anne marie mcewan

Nellie, I have long had a real problem with concept of leadership. It is something I have written about elsewhere. Does collaboration need leadership? Definitely not, especially in a group of self-determining peers who choose to come together to do something. Like you Gina, I have also enjoyed very satisfying collaborations with the characteristics you describe.

Context is everything. The sort of collaborations Sylvia is talking about, large-scale and involving many different institutions, probably do need someone to play a co-ordinating role. Or maybe not. What do you think?

The project I spoke about in my previous post would most likely have been plain sailing had it not been for that one person. The three key players were all academics and would have understood the hands-off approach I took to the researchers. Their leadership would have been supportive.

In fact, their support for me was one of the reasons I got so much flack. She had a power struggle with them and I was in the firing line of her understandable frustrations. Then add different views about how things should be done, because of our different experiences of organisational culture, and the fact that she had held high office and I was gaining my first real project management experience - it is easy to see why this inter-institutional collaboration was challenging.

So I think that leadership in and of itself is not necessarily problematic in collaboration. The complex mix of diverse individual and organisational perspectives, cultures, prior experience, pre-existing relationships, propensity to seek power and dominance, existence of hidden agendas, etc are issues enough even without leadership. In my view, these are some of 'the various dimensions we need to consider in collaborative projects that involve multiple players and layers' that Sylvia asks about.

Thanks for an interesting conversation .

I am a long-time listener, on and off, to Scope conversations. This one on collaboration is particularly interesting to me and is a topic that I know a little about.

Collaboration sounds so nice and fluffy. It can be hell.

You ask, Sylvia: " What are the various dimensions we need to consider in collaborative projects that involve multiple players and layers?". Great question.

We all have experience of collaboration. Here's my story. My baptism of fire was my first job after receiving a newly-minted PhD. I project-managed a 26 partner research project, involving 10 universities, a couple of think-tanks, Acas (employment concilliation service), unions and the CBI (Conferedation of British Industry). It was probably the most stressful thing I have ever done.

The CBI and unions were great. No strife or disagreement there. The researchers from the 10 universities were great - collegiate, collaborative, wonderful. What gave me problems were the strength of hidden prior relationships, both power-driven and antagonistic, among the project leaders. There were three leaders and one person who considered herself a leader in the project. I think it is fair to say that the three excluded her.

The dynamics among those four caused most of the problems. One the four came from a different work culture and had held CEO status in a major organisation. And here's me all new and shiny! This person tried to impose a highly controlled way of working on academics. You can imagine the reaction when I insisted on letting the academics get on with it. All was eventually well and tickety-boo. Quality research outputs were delivered on time, as I knew they would be, but the project was not good for my health.

I have since participated in EU research projects on collaboration and new ways of working. There is a plethora of research available but if I might recommend just one reference it is by Wendy Hirsh,Valerie Garrow and Linda Holbeche:

A practical facilitation guide for directors and senior managers - case studies, frameworks and checklists that enable effective preparation, management and delivery of collaborative ventures. Published April 2005 by Roffey Park

Hello to everyone

My name is Anne Marie McEwan. I have multiple, inter-related areas of knowledge and expertise. I suppose they can be catagorised into 'what' and 'how'.

The 'what', broadly, is how organisational management systems influence organisation behaviour. Recently, this has evolved into monitoring how workplaces are changing globally (or not) in response to technological, economic and demographic developments.

The 'how' is action learning. I work with senior executives to help them evaluate and implement new business strategies, increasingly focusing on making the transition to new working practices. Rather than executives joining a pre-designed Master's course, my colleagues and I design Master's programmes around a practical strategic challenge the executives bring to us. After scoping the problem, we build a customised programme of work. The executives are awarded academic credit for what they learn from what they do.

My work to date has been exclusively face-to-face. In my own business, since leaving academia, I have routinely been learning, sharing and collaborating online.

I know that there is great scope to take online elements of what I do face-to-face, and I am currently working with developers to build a learning platform.

Why am I here? To share whatever might be useful or interesting, and to learn from all the deep expertise in this community.

