Managing complex change collaboratively

The Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the UK Leadership Foundation supports UK higher education institutions to achieve complex cultural change through its annual Change Academy (CA) programme. This chapter describes the creation of a new collaborative network of academic libraries in the north of England following an intensive cross-institutional planning initiative and presence at the HEA Change Academy Conference and subsequent work in 2010-11 that launched the COLLABORATE! Project and the Northern Collaboration. The process enabled the vision of key individuals to be converted into a tangible entity. The interplay between creative thinking, conceptual activity, teamwork and action is thought to be a constructive way to bring about ideas for achieving complex change. I describe the thinking behind the approach, and how this was achieved at a time of volatility (and opportunity) in higher education.