Universities are complex organisations, where teams and individuals often struggle with entrenched hierarchies and limited space for innovation. Building a culture where anyone can show leadership, and all voices are heard, demands new tools and methods.
Edinburgh Innovations, working with the University of Glasgow and the University of St Andrews, developed and tested a practical model for embedding facilitation and collective leadership skills across three institutions. The project trained 95 participants across two programmes and built a 76-member cross-institutional community of practice. Download the guide below, or get in touch with Claire Pembleton to bring this training, or facilitation support, to your team.
Collective leadership practices offer readily adoptable tools and processes: tried and tested ways to engage people with the questions and challenges they face. Applying these methods requires skill and confidence to design and facilitate spaces that are appropriate, effective and safe. Despite the value they offer, these methods remain little known and rarely applied in the university sector.
Why embed facilitation?
Facilitation equips academic, technical and professional services staff to lead purposeful conversations and navigate complex situations. In HR, it builds a culture of engagement and reduces siloed working. In technology transfer, it strengthens industry engagement and supports strategic objectives. In academic leadership, it builds leadership capacity and improves cross-disciplinary working.
The full guide covers what collective leadership and facilitation mean for higher education, how the project got started, three worked case studies, and a set of practical questions to clarify the purpose of any facilitation project.
The approach
What people say
The activities were genuinely well thought out, they got people talking openly and honestly, and helped us move from vague ideas into something concrete."
— Megan Cleary, Sustainability Innovation and Reporting Analyst and EDI Chair, Edinburgh Innovations.
“The experience was so engaging and enjoyable...I gained a range of practical tools from each workshop and was able to reflect on past experiences or sessions with a fresh perspective. This shift in viewpoint immediately began to influence how I approach future situations, activities, and facilitation practice.”
— Workshop participant
“The preparation and learning from the workshops greatly increased my confidence and made it much easier to design a purposeful and engaging networking session. Learning how to plan with a clear structure...was a truly eye-opening lesson.”
— Tabea Gerlach, Scottish Research Technicians' Professional (SRTP) Academy Coordinator.
Bring this expertise to your team
Claire Pembleton, Business Development Executive at Edinburgh Innovations, led the design and delivery of this project and holds a bank of facilitation training materials, session plans and a network of trained facilitators, available to support your team or institution.
Claire and the Edinburgh Innovations facilitation team can help with:
Get in touch with Claire Pembleton to discuss training or facilitation support.
This How To Guide was produced as part of an InFrame Culture Catalyst Fund project.
InFrame was funded by the Wellcome Trust Institutional Funding for Research Culture [grant number 228092/Z/23/Z], which is led by the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.
InFrame Project 2026 by InFrame is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
