Category: Leadership

Tom Waits from a long time ago. His voice doesn’t sound like a thousand cigarettes in a meat-grinder yet. It’s that kind of evening.

Tom Waits. Back when his voice was beautiful.

I’m thinking about organizational development tonight. I’m thinking about how to best intentionally build leaders in our organization. You see, our team is down a few key positions right now. We’re missing half our leadership staff, a management position, and a couple staff. For various reasons, we can’t just hire our way out of this right now. We’re going to have to deal with being short staffed for a bit.

You know what? I couldn’t be happier. Don’t get me wrong, we desperately need these positions. But this challenge has brought a certain clarity–a level of precision to our vision–that I haven’t experienced before. Our people are doing more each day, with greater quality, than I’ve ever seen. One thing that’s clear to me is that we need more leaders–and our people are, indeed, leading. So now, I owe it to them to put infrastructure behind their efforts. To help build the systems to connect their work to the praxis of the university. 

The old Tom Waits album is pretty good. It’s okay, really…sort of an edgy Frank Sinatra thing. But it isn’t Tom Waits yet. Tom Waits wasn’t that special back when he had a voice. He didn’t become his bad self until his voice went.

Thank you, Mr. Waits. This is much better.

Getting ready to make a few promises you won’t keep? The new year must be coming! Ever wish it would be different?

Thanks to Seth Godin for inspiration to keep those promises to yourself:

 

 

Amongst all the vision-y people-centered genius things leaders are supposed to do–I’ve come to believe that simply responding to everyone, quickly, all the time might make all the difference.

There’s a higher ed IT CIO I really admire. I’ve never seen anybody more responsive. It’s almost embarrassing to correspond with her because she makes quick, concise, quality responses seem effortless.

O my lord! I’m so stressed! My email is killing me!

…says everyone else (who are not inspiring confidence in those they lead).

See, it isn’t just about responding. It’s about responding with quality and coolness. This is especially important with a stress-out IT staff. You’ve gotta keep your cool, even if you’re freaking out inside.

Even though this CIO does a lot of other things well, I suspect this single skill might be enough in itself to keep her afloat  if necessary.

My personal responsiveness resolutions:

Respond to everything same day

Respond as definitively as possible

Don’t respond with some stupid question just to look like I’m responding. I’m going to do my best to resolve the communication string in as few steps as possible. Also, responses like “got your message, I’ll get back to you later” only force you to keep track of issues and write more email.

Respond honestly and decisively

When I put off responding to something, it’s probably because  either I’m not sure how to handle it, or I don’t really have time for it. So I tell myself, I’ll just let that marinate for a while. I’ll have time to really figure it out later. Right? Wrong. I never have time later. I just get more busy. Future me has way less time then present me. If I’m not going to be able to do something, or act on an idea from our staff, I’m just gonna tell them.

 

Ever feel like your strategic planning cycle is more of a strategic planning cyclone? 

Maybe every three or five years, it blows into town, knocking out your projects, relationships, and everything else your organization is working on. It’s the maelstrom that wipes out creativity and agility.

Sure, it can be changed. But it’s the 3 – 5 year promise you made to your institution. Too much change can make the leader look or feel like a false prophet. LIke she or he made a silly plan in the first place.

Fixed 3 – 5 year planning cycles also fix monolithic and artificial goals, and imply that you can be “done”. You might say things like, “we’re working year three of the plan, almost done!” Riiiiight.

Great new idea at an EDUCAUSE annual conference session yesterday from Theresa Rowe, CIO at Oakland University (@oucio).

Forget cycles. Theresa Rowe suggests an ongoing strategic plan. She uses a 3 year plan, but is always in “year 1” of the plan. That’s because her team rolls another year onto plan every year, perpetually extending and updating the three year picture.

What do I love about this?

It makes the plan nimble in an intentional way.

You don’t look foolish when the plan changes; change was the plan all along.

The plan connects to the institution continuously, rather than just every few years.

In explaining this, Theresa Rowe pointed out that you still have a plan with commitments. And you need to keep those commitments.

 

 

 

Sir Ken Robinson, that is. The Obi-Wan of education reform.

