Response to March Dictionary Entry by Kristy Docherty on Collective Leadership. Written by Fraser Macdonald - Data for Children Collaborative, Deputy Director.

Last month, our Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) colleague, Kristy Docherty, provided a Data for Children Dictionary Series entry on Collective Leadership in practice. If you've not read it, I highly recommend it! Kristy provides a simple framework for embedding Collective Leadership when collaborating with others. The framework is based on four primary principles; Systems-focused, Emergent working, Inquiry-led, and relational approaches. Kristy identifies that combining these four principles can enable a team to collaborate far more effectively and take on increasingly complex tasks.  

At the Data for Children Collaborative, we continually reflect on our own methods and seek opportunities to refine how we deliver on complex challenges.

Kristy’s principles of Collective Leadership

Kristy's framework provides an excellent backdrop to assess our approach to collaboration, to consider how we currently apply Collective Leadership, and how we can improve our projects moving forward. In short - it is an ideal opportunity to take an honest look in the mirror. So, what did I see? Let's break this down by Kristy's principles.

The idea here is that to solve issues, we must first acknowledge the complexity of the system in which our challenge exists. Collaborative working can only deliver genuine impact if we take the time to understand the broader system surrounding a particular issue.

At the Data for Children Collaborative, our projects are always designed around the central tenet of delivering tangible outcomes to enable real benefits to young people. One of our commonly used mantras is 'To solve complex problems, you need different perspectives'. Crucially, one of these 'perspectives' must be from the end-user, who can bring an understanding of the system driving the issue. We embed end-users in the project team to provide that critically important broader context or systemic perspective.

However, more can always be done to ensure we are systems-focused. Recently, we have been refining methods that emphasise incorporating broader perspectives and going beyond a single end-user. Pragmatically, this means we continually ask ourselves, ‘Is this the only end-user to be impacted by our project's outcomes? Who else gains from this work? Or, importantly, ‘who may be negatively impacted?’.

Often, the Data for Children Collaborative finds itself tackling the issues most perceive as 'too complex to address'. When you focus on addressing issues affecting children, you quickly realise how complex things can get. We've learned that there is a need to be exploratory. We accept the risk that our ideas may not work. We enjoy working in this slightly uncertain space. When appropriately managed, exploratory projects can drive real change at the heart of complex issues. We might think of ourselves as an organisation which is extremely structured about being unstructured!

The Data for Children Collaborative practices emergent working through the adoption of Agile management. From experience, we have found that enabling iterative delivery allows our collaborative teams to maintain an exploratory mindset when taking on challenges. It's straightforward for us to shift focus if, for instance, a new data set becomes available or an early outcome reveals a more pressing issue to be addressed.

Emergent working does come with other risks. With multiple collaborators, we must always be conscious of scope drift. We must remain mindful of the original challenge set by our end users. That is why we have them actively engaged in the project design, delivery and evaluation. Their guidance is invaluable in managing risk in emergent working.

If we are to be inquiry-led, we must ensure we create spaces that enable explorative discussion and an opportunity to challenge norms. A core part of our Impact Collaboration process involves a series of workshops built on design thinking principles. Throughout the workshops, we direct the conversation towards unpacking the challenge and then creating a solution that reflects our understanding of the issues identified.  

To maximise inclusivity, we favour running workshops online. This is both for attendees to join from far and wide but also to accommodate different working styles – some may be vocal and can chime in during the session, while some may be reflective and enjoy contributing through [electronic] post-it notes during the session or afterwards. In addition, all our tools are built on virtual infrastructure. Despite this, the most challenging part of our process is time. We are all busy people, and our time is a highly valued commodity, so we tend to constrain our sessions to 2 hours. Although virtual, running an inquiry-led session within a 2-hour online workshop can take a lot of work for the facilitator. In addition, arranging three 2-hour workshops that all collaborators can attend is a diary management minefield which sometimes has us rely on giving those that cannot attend a recording of the session.

At the Data for Children Collaborative, we continue to explore ways to maintain accessibility and valued input while removing barriers. How far can you push hybrid cross-sector global collaboration and maintain an inquiry-led mindset? We are continuing to learn and find out.  

Relationships are fundamental to all collaborative work. More often than not, we stretch individuals out of their comfort zones and ask them to work in new ways. A technique we often use is to ask collaborators to discuss why they personally, are interested in this project. We do this to strip back professional interests or organisational drivers and allow people to express their personal attachments to the issues at hand. From experience, this creates a deeper relational dynamic among collaborators, as it separates professional bias from real human connection.

At the Data for Children Collaborative, we are always mindful of our core values, focusing on every child with trust, transparency, and safe data. When we begin our workshop, we discuss how these values translate to expected behaviours. It can be something as specific as ensuring people respect others by raising a virtual hand or simply ensuring that we are child-centred in our decisions. While this level of instruction could seem trivial to some, our aim is to strike a balance of creating an environment where views are respected, and all voices are heard while empowering collaborators to ask challenging questions. By agreeing on behaviours up front, we set ourselves on solid ground for genuinely collaborative discussions.

Over the next few months, we will be inviting Kristy along to some of our design thinking workshops as a mutual learning exercise. We know it will be invaluable to hear from Kristy on her reflections on our approach to relational thinking, as there will always be improvements on how to bring out the best in people in this respect.

As Kristy puts it in her Dictionary Entry

“All of the principles interrelate, and the boundaries between them are blurred, but when applied together they reinforce each other, providing a distinctive approach to working.”

I hope I have helped to show how the Data for Children Collaborative sets about having its own distinctive approach to working. As a specialist unit within Edinburgh Futures Institute, we are encouraged to think differently and explore the value of effective collaboration. Kristy's framework has provided us with a valuable lens through which we can assess where the Data for Children Collaborative team is leveraging Collective Leadership and, crucially, where we must improve. We were extremely grateful to Kristy for sharing her framework, and we look forward to continuing our learning journey with the broader EFI ecosystem to improve outcomes for children.  

Dictionary Series – What is the practical reality of practising Collective Leadership and are we getting it right?

At the Data for Children Collaborative, we continually reflect on our own methods and seek opportunities to refine how we deliver on complex challenges.

“All of the principles interrelate, and the boundaries between them are blurred, but when applied together they reinforce each other, providing a distinctive approach to working.”