Universities - The New Context

Universities in Canada today are booming as a result of the double cohort. But after the boom will come the bust. Here is how I see the future.

How will Universities Cope?

We live today in one of those periodic times, when shifts in beliefs and in communication technology drive a fundamental change in how power is defined and exercised. What are these trends and how do they manifest themselves in the lives of universities? How can universities, with their unique cultures and management processes, cope and even prosper in this type of environment?

What is going on? What are these trends and what do they mean for managing a University? In particular, what do they mean for the social and human aspects that HR will have to plan for?

A revolution in demography - By 2020, most people in the developed world will be over 50. This is a unique demographic event in the history of nature. This aging of society will affect all aspects of the social and work world. It will be especially challenging for organizations that rely on a stream of young customers or those who rely on the young to replace the old as participants. Universities are vulnerable in both ends of the age spectrum. Who will teach? Who will be the students? How will we attract and retain staff and students? Our previous assumptions about the answers to these questions will have to be revisited.

A revolution in values. There is a pronounced shift in organizational values in the developed world. The shift is from an acceptance in organizations of a top down and process driven approach toward a new set of values that built on self-expression and dialogue. This values' shift is proving a challenge to all organizations In particular, all "customer" interfaces in every field of service delivery are being challenged by this new values set. There is no reason why institutions of learning should be exempt from this shift. where the managerial culture is authoritarian. For academia, the shift is especially challenging as it demands also a shift in pedagogy from where the teacher and content is the centre piece to where the student and dialogue is the centre piece. What is meant by this shift? What is the right course to take? How will we get there? Our current approach to delivery and to teaching itself has to re-evaluated.

A revolution in technology - It is not an illusion, the pace of technological change is accelerating in a non-linear manner. The web revolution has however only just begun. The impact on society will be similar to the advent of the railway which radically changed how and where people lived and worked in the 19th century. We can expect no less of a revolution today. While the new design for society is not yet clear, the new design for service delivery is emerging with some clarity. New technology enables the customer to access the service provider on his terms and at times that suit the customer. The new manufacturing process, as developed by Dell, has turned the Ford model of make and sell on its head. The adversarial customer relationship of the transaction economy, is being replaced by a community and relationship based model as exemplified by eBay and Amazon. How will this affect education? Many say that education is different. This may be a dangerous assumption. These technological and cultural forces are located already on the edge of the Academic world and are becoming ubiquitous. They fit the new values and they fit the new service/cost criteria as we are seeing in the airline industry. They will bear down on how universities operate. What will happen to high cost, place and content based universities when an educational equivalent of Southwest Airlines or EBay emerges? Other organizations in other sectors that have not thought about this threat now face extinction.

A revolution in educational costs and service expectations - A generation ago, post secondary education was an elite process. Now it is expected to be accessible to most young people. This has lead to a massive expansion in the scale of universities and to a new and challenging relationship with government. Governments, in many parts of the developed world, see universities as engines of economic and social development. As Governments pay many of the bills, their social and economic expectations are becoming important parts of the university agenda. In response, Universities have had little choice but to adopt many of the features of the industrial workplace. Mass production of content and mass processing of students has enabled student participation to rise but at the cost of a significant increase in infrastructure costs and a corresponding reduction in organizational flexibility. Development and fund raising have become critical skills of the President. Coping with Unions and labour relations has become an important Presidential skill. As a result, the culture of business is seeping though the academic world. Paradoxically, as more students participate and as the direct and indirect costs of education rise for the student, the value of a BA is devalued in the work place. The average student can no longer afford a 4 year term at university away from home. Something in the cost mix will have to break. The current system cannot deliver the price and the quality that the student can afford and that the staff can tolerate. The result is a growing conflict between the internal stakeholders. All the stakeholders intuitively sense that something has to give but have circled their own wagons to defend themselves. How can Universities break the deadlock between their constituent parts? Is it likely that the conventional process of fighting this out at the bargaining table will work? What new process would give us the chance of reconciling the fears of the competing groups?

What operational issues will be exposed by these trends? - Bearing in mind, a very small pool and a huge demand, how will we attract and retain the key academic and specialist staff that we need? Rank this issue in importance? Is this a survival issue or just a tough one to deal with? What are the financial implications of getting this wrong? What are the reputational issues of getting this wrong?
How important will dealing with the subset issues such as pay and work place culture be to the attraction and retention issues? Is money the only issue? What can you afford bearing mind the pressure on the cost front?

