Release the Golden Unicorns!

Keynote for Coleg Sir Gâr and Coleg Ceredigion, 30.6.22

Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti on Unsplash

When did unicorns get so rainbow-y? Sourcing photographs for this presentation I had to wade through a sea of glitter and soft toys…I’m sure many of you have play baskets stuffed full of the shiny creatures at home. I couldn’t exactly go out and photograph some unicorns for myself, so it took me a while to put the slides together! I particularly hope you enjoy the one where someone has clearly just stuck a cone on their horse.

I grew up with a rather different kind of unicorn. One of the first books I fell in love with once I was old enough to understand it was Alan Garner’s ‘Elidor’, where tragic unicorn Findhorn dies to save…well, the world. No ‘my little pony’ unicorns in mythology, where unicorns range from fierce and magical warriors to allegorical representations of purity.

These days, apart from being appealing to children, unicorns have come to symbolise a kind of hope. My artist friend does a lucrative line in unicorn tattoos…and I get it. In times which are increasingly dark and uncertain, we need the comfort of hope. 

In business leadership, which loves a metaphor, unicorns - particularly golden unicorns - have come to mean those employees who have unreleased potential. Shame and vulnerability researcher Brené Brown describes these people as those who have worked for the company for a long-time: 

I have all this information, all this history, all this experience, all this wisdom and I’m insatiably curious and excited about what’s next.

Note that word ‘curious’, which is so important to you folks here, your ‘culture of curiosity’. 

The problem with golden unicorns is that they are so often overlooked, overshadowed by the latest new thing - or new person. Often - and I mean no disrespect here to people in the room - at exec level, particularly in huge and overworked organisations, you don’t always know who your golden unicorns are. Which means you have a huge well of untapped potential, quietly getting on with their work and capable of offering so much more. If they could trust that they’d be listened to.

In FE, we have huge workforces which are stuffed full of people who have done the job for years. So many of you are listening today, possibly with the odd eye-roll. I want you to hear that I recognise your organisational capital. I know how deeply you understand the communities you work in, how anchored you are in your subject knowledge, how comfortable you are in your pedagogy. You have endured change after change after change. You despair of how burdened your working life has become with admin and bureaucracy. You sit in meetings with your arms folded, keeping quiet because speaking up means the meeting will last longer and anyway, nobody wants to listen to what you have to say. You might very well recognise that you’re seen as a team ‘moaner’. You are sick of keep moving office, but you’re the one who knows how to work the photocopier (unless it’s a different one each time you move). And you know - deeply - the culture of this college and its component parts. In fact, you may be the very one who quietly instructs the bright shiny new member of staff in how everything works. 

Some of you will have been awakened from your metaphorical thousand years’ sleep by the research culture which has been patiently established here not only over the past year but certainly back over the three years I’ve been involved with Bryony Evett-Hackfort and the team here (and probably longer). Becoming involved in research, beginning to identify yourself as a researcher (along with all the rest) and either because of or in spite of the pandemic upheaval you’ve found yourself falling in love with your teaching again (and I mean teaching in its broadest context, so coaches, pastoral workers and classroom support people I’m also talking to you). Renewed and regenerated by the new ideas you’re having and the new approaches you’re testing, rather than just sitting out your time. 

But others of you will have been worn out by the fear and scarcity and noise of having to work in new ways…and maybe, when you could finally return to the ‘old’, it wasn’t the same any more. In FE, our students are often those who are living at the sharp edge of poverty and inequality, in lives which are increasingly precarious. And we are also products of our communities, we experience the same insecurities as those we live alongside. Pay has dropped in real terms and we face the same cost-of-living increases and the challenges of precarious housing and work. 

Where do we find hope in all of this? This college group would be unique indeed if mental health challenges hadn’t exponentially increased, amongst students and staff. Life seems to get tougher with each passing term. That’s the pattern across the whole FE system. 

There’s no shade in any of this. I totally get it and I’m there with you too. Worrying about the gas bill, worrying about healthcare for my 92 year old mum, worrying about my son’s future. We carry all of this into our work. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. 

