Good morning and Happy New Year! It’s come around quickly, hasn’t it? Whatever your break was like, I hope it provided some rest and breathing space for you.
We woke up on Sunday to a public service at breaking point. The NHS rightly gets a lot of the media attention, but I don’t need to tell you that FE has become a safety net for much that is broken on the outside. You work so hard and when I say ‘you’ I mean every one of you in every role - absolutely not just teachers. I am speaking to everyone today and if you are in any sort of business support or other non-teaching role - including middle and senior management, including leadership - I want you to hear from the off that this session is as much for you as it is for anyone else. I know that today is for all of you and that aligns with my own work. I work with changemakers in FE.
I am not in denial about the pressures you all face and I’m not so far away from a full-time teaching role in FE myself not to remember how tough it is to go back to work after a break, no matter how much we love our jobs (and I don’t assume that everyone does, no shade or shame in that).
What I’m here to tell you is that the time for change is here and everyone knows it and it’s everyone’s responsibility. I’ve managed to get myself into all sorts of decision-making spaces over the past few years, working with FE’s policy as well as decision makers, and I’ve been astonished by how every single person I’ve come across - including senior folks at the DfE, including the big infrastructure organisations like ETF and AoC, including Ofsted - wants radical change. I know that’s hard to hear when your daily working lives feel like they lack agency so much of the time, and I didn’t expect to hear it. But I heard it and I trusted it too. If you need convincing of that, check out David Russell’s series of blogs, arising from his research over the past year into a self-improving system for FE. Key findings - that everyone wants more trust (but thinks that the problem is with others, never with them) and that we all believe in FE’s social purpose.
And there’s a wider changemaking context too, if only we had the time and space to listen. This includes the post-pandemic ‘great resignation’ - now being termed the ‘great resistance’, where people across all workforces are choosing differently in their lives - different jobs, running their own enterprises, shorter working hours. And our response to the upheavals of global change: no service is better situated to lead social change. All the research coming out of business schools across the US, UK and Europe is converging on changemaking - finding joy, agency and space in working life, respecting the human workforce in meaningful ways and developing a triple-bottom line of people and planet, as well as profit. There is such a growing convergence of thinking that I won’t make a lot of specific references in this talk, but in this previous article you’ll find a map of thinkers who navigate my way. The freshness of their thinking comes from sound research, diverse identities and lived experience and their openness in leadership to their own vulnerabilities and to listening to others.
So we all want change, pretty much. And we all feel we lack agency. And we don’t know how to change things, because everything is so tight - systems, processes and hierarchies designed - intentionally or not - to keep us grafting, so that we don’t have time to think in all the noise and the boom and bust exhaustion of college life. Let me spell this out: leaders can’t fix this alone. Even the government can’t fix this alone because it’s not just about money (though that would be nice) or even ideology, it’s about finding new ways of being in this ever-changing world.
I’m coming to you today with some ideas, but I want to introduce you to a few concepts first. To do things differently, we need to use new language, new motifs, otherwise the old containers will keep dragging us back to the status quo. In JoyFE, which is a collective movement in FE that I’m part of, we call this ‘gobackery’.
Concept 1 - Golden Unicorns
Yes, it’s fanciful and the work I’m doing around this has a delightfully unexpected outcome - people keep sending me unicorn stuff. I haven’t just made it up though, there’s an established research context. A ‘unicorn employee’ used to mean that special person who fits the organisation perfectly - back in the days where crisis was something that only happened sometimes. Now we’re in permacrisis - it was the Collins Dictionary word of the year for 2022 in fact. We all ‘came back’ after the first flush of the pandemic with a desperate need to get back to normal, but there’s no normal, not even any ‘new normal’, just constant flux and change. We are dealing with uncertainty all the time and that requires a new kind of leadership and a new kind of attitude to work. Those ‘unicorn employees’, perfect for then, are all at sea in this enduring storm, along with the rest of us. Have you ever found yourself in that position where you think you’re doing well…then suddenly, you’re not?
