Personal Reflections on Practice: Analysing Stories as a
Guide to Practice.
Steve Outram - [email protected]
The Higher Education Academy
www.heacademy.ac.uk
As an Academic Lead for Leadership, Strategy and Change at the Higher Education Academy I
spend a lot of time working with teams and with individuals enabling them to achieve
transformational, sustainable change in their institutions and departments. One of the important
elements in this process is to introduce colleagues to the nature and practice of storytelling in
organisations. There is a vast research literature on the subject. It occurred to me during one of
these sessions that there is a similarity in the stories we tell one another in our institutions and the
narratives we create when we are engaged with reflection. Moreover, through analysing the stories
we tell we can involve ourselves in ‘double loop’ learning or reflection. That is, we can analyse a
story reflectively and learn about ourselves. But, by looking at our reflections, further learning about
ourselves is possible.
Let me tell you a story about when I first joined the Change Academy team and I was given the
task of preparing a session on evaluation. Change Academy was a joint Higher Education
Academy and Leadership Foundation programme that lasted a year and where institutional teams
were supported in their aim of bringing about sustainable, transformational change. The model of
change that informed this programme was based on the principle that successful change in
universities and colleges is emergent; is likely to be chaotic and cannot be pinned down to a
particular timeline. Emergent change is not amenable to the usual evaluation methods such as
ascertaining whether the objectives of the project were met within the given timeframe and within
budget. I spent a lot of time in York University library researching possible alternative methods and
then more time preparing a presentation to ‘blow people away’!
My session was scheduled for 7:00pm on the third day and I delivered a passionate, energetic as
well as humorous presentation. There was a good deal of laughter and the body language of my
colleagues delivering the programme was extremely positive.
It was a shock, therefore, to read the feedback sheets after the residential and discover that the
evaluation session was perceived, at best, as being fair. A number of participants commented that
it was ‘too academic’ and that a formal lecture was less useful than a practical session.
Now let’s analyse this story.
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