“the Digital can be (among other things) a tool, or a resource full of content, but its existence as a Place is what can be terrifically hard to see.“

Mapping Practice and Strategy: Leadership tools from Visitors and Residents

I’ve been thinking about the role that recognising and understanding one’s own practice, especially in the digital space, can have when it comes to a more complex awareness of the strategic and operational aspects of an organisation.

In serendipitous co-evolution of this idea Lanclos and White have recently delivered a more strategic focused workshop of their Visitor and Resident model for Carnegie Mellon. The workshop revealed not just technology use, but as Donna Lanclos covers in her post,  the ways in which it is used to engage people. With Dave White’s post some of the processes used can be seen.

Reflecting now on the work that has gone before and the potential links to work I am developing at Jisc around Digital Leadership and Digital Capabilities there is obvious scope to use the V&R model to both reflect on “Being an effective digital leader/manager (personal/professional development)” and then also developing a plan for “Leading/ managing an effective digital organisation (team, service, department) (organisational development)” .

The application of the V&R model will have three main aims;

  1. To identify and build on skills and strengths of practice among individuals working within the institution; and reveal the range of practices that individuals are using.
  2. To frame a conversation with leaders in order to to help them to understand what it is that is going on in their organisation and giving them a reference point to examine existing digital strategies with a view to either adjusting the strategy to exploit the existing good practices surfaced; or putting processes and enablers in place to change practice toward the strategy.
  3. Finally the process should enable leaders to understand their own practice, identify their own strengths and where they could develop to help them demonstrate their own digital identity as a leader.

The Jisc Digital Leadership work will be piloting a course in the Autumn, the V&R model will be used at the start of the course to enable an understanding of the personal / professional development aspects of leadership and digital. As the course develops and with new knowledge and understanding we will be looking at how it can then be used to provide an effective tool for developing and supporting both strategies and operational plans.

For leaders in education, as Lanclos states, “The Digital can be (among other things) a tool, or a resource full of content, but its existence as a Place is what can be hard to see,” It is this concept and the potential for enhancing and extending research and education that is so important for emerging institutional leaders to grasp.

“the Digital can be (among other things) a tool, or a resource full of content, but its existence as a Place is what can be terrifically hard to see.“
“The Digital can be (among other things) a tool, or a resource full of content, but its existence as a Place is what can be hard to see” Lanclos, 2015

One comment

  1. […] We seldom have time to be reflective about our own practices, what they are as well as what they mean.  In offering the workshop format as an open resource, and also in coming in to run the workshops ourselves, as we did this last week at Parsons and at CMU/Pitt, the Visitors and Residents team is helping provide space for such reflection to take place.  Further thoughts from Lawrie Phipps about where we can take the V&R framework from here can be found here. […]

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