The most significant mindshift we need to make is the turn against perfection. Perfection isn’t possible in ever-changing times, when we need to be able to take risks and make mistakes without being punished for them. If I could change one thing about FE - and I’m trying - it would be to remove that word ‘outstanding’ from Ofsted’s lexicon. It encourages cultures of perfectionism - and we know from Brené Brown’s lifetime of research into shame that perfectionism makes us sick.
So the notion of that perfectly situated ‘unicorn employee’ - imagine the pressure on them to be perfect all the time! - is outdated and a little dangerous. The last thing you want in a team navigating choppy seas is for people to be competitive with one another, or for there to be a culture of favouritism. So let’s flip the concept.
To some extent we are pretty much all Golden Unicorns, or we could be, if the systems and culture dominating our working lives allowed us to release our potential. If we didn’t spend endless hours in meetings that achieve little, before returning to our desks to complete paperwork that seems pointless. We are going to be sideswiped by change after change, because that’s how the world is now; if we resist that we’ll break, but we can work within the flow of it. But many of us - and many of you here - have changemaking potential that is trapped inside by the fear and desperation of modern life, by worrying about the gas bill (here and at home), by endless reorganisation and toxic teams where we’ve come to believe that our voices will not be heard. Our only power is in withholding our voice and maybe also our goodwill.
The new definition of a Golden Unicorn is this:
“I have all this information, all this experience, all this wisdom and I’m insatiably curious.”
That’s Brené Brown’s spin on the golden unicorn. I am going to add for the purpose of this session:
“...and I don’t try to change things any more because what’s the point? I know no-one is listening. And I know nothing will really change. So I come to work and do the job and I count the days to the end of term.”
How far does this fit with how you are feeling about work right now? We all have Unicorn Power, that’s a fundamental assumption of my work, I don’t believe for a moment that anyone comes to work to deliberately do a bad job, especially in education where we’re drawn to making a change.
Concept 2 - Potentia
One of the biggest influences on my work is - perhaps surprisingly - a 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher called Baruch Spinoza. He was writing in Latin back in the day and that gave him two words for power.
Potestas is what we think of as power as usual - status, hierarchy, clout. At any level of the organisation we may feel we have little of that, and we may perceive that others have more than they do.
Potentia is what I’m interested in, unicorn power. It’s an activist, changemaking power, an energy really. If I asked you to think about someone at work who’s exciting to be around, they have potentia. Others may think that about you! I’m not talking about the toxic positivity of ‘everything is awesome’ - when it’s clearly not - I’m talking about those conversations you come away energised from.
How would you assess your potestas/potentia blend?
Concept 3 - Systems and Culture Change
The final concept I want to introduce to you is about systems and culture change. We all know what those words mean and they are bandied around a lot at the minute. I never could get my head around systems change, it always seemed so complicated and an engineering metaphor is not a good fit for my brain, but I found my way into it last year via the concept of a lever. So a system rolls on, with each component playing its part. Think about an automated train set. If you change something, the whole system is affected. Everyone’s on the train to Liverpool then you pull the lever on the track and suddenly they are going to London.
Releasing the potentia of Golden Unicorns is one such lever. There are others. But if we can model different ways of working in one place, if other places learn from that…change starts to spread.
In colleges, we often think in terms of culture change. But in a game of rock, paper, scissors, systems change is always going to win because whatever we do to change the culture, the systems we have in place will drag everything back to the status quo - that ‘gobackery’ again. We can change systems in our organisations (and as long as we are open about sharing what we’ve done, those changes can help to transform FE as a whole). But we need to pause, notice the things we take for granted and then change them. Instead of making a whole lot of untrue limiting assumptions that we live as true.
The fact is that we all have a part to play. The new college governor who draws attention to the fact it took seven signatures to get an ID badge (that was me by the way), the sessional member of staff who calls out a toxic culture in their team (and is listened to), the established colleague who notices their work is driven by cynicism and determines to change, the leader who campaigns across the sector to influence the Ofsted framework - they can all change systems at different levels. The finest changemaker I know is a chef - Clare Mutchell from Fircroft College, who started her new job the first day of lockdown and was charged with making the college menus veggie. Fircroft recently went up against much bigger organisations to win a coveted Green Gown award, which is raising the profile of the college. Change is happening, and it’s beginning to play out in not only the data, but in inspections too.