So the FE system needs to change, and our college cultures need to change, if we are to all re-discover the joyful calling which  brought us into FE in the first place. We get glimpses of it and at this time of year more than at most others. We might be exhausted, but we can still glow with pride as that student achieves beyond their most hopeful dreams; we can still be moved by the cards and gifts and appreciation we receive. But we are also aware of the boom and bust of working in FE. Summer is approaching but beyond that the overwhelm of the Autumn term is already on the horizon. 

We have come to realise over the past few years that we can’t rely on our leadership to fix what’s wrong. Every organisation is also a system and every system needs all the cogs in its workings to be playing their part - maintained and oiled and functioning at its best. 

So I’m going to talk to you about how we can all share responsibility for this - not as a burden but as a joy.

All organisations focus on getting the right people through the door to work for them. The best organisations also ask themselves the right questions about how best to train and maintain staff and the very best know that cultures need to change, to keep everyone on tip-top form. That’s what’s at the heart of the culture of curiosity here - it may say ‘quality improvement’ on the tin but it’s also deeply about professional development, keeping you switched on and happy in your work. 

But it would be a rare organisation indeed - unicorn rare, in fact - if it didn’t also have plenty of staff whose golden unicorn went to sleep a thousand years ago. We worry about capacity in times of scarcity such as these…and we have so much capacity within us, waiting to be released. Look at the bell curve below and imagine if it shifted to the right - all that unicorn power right there.

Indicative menti indicating common result

I don’t mean working harder, I mean working with more joy. 

OK, I can hear you. If your menti contribution was at the left-hand side of the scale, you might be beginning to switch off now. You hear that word joy and you think, fluffy. But there’s nothing fluffy about joyful practice and there’s nothing fluffy about living, breathing unicorns. 

Here are the lessons I’m learning and continuing to learn, about how to release the golden unicorns within the organisation and within ourselves. 

1. Leading culture change is for all of us

2. Values can be baked in

3. Golden unicorns are everywhere

4. Meetings make us stuck

5. Clear is kind

6. Research is an energy

1. Leading culture change is for all of us

Leaders are starting to wake up to the fact that they can’t do it all. In all the best stories, the s/hero is accompanied by some sort of mythical creature and probably a friendship group too. The day of the single heroic leader is gone and leadership research is realising that change needs a joyful army of people, to make it happen. 

Back in 2014, leadership thinker Richard Wilson toured FE with his ‘Anti-Hero’ message, which conveyed that in a complex and uncertain world, we need everyone to be a leader. We have very few simple problems left to fix. We can cure infection, cool food and make fire. What’s facing us are complex and inter-related problems: poverty, inequality, climate change, racial reckoning, mental ill-health. No-one is coming to save us. We have to make a collective response. 

The problem was, he couldn’t tell us how. 

I believe the answer is in looking at power differently. I don’t know about Welsh, but we have just one word for power in English, and it means a certain type of power - invested in role, status and clout. 

My research dug back several centuries, to the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza - that little guy below - who wrote about power in Latin. He had two words at his disposal. 

Potestas means power-as-usual, rank, status, the individual. Power as we conventionally know it, which plays out in hierarchies and control.

Potentia is the power that we all have, the glittering light, the collective energy. It’s unicorn power, a kind of joyful activism. 

We can’t rely on the leader at the top - or the leaders on SLT - to have the ideas and make them happen. In fact, there’s an argument that the further up the ladder you go, the more obedient you have to be to counting the beans. We need the power of all of us, to shift the FE system - and the organisational culture - to something which is hopeful and open to new possibilities. Here at Coleg Sir Gâr, Coleg Ceredigion that’s released through the culture of curiosity, through practitioner research, through falling in love with your practice enough to be joyful and fascinated by it. Research is the lever that shifts the system. Those of you who are at the right hand side of the scale have released your inner unicorn! You feel heard, you feel relevant. 

