Learnings on Authentic Digital Leadership through Crisis

Reflections on an organisational and personal leadership journey through COVID impacted ‘remote learning’ responses and how this has influenced a culture which was already working towards an intentional digital transformation. Positive and negative impact of the rapid changes implemented will be considered alongside early review of evidence on how this has shaped initiatives that were already underway as well as future planning for long term recovery and institutional direction. How University of Adelaide responded to the COVID19 impact on face to face teaching with an immediate institutional reframing of ‘Remote Learning’ and how this was received, translated and implemented across Faculties and Service Areas. In addition, the impact this activity had on in-flight strategic initiatives in the fully Online arena and comparisons of the two streams of activity (‘remote’ and ‘online’) in terms of:

 Readiness of teaching staff
 Engagement of teaching staff
 Quality of content
 Student experience

From a leadership perspective, driving the University’s fully online development and delivery of postgraduate programs, this scenario provided challenges and opportunities in simultaneously being required to bridge the gap and yet maintain the difference between these two very different approaches to ‘distance’ learning, including internal framing of this distinction and extensive triage of misaligned content in both streams. For the institute, and especially senior leadership tasked with delivering this message, this was a particularly challenging exercise in communication and collegiality, often providing both technical and pastoral support to intensely overwhelmed academic colleagues. Authentic leadership was the lynchpin tool by which University of Adelaide, and this author as an agent within that, managed to navigate and learn from the experience, in order to leverage the momentum of an unexpected transition towards online as ‘business as usual’ in order to assist with the ongoing digital transformation of the organisation at large. This Pecha Kucha, utilising both narrative and data based evidence, will showcase the learnings from this experience.