It’s been a very busy fortnight. I’ve been immersed in a very deep research hangout. So what is a deep research hangout I hear you ask, and why was I in one?

Well, even though I am currently in Australia I am still working with a team in England on a big research project looking at the sustainability of school leadership. It’s a three year project which finishes at the end of this year. We decided early on that we would present at an international conference which was going to be in Melbourne in February 2025. We figured that this would bring us together in one space and give us time to do some analysis and thinking.

Yes, we need time. You see, even though we meet very regularly online we often get bogged down in pressing organisational matters. This is not surprising as it’s quite a complex project across three of the four UK nations involving secondary data, survey, “expert” interviews and qualitative case studies. While we have managed to write a couple of papers and plan a book and get the book contract, we knew that by 2025 we’d be at the point where we needed to do some concentrated work.

The conference provided an opportunity to present work in progress. It forced us to get three papers together which summarised where we were up to. While we were able to write the symposium and paper abstracts last year, some of the survey data analysis that we actually shared was only 24 hours or so old!

The conference was a good thing in itself. It went for five days. And we not only presented papers from our project and attended others but also met with colleagues who were doing related work. We often discussed these over an evening meal.

Then we did more. At the end of the conference we met for a day with an Australian team researching a related topic. Each team presented our work and we had a lengthy and unhurried discussion after each of the presentations. It was a luxury to spend most of a day discussing our projects; busy academics rarely have this kind of time. The discussions helped us to see possibilities for joint publication – a special issue of a journal – and the potential for some shared comparative work.

Our research hangout was however far from finished. We had planned to spend the next week at my home in South Australia. And we decided that, since it was a weekend, we could afford time for a research road trip.

It was unfortunately unseasonably rainy and cold weather in Victoria but the Great Ocean Road did not disappoint. We managed to see kangaroos and koalas in the wild as well as the dramatic and changing landscape. As importantly, the time together provided lots of opportunities for conversation. Much of this was work related. This meant that when we did get to our five days of thinking and planning we had already moved on from our conference presentations.

Our five day research retreat was highly productive. There is no doubt that we advanced our thinking further than we would have done if we were simply meeting for a few hours here and there. It was not simply the face to faceness of it all although clearly that mattered. It was not simply that we were able to cover a lot of ground, although that clearly was the case. And it was not simply that we all got to know each other a lot better, building better understandings of where we were all coming from –  although this was crucial.  It was also that we were in an ongoing and slow conversation.

Even when we had started and apparently finished a topic, it was not uncommon for us to continue a line of thought through the next topic in our agenda and alight on something new and important. It was not uncommon for any of us to come back to a topic with a new thought that had bubbled up overnight. Our conversation sparked ideas and realisations that were not always immediate, although sometimes there were real aha moments. Slow time meant were percolating ideas, not always consciously.

The concentrated focus we achieved was partly down to stopping other work. Although we did spend time each morning doing emails, we all put tasks on hold so that we could immerse ourselves in the thinking and talking. Hence why no blog post last week. I was otherwise preoccupied.

Clearing time and diary space was difficult, particularly for my full time colleagues, but even for me. But this space clearing was part of our commitment to advancing the research and it will, I suspect, be something we see as key to completing our project.

I have also concluded that the deep research hangout, as I am now calling it, is something that other research teams might also consider making part of their project planning. Slow space. Conversation. Percolating. Two weeks is a lot of time to find, but the benefits outweigh the costs.