Anyway, you get the picture. Locked inside every organisation is so much potentia power. Everyone can potentially be a changemaker - and enjoy their work much more because of the sense of agency that brings. But we need to work together across a number of levers and we need to do that en masse. Note I am not calling these solutions because they are so much more about process than about fixed goals. There’s no magic bullet. Like any organisation, you’ll have loads of snake-oil salesmen come calling with the latest shiny thing. If there was a quick fix to any of this, we’d all be doing it by now.
This is graft.
Lever 1 - Professional Learning Communities
How to unlock that Unicorn Power? One way is by talking about it. We’ve got to move on from the ‘us and them’. If I’ve learned anything over the past few years it’s that ‘they’ only have the same potentia as ‘we’ do. The days of waiting for the manager, the principal, Ofsted, the government to fix things are gone.
In all the folk fantasy books that were popular in my childhood - like The Dark is Rising, if you heard that on the radio over Christmas - there’s often a magical white horse that saves the day at some stage, with or without the pointy horn. Unicorns are deep in the folk memory in Europe and the UK. But nobody is going to come and rescue us, because everyone is stuck, at every level of power-as-usual. Conventional systems have outlived their day. One of the most powerful levers of systems change that I am seeing is community and at the heart of community is the way we communicate with one another. Professional learning communities - and there will be many, within every workplace, whether they are formalised or not - tend to be based on consumption - taking away good practice - rather than connection, which has more to do with listening and thinking, coming up with solutions together.
How do you gather? How do you connect? What do your meetings look like? What does the everyday connection between people feel like, in your team and the wider community? Do you take time to think together? Do you smile and say hello? Do you even know everyone’s name? It seems simplistic, but the quality of listening can make or break a community. I’d like to propose a names amnesty; when you gather for professional development even if the facilitator doesn’t mention it, be bold and suggest a simple round of names (you don’t need role and rank), then use the names. Ask people how they are and listen to the answer. Be succinct and honest in your own responses. These small acts of connection will change things - and if you can’t find time for this, the system is surely broken so call it out.
If convening a meeting is in your job role, be ruthless about changing how that meeting looks and feels. You may have encountered the Thinking Environment, which is a huge part of my work. Check out Kirklees College and how they are using its radical discipline for changemaking culture and systems.
How do you gather for professional learning all the time, not just on days like today? Is it consumption-led? We all need that expert CPD but far less of it than we might think, what we’re thirsty for is time to process how we’ll contextualise the learning, really make it happen. Up and down the country there’s a recognition that professional learning communities are what make new thinking really stick, alongside developing co-operative changemaking cultures.
And what does your accountability structure feel like in practice? Mike Erwin describes accountability as a gateway to trust, yet many of our accountability frameworks have mistrust baked into them. What could they look and feel like, if trust was built in from the start? That doesn’t mean not evidencing stuff. It means working from a true liberating assumption that you can trust people, until they show you otherwise. Big questions, but not insurmountable ones, if we take the time to pause, think and take action. As I travel up and down the country doing values work I hear the same three desires from staff at all levels - you want kindness, respect and trust.
Lever 2 - Joyful Practice
This leads us to the second lever: joyful practice. Joy in Spinoza’s work is absolutely not the toxic positivity of internet memes and the wellbeing industry. Sometimes we have just not ‘got this’. You don’t need me to tell you that there’s a mental health crisis out there - and in here. Joyful practice is not about denying the fear, despair, anger and frustration of life, it’s about channelling it into affirmative action through the deliberate practice of values.
Our systems, processes and hierarchies are built for a different time and they are going to be difficult to budge, I don’t deny it though change is coming. But most of us have stuff we can influence, especially if we work together. We’re getting near to the time when we start planning for next academic year. If we’re serious about a triple bottom line of people and planet, as well as keeping the cart on the tracks financially, we need to plan differently.
