GCSI and RADMIN — In Your Livelihood
By Joanne McNeill, Deputy Director GCSI
The Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation (GCSI) team has been working through a wind-up process for the Centre since April this year, with the closure date being 1 November 2024. We’ve written a few things about this previously, for example this blog — the short version is that our five year ‘exploration’ agreement with Griffith Business School has come to an end, so we’ve been busily composting and chrysalising different aspects of our work over the past six months.
One of those aspects is the cohort of Industry Adjuncts we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with over the past few years. Each Adjunct has a different focus, and so how we’re winding up our formal arrangements with them is different in each case.
Kate Rich is one of the wonderful Adjuncts we’ve been in conversation with over the past year or so. Kate is an artist, trader and feral economist with 30+ years lived experience in and outside formal institutions. Her work specialises in opening up room to move in spaces that often seem stuck. Kate shares our fascination with the ‘boring bits’ and together we’ve been exploring day-to-day administration as a place where real change might be leveraged. Some of the initiatives Kate is central to include The Feral MBA, Feral Trade, and RADMIN — In Your Livelihood on which she collaborates with Chiz Williams.
The RADMIN course is an individual activity, which I participated in in January-February this year (2024) and found the process generated useful and interesting insights, through creating space for reflexive activities that helped me connect threads that were floating loosely through my thinking and practices. I also came out of it with a curiosity as to whether the process could perhaps be used with teams — to foster reflective learning, generate new and interesting approaches, and maybe help with ‘untangling’ the inevitable knots that arise from time to time when working closely with others.
When thinking with Kate about how we might constructively wind-up our formal Adjunct relationship, we hit upon doing an experiment with the GCSI team to explore whether and how the program could potentially be adapted to team contexts. I’m grateful to our ever-curious and generous team members for agreeing to be involved! Six of us (about half our team) worked with Kate and Chiz over the course of about a month to trial the approach they designed.
The timing — during August this year when our wind-up timeline was becoming very real — turned out to be fertile ground for the process. In different ways, we each found it cathartic — giving us space to discuss and reflect on how we were navigating the significant changes we’re facing individually and together. Collectively acknowledging and exploring a sense of sadness about not continuing to work together helped us also recognise the inevitability of impermanence and to move into looking forward to the opportunities new beginnings can bring.
We’re all really grateful for what came out of it for us and continue to draw on thinking we did through the RADMIN process. My hope is that there will be opportunities for Kate and Chiz to bring their approach to other teams — to explore, learn and create together. For those navigating turbulent times and/or wrestling with knotty issues, the method has potential to be particularly generative 😊