The nature of intervention in institutions, and in the educational process, is complex, contested. At our May programme meeting, projects described organisational change as a swamp, in which multiple lifeforms are pursuing their own ends. Interventions create ripples but there are too many interacting forces to be certain what the outcomes will be. In the course of these discussions, several different approaches to change emerged.

• 'Ankle-biting', acting as an irritant to the received way of doing things, and/or speaking as the 'conscience' of a specific agenda, (e.g. student experience, innovation, employability) in times of change: 'We're ankle-biters, making sure EQAL remembers what it was for. [We are] able to run focus groups, stakeholder meetings. Our function is to be irritating to the process.' (SRC)

• Revealing and clarifying processes has a potentially transformational function. Bringing people together across boundaries to find shared meanings around both organisational and educational processes, setting up processes of open, collaborative and appreciative enquiry, these allow challenges and new goals to be defined.

• Project branding: that a project exists, has funding, has a profile outside the institution, and has an acronym, all enable it to act as a focus for activities which might otherwise be disparate and dissipated. Projects are identified with Change (change happens all the time, thru managerial or organic processes) so can act as a focus for discussion and a pool of ideas. People project their own aspirations or fears onto projects, which is both a risk to be managed and an opportunity to make waves. It polarises some people against it, while it attracts others to try and achieve their own agenda. Projects need to manage these projections as best they can.

• Evaluation and reflection are potentially game changing – having the space, funding, and expectation that something will be evaluated means it is done with greater awareness and more critically.

• Get things done that make things better. This is the low-hanging fruit approach – projects that successfully manage the implementation of something useful, however small, gain the right to manage bigger changes. CourseTools at the highly federated University of Cambridge has learned that baby steps are less threatening; Enable has discovered that showing a senior manager a prototype can create a 'eureka' moment that cannot be achieved by sitting in committees.

Engaging stakeholder with such ideas is very difficult as long as they remain just ideas, but demonstrators and prototypes which allow a hands on experience can be much more effective. This is where projects need ‘coding heroes’, able to throw together a prototype in a short time and with minimal investment. (CourseTools)

The challenge is how to put in place structures, systems and processes that make it possible for [creative, innovative] approaches to flourish and not be marginalised by the operational pressures that tend to... exclude innovation.(CoEducate)