Introduction to Change Theory

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REFRAMING CHANGE

if, as we’ve seen, the organizational structure and culture of higher education means that colleges and universities are not well served by the change management strategies developed for corporate and military environments, what works better? Everyone knows there are plenty of changes already occurring throughout higher education today: global- ization, the flipped classroom, increased competition, rapidly diminished resources, continually changing technology, and all the other factors that can be placed in the category I’ll call received change. To these we can add all the changes we’d like to see in our programs: more creative teaching and active learning, higher levels of student success, more inno- vative research, progress in efficiency and effectiveness, higher levels of satisfaction, and all the other goals that we might call intentional change.

Different Ways of Viewing Change

With so much change going on all around us, how can academic leaders approach their challenges and opportunities in ways that will most ben- efit the programs they supervise? Let’s begin to answer this question by understanding that there are several different ways to look at change and that the perspective we take profoundly affects the way we lead others through a change process.

The Common View of Change

If you were to go up to people on the street and ask them to define the word change, most of them would probably say it’s about “making some- thing different from what it was.” In other words, it was A before; it’s B now. A has “changed into” B. This common view of change is what frequently makes people uncomfortable with the prospect of change: it suggests that you’re always losing something. To use the Kübler-Ross

29 Buller, Jeffrey L.. Change Leadership in Higher Education : A Practical Guide to Academic Transformation, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1873101. Created from capella on 2019-04-19 09:46:24.

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model, it’s like the old state we were in has died. “But what if I really liked A or at least liked key elements of A?” people might ask. “How do I know I’ll like B better? And if A no longer exists and we realize that the change was a mistake, will it be possible to go back? Will we be giving up more than we will gain? Maybe the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t?” We might call this common view of change the replace- ment view of change. At colleges and universities, due to the IKEA effect (see chapter 1), this reaction tends to become even more pronounced than it would be in other situations—for example: “This idea of changing to B makes me uncomfortable. Doing things differently always means a lot more work and the loss of things that I’m perfectly happy with right now. Besides, I was one of the people who developed A. We put a great deal of thought into it and did a good job. Why would we discard all that just to try something unproven? Don’t you think we knew what we were doing when we developed A in the first place?”

People don’t really fear change. They fear loss.

A fundamental problem with many change processes in higher educa- tion is that they let the replacement view of change frame the discourse. When a single, very common model is introduced during a discussion and no one challenges it, it starts to seem like a fact after a while, not a metaphor or merely one possible paradigm among many others we could adopt. As we’ll see, however, there are many other ways of thinking about change than regarding it as replacement for or loss of what we have right now. In addition, the replacement view of change frequently merges with a phenomenon known as the sunk cost fallacy—the mistaken belief that past expenditure of either money or labor (what is known as the retro- spective or sunk cost) has a bearing on the value of something in the present. We engage in the sunk cost fallacy when we refuse to sell a stock because its price has declined far lower than what we paid for it (even if we have good reasons to believe that its price will continue to decline), won’t walk away from a slot machine because we want to win back all the money we’ve “invested” in it, stick with a research project that’s clearly taking us down a blind alley because we’ve already spent so much time on it—or change a curriculum, procedure, or organizational structure at our school because we put so much effort into developing it in the first place. The real question must always be, “Of what value is A to us now, and what value is it likely to have in the future?” not, “How strongly

Buller, Jeffrey L.. Change Leadership in Higher Education : A Practical Guide to Academic Transformation, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1873101. Created from capella on 2019-04-19 09:46:24.

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should we be committed to A based on how much we’ve invested in it in the past?” The replacement view of change fears “losing” A because we’ve paid so dearly for it. Challenging the replacement view of change and sunk cost fallacy

head-on can be emotionally satisfying at times, but that direct approach rarely changes anyone’s mind. It’s a natural human tendency to dig in your heels when someone openly questions your reasoning process, and that tendency is all the more common at academic institutions where we pride ourselves on our analytical abilities and have a hard time imagining ourselves committing a fallacy. The more effective way of introducing an understanding of these concepts into a change process is through a suggestion such as, “We’ve been looking at this issue only in terms of what we’d be giving up. Let’s also look at it in terms of what we stand to gain,” or, “I think there’s another way for us to approach this question. So far, we’ve been talking about replacing A with B. Perhaps it’s more useful to look at what we’re doing a little differently”—and then describe one of the other change models that we’ll examine in this chapter. In fact, since the word change itself is likely to be seen by many people as a synonym for the replacement view of change, the best thing may be to avoid the word entirely and adopt one of the other ways of describing the proposed initiatives that I outlined in Positive Academic Leadership (Buller, 2013, 78):