A practical way of doing this is to start with possibility questions. These bring values down from the walls and into action - lived, not laminated. Start by identifying your values collectively, using an anonymous survey (I can guarantee trust and kindness will be in there). Then construct possibility questions, along the values line. Here are some I collected in the summer:
What could assessment look like, as a practice of trust?
What could curriculum planning look like, as a practice of community?
What could library induction look like, as a practice of creativity?
What could supervision look like, as a practice of care?
Once you’re practised, you might want to get bolder with the second clause. Here are some I’ve gathered from changemaking work with different colleges over the last few months:
How can we remove feelings of guilt, if we take time out from the busy working day?
What would a day of no meetings look like, in a world of busy?
What could sustainable growth look like, if we celebrated imperfection?
What potential could students reach, if they were encouraged to think independently?
What practice architecture needs to be in place, for people to heal?
What would work feel like, if we were involved in making decisions about the things that impact us?
This doesn’t mean you don’t still work towards KPIs, but whoever said you can’t design values into them?
Lever 3 - Radical Rest
None of this is easy; it’s a genuine paradigm shift and it won’t be fixed by reading a blog. I do intensive changemaking work with organisations and there’s always a point at which I leave and you have to pick it up.
Clearly, if you’re serious about doing the work there are people within the organisation who have the right potestas/potentia mix to kickstart things. But there’s also personal responsibility. This is not me saying be more resilient - I am not a fan of that word, it’s endurance we need now, not being told to accept more crap being piled on us and I’m certainly not telling you to work harder. If you’re hearing that from me, with respect you’re not listening. What I’m saying is that there’s joy and energy to be found in changemaking work - in pulling together as Golden Unicorns through these permacrisis times and we have to do the work on ourselves to do that work. Look at the possibility question we saw a few moments ago:
How can we remove feelings of guilt, if we take time out from the busy working day?
Even the kindest and most trusting supervision in the world can’t make another human remove their own feelings of guilt. At the same time, leaders are often those who have the clout to change systems. So it’s a pincer movement of systems change and personal development, as it always will be.
So, to close. It can be better than it is, but nothing will change if we’re exhausted all the time. Everything in FE always seems to be urgent, but my first career was in the NHS, I’ve worked in the emergency room and I promise you that outside of a life-threatening safeguarding incident, FE is not A+E. If you take one thing away with you reading this, I hope it might be that.
Much of my work in 2023 is going to be about radical rest. That’s centred in the understanding that we need to do the work on ourselves if we’re going to do the social purpose work of FE, which is deeply rooted in struggles for equality and survival, as well as thriving and flourishing in the world. It’s a tricky one for us. Even as a freelancer, my working life reflects the boom and bust of the academic year. I’m deeply rested now, but I can only carry on changemaking if I build radical rest into my daily life, I can’t wait for Easter. It’s beyond challenging to do the job and also find rested thinking time for changemaking.
The key seems to be pause, notice and take action. In her book about changemaking (she calls it ‘lightmaking’), Karen Walrond asks us to “listen to the whispers”, but we just don’t hear them amidst the noise.
Golden Unicorns need downtime, alone and in community, as well as the buzzy connected excitement of days like today. I’ve got lots of ideas, based on my work with FE’s changemakers. But here’s just one that I’ll leave you with today.
How can everyone in your organisation start each day with these three questions:
How can I feel healthy?
How can I feel connected?
How can I feel purposeful?
I’m not asking you as an individual to set a good intention, though you may wish to. Good intentions often don’t translate to sustainable action. I’m asking how your organisation can make asking these three questions something everyone wants to do at the start of each day. That’s the difference in changemaking work - baking in the change.
You might go away thinking, well what did I learn from that? I promise you, if there was a magic bullet I would have shared it with you here. All I could do in this time was give you some pointers and hope to get you thinking and listening together. It’s been a whistle-stop tour round the Golden Unicorn stables, but I hope at least I’ve got you thinking and talking. And keep in touch! You can see my socials in my profile and it would be great to hear how your Golden Unicorns are doing.