Sheerwater rediscovered follow ups

A photo about our event in October 29 2025 reported in the Woking News and Mail 

After our successful event in 2025 "Sheerwater rediscovered!" (also reported in this blog), in 2026 I have been following up with several activities which I would like to share and reflect on.  

Here is a summary to date: 

• In November 7^th, 2025, and thanks to the support of the Mascot Hub and St Michael’s church, I was radio interviewed in the BBC Surrey Breakfast by Mr James Cannon (at 7:21am). I offered a quick summary of the project leading to the event, and highlighted the key project finding that “The Sheerwater community is still alive, we just need to know where to look for it.” 

 

• Also in November 18^th,  Mr Paul Salt visited Royal Holloway, University of London (my workplace) to talk about the “Sheerwater group” to the business school’s M.Sc. students.   This Facebook© group of around 2.3k members currently acts as a main forum for discussion and news about the Sheerwater community issues. Paul engaged very well with our students, and they enjoyed his company.  He made us all aware of the importance of having clear boundaries in both the design and use of social media and technology in general. Thank you Paul, it was a pleasure having you on campus! 

 

Sheerwater resident Paul Salt talking to Royal Holloway M.Sc. students (AI in Business and Business Analytics 2025-2026, November 18^th, 2025)

 

• In January 14^th 2026 I was invited to talk to teachers about the history of Sheerwater at the Broadmere Primary Academy in Sheerwater. The feedback received was very positive. One of them suggested to have the same talk at the David Bishop Brown secondary school next door. This is something to be considered for further funding and dissemination.  Many thanks to Tracey Francis (St Michael's Church in Sheerwater) and Karen Barham (Headteacher at Broadmere) for making this talk possible. 

 Presenting a history of Sheerwater at Broadmere Primary Academy

• On the 23rd of April 2026 and thanks to the invitation of Trevor Wenden, Sheerwater Football Club secretary and a long standing member of this club, I attended a Sheerwater residents meeting which included residents and local councillors.  During the meeting, I ventured to speak out to present our research project and one of its posters (history of Sheerwater).  Having listened to several problematic issues raised by residents during the meeting, I suggested that our project gave us the key suggestion to work together to face these and other issues as it was done in the past. I also offered an idea: to join forces with the Sheerwater Football club to help clean the rubbish that is still lying around from the buildings that have been vacated for more than a year now.  Am happy to report that the community engagement team of Woking Borough Council had a similar idea, and in May 22 2026 they organised a community litter picking event. Whether they took my suggestion or not, that will be up to the jury (of the meeting) to decide.  

• Throughout the football season of 2025-2026, I have become an almost staunch supporter of the Sheerwater Football club.  It is a great community of fans and volunteers which has given me a place to learn more about Sheerwater, take my children to live football on Saturdays and meet lovely people. We are to volunteer for the children's tournament on the 13th of June and are looking forward to see the mini-sheers in action.  

As I finish writing his post, and finally have managed to join the facebook Sheerwater group,  I can still say that the Sheerwater community is much alive, and that now I am more familiar with the places and events where this happens. I hope to help them continue rediscovering their communities and regaining a sense of hope for the future.   We all need it!

New course on creativity and problem solving

2025-2026: New wine in old bottles for creativity and problem solving (MN2515)?

No. 

Through our revamping of business education, we (me and colleagues) have kept the same course code.  

But this is a new version of our undergraduate management course on creativity and problem solving at Royal Holloway.

Under the new business and management portfolio, it has been a a very positive relief to be able to include systems thinking ideas more openly and extensively in this course.  And many students seem to have liked it.

As the course leader, this year I faced now a different problem: Which systems ideas or methods to include alongside their counterparts in creativity? Since 2015 (year of inception of this course), I have been combining creativity with other areas of knowledge.  In 2017, I integrated ideas from process management, which also included the study of six sigma and lean approaches to improvement, and how the later (lean) has been used with a systems thinking lens.  

This year, an answer to the above question has emerged gradually.    

I decided to start by raising the importance of thinking in terms of systems, something that could help us as individuals or organisations deal with VUCA situations. 

VUCA, a military term to account for situations exhibiting volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. In the systems thinking world we name those "messes".  Such situations do not have a clear cut formulation or solution.  Moreover, they change as we try to solve their problems, because there are interconnected elements.  It is better to see them as systems which have environments.  Any change on the system or environment will affect both.  

In the course, I asked my students to choose situations of their own, and start treating them like messes.  They would then express them with the help of systemic perspectives (Jackson, 2024), a kind of metaphor or lens that highlights certain aspects of the situation whilst obscuring others.  

Students would then select and assemble three (3) relevant issues from their expressing of the situation as a system. They would formulate three (3) solutions to tackle those issues. 

We spent some time talking and practising complexity as a specific lens to identify patterns in VUCA situations.  We used Kumu software to model situations.  This is a great tool, easy to use (and free) that allows us to model systems as sets of elements and connections (using flows and stocks for example).  We can also document and label all these elements.  As seen below, we practised modelling systems with the theme of sleep (self-care).  Together with students, we identified some possibilities to improve our own self-care, creatively.   

For the second part of the course, students were asked to refine one of the chosen solutions using the six thinking hats creativity technique of Edward de Bono.  After, they were to present their solution to relevant audiences, and receive feedback.  

