Recently Barry Verdin, a colleague at The Open University, recently invited me to explore the ideas behind Julian Stodd‘s work around Social Leadership. Julian has written several books on the topic of social leadership – see HERE for his latest ideas. We will be tweeting about this under the hashtag #100DaysOU. You can see others posting about the ideas generally under the hashtag #SL100.
The reflection and conversation are driven by the First 100 Days book. Here is an example of Day 1. I will be updating this blog post with my daily reflections. I won’t be pasting an image of the book from each day, rather, short notes on my ideas.
Day 1 – Are you content?
Day 1 asks us to think about..
If we are content with what we see in the organisation?
Overall I would say yes, BUT I also see so many opportunities to improve it. There are opportunities to make it fairer, more equal and more innovative, but at the same time I see it having such an impact already.
Is it ready to face tomorrow?
Probably not. Competition is rising, costs do not seem to be managed well and the systems and processes used to support our clients, students is very complex and spaghetti like. As an example, the tutorial booking systems has not worked well this week. My wife has been trying for several days to book tutorials for the four modules she is studying.
Is it adapted to the realities of the Social Age?
With my limited view, I would say yes.
If we could change one thing, what would it be?
Not particularly simple, but it would be align everything to raise the student experience, so that we are at the top of student satisfaction rankings again.
As part of the twitter conversation, Barry Verdin developed an idea around contentment. Here is his tweet and my visualisation of his idea:
Day 2: Power
Julian suggests there are three type of power: individual, hierarchical and networked.
What types of power do I have?
I probably have a reasonable doses of personal power within my own family context. Within the OU I have very little hierarchical power, as I am a part time Associate Lecturer and very rarely visit the Milton Keynes campus. I also know very few people across the OU. I exert very little networked power: Occasionally when I meet peers from my modules or speak to my line manager and at occasional meetings with other when I am at campus. I could exert more power in this way, but it would mean spending a reasonable amount of time with people and possibly travel. I am also wondering whether the use of internal tools such as Yammer could help me exert more power. Possibly, but I am not sure people are really using these platforms much. Overall within the system that is the OU, I feel pretty powerless and at the same time under-utilised.
On reflection, rather than direct influence, I wonder if I can best be of service through my experience of coaching and facilitation and possibly training in the areas of influencing, collaboration, systems thinking and emotional intelligence. I could to some extent help empower others.
As an aside, I spotted a great visual on storytelling today on twitter, and I guess this will come into play later in the 100 days, so I have started a new resource collecting blog post HERE.
Day 3: If not you, then who?
Following on from the previous day: between formal power and social, mine is very much social, which requires a great deal of networking and influencing. I have not particularly worked on this a great deal, so there it potential to raise it.
I found the questions quite difficult to connect just to the OU:
Where do you see inequality: Across the OU, from my perspective, I see quite large gaps between Support Services, Academics and Associate Lecturers.
Where do you see unfairness: I really struggled with this as “fair” is a difficult concept. On person’s fair is not anothers.
Where do you see a challenge: I see many challenges – where to start, how to tackle and who to involve are different for each. One major one I see is engaging the AL community to maximise value for things like internal consulting, change management, staff development etc.
Who will solve it: US – We, the participants of the system CAN solve the issues and many are being worked on. Not all is doom and gloom. As an organisation we have an amazing impact and often it is pretty easy to forget that!
Day 4 – Where is the knowledge?
In the OU the formal knowledge seems, from an AL perspective to live in the spaghetti that is the intranet in the form of forums and documents. Informally it lives also in forums and the heads of my colleagues. Socially we do not connect much, via forums and sometimes at staff development days. Trips to MK, the mothership are very rare. Once in my first 5 years! Recently more regularly, as in 2 / 3 times per year. We do have other ways of connecting i.e. skype and yammer, but these do not seem to well used. I also connect to colleagues beyond OU tools / systems. Twitter is particularly helpful and occasionally LinkedIn groups.
Day 5 – Generosity
How I can help:
- Share the tools I have curated or know i.e collaboration collection or the canvas collection.
- Share my time, particularly in the role as a coach or facilitator.
- Share my experience in general: change programmes, leadership development, influencing skills / tools and so on.
- Be available to listen, we tend not to have enough of this!
Day 6 – Your formal power
Quite a depressing read really. What can I achieve by my formal power? I can provide feedback and ideas. As a part time, distance worker in the organisation at the very low end of OU hierarchy I wield little forma power. The other aspect of this day, in terms of what can I achieve through reputation is interesting. I think I am well respected in my micro-community of ALS delivery the module I support. Beyond that I know very few people in the OU. One thing I think I can achieve is the broadening of ideas of those I connect with.
Day 7 – The Gig economy
The question for the day is “how many jobs have you had?”. I am not sure this is particularly useful as say “how many roles have you played that required differing skills”. I would imagine that if I ask five Associate Lecturers how many jobs they have had, it could be in the dozens. I would imagine that the OU overall has ALL of the skills it needs to evolve BUT there is no system to map those skills nor connect the people to each other that have the required skills for any transformation project. Some of the big corporates I have worked with have had some really good experience / skill mapping processes. IBM for example gets all staff to log all projects and skills they have developed as well as clients they have worked for. This allows a really quick search to ask someone a question or resource a presentation / project. They also have a very active social / collaboration portal for working together. Leaps and bounds ahead of the OU.
Day 8 – Do you trust me?
This day asks us to consider factors that build and erode trust. Three sets of work I like around this are:
1 – The Trust Equation
This looks at four facets that build and erode trust:
2 – The trust fund
Developed by coach and consultant Mick Cope. He talks about five facets that build and destroy trust:
These can be held in the positive or negative, which he calls “Trust Fund” like a bank account:
Both of the above images are from HERE. I have Mick’s books on coaching and consulting and they are up in my top 10 books list for those subjects.
3 – Speed of Trust
Developed by Stephen M R Covey (Son of 7 Habits Author):
Click HERE to access a .pdf book summary of Speed of Trust.
Day 9 – A do not believe it
This day is around authenticity. I have not found in the OU community people who are not this. Every single conversation and person has seemed authentic. I see this as a none issue and see everyone as coming from a place of authenticity. Wondering is this is because it is an academic community, rather than say an political or commercial organisation.
Day 10 – I’d follow
I am quite happy following Mary Kellett (Acting Vice-Chancellor). She took on the challenge of the role at a moments notice. Three reasons for following here for me are:
- She seems to be in regular communication with people across the organisation.
- She has made efforts to create dialogue and feedback.
- She seems to manage conflict and tension pretty well.
These are based on what I have seen and heard from internal comms, webcasts etc.
Why would people follow me? Not really sure but I think:
Experience in a range of sectors and I am reasonably personable and approachable.
End of the first ten days – thanks for readIng this far. The journey now continues HERE.
A really excellent way to get people thinking short term and working long term. Implementation of any kind of change is a long and drawn out effort; nothing comes easily and much comes from a gradual awakening along with increasing ownership-involvement. The real key is generating enough self-reinforcement to keep the user returning day after day after day to make these reinforced incremental improvements.
I see parallels to learning language from an online course. What got you IN and what keeps you GOING.
This seems like a very powerful tool for generating that critical self-reflection and for anchoring the continuous continuous improvement needed to actually do something differently. Keep them involved and keep them engaged.
Beautiful presentation of content. I am keen on learning visual facilitation methods. I got some ideas from your work.
Could I have access to all100 days.
Thank you
Thanks Arshad. Hopefully you have checked my other blog posts (click visual category). I am actually working through this now, so I do not have all 100 ready.