I ended the week at the graduation ceremony for our partner, the Centre for Health Communication Research, on Friday evening as their Cohort 10 students collected their Postgraduate certificates. Cohort 10. Ten cohorts of people who have finished something they started, often around lives that were already full. This is celebration in its purest form. All the planning, hard work, and effort finally shows up as people in their best clothes, with the biggest grins, collecting their certificates and cheering each other on. I find a graduation a strange and lovely thing to see. Whatever else I do in this role, days like that are the reason.
So what ties a pitch, a community award, a training session, and a graduation together? For me it is two things. Everything I do in external collaborations comes back to innovation, but not innovation as novelty for its own sake. Innovative thinking, yes. Innovation in what we build and how we build it. But mostly I mean innovation in how we nurture the people around us, our students, learners, partners, and community to think more boldly themselves. My job is not to be the clever one but to make space for clever, brave, useful ideas to occur.
The second thing is celebration. So many of the moments this week were, in one way or another, occasions to stop and mark something good. We are not always good at that. We finish one thing and move straight to the next, and the achievement slips past unremarked. This week made me want to do the opposite. To notice the effort and to say it out loud. That is what made the week special. Not that it was busy, because it so often is. But that so much of it was worth celebrating, and this time I let myself celebrate it.
A busy week, then. But a good one, and one I am glad I stopped to enjoy.