On the left hand side, you fear that you are irrelevant, because you don’t feel heard. So leadership also means listening, and I’ll come onto that, because it’s about how we meet, how we group, how we gather as staff teams and how we filter our collective expertise into decision-making processes.

2. Values can be baked in

You can no doubt read your organisational values on a mission statement somewhere and - I’m not there to see them, today - but they are probably on your walls too. But do you live them? That’s another question I could have asked you today, and your answers would be instructive. I’ve no doubt that if we did another menti scale, we’d see a similar distribution. Where colleagues trust that values are lived, organisations thrive. But again, we can only set the agenda from the top. We all have to practice those values, and that’s not fluffy, it’s direct and intentional. 

We do this through values-led design, by baking them into every decision we make, from which activities to use in the classroom to how we spend the staff development budget, and on whom. And certainly into how we treat one another and the students and communities who are also part of our eco-system. 

This means asking these questions, everywhere: 

What does [WORK PRACTICE] look like, as a practice of [VALUE]?

I’ll give you some examples: 

What does curriculum planning look like, as a practice of curiosity?

What does appraisal look like, as a practice of ease?

What does induction look like, as a practice of equality?

What does staff development look like, as a practice of recovery?

What does work look like, as a practice of joy? 

The work practices are common to all of us. The values are those we collectively choose, to guide our work. These questions should be present at every planning opportunity, formal and informal. 

Values should not be laminated, if they are not lived. And they certainly should not be used as another stick to beat us. Unicorns are all about the carrot.

A huge public service organisation (which I won’t name) spent hundreds of thousands (of public money) on consultants who drew up seven values. Staff are held to account via appraisals, they have to itemise how they’ve enacted each of those values through the year. Do the staff own the values? No. Do they mock them? Yes. It’s not the way to go. Values work begins on the inside.

As an aside, I don’t believe that ‘excellence’ is a value, I believe it’s an outcome. It’s a burden, given the perfectionist culture we work in, with the word ‘outstanding’ at the top. If Ofsted could do one thing it would be to remove that word (I bang on about this all the time). Brené Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability - based on 30 years of research - also teaches us that perfectionism makes us sick. 

2. Golden Unicorns are everywhere

Another word for a golden unicorn is a changemaker. Karen Walrond describes changemakers - she calls us lightmakers - as being 

people who quietly and diligently work behind the scenes for good and justice - those who daily activate their own gifts and talents and determination as part of a larger cause.

We all have the capacity for making change (and I’m not just referring to the individual transformation that some students experience, which is golden in itself, which keeps us going, but which is not enough). In Christina Donovan’s work on trust in FE, she identifies that collective transformation, cultural and organisational transformation is the starting point for trust building - and of course our unicorns fall fast asleep in cultures which lack trust. 

Transformation (here, it’s that research culture lever, but there are other levers, such as the Thinking Environment which is changing cultures at Kirklees College).

Unity (accept that you won’t win everyone over at once, what you’re looking for is a critical mass of potentia).

Thriving (when transformation hits its stride, others come on board).

Hope (Christina uses the word ‘optimism’, whatever we call it, we all need it, to keep things fresh and moving forward).

There are golden unicorns at every level of an organisation and in every role. One of the finest changemakers I know in FE is a chef - Claire, at Fircroft College. 

Claire started her job as lockdown hit. She was new to FE and her challenge was to make the entire menu vegan/vegetarian, using produce from the gardens - and to sell it to students and staff. This has made a huge impact on the college’s social justice culture (and the food is awesome!)

3. Meetings make us stuck

I nearly said ‘meetings make us sick’ there, and that’s also true. I don’t know what the meetings culture is like here, but as I travel up and down the country I learn two consistent things: that most people want to be trusted (and feel they are not) and that meetings are killing creativity. 

Meetings are how we encounter one another in public service - and I mean all kinds of meetings, including research, appraisal and feedback meetings. But the big formal ones are the killers, aren’t they? The place where power games are writ large. 

There are ways to address this, starting by not making it a meeting if a message will do. Priya Parker is the go-to thinker for this and it might seem as though I only ever reference Brené Brown but her Dare to Lead podcasts with Priya around how we gather, post-lockdown, are inspiring. 

