Some Exciting Changes for 2020
Sometime in about 1984 or 1985 I fell absolutely in love with the university and knew that's where I wanted to build a career. I fell in love with the possibility of actually being paid to continue learning myself and helping other people learn as well.
Because of a series of circumstances, my route to that particular destination was a circuitous one. It would take until 1998 for me to land my first full-time job in higher education. It was not a job in the classroom, however, as I had envisioned. It was a job developing and delivering educational programming to civic and organizational leaders as part of the university's outreach and engagement mission.
This would primarily be my work for the 20 years that would follow. During this time, I had the great good fortune to meet and become friends and colleagues with a remarkable group of people including Ed Morrison. For 15 years we’ve been nurturing a set of insights and experiences related to how people come together in open networks and tackle complex (often wicked) challenges. We’ve taken these insights and figured out how to teach them to others through books, online learning, and professional development training. That work has taken us, literally, all over the world. I’ve been able to teach thousands of adult learners from over 140 countries. Amazing!
Most of this work, however, was focused on learning that takes place outside of the university classroom. In 2011, still wanting to be able to teach university students, I set out to complete the PhD I had started nearly 15 years earlier. By 2014 I had the requisite doctoral credentials and began developing and teaching a graduate course called Collaborative Leadership and Agile Strategy.
This was the first time we took what we had been learning and teaching in professional development settings and put those insights into a university course. From this one course, I was asked to develop and teach a few other courses here and there, both graduate and undergraduate. The teaching, however, remained a lesser percentage of my time and energy. The majority was still spent supporting the university’s outreach and engagement work.
2020 marks a professional milestone. I’ll now begin doing more of what I set out to do 35 years ago. Beginning in the Spring semester, I’ll be teaching nearly full time, with the outreach and engagement work representing a smaller portion of my overall committment. I’ll be teaching four courses this Spring and developing a fifth. More than this, however, I’ll be working with colleagues to establish a brand-new teaching and research discipline based on the work we’ve been doing over the last two decades. 2020 will mark the birth of the Science and Practice of Complex Collaboration.
One challenge of developing a new academic discipline is related to where it fits in the existing configuration of colleges, departments, and programs that make up a university. My courses attract students from all across the university. I’ll have young people studying engineering, science, management, education, nursing, pharmacy, liberal arts, and every field of study in between in my courses. For coursework on complex collaboration you could not ask for a better scenario! In terms, of how to institutionalize it within a more vertically-configured organizations, therein lies the rub. The good news is that I have some really smart, supportive people who will be helping me figure all that out.
Another bonus is that I’ll be doing less traveling in the coming months. Although I love the work and the people I work with, travel is stressful, especially for a homebody like me. Over the last few years I’ve averaged three trips per month, for both domestic and international engagements. Most of that will be put on pause this semester to focus on what’s outlined above.
