The Problem with Bubbles When I worked at CSU, educational designers were school and faculty based but centrally managed. They were embedded in their own areas, responding to the specific needs of the academics they worked with. It didn't take long after I joined to realise that every single one of them had developed a completely different set of skills and approaches. On one level that was interesting. On the other hand, it meant the work had become deeply atomised. Everyone operated in their own bubble. There was collegiality and a genuine desire to do better, but the structure of the team didn't allow for it. Starting from Scratch When I joined the University of Adelaide, I had the opportunity to build something from the ground up. One of the things I was most focused on was developing a genuine team approach to delivering learning design — not a group of individuals working in parallel, but a team that actually functioned as one. The team I built included media developers, learning designers, and project officers. That diversity of skills created an environment where a lot of organic work developed naturally. Things got done faster because you weren't waiting for approvals or scheduling meetings to have conversations — you could stick your head over a desk and ask. As we grew from two to six learning designers, I got to hire each person joining the team. What I was looking for wasn't just competence — I already had two accomplished learning designers as a foundation, so I could afford to take some calculated risks. What I was really looking for was diversity: different backgrounds, different strengths, different ways of seeing problems. That turned out to be the best decision I made. Having a diverse set of skills and perspectives ensured we had the breadth of skill and experience to deal with every situation and context. What was required was the creation of the right structures and processes for collaboration – common points of contact and shared ways of working that adapt to different contexts rather than imposing uniformity. We had to create spaces that surface the knowledge and perspective each individual brings. How the Work Actually Happened Each learning designer held the lead role on specific courses, enough work to keep them fully occupied. What made the difference initially was ensuring that each team member could discuss their course and their challenges. Our meetings became spaces for conversation among team members throughout the process. Rather than meeting to discuss progress, we outsourced that to Jira; we discussed our work - shared the challenges and opportunities, asked for feedback, and sense-checked decisions. We also developed shared artifacts that made collaboration concrete. Course maps became a common language — skeletal diagrams of an entire course that could be passed between designers, reviewed, and built on. Feedback loops became a normal part of the process because it created a point for collaboration rather than a formal checkpoint. We also adopted an agile philosophy, which brought with it sprints, Jira, and the associated language. Of everything that came with agile, the single most valuable thing was the retrospective. Having a built-in ceremony where the team could review decisions, name what wasn't working, and actually change things, shaped the way we operated more than almost anything else. Consent-Based Decision Making Early on, I was fixated on consensus and getting everyone to agree before moving forward. The intention was good: I wanted the team involved in decisions so they understood the reasoning and were genuinely on board. The problem was that getting consensus was slow, and my own indecisiveness didn't help. I didn't want to be authoritarian, but consensus wasn't working either. The answer came through stumbling across consent-based decision-making. We didn't adopt the formal process wholesale, but the core idea changed how we operated: propose a solution, get permission to proceed, then build in a review. The retrospective became the natural home for that review — a ceremony that made the whole loop work. This became the space in which we made progress - adapting documentation and processes, tweaking styles and adding layout option, adopting best practices across the team. What It Produced The big one was two fully online programs. But it also included processes that held up through a pandemic, staffing challenges, and the friction that comes with any team of people from genuinely different disciplines. A group that knew how to co-labour – not just cooperate, but actually work together on the hard problems. Diversity, it turns out, isn't a nice-to-have for a team. It's the mechanism by which the team actually works. At the end of last year I said farewell to my old team as we prepared for the final stage of "the merge". When I look back, it is with a sense of pride rather than sadness. The gut-feeling I had around collaboration was right. What I didn't realise was that you can't just plonk a group of diverse individuals together and expect collaboration. You have to create the environment and structure to do it. It requires action, purpose, and support to work. There is a level of infrastructure required for collaboration to occur - spaces to discuss, trust to create, debates to have, disagreements and conflicts, but also resolutions and peace. Collaboration isn't something that just happens; you have to nurture and care for it. It takes time and effort and patience, but when it all clicks – it is magic! That is the thing I miss – the magic! Knowing I had a team of the very best people to work with, and that by working together we could do anything and solve any problem. And that feeling - that's the solution for how you want to work and what you want your job to feel like.