Some things are easier than others to change. Facilitating meetings in a Thinking Environment - my practice of 26 years and one which I know is shared by Bryony and the team here - means that everyone is offered the chance to speak if they need - and they are listened to. Being listened to is the only thing that will convince you that you are not irrelevant. 

The value of equality which is baked into Thinking Environment processes mitigates against the hijacking of meetings by ego and encourages unicorns to wake up and use the power of their voice. The simple act of making agenda items questions wakes up the brain and welcomes engagement. The practice of being succinct means that time is saved. There’s lots out there about Thinking Environments and we don’t have time to explore here why they are such an effective culture change tool. I know that Bryony and her team are training and practising all the time. The key thing is that Thinking Environment practice is a discipline. In FE we’re great at compliance, discipline and self-regulation not so much. Completely understandable, when we’ve been infantilised for so long by systems of scrutiny - but it’s something that needs to change.

4. Clear is kind

This is the practice of radical candour. Another step towards releasing the golden unicorns is learning how to disagree, with respect. It becomes impossible to speak up in groupthink situations, where what we have to say goes against the grain. 

Google alumna Kim Scott’s model of radical candour (see below) reminds us that clear is kind, that you can care personally and also challenge directly. Hopefully you don’t go in for too much obnoxious aggression here, but I bet there’s plenty of ruinous empathy and even a little manipulative insincerity, because I see it everywhere. Even using the term ‘radical candour’ is a helpful opening to what you might fear will be a difficult conversation. And it leads to us making generous assumptions about one another, which in turn helps us listen and tackle that fear of being irrelevant, which keeps the unicorn hidden well inside. Connection is everything, it’s certainly the way in which we can counter the shame of the sleeping unicorn, who feels they have been knocked down one time too many.

6. Research is an energy (and a lever for systems change)

It really is. Engaging in a research culture where your expertise is valued and heard, where risk is encouraged and mistakes are rewarded by collective learning, is the most effective way of releasing that potentia unicorn power I described above. Becoming fascinated again by your practice shifts attention away from the bureaucracy of meeting endless KPIs, reconnects you with your values - since every research has an ethics - and reminds you what you have to offer to the whole. 

Over the past three years, the national CfEM (Centres for Excellence in Maths) programme has brought together action research groups of maths teachers, to investigate new approaches. We have just completed our third round of live events and it has been a privilege to watch the research culture take deep root over the years. Working pan-organisationally takes time and care, and it brings an essential freshness to systems change approaches. We like.

We are in the middle of what some leadership thinkers call ‘the great resignation’. It’s true that, for some of you stuck at the left hand side of our menti scale, the joy has gone from the work and it ain’t coming back. I hear you, I respect you, and I wonder if there’s other work out there for you which can set you free? Don’t be afraid. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that life is too short to do stuff that doesn’t bring us joy and there are some amazing opportunities out there. 

For others, research will be the answer, or at least the opportunity to re-find what brought you here in the first place. It’s not all on you. We are all enduring a lot, and the system has to work as a whole, if you are to trust that your unicorn can safely awake. All the current research into workplaces shows that people are voting with their feet, where the organisational culture keeps the unicorn in the cave (I might be mixing it up with a dragon there). People leave organisations, not the job. They leave poor managers, not the work. The work of Donald and Charlie Sull identifies that a lack of respect is the main reason why people leave workplaces, closely followed by an absence of equality and difference. Endless reorganisations are an indicator of toxic culture and the most effective way to address stagnation is to offer lateral career opportunities - the importance of moving sideways and not being sidelined if you choose not to move ‘up’. 

FE is just waking up to this and research has been the clarion call, which has gathered people together around an awakening of new joyful practice. I don’t know how everything is for you all here and in such a vast organisation the answer is bound to be, ‘different everywhere’. But it seems to me that you have enough to make a start. 

I wish you a summer of sunshine and happy memories, and maybe an awakening of that golden unicorn inside.