left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

One of the easiest ways to gain popularity in a university is to declare a desire to reduce the number of committees and meetings.  Even more so now, as this can be offered up as a sacrifice to the call to increase efficiency in the face of the sector’s financial challenges.

That’s fine as far as it goes.  We’ve all sat in meetings, whether formal committees or less formal gatherings, where we’ve been tempted to calculate the cost of the time of all those assembled in order to contrast that with the meagre outcomes that emerge.

purpose

As is often the case (and I’ve argued elements of this before), much of this comes down to issues of purpose.  Too many meetings are unclear about, and/or misunderstand, their purpose, and as a result achieve less than they should – and what they do achieve, is done so less efficiently and effectively than it should be.

Often, though, there are also reasons for this other than lack of purpose, and one of them is often a blind spot resulting at least in part from one of the key, necessary elements of university cultures.

critical analysis

Criticality is central to who and what we are as universities.  A piece in the Times Higher Education earlier this year celebrated this quality of universities, but also warned of the downside for individuals of this focus on critical analysis:

we can learn it too well, and it becomes our dominant way of thinking. While it might be helpful in research, it’s not that useful when you start applying it more widely.

Hugh Kearns, Researchers are too critical – we need to give ourselves (and others) a break, Times Higher Education, 8 Dec. 2023 (£)

Kearns focused on the potential negative impacts of this on individuals, but I wonder if there are also broader implications for institutional behaviours and practice and how we run ourselves – including our decision-making processes.

complicated, complex and wicked

Many of the challenges that we encounter in running our universities, and consider in our decision-making processes (i.e. our meetings, our committees), are either complicated and/or complex.  We also have our share of wicked problems.  Addressing these require the application of relevant expertise and critical analysis, to generate the understanding needed for our decision-making bodies to make good decisions.

And our universities are full of people (in both academic departments, and professional services) with the expertise needed to engage deeply and critically with the issues these challenges raise, and bring the outputs of this engagement into our decision-making processes.

This work on the issue by the expert(s) should result in proposals being made to our decision-making processes that unlock the complexity of the issues being addressed. And while this might not make the decision required an easy one, the nature of the issues and the proposed solutions should be more easily understood.

But often that doesn’t happen.

There’s nothing wrong with the analysis and thinking that has gone into the proposals that have been brought forward. But the way in which these are communicated often make it so hard to see and understand the issues, the proposed solution and why this solution is the best way to address the issues

Rather than setting out the challenge and its issues, and how it is proposed to address these, presentations and papers get lost in the detail. Or assume levels of knowledge and understanding in those at the meeting/committee that are unrealistic.

So making the decision(s) becomes so much harder.

And when that happens we frequently end up criticising the process/structure (the committee/meeting), rather than the nature of the information presented as the basis for decision-making.

clarity

A key reason for this is that while complicated, complex and wicked issues need to be met with critical analysis and the application of expertise, once this has been done the issues and potential ways forward need to be presented with clarity. That too often that’s not the case, is frequently because clarity is mistaken as a synonym for simplicity.

The problem is complicated/complex/wicked.  And of course we all know that ‘for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong’.  So the proposals submitted to a committee to address such issues must inevitably be complicated/complex. And won’t be clear.

real clarity

That’s wrong-headed.  Clarity supports effective decision-making, and clarity and simplicity are different things.

For me this was well captured as part of a tribute to Professor Anthony King, written shortly before King’s death.  King was one of, if not the, outstanding political scientists of his generation, and in describing King’s teaching one of his long-standing colleagues wrote:

In your lectures, your arguments were so compelling, and so compellingly presented, that some of the more stupid attendees would sometimes observe ‘but this is all so obvious’. What they failed to understand is that arriving at an ‘obvious’ conclusion that is difficult to challenge is the hallmark of the great mind. The conclusion is only ‘obvious’ precisely because it has been so brilliantly thought-through and presented.

David Sanders, ‘You have been an inspiration to me’: a letter to Anthony King, Times Higher Education, 14 Jan. 2017 (£)

Clarity is fundamentally different from simplicity.

Simplicity is the product of lack of proper engagement with, and/or understanding of, the issues in play.

Clarity is rooted in a deep engagement with, and thinking about, these issues leading to genuine understanding. And it is that understanding that allows the expert to provide the clarity that unlocks complexity for others and supports good decision making.

why don’t we try … not to make it so hard for ourselves

Too often our decision-making processes appear inefficient or ineffective because expertise has been applied to consider and address the issues, but much less (and sometimes little) thought has been given to communicating the views of the experts with clarity, as the issues are thought to be too complicated/complex/wicked to be susceptible to clarity.

But clarity is essential so that all involved in making and implementing a decision, not just for the relevant experts, have the understanding necessary to make an informed and good decision.

Of course this is only one of the ways in which we make it so hard for ourselves in the way that we operate our decision-making processes, in committees and other meetings.  But it’s one that I’ve seen across multiple universities, and I suspect addressing this would have a bigger impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of committees and meetings than it’s tempting to think.