Looking forward to it

"Knowledge mobilization addresses how external knowledge (outside of the organization) is sought out and combined with internal knowledge to create new knowledge that meets the needs of target users/clients."

I am a long-time Scope lurker, and often feel on the fringes of debates. This is because my knowledge and experience feels only loosely related to the conversations that take place on the forum.

Knowledge translation and knowledge mobilisation - now there's something I have loads of experience of, and on which I would like to comment. I understand Stephen's points about the danger of institutions legitimising predjudiced authority through knowledge mobilisation.

The context within which I adopt a knowlede mobilisation / translation approach is not institutional. It is relational and used as part of a dialogue.

I have deep experience, over approximately 8 years, of co-designing and facilitating work-based learning programmes with and for senior executives. My current work includes intensive engagement with director-level, post-MBA executives in Russia. The country is developing rapidly and the people I am working with are creating, revising, implementing and adapting the business stragegies of the companies for which they are responsible.

Complex is not the word! The operating environment (legislative, social, business opportunities, labour markets, financial ...) changes at a speed that would make your head whirl. Add to this the fact that Peristroika was only 17 years ago. These people are super-smart, and they do not want us coming to Russia and telling them what they should do.

What they do want to know is, what is already known about organising principles, what does research and practice indicate can be effective in mediating organisational dynamics, under what conditions etc? And this is on a whole raft of strategic topics.

Rather that being shoe-horned into a pre-designed learning programme, we turn the process of engagement on its head. We begin with the company and executive (or team of executives) and a joint diagnostic of the strategic business issue. A programme of activities is co-designed, which the executives set about implementing. Specialist knowledge (from people, modules, research, theoretical literature, industry reports etc) is accessed in a just-in-time fashion, and introduced exactly when it is needed.

Because the learning framework is so customised and focussed on the executives' strategic business challenges, the information they are offered is divergent. I am able to draw on my (by now) extensive knowledge of sources and act as a knowledge broker. Again, both the executives and I know that they are receiving my biased selection in the sources I offer them. It is at least a start, and once set off on a train of thought, they go and explore for themselves. I benefit from their exporations because they in turn pass their sources on to me.

The knowledge mobilisation process is then two-way, and that includes the practical and privileged insights I gain from their work.

As far as knowledge translation is concerned, this is the executives' responsibility. The academic research, frameworks and models offered to them have been developed within a US or European context. The executives are accutely aware of this cultural bias, and they constantly question and adapt frameworks amd models to their own specific cultural and business contexts.

I realise that this conference is about pan-Canadian e-learning. For work-based learning, especially at the level of strategic learning, the narrow focus on Canada is, in my view, misplaced. There are many more fundamental issues around learning in the workplace that are crucial for Canada's future, and the globally fragmenting nature of business structures is one of them.

I hopped on a plane from London to Toronto last October, to the University of Waterloo for the Workplace 2017 conference. This was the best conference I have ever attended; the quality of the speakers was outstanding. Several key messages came through, one of which was that work is becoming increasingly devoid of meaning (businesses are increasingly risk-averse). In turn, this lack of meaning is leading to widespread employee disengagement. What role might e-learning (whatever that might mean) play in re-engaging a disengaged workforce? And I bet knowledge mobilisation and knowledge translation, through online conversations, will be an important component in re-engagement.

I hope so - that is what I am building my business around. Fingers crossed!

Hi Emma

I hear clearly what you are saying about the amount of effort in designing and maintaining online material, and ofcourse there is a real danger of standards being compromised if staff and students are not supported through such fundamental changes in approaches to learning.

Supporting workbased learning is equally novel and staff intensive, requiring new skills from facilitators and students alike. For staff, this includes adjusting to new pedagogic / andragogic methods and developing sophisticated inter-personal skills in working with students. In my experience, WBL can be stressful and emotional.  Now add social media technologies into the mix - it all needs careful and sensitive handling. Not easy for already over-committed lecturers.

Threat to quality under these circumstances is related to appropriate resourcing and support. Some traditional educators think that work-based and distance learning is inherently academically inferior and therefore threatens quality. It is very pleasing to be able to demonstrate otherwise.