There's a barn owl that comes into our garden every evening. Has no interest in us,
no interest in who we are, and there's something extraordinary about its wildness.
I'm in North Norfolk, which is the kind of hunchback on the East of England, close to
the North Sea, and I've been here for a year. It's the longest time I've been in one place,
I think in my whole life. You know I'm quite an urban soul in a way, so it's been odd.
I've loved some of it though. I've loved actually
being somewhere for the whole 12 months, watching the seasons change, and actually now
as I'm talking outside the window it's pouring with snow all the snowdrops are covered.
But I've missed, I've missed people. I've missed the wonderful people I work with.
I've missed my family. I've missed my daughter. I've missed my mother. So
it's been a really intense, odd time up here on the edge of the land by the North Sea.
I've found that I've had to adapt my way of working, and I think it's been in response to
how virtual and ephemeral this way of being is. I've found a need to make things that last so
the wonderful conversations that I end up having with, you know,
faculty or people who come on our programmes, I've tried to turn them into podcasts. I've
kept a journal. We have felt that we needed to literally make things,
like sort of packs of cards with ideas in them, and playlists, things that actually viscerally
connect us with other people, and things that last, things that won't blow away on the wind.
Two things really stand out for me, and they were things that I didn't think were possible before
this year. One is, you can really collaborate and be creative and not be in the same room.
I found the intensity of being on Zoom, or Teams, or whatever it is, the face-to-face nature of it,
particularly working with people who are good at all kinds of things that I'm not good at,
that we've been so productive and creative in those moments. I mean more than when one's in
a room with a whiteboard and there's dilution of noise from another room. I've been really
surprised at how creative we've been able to be. The second thing I've learned is that you can
build real intimate relationships of trust from scratch without ever meeting the person,
and there's something about the fact that we're in each other's rooms, we're in each other's houses,
we're in the rhythms of one another's lives, we're all under pressure together that shared
sense of us going through something unimaginable, has meant that I have met people this year I have
got to know them I feel like they're friends and I've never met them. So that's, those are
two things that have really struck me and been very very powerful forces for good this year.
I think they know that small things can can send people
into swoops of sadness or changes of mood. They make time for people, they are not just having
meetings as usual, they're leaving time to ask people how they are. They are good at reading
faces, and I do feel passionately that, you know, turning on the camera
is hugely important. Seeing people's faces, seeing whether they're fragile or not,
and just because someone wasn't yesterday doesn't mean to say that they are today. I think that sort
of nurturing and, you know, we hardly ever use the word love in organisations, but that kind of
love of one's people, the people that they that work for you. The leaders that have shown that
and understood just the rhythm of checking in, the rhythm of seeing that people are thriving,
that sort of leadership has been hugely inspirational and important this year.