He was funny, insightful, and on-point. A few quick take-aways:

Imagination: Bringing to mind things that can’t be perceived by the senses.

Creativity: A process, not an event; the process of having original ideas that have value.

Innovation: Putting these creative ideas into practice

Sir Ken believes we are undergoing a significant revolution, noting that the worlds population is exploding in the developing world—we expect to add another billion homo sapiens by century’s end—but this isn’t true in North America and Europe where populations are relatively stagnant.

Apparently, women must average 2 offspring each just to maintain population levels. Sir Ken quipped that “in fifty years, we might well run out of French people.”

And the bad news? Studies show the Earth can only support about 1.4 billion people if everyone consumed at North American levels. We can stretch it up to 15 billion if everyone consumes at Rwandan levels. All this started in the last 300 years because of technology.

The point, said he: the projections he mentioned assume that we continue with our same modes and means of production. The revolution enabled by educational technology is just getting warmed up as the world starts to massively change.

And I think it’s urgent – Ken Robinson

If you haven’t seen Sir Ken’s famous 2006 Ted Talk–give it a watch: 

 

Much of the Educause Leadership Institute talk today was devoted to change. The institute faculty referenced three kinds of change: developmental, transitional, and transformational. I think these are roughly the same as Holman’s three types of change that I’ve discussed before: steady state, incremental, and emergence. I’m thinking the three types of change tall, grande, and vente (hey, I’m from Seattle!). Clearly, we are focused on the third category–the most disruptive. Why else would we have flown all the way to Chicago in the middle of summer?

During the learning technologies discussion, the faculty gave us a fascinating scenario (I’ll paraphrase):

It’s the year 2018 and you are the CIO. You’ve been CIO for five years. Now, after five years in office, your university has been written up in the mainstream press for being one of the most innovative universities using technology in teaching, learning, and research. As CIO, what was your role in bringing this about? What are two specific contributions you made? Was this the change tall, grande, or vente? I think everyone in IT should do this exercise periodically.

Two perspectives on technology and disruption

A couple of great articles. I recommend reading both, back-to-back.

“How Disruptive is Information Technology Really?” by Judith A. Ramaley from the Educause Review.

“The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education” [PDF] by Henry J. Eyring and Clayton M. Christensen, from the American Council on Education.

I’d love to hear what others get out of these two very good articles. I challenge you to think about the three types of change framework as you read both. I interpret Ramaley as arguing that, while significant, the digital age brings transitional (incremental, grande) level change. She writes, “The new technologies give us much more to work with and a better way to explore topics in depth, but we still need to do so in the company of others.” Ramaley certainly points to the serious changes demanded by new technology capabilities. She fully recognizes that instant access to the world’s knowledge, online connectivity, and other marvels will force universities to evolve. But I get the sense that her position predicts more gradual, evolutionary change.

In Holman’s model, I think she used the example of change to a national government. In that example, passing a new law is steady state change. Amending the constitution is incremental. Chucking the constitution to go with a wholly different political system all at once is emergence. Holman sets a pretty high bar for what it means to claim the grand prize at the change-a-thon. It doesn’t mean maybe sorta kinda over time and nobody’s feelings get hurt.

So, I see the sense of Ramaley’s case. Yeah, tech matters. It’ll really alter the constitution of higher ed. Over time, it might not look anything like it used to. But we won’t be tearing down colleges, ending promotion and tenure, or getting rid of credit-hours any time soon.

Eyring and Christensen are a bit harder to pin down, but I think they are arguing that we are facing emergent, transformational forces. They go further, using the whole DNA concept as a metaphor. That is to say, the current species of Academia was shaped by a set of very specific adaptations suited to a particular environment. And that environment just went bye-bye.

As with a species, they are doubtful that most of Academia can adapt quickly enough to survive, and that new species will take over. Like when the asteroid/climate change/alien attack or whatever changed the planet so that the dinosaurs couldn’t survive, the mammals took over. A few dinos managed to turn into birds and gators, but their time was over. By the way, the article doesn’t talk about evolution the whole time, that’s just me. Eyring and Christensen spend most of their time talking about the history of Harvard to show the specific conditions to which higher ed adapted and why. This helps us see that practices such as tenure, majors, athletics, and credit hours aren’t immutable laws of physics–but rather artifacts of specific environmental pressures.