Is transforming our costs merely about finding new cuts or will they come from a redesign of how we do things? How will conventional cuts affect the ability of the university to deliver? What will happen to morale and to students? What will increasing risk of more internal conflict mean?

Will finding more effective and ways of teaching more for less be about the application of new technology or is it about finding a way to change our mindsets about how to do this differently?

Is affecting change itself an issue of power or is it an issue of understanding how we change from a psycho-social perspective. How important is being able to change?

How important is it to reduce the centrifugal forces that are affecting our university? Can this be done as a matter of power or are there social and organizational design issues involved?

How can we reduce the inertial and complexity drag of our union environment? How important is this in a rapidly changing world? Can we use power to do this?

Our health and benefits costs are growing at a non linear rate. How substantive is the threat to our financial health? Is solving this issue a matter of power or design?

The reaction to these trends by the key players. Many universities have no process to engage the interests of the entire university but have highly developed processes to defend the interests of particular parts. The centrifugal forces are building. Like Canada itself, the position of the centre is under siege at a time when the strategic issues are so complex and challenging that they can neither be solved in the President's office nor by each faculty acting alone. Simplistic thinking tells us that we should centralize or that we should decentralize. Our national discourse is full of these ideas. Is there a better way?

What is at the heart of the challenge? The core issues are social and cultural. They are about core beliefs and identity. The risk is to assume that our current process of adjudication can solve tensions of this nature when the stakes are survival and the issues are shaped as paradoxes.

Imposing a the central will of the president will work no better for a university that for Canada. Nor will balkanization work. Our management process has been designed for a more simple time. We need a new way of solving complex problems.

What are the principles of a process that has a good chance of coping with these challenges?

Sharing the Burden - The core principle is to shift the burden of solving these many challenges and paradoxes from the office of the President on to the leaders of all the key stakeholders at a university. When all the stakeholders are at the table, and when they are collectively responsible, then there is a chance that as a group they may act responsibly.

Shifting the organizational metaphor from machine to network - So long as we use the machine as our organizational metaphor, we tend to seek autonomy as the solution. This sets up an irreconcilable tension between the centre and the parts. There is no way that the issues confronting universities today can be solved in an environment of power tension. It is no coincidence that our new organizational metaphor is the web - a network. Networks have at their centre not an office or a person but a set of protocols. There is no ebb and flow of power from the centre to the parts and no waste of energy in this type of fruitless conflict. If a university was configured as a network, the primary role of the governing body would be to set the principles or protocols that provide the value and the connecting rules of the network. Who would be the Governing body? The empowered representatives of the owners of the network.

Making the shift from Interest to Principle - In a diverse environment with many stakeholders, there is no way of reconciling competing interests. But it is possible to raise the strategic debate at the University level to that of principle. At the level of principle, agreement is possible in a diverse society that has many interests such as a modern university. Once there is agreement on principle, the needs of diversity can be met by a subsequent process of design. In networks, significant local diversity is possible once the protocols for membership have been defined. Visa International or Interac are good examples of a model in practice. What would a set of principles be that could support a shift to a network and solve the competing differences between the stakeholders? Would they be mainly technical or social and cultural?

Intellectual heavy lifting - access to the distributed intelligence of the university is required - The issues are so complex that no single person or perspective can solve them. It will be essential for the governing body for the university will have to tap into the broad intellectual capital of the organization. It is ironic that the concept of a learning organization has largely escaped the world of the university that has so much latent talent. In a world that is defined by barriers and silos, how do we create the essential horizontal linkages? What practice can we draw on to help us do this?

Facilitation is the lubricant of cultural change and of learning breakthroughs. - While some truly exceptional intellects do achieve breakthroughs on their own, most of us have had the benefit of mentors or supervisors - especially in the early stage of our intellectual career. In addition to our intellectual development, no one who has made a significant lifestyle change has made this on their own without the support of peers. No organization has transformed itself without the agency of facilitation.

What are the skills of facilitation? What best practice can we rely on to help us acquire these skills?

What do these principles imply? They imply conceiving the university as a network. It implies that having diverse parts is not only legitimate but desirable.