Leadership
As part of the preparation for TransforMATive LIVE: Sweden, our leadership exchange taking place in December, I recently had the opportunity to spend a few hours in Stockholm.
Sweden feels like a particularly relevant place for this conversation. It has a long history of digitalisation in education, strong digital infrastructure and skills, and a well-developed EdTech ecosystem. Around nine in ten secondary pupils have access to a school-provided digital device, while the European Commission continues to describe Sweden as having a strong digital ecosystem, high-quality connectivity and a highly digitally skilled population. Digital Strategy
For me, that makes Sweden interesting not simply because technology is present, but because it provides an opportunity to explore what happens after digital adoption. How do digitally mature organisations make better choices about what technology should enable, where it should sit and, increasingly, where it should not?
That question stayed with me as I experienced Stockholm.
From the Vasa Museum and Djurgården, across the waterfront and Skeppsholmen, through to the Royal Palace and the streets of Gamla Stan, what struck me was the contrast.
The Vasa itself provides an extraordinary leadership lesson. It was an ambitious seventeenth-century Swedish warship which sank in Stockholm harbour just minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628, before being recovered from the seabed 333 years later. Vasa Museum
For me, its story is a reminder that progress is not simply about ambition, resources or technical capability.
It is also about judgement.
Challenge.
And whether an organisation creates the conditions for good decisions to be made.
Elsewhere, Stockholm brings together history, culture, design and modern public life in a way that feels intentional and connected rather than hurried.
That feels increasingly relevant to leadership in the age of AI.
AI gives us the ability to move faster, process more information and automate increasing amounts of work.
But speed and productivity are not the same thing as progress.
If every efficiency simply creates capacity for another report, another task, another analysis or another decision, we risk replacing workload with work intensity.
For MAT leaders, that distinction matters.
The promise of digital transformation should not simply be that we can fit more into the working day.
It should be that we can make better decisions about what deserves our time in the first place.
That is why I increasingly think head space is becoming a strategic resource.
Leaders need space to think.
Space to challenge assumptions.
Space to make connections between things that might otherwise remain separate.
Space to listen to different perspectives.
And, occasionally, space to decide that something does not need to be done at all.
This thinking sits at the heart of the Connect theme for our Digital Leadership Summit and our wider TransforMATive community, including TransforMATive LIVE.
Connect is not simply about bringing people together.
It is about creating the conditions for reflection, challenge and shared understanding.
It is about stepping outside the rhythm of everyday operational leadership long enough to ask whether we are solving the right problems, whether technology is genuinely helping and whether activity remains connected to organisational purpose.
These moments deliberately introduce a little useful friction.
They allow us to listen.
To compare experiences.
To question what has become normal.
To understand how other organisations are approaching similar challenges.
And to consider where technology can genuinely add value, rather than simply add pace.
For me, that leaves three increasingly important questions for MAT leaders:
What can technology enable us to do?
But also:
What should we do differently because the technology now exists?
And perhaps most importantly:
What should remain fundamentally human?
As trusts mature digitally, those questions become more important, not less.
The greatest value technology creates may not always be additional capacity to do more.
Sometimes it is the space to think more clearly about what matters, what we can stop doing and what should come next.
Perhaps that is one of the most important forms of Connect of all.
Jonny Wathen
CEO, TransforMATive
TransforMATive Insights brings together learning from our work with multi-academy trusts, sector leaders and partners, informed by the latest research and emerging evidence, to explore the issues, opportunities and practical choices shaping digital leadership across education.