Is change just happening to us? Or are we changing stuff?

Coming back to our conference–and the question our table faced about what sort of change we’d bring as CIOs in 2018–we quickly realized that it’s not a prediction, like wondering if it’ll rain tomorrow. We aren’t asking, huh, what’ll this change do to us?

It’s a decision. A bunch of decisions, made by a bunch of people. Like us, our students, voters, faculty, etc. How much change are we willing to bring about? What’ll we put on the line as leaders to make sure our we’re really giving students and our communities the best possible expression of our values?

[Quick personal soapbox: notice I said “our values” and not “market values”. I don’t think the mission of education is workforce training. Jobs are boring. I don’t want a job, I want a passion that somebody is silly enough to pay me for. I think education is about building civil society, giving everyone a chance to achieve their dreams, equalizing opportunity, and ultimately, giving back. If Google gets better hires along the way, bully for them. Google, by the way, also has a mission statement that says nothing about making money or selling ads. So there.]

Because of all this, I had an insight about myself. Back at the ranch, I’m in charge of brining IT Service Management (ITIL v3) to our IT department. Our project has finished the research and is getting ready to broadly engage our IT group about what ITSM means for them. I asked our Leadership team a question last week. I asked something like: “When I start rolling out ITSM, how crazy should I get? On the richter scale, do you want a 2, or a 7?” I felt really inarticulate and I don’t think I made myself understood. Now, I realize what I was really asking. ITSM is one of the many practices that can totally re-make everything about IT, or can just be used to tweak a few things. I was really asking them what type of change they could handle: tall, grande, or vente?

I wish I’d put all this together in my head a week ago!

(On Engaging Emergence, 2nd Posting)

Higher education’s basic principles are eroding. Just check the Chronicle of Higher Education’s map of major players and connections in the MOOC space (thanks @BryanAlexander). This is already an old debate, but the map of MOOC players is a profound indicator of just how deeply and quickly this new educational industry has taken root.

Private corporations are making big bets that they can make money here, and the intellectuals could cede control to profiteers if they aren’t careful.

Not of course, that private educational firms are greedy–but faculty and other academic leaders don’t want to loose a seat at the head table. That’s the danger when institutions reject MOOCs wholesale.

Again, these service providers aren’t all bad actors and there are plenty of non-profit and open-everything advocates involved.

I mentioned the three types of change  in systems from Holman’s book in a previous post. traditional higher education institutions are facing emergence. Heck, we all are. It’s called the internet, and we are still figuring out what the internet does.

When it comes to education, the big gorillas are getting into the action. MIT, Standford, the long line of institutions signing up for Coursera.

But what about the smaller colleges? The public regional liberal arts colleges and universities? These institutions are bedrocks of community and social justice around the nation. These places are special–they tend to focus more on the student experience than on faculty research. Often lacking large endowments, they are the most vulnerable to state budget cuts.

The big institutions can diversify their way out of trouble. They can launch a MOOC solution, quality online and hybrid programs, world-class mobile solutions for web and devices, implement in-depth (and expensive) analytics systems. They can do all of these things and still maintain traditional high-quality brick-and-mortar college experiences.

But what’s a small college to do? With limited resources and influence? They can’t hedge their bets by doing it all, like the big universities. They might have to pick something. Everyone is starting to think about betting on new models for credit hours, promotion and tenure, graduation requirements, and so on. But the smaller schools might have to bet on one particular model to emerge as a player in the new higher ed market.

But small colleges might feel they are risking it all on adopting something untried. Colleges are steeped in tradition and averse to risk. Decision-making processes in academia move slowly, if at all. Shifting resources into new and untried territory in an effort to compete in a new arena is incredibly risky. Holman gives and example about the journalism industry–and I think it applies to higher education:

Yet their need for assurance is understandable, given the number of lives affected by their decisions. A publishing executive said to me, “We have plenty of ideas. There simply aren’t the resources to pursue them all. We know we need to act. How do we choose among the options?” (Holman, 2010).

I don’t think traditional higher ed needs convincing. I think we need strong collaboration from the business, legal, and technological sides of our colleges.