Narrative Goals

Last week I went to the first meeting of a project to look at producing a set of narrative goals about why diversity in our staff is good for us. I've been involved in the University Equality and Diversity Board for many years, and in a project to look at equality objectives for a couple of years. It's really important to understand that this isn't about box ticking, trying to achieve targets, or positive discrimination. It's about recognising that people are diverse, and that diverse teams have been shown to work better together, to solve problems quicker, and achieve higher outputs. It's a real tendency to appoint in our own image - we all like to think we're great at our job, and if only everyone else we're just like us.... Well actually, that's not true. We need different people, from different backgrounds in our teams. And instead of appointing the best person for the job we should often be looking for the best person for the team.

Our department is taking part in a pilot to produce a set of narrative goals (not targets!) to help us work out what sort of teams will help us be the CiCS of the future! What sort of skills and personalities do we need, what have we got, what are we lacking. How should we be recruiting etc. we're in the early stages at the moment, we've had one workshop with Simon Fanshawe and Roy Hutchins, which was a fairly intensive 3 hour sessions with just two of us from ViCS, but certainly made us think!

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