left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Last week Diana Beech published a really interesting blog for HEPI on the sudden focus on the term ‘tertiary’ in policy discussion and thinking.

The post recognised the importance of thinking about the way that further and higher education could and should link up more effectively, to support the development of knowledge and skills that support both individuals and address the country’s skill needs.  But it also pointed out the danger that this might lead to overlooking and neglecting the contribution of university’s contribution to research and innovation.

A really important point, and I tweeted (it still sounds so much better than ‘I X-ed’) about the danger that when an idea starts to gain currency with policy makers it can end up as being seen as the silver bullet with the result that importance of complexity and nuance is overlooked.  It set me thinking a little bit more about that, and I ended up landing on the issue of decision-making in universities.

effective decision-making

A couple of years ago I was one of three speakers asked to talk at a QAA event focusing on Effective Decision Making.  The other speakers talked about data, and cognitive neuroscience (i.e. biases, nudge etc.), in relation to decision-making.  Very valid, also very on trend.  I went a slightly different route.

It was just as we were emerging from the pandemic. There had been a lot of talk around the sector about the way universities had responded at pace to the challenges of Covid-19, and how this showed decisions could be taken, and change could be done, quickly. The implication was that it showed the way ahead for decision-making at universities. And in some ways it did. But I had problems with two aspects of this.

what matters in decision-making?

One was that decisions had been made quickly and change had happened at a gobsmacking pace. The unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic meant that many things could not be done in the way they had before, and this did lead to innovation and an openness to change driven by necessity.

But this came at a cost. The demands that made on students and staff weren’t sustainable. Indeed the consequences of these demands are still impacting today on many of those working and studying in higher education. So this approach to decision-making was to a significant extent underpinned by an unsustainable approach to implementation. And decisions that can’t be or aren’t implemented aren’t really decisions.

My second problem was perhaps less obvious, but just as important.  What concerned me was that all the emphasis coming out of the pandemic was on the speed of decision-making.  Speed was a virtue in its own right, and little if anything was said about the importance of effective and good quality decision-making.

This was what I talked about at the event.  That the quality of decision-making was as and probably more important as its speed.

I wasn’t saying that speedy decision-making wasn’t valuable, and in many instances essential.  I also wasn’t counselling that all decision-making needed to be based on comprehensive and complete information, implicitly dictating slow decision-making.

Rather I was saying we needed to focus on the quality of decision-making. Leaders and managers needed to use their practical judgment in the specific context of each decision they made, to balance the sometimes competing demands of speed and quality.

My concern was that we were slipping into consensus about speed being the key factor (and sometimes it felt that some were implying it was the only key factor) in making a decision, a silver bullet for the challenges universities faced.

decision-making by committee?

There’s another idea about decision-making in universities that has been, continues to be, persistent since I started working in higher education. That committees are the anathema of effective decision-making. And I’m just not convinced. I think that the fault is not in committees but in ourselves.

As with most (and perhaps all) things, the key is purpose.  The purpose of a committee is as a decision-making body.  Its form, its culture and its operation all need to be fitted to that purpose, and in universities too often this isn’t the case.

How often when we sit on our committees do we have that clarity about what its purpose is? And how often when we’re in those meetings are we just enacting either a routine that we have settled into, or an inherited script about what the meeting does and how it does it with little sense of why it does it?

Over the last 20 years I’ve worked with more committee chairs than I can remember or count. I’ve worked with many good chairs, and while they have all been hugely different in personality and approach the common quality all of them have had has been real clarity about what the committee they chair is there to do: to consider the business before them and make decisions. And this has driven how their committees have operated. In their own, very different ways, they made that central to the culture of their committee.

But often we muddy that clarity by trying to use committees in ways that aren’t aligned to their true purpose as decision-making bodies.  We try to use committees to build networks, share information, generate new ideas, share good practice, act as discussion fora etc.  And most of the time committees are bad at this, or at the least are less good than approaches that are fitted to those purposes.

use the tool appropriate to the job

I remember being involved in a project to implement a new institution wide IT package.  It was approved and set up as a project.  We did what you do you when you set up a project, and established a Steering Group to oversee it.  After all, every project needs effective governance.

And it sort of worked. The project progressed, but the Steering Group added little value. So we thought again about the Group. We were trying to get it to do things that a committee wasn’t well suited to – think and talk about project planning, generate ideas and so on. And this was mixed in with the formal governance and decision-making the Group needed to do. Essentially the committee wasn’t working as well as we wanted it to, because of the decisions we had made about what it did and how it did it.

So we moved to a different approach. Where we needed to make decisions and do formal governance (which was much less frequently than we thought) we met as a committee. Other times (and from memory more frequently), when we needed to do other things that were as important but different in nature to formal governance, we got the same group of people to meet in different formats (workshops, World Cafés etc.) that we matched to what we were trying to achieve in those sessions. And with purpose and approach aligned, we achieved far more of what we needed to do.

purpose

Of course I’m not saying that a committee is the right approach for every decision-making situation.  Often a committee is absolutely the wrong forum for, or approach to, decision-making.  And I’m sure there are a lot of us in the sector (me included) who feel that in the past there has been too much of a tendency to default to decision-making by committee. But where we do use committees, we need to ensure that their culture and approach is true to their purpose – to be decision-making bodies and to make decisions. When our committees don’t work, and we come out of them depressed and frustrated, it’s often because we’re trying to do things that aren’t true to what is (or should be) their purpose: decision-making.