With the hats techniques, many students were able to add features to their solutions, and consider if it was the 'right' solution.  When presenting it, they received very useful feedback (some students used the hats to get the feedback).  They also ventured to model what had happened when presenting their solutions.  I suggested they could use another software tool for this modelling: Canva-AI.  

During workshops, I noticed that the use of this tool took students sometime.  Not only to learn about it, but to get the outputs they needed.  So for their second assessment, I made explicit where it could be used.  I also made it explicit which content needed to be generated in Kumu.  My aim was to encourage students to appropriately learn both tools.  

The final part of the assessment was to design a system with the feedback obtained.  Students could choose to design, using Kumu, a system archetype (similar to the one presented above, to identify and address patterns of behaviour); a human activity system or HAS (a purposeful system that could be discussed to identify possible accommodations between parties); or a systems boundary, which could be drawn by referring to Werner Ulrich's critical systems heuristics (CSH) or Gerald Midgley's boundary critique.  

I was very and positively impressed with many students' work.  They took it very seriously and engaged with situations varying from our university library services or accommodation to restaurants, pubs and commuting.  In their engagements, they also used the models or presentations they had produced for their course, and this helped them communicate with people who had similar or different views to them.  

Moreover, when asked to reflect on their attempts to be positively creative, many students acknowledged the value of their ideas when presenting them to others.  They also valued the resources they used (i.e. networks of friends) and overall, the possibility of using their knowledge to benefit others meaningfully, so that they could help (at least on paper) solve messy situations.  

Throughout the course, there as a perennial issue of students attendance to face to face sessions, and this seems to have affected their engagement and performance.  This is something of a systemic issue, as it is experienced not only in my course but in others.  Many students do part-time work nowadays.  Others carefully decide, on financial grounds, which sessions need to be attended and which do not.  And others are still finding the meaning of what it means to be at university.  

When I look back at this course in the previous years, I can see many differences, not only in the content or the groups of students that have taken it, but also in myself.  I am more confident to put systems thinking ideas (including my own) about, to use them to educate my students, and to support their interests to apply knowledge beyond the classroom, if that is what they want to do.  

What about the future?  Well, who knows.  My only idea to face the future with this course is to try to stay open to emerging opportunities and challenges.  And to support students who want to broaden their boundaries of thinking and action with this course. 

Circular Economy and Digitalisation Creativities

April 2026. We have finished, colleagues and I, delivering an undergraduate management course titled "Digitalisation and Circular Economy". It was a very interesting course (I think), where we created a synergy between two paradigms:  Digital Transformation (DT), and Circular Economy (CE).  

The DT paradigm has been for longer.  It proposes a radical rethinking of organisational or business practices which, according to many, can be simplified or accelerated, if not obliterated, with digital technologies.  

The CE paradigm, most prominent in Europe than other regions in the world, points to a similar direction of simplification by creating or closing loops in practices so that their resource use can be recycled, reduced or prevented.  

A champion of this paradigm in the is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.  

I was fortunate to work with colleagues that introduced me to this foundation many years ago (thank you Rokiah from LEAP Micro AD) and other colleagues at Royal Holloway which know more about digitalisation and DT.  I provided my knowledge and expertise in CE which I have developed in projects like "Somebody's food" (mentioned already in this blog).  And I also used my work experience and ideas on systemic innovation provided by my former PhD supervisor Gerald Midgley.  

We were also fortunate to involve our campus senior gardener Daniel Steel who kindly walked us through different sites.  He talked about how him and his team are working to restore native species.  This to him is an essential form of CE.  

Visiting the green composting facility. 

If we consider our campus as a system, we can then think of how this system can keep a better balance between its different elements.  Native species seem to have been overtaken by foreign ones.  Us humans seem not to take notice of what goes on.  In our daily lives, we consciously or unconsciously marginalise certain elements of this system. 

Having another look at species that live next to our Moore Annex Building. 

What can we do about this?  In our course, we asked students to use their creativity to identify issues of concern on campus and beyond, issues that have been also flagged up by proposers of the CE paradigm when they talk about reduce, reuse and regenerate.  

With those issues, students were to develop digital prototypes of a solution, which they then refined by reflecting on why it could fail or non fail, if we refine the solution with emerging digital technologies like data analysis, internet of things (IoT), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and so on.  

With the above, we hoped students could then better understand the possibilities and challenges involved when we think of rethinking (radically) how we are to operate as CE-driven individuals and organisations.   In particular, if as individuals or future managers we consider the potential inclusion (or marginalisation) of valuable species or resources (i.e. food and its waste; clothing garments; vehicles, etc) in what we do. 

I was impressed with the quality of students work, in particular with their reflective accounts of why/how could their solutions (not) work.  I also perceived that they value the idea of digital product passports to help organisations trace products and alert consumers to events, for example when a product needs or can be reused or recycled.  Perhaps they value this idea too much, which in terms of creativity narrows the spectrum of possibilities.  

The futures of this course and creativity look bright.  The rise of AI offers possibilities that could be realised by adopting a responsible attitude to its adoption. CE needs to continue if we are to make positive impacts in our planet.  I hope students become better at seeing situations from different perspectives, considering tradeoffs of implementation.  

Presenting a poster about our course at the Royal Holloway Education Conference in April 2026. 

I also hope to continue helping myself and them to manage the changes that emerge when we decide (or are decided) to innovate.