For academic teams
Real demand. Without the grind.
A workshop series that teaches your academics to protect the work that matters and meet a demanding sector without grinding themselves down. A change in method, not another wellbeing day.
For academic teams
A workshop series that teaches your academics to protect the work that matters and meet a demanding sector without grinding themselves down. A change in method, not another wellbeing day.
"You can't make ten by hand. You can build a studio."
The program
A sculptor makes one extraordinary piece, and is commissioned to make ten more, as recognition for how good it is. Try to make all ten by hand, the same way, and the work suffers and the maker breaks. The way through is not to work harder. It is to change how the work is made.
That is exactly where good academics find themselves. The sector asks more of them precisely because they are good, and under that pressure talented people quietly start working like a factory: doing more and more themselves, by hand, until their own research is pushed to never and the marking owns the evenings. The autonomy of a studio was theirs the whole time; they just lost sight of it. The Flourishing Academic teaches your people to build that studio practice in the autonomy they already have. It runs on one idea, the studio mindset, expressed as three moves they learn to make their own.
Build reusable systems, templates, and structures so that whatever repeats is never made from scratch twice. Teaching prep, marking, feedback, the same email written a hundred times. This is where time comes back.
Give capable people, and digital tools, the work that does not require you. This is where capacity comes back, and where the digital-hands toolkit, AI and productivity workflows used with integrity, does real lifting.
Spend your irreplaceable expertise, your research and your deep work, only where nothing else will do. Held together, the three become a studio practice that meets a demanding sector and makes the work, and the person, better over time.
The shape of it
An arc across a term, not a one-off. Every participant takes the Studio Self-Audit first, so each person gets a private read of where their time is going and the room sees an anonymous cohort picture. The Studio Mindset keynote opens the program, your team's chosen deep-dives sit in the middle, drawn from a menu of six (research, teaching, admin, service, supervision, collegiality), and the Sustainable Term capstone closes it, with every participant leaving on a personal Studio Practice Plan.
The cohort mirror does the quiet work. When the whole room sees, anonymously, that everyone is hand-making the same things, the message lands as "we can change how we work," not "you are not coping." It reads as the team investing in its people, because it is.
Three ways in: a single Studio Mindset Day, the full program across a term, or an embedded program that re-audits and proves the shift. Make an enquiry and we'll shape it to your team.
Tell me about your team and what's prompting it, and we'll work out the right shape.
Make an enquiry
Tell me a little about your team and what you're weighing up. I'll reply personally, usually within a day or two, and we'll work out together whether there's a fit.
Thank you.
Your enquiry is with Brad. You'll hear back personally, usually within a day or two.
Only Human
A short piece of thinking, every so often. Written for leaders who are curious about the humans they lead, including themselves.