We began with a silent discussion. I know, I hadn't heard of it either. But it was an excellent method for getting lots of voices 'heard' and lots of ideas onto paper. Andy Sandford took a video of the process below. Essentially everyone is invited to write (or draw) on a communal space, silently, for a few minutes. We then took a moment to talk about the different themes appearing on the paper.
Silent discussion in action today great way to start a build on the topics #lego #learnengageplay pic.twitter.com/KgXKqL4aDm— Andy Sandford (@Leanandagile) March 30, 2019
Alison asked us to take one of those themes, as well as something that was missing from the discussion and build a LEGO model around these two ideas. I was struck by the image of healthy-looking tree, with the words "growth" inside so chose that as my starting topic. A single second's reflection on what was missing and I decided to also look at "death" as the secondary topic. Because hey, binaries can be fun sometimes. But as I started to build I thought more about what both growth and death mean in the context of a sustainable organisation, and the unexpected conclusions I drew shocked me.
We tend to think of growth as good thing, something to strive for and to cultivate. And yet, in no system is growth - and only growth - sustainable. In biology for example, whole communities rely on death for their survival. Fungi grow on dead and decaying matter, worms feed on the same to create humus, and plants need that humus to grow. Even as human beings, we need death (in the form of food) in order to live and at a cellular level our bodies are constantly recycling themselves through autophagy. So what does growth mean for the sustainable university? I think that if we want to be able to grow and develop in ways that will benefit our communities we need to let go of some of the processes and ways of thinking that are holding us back. By letting them die we can invest our energy into new and exciting ventures.
Every organisation has skeletons in the closet. Occasionally, someone will joke about "knowing where the bodies are buried" in their workplace. But that covert assassination is not the kind of death I'm talking about. We can draw some inspiration from Marie Kondo here, and give those outdated or unhelpful processes a noble death. If we really want to grow, and do so sustainably, then perhaps it's time to acknowledge the now unhelpful things that have served us well in the past (and indeed in some universities served us well for hundreds of years), and let them go gently. We can then use that energy, time or resource to grow the university in other ways.
This is all terribly abstract. But it is proof that sometimes playing with a bit of LEGO can be useful for ideation and exploring overlooked concepts.
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