Leaving the 'Big Light' On

Advanced Practitioners Sharing and Networking Event, Kirklees College 21.6.23

I am just so pleased to be invited to open your event today. So many joyful faces - old friends and new. And Kirklees College is an old friend. When I was at Northern College we were comrades on the Huddersfield teacher education programme and I’ve visited many times. Over the past couple of years I’ve been doing some diamond work with Andrea, Kathryn and the TDLI team here. 

And that’s what I want to talk with you about today. I want to remind you of your recent history as advanced practitioners. And - just in case you haven’t noticed - I want to affirm that you are changemakers, here and elsewhere. 

Kathryn, Heather from Shipley - give us a wave, Heather - and I go way back to those Huddersfield Uni days but we met again a few years ago on the national Advanced Practitioner Programme #APConnect. Alison was there too, and I see other familiar faces. I’m looking forward to catching up with you all. 

This was 2018 and things were different. I’d say that FE was plodding on, rolling with the punches as it does, before the massive pace of change in recent years. I was working for Joss Kang, now my partner in the social enterprise FE Constellations. My job was to build a community of practice but my word if you saw the platform we’d inherited. We soon kicked that into touch and began to build the rhizomatic community we see represented here today - constellations of golden unicorns and changemaking stars. 

I expected #APConnect to be good work - I knew Joss’s reputation and I wouldn’t have taken on the gig if I hadn’t believed in it. What I didn’t expect was that it would be so exciting! It became a space of leadership, change leadership. Joyful leadership. It wasn’t funded to do that, to be truthful. We definitely did what we were paid for. But once APs found each other in an anti-competitive, pro-social, pan-organisational space, beautiful things happened. I know the work that many of you in this room have done - and many, many others - to make your organisations better places to be, for everyone.

It’s not easy. I don’t know if you saw the recent article by Andy Forbes from the Lifelong Learning Institute entitled, ‘Fighting on Six Fronts: leading a general FE college today’. We’ve put together a padlet of interesting stuff for you, and I’ve added it if you want a read. I’m not going to depress us all by running through it - you are living it! But the point I want to make is that nobody can easily fix the situation FE is in. Even a change of government won’t fix it…not for a long time, anyway. All we can do is vote, influence where we can and campaign. And, day to day, we can choose to live with despair or we can choose to operate more joyfully - and that’s what today is all about. As our friend Michaela Greaves always says, “If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.”

Nobody knows how to make this better. Not your principal, not SLT, not governors and not our infrastructure organisations - AoC and ETF - try as they might. So, why not us? We are changemakers, we’ve got lived experience, stories and - increasingly - evidence. And we’ve got a vehicle.

Some of you will have already encountered the Thinking Environment. For others, it will be new for today. Here at Kirklees, it’s absolutely been the lever for change. Culture - and systems change. You may have heard of that old saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”? Well no culture change in the world will hold up if the systems aren’t working effectively. Here, the TLDI team have been using the Thinking Environment to work across both fronts.

And I use that word ‘front’ - like a weather front - thoughtfully. Because what the TLDLs have done here is to use Thinking Environment processes to open up new fronts of possibility by - quite literally - generating possibility questions and considering them in a Thinking Environment. More of that later. Kirklees Ofsted inspection demonstrated that where it matters, this sprawling, multi-identitied college is really beginning to thrive.

It’s been a slow process, and so it should be. If change is to be healthy and sustainable, it will take time. And that’s how we make change work; stepping to one side of the ‘everything is urgent’ mindset of FE - aside, everything is not urgent, FE is not A+E - and having a parallel path that runs alongside ‘keeping the show on the road’ work of meeting KPIs, a meandering forest walk which is slowly driving deep change aligned to the values of the organisation. That’s not to say that there aren’t quick wins, but the team know that at the very heart of change is building trust, taking people along with you. I was watching a Simon Sinek video the other day, only seven minutes long but it packs a punch. He was saying that the highest performing organisations value leaders who are high on trust/medium on performance over leaders who are high on performance and low on trust. I’ve popped it on the padlet for you. The world is changing. Work is not how it used to be. And we need to change with it. KPI is no longer the only god.

Other organisations are working in this way too. You’ll hear from Chesterfield College and Hopwood Hall and I’m doing work down in Birmingham along a similar timescale, with the glorious Fircroft. 

Me, Kathryn and Andrea were laughing the other morning because we’d each come up with a cake metaphor for our work together. Here’s my friend Mandy’s Lemon Drizzle cake - and I bet you’re wishing I’d hurry up now so we can get to the break! What the team here are using the Thinking Environment for, is to bake each of the values of the organisation into every decision, project, process, meeting, interaction. Like egg in a cake - and yes, I know there are eggless cakes, have you tried them? - those values need to be beaten into the cake mix or it won’t rise. After two years, that’s where we are at. Next year is about the *really* special part of the lemon drizzle cake; saturating the organisation with all that sugary goodness. Or, if you prefer, this is the bit where you soak a litre of brandy into the Christmas cake, à la Nigella.

What we are trying to do, collectively, is create momentum for change, so that it’s not the team’s energy all the time. Changemaking at Kirklees - changemaking anywhere - has to have a life of its own. To return to Simon Sinek: 

“I want to know the value I’m creating can sustain without me pushing it.” 

