may have been missing an opportunity to convey a vision that a team could buy into so prompted by these reflections I started to think about whether I had any underlying approach but perhaps I wouldn't surface that to the team was there something about an underlying motive that limited trust there is still much uncertainty at the operational level but is that something to be concerned about or to embrace now I was going to do this as a poll but I'm prattling on for too much longer I'll give you these questions to think about yourselves how certain are you of what's expected from you in your role in six months time and how equipped are you to address something currently unknown that will significantly impact your ways of working and we'll think about those two questions now I went back to some earlier reading on distributed leadership as a mechanism to drive change thinking here about how we enable the team to make decisions within a framework and how to empower them as a programme design approach and we're calling the language of Philip Woods and Peter Gron they talk about tapping into the ideas, creativity skills and energies which initiate and sustain change that greater capacity for organisational responsiveness and sustained improvement oh hang on a minute that's what I want to create that's what I'm trying to achieve I'm trying to aim for the online learning team at least to be exactly this responsive to new opportunities and challenges focused on sustained sustainable improvement but doing this by drawing on the advantages of a large team with very specialist roles and expertise so leading the team to be facilitators of change through their own specialisms in partnership with academic colleagues so I need to create that environment for creativity address hierarchical barriers and empower the team to excel in their roles so I'm leading that restructure and redefinition of roles which is attempting to create the environment for flexibility in ways of working in empowerment I'm hoping for roles that will grow and evolve provide motivation through creativity and design partnerships but ultimately I've come to realise that what I'm trying to do is actually change towards a culture of learning and by implication that's an openness to failing too how do we set ourselves up as a culture that's receptive to both change, success and failure and learning from that it's not an operational change agenda that I should have started with it's a culture change and as I've tried to articulate at this stage of the change process there are still many unknowns if things don't work out that's fine we shall adapt but at the moment I'm sensitive to how this uncertainty actually heightens anxieties a sense of continuous change being accompanied by a sense of continuous risk or continuous loss and it encouraged me to think again about how to frame for continuous opportunities for gain indeed our DVC for student education Professor Jeff Grable with former colleagues from Michigan State University provided a possible way forward here the idea for design for change they talked about having a culture of change learning and success that appreciates not all answers are known at the beginning so think about your answers to those two questions on awareness of your future and your readiness for the unknown bear in mind that our sector change is constant but it's very nature we need to be innovative we are innovative we need to be responsive we are responsive adaptable solutions focused and appreciating that sometimes things just won't work and we'll learn from it that culture has to be established but often change programs work at a pace that don't allow for culture change Grable and colleagues argued that traditional leadership models are too linear don't engender that culture of iteration learning in fact where there is uncertainty or should we say unknown opportunities and risks a design approach makes more sense they talk of it being facilitated conversations iteration prototyping learning but how to make that cultural change and that's where I go back to the old framework for ethical learning technology the questions that come from that that's where the questioning of your own ethical leadership can provide a compass through that uncertainty so to conclude as I said at start we're in the middle of a significant journey I think had I at the start considered some of the prompts that I now have based on that framework I may have been able to better articulate my cultural vision earlier and from that build trust with the team that the proposed changes are underpinned by an ethos grounded in positivity and learning this is a narrative that I now have that's shared with the team on all the new roles that I don't think I could have written nine months ago it's needed that time to draw upon and understand the team, their collective passion their expertise, their motivations this is a narrative that sets us up for success strategically but also starts to be about a culture of learning a culture of partnership design thinking that common goal of student success now that's a culture that I would love to work in and as a leader I have to do whatever I can to embody that and enable it thank you I think we've got time for a question any questions I said that ah lovely if there are any other questions I've kindly asked that I get them afterwards as well so I'll put them on my blog as well and respond to them what effect did the project have my health and well-being well I know the effect it's had on my team as I said earlier it's really challenged my resilience and we're still in the middle of it I am still a human being as well so you can imagine that when you're leading change that you know is painful for others there is that reciprocal pain that you're also feeling but I'm committed in the direction I think we should be going in I know that it's grounded from evidence I know it's grounded from best practice and I latch on to that to help me proceed because I know what we're ultimately doing is creating a really great environment to create amazing online education and so I'm latching on to that bigger picture all the time if you go quickly we can do this second one yeah in terms of highlighting clear skills gaps what are those gaps and how do I feel and we have identified a lot of skills gaps and that's been actually a very positive exercise because Simon, Harry and Jane Luntu the two digital education managers in my team are currently working on a team development framework based on competencies that we know we need within the team so this exercise has been so powerful and that feedback I showed on the mirror board I mean we've got a three-year plan now basically on how we develop our team based on that and the opportunities that we're able to bring into online education through the ideas that they're able to share so I'm holding on to that as the positive outcome very much so and I think any opportunity to learn about the people in your team what their passions are and how you can support them to excel in their role take it