left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

A few weeks ago I read a LinkedIn post, by a former colleague and continuing friend, from the higher education governance consultancy they have set up.  The post was about how to develop your confidence and find your voice as a board member, and was full of good advice.

It closed with a question asking how the reader approached building confidence in the boardroom.  I didn’t respond, largely because I wasn’t sure what my answer would be.  But the question stayed with me, and now a little later I think I have an answer – just one a bit too long for a LinkedIn comment.

Hence this post.

the same, but different

That closing question particularly drew my attention, as in 2020 after nearly two decades working in universities I had joined my first (and so far only) board.

I always knew that aspects of this would be different and challenging compared to my professional experience to date. After all was one of the reasons for choosing to do this. I’d expected the challenge to come from working in a similar, linked area (further education rather than the university sector).  What I hadn’t thought would be a challenge was being a board member as such.

After all, I had more experience of committees than perhaps I should admit to in public.  First in supporting and managing committees, then as a member in my own right.

Nevertheless it took me time to find my feet (to the extent that I have) as a board member.

As well as being the shift of sector, the time this took was no doubt also down to the challenge of engaging with a new organisation for the first time.

Additionally, much of this reflected moving from engaging with committees and boards through leadership and management perspectives, to a role as a corporate governor.  The landscape of a committee/board meeting perhaps hadn’t changed too much, but the vantage point from which I was viewing it had. 

But whatever the reason, the fact was that I was much less confident as a board member in this new organisation than I had come to feel as a committee member at the universities where I had worked.

how do you eat an elephant?

Everyone’s path to developing their confidence as a board member is different.  And for any given individual there are multiple things that helped them do this.  For me, though, there was one thing that really helped.

A board member gets a lot of information; the infamous board pack that does a passable impersonation of door stop.  I was, of course, used to this; after all, I’d run institution-level education committees at three universities.

But as a new board member it was still a bit intimidating. New areas I knew nothing about, and even on those topics where I did know things I needed to look at them from a different perspective.  Being confident in how to engage with this, and how to engage in board meetings on this basis, was a challenge.

And a key thing in helping me do this was one question.  Or rather one key question, with two follow-ups.

one question at a time

Essentially whenever I was looking at a paper/issue, I approached it with one question always on my mind:

What is the question that this paper is seeking to answer?

 And then two questions followed, in my view, naturally from this:

Was the question being answered the right question?

How well does the paper answer the question it should be answering?

Having this question (and it’s two supportive friends) at the front of my mind on everything that came to board gave me a clear way into every paper, whether it was something I was familiar with or fully understood or not.

Of course the approach wasn’t entirely foolproof, but it worked far more often than it didn’t.  And because it did, it helped me build confidence that I had a solid basis on which to engage as a new board member, operating in familiar but different territory but in a role that was very definitely unfamiliar.

keep it simple

Essentially it was an heuristic; a ‘fast and frugal rule of thumb’, as Bent Flybvjerg puts it in a great article on the use of heuristics in project leadership.

In education, and higher education in particular, we tend to undervalue heuristics; their idea that ‘the cure to complexity is simplicity’ and that ‘more detail leads to less accuracy’ [p.616] feels too counter-intuitive.  But when faced with the uncertainty of new situations, including becoming a board member for the first time or joining a new board, good heuristics can be invaluable.

Of course this wasn’t the only thing that helped me develop some degree of confidence as a board member.  And these things are different for different for different people.

But for me, having that one question (what is the question that this paper is seeking to answer?) always on my mind was crucial to giving me a process, a method to engage with papers and issues and through that develop a greater degree of confidence as a board member.