Momentum takes energy, it takes purpose and it takes a bunch of changemakers - golden unicorns - finding the time to co-create new possibilities. This is not about the big showy stuff. It’s about small, consistent, persistent acts of change all adding up to something bigger, and a constant commitment to baking those values in. That’s how trust is built. That’s how you bring people along with you. And that’s how you influence up, down and across. Events like today allow us to check in, see where we’ve been and collectively share that changemaker energy. Momentum needs this, not for accountability but for hope and energy.

The most powerful lever for culture and systems change is to transform how we meet, and that’s where the Thinking Environment comes in. Whether it’s a formal meeting, building trust and relationships in the classroom, workshopping an idea, walking and thinking together or simply making the effort to listen attentively to one another, if we change the culture of our gatherings, we change the way the organisation operates.

The Thinking Environment is a set of disciplined processes which clear away the noise and enable us to encounter one another as equal thinkers. People who don’t know the work at all - or who fear it! - like to describe it as fluffy, which always outrages me. They are often the same people who can’t follow a simple rule, such as please don’t interrupt. I’ve never known such a disciplined process; returning to standard meetings after a Thinking Environment feels like chaos.

It comes from the work of Nancy Kline who, fifty years ago, began to observe what conditions were in place when people came together to do their best independent thinking. In this sense, it’s empirical - and neuroscience backs up Nancy’s observations. It’s also values driven. And it’s always facilitated. The facilitator’s role is to hold in place the Ten Values - we call them components - of the Thinking Environment, by applying a set of rules. The rules and values don’t change, but the application does. Today you’ll experience rounds, pairs and dialogue - the building blocks of a Thinking Environment. You can also apply the process to coaching, workshops, teaching, challenging conversations, interviews, one-to-ones and a whole lot more. You may have heard of the Ideas Room, a disciplined online ‘greenhouse’ where seedlings of ideas first see the light of day. Or the Time to Think Council, which brings different perspectives to an idea or challenge.

In a Thinking Environment, role rank and hopefully ego are left at the door - this is an explicit request which enables us to think together as equals. We don’t advise - this is about people doing their best independent thinking so how can we? If independent thinking is at one end of the spectrum, advice is at the other. It derails us. And there is strictly no interruption in a Thinking Environment, even of silences. We don’t do our best thinking when we are talking at the same time. The rules protect the space for you to gather your thoughts and then speak - which you are likely to do more succinctly when you know your silence will not be interrupted.

 

Thinking Environment practices disrupt power plays and compel people to take responsibility for the air space they use. Through our research, we’ve found that - actually - those who dominate sometimes do so because they can’t bear silences. Learning to lean into that silence is a powerful moment of reflection. And those who don’t participate sometimes do so because their silence is the only power they hold. Over time, that all gets balanced out. Yes of course you can sabotage a Thinking Environment by breaking the rules, but it’s obvious. You can’t subvert it. It’s oblivious to power play.

And it’s a grown up, non-infantilising space. We are going to do rounds shortly and time is a little tight with so many people in the room. We *could* police things by giving everyone 30 seconds each but we’re equal as thinkers so we wouldn’t dream of it. Instead, we’ll ask you to mind the time - and mind the time you take up - to bring us home efficiently, so that we can all get a slice of that lemon drizzle cake. And so we learn to work together better.

We get where we need to go much more efficiently when there are no rabbit holes, tangents or bursts of hot air. That’s why questions are such an essential part of the Thinking Environment - one of the ten components in fact. They focus us. Today, we are introducing you to Possibility Questions, questions which enable us to co-construct unimagined futures. These have guided our second year of working together at Kirklees. But I’d also like to mention Values Line questions, running alongside the KPIs and baking in values to every single work process. A value of Kirklees College is kindness. We can find practical solutions to questions like, “What could appraisal look like as a practice of kindness?” “What could induction look like as a practice of kindness?” etcetera. And we need to bring the KPI line and the values line together.

Back to Simon Sinek:

“We have lop-sided metrics. We have a million and one metrics to measure someone’s performance and no metrics to measure someone’s trustworthiness.”

Where does all this fit into your history of advanced practice? Well, back in 2018 Joss kindly gave me 50 minutes in a tiny Birmingham hotel room to introduce our first #APConnect colleagues to the Thinking Environment and it’s been baked into everything from there. One-to-one coaching session - TICK. 250 people on a Zoom - TICK.

It’s a big part of why APs almost accidentally discovered that they were changemakers. Let’s be right about it, you don’t become an AP - whatever you call the role - for the money or even the remission in some places. You become an AP because you’ve got a real energy for change. You light up an organisation. It’s something to do with you, something to do with where you’re positioned in the organisation, the influence it brings, and a lot to do with how outward looking you are, networking pan-organisationally to bring in new ideas, working in Thinking Environments to bring about change of your own. 

Everything you try won’t work out. Momentum can be wobbly and it can be unsure. That’s fine. We don’t change anything by standing still and all of us can wobble when we walk, sometimes. 

Towards the end of #APConnect, Joss commissioned some research led by trust researcher Christina Donovan; naturally it was a co-evaluated piece with APs. It completely re-imagined the role of the AP. Still powerfully involved in quality improvement not as an agent of Ofsted but as an agent of change. This ‘Christmas Tree’ model of advanced practice introduced the metaphor of the Christmas lights. As APs, you *are* the Christmas lights. You light up the organisation with your joyful changemaking. But when you move on - as so many of you do, because you’re brilliant - how do we leave the Big Light on? Lights stay on when the culture is in place and the systems are effective, even when people move on. Well, colleagues, today you’re going to be thinking about that and you’re going to be hearing from some brilliant changemakers who have been working on it too.