Remember that you already know a lot!

How do you help your students manage not knowing?
How do you yourself learn, can you think of any examples of learning experiences (your own or others) that particularly stand out?
How would you go about developing a teaching or research programme?
It can be helpful to use the Kolb learning cycle as a framework - with four stages of : concrete experience (learning from ourselves and others), reflective observation (relevance for our vision), abstract conceptualisation (the brief we want), active experimentation (testing through design and pilots).

Organise site visits

Visiting places and hearing people’s stories is, without doubt, the best way to get people involved and to find out what’s important to them. Take a look through our buildings and case studies to get a feel for those buildings that you might like to visit.

Listen rather than talk

Providing evidence of poor space utilisation is not going to excite academics into getting involved!

Ensure timely decision-making

Opportunities for change decrease over time, while the cost of change tends to increase. Some stakeholders may be unused to projects where there is so little room for slippage - so it's vital that you keep reminding them.

Choose your starting point carefully

This will determine focus of all conversations, data-sets and design solutions. What would make for an effective and enjoyable project experience?

The way you see the problem is the problem

 The way you see the opportunity is the opportunity. And as Henry Ford was prone to say, ‘If you think you can, or you can’t, you’re probably right.’

Be prepared to act – and therefore to err

The analysis of a situation is one thing, the prescription of a remedy another. An understanding of why an existing academic environment is working unsatisfactorily does not automatically lead to an improved new environment. To achieve this requires knowledge of how to create, use and manage successful academic environments. And we won’t know whether or not we’ve got it right until we’ve actually done it.

Accept space as only one element of project

Other important elements include people (attitude to project), work patterns/styles, technology (degree of mobility enabled), communication systems (physical and virtual interconnectedness of people), administrative systems (managing people, services, resources and budgets), space management (rules of allocation).

Recognise sense of uncertainty that projects can create

Honouring our professional sense of self will be important throughout project – the core and peripheral notions of ‘who I am’, the invalidation of which can cause anything from minor irritation to major distress. The project context includes all the ambiguities and dilemmas of life itself and what each person contributes is very much a matter of how they make sense of themselves and the situation. We may feel anxiety if unable to understand what is happening, or inadequacy if unable to make a difference to the situation, or guilt if our sense of self as a competent professional is threatened.