❍ An opportunity to build on our solid foundations

❍ A chance to take full advantage of our past successes

❍ A natural development from the solid foundations this program has laid

❍ The next logical step in our ongoing progress

❍ An occasion to grow that’s been made possible by our program’s established strengths

❍ Carrying the plans we’ve made together to the next stage

The basic idea here is to reframe the discussion not as replacing A with B, but continuing A to its next, most appropriate stage of evolution: A’. In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (2010), Chip and Dan Heath call this approach “shrinking the change.” Rather than frightening people with how revolutionary and innovative the new approach will be, the goal becomes to calm people by reassuring them how minor and painless the process will be.

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The Classical View of Change

The observation that there are serious flaws in the belief that change involves completely replacing one thing with another is hardly new. As early as the mid-fourth century BCE, Aristotle argued in the Physics that what we’ve called the replacement view of change was unsatisfactory. One way of understanding Aristotle’s objection is to consider what that model is really saying: “It was A before. It’s B now.” But if that’s the case, what is “It”? In other words, the replacement view of change suggests that A utterly ceases to exist when B comes into existence. But that’s not really change; it’s substitution. In order to declare that an actual change has occurred, something has to remain that is still somehow recognizable as A. To account for this “continuation despite modification,” Aristotle posits that everything in the physical world has two distinct components: matter (the stuff that remains) and form (the shape that changes). We can think of the classical view of change in terms of a potter who’s creating a vase. She first makes a pitcher, then finds that result unsatisfactory and, before placing the soft clay into the kiln, reshapes it into a bowl. Believ- ing that she already has too many bowls, she changes her mind again and flattens the clay into a plate. Throughout this entire process, the matter (the clay) has remained the same; its chemical composition hasn’t been altered in the slightest. But its form (the shape the clay assumes) has been modified. That, Aristotle says, is what all change is about: giving matter a different form from the one it possessed previously. To revert to our earlier terminology, he saw change as far more similar to A → A’ than to A→ B. In this system of annotation, A represents the matter; the presence or absence of the apostrophe (’) represents the modification in form.

“The art of progress is to preserve change amid order and preserve order amid change.”—Alfred North Whitehead (Whitehead, Griffin, and Sherburne, 1929/1978, 339).

The point of introducing Aristotle’s theory of change here isn’t simply to indicate that there’s more than one way to understand what change is (although that’s certainly a valuable by-product), but rather to see how we need to reframe the discussion when we start seeing stakeholders inter- preting change in higher education as loss rather than gain. In the change processes that occur in higher education, we do have something that per- sists along the lines of Aristotle’s concept of matter: our core values. What the classical view of change reminds us is that it’s important to prevent discussions of desirable change from being hijacked by the assumption

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that change is identical to replacement and loss. Rather, we can reframe the discussion so as to make the following equation clearer:

Change = Replacement + resilience

In this equation, I’m using the term resilience as it’s been defined by Andrew Zolli, the executive director of the global community of inno- vators known as Pop! Tech: “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramati- cally changed circumstances” (Zolli and Healy, 2012, 7). In other words, our core purpose (our mission) and our integrity (the values and guiding principles that we hold dear) are the basis of who we are. They’re the institutional equivalent of Aristotle’s matter: the factors that persist even as change goes on all around them.What changes, we might say, is merely external form: procedures, terminology, and the means to achieve specific ends, not the ends themselves. The classical view of change holds that the true essence of something

remains unaffected by what we might call “the next logical step in our ongoing progress.” We can imagine an academic leader dispelling the fear of those who feel threatened by the change by saying:

Who we are isn’t going to change, but how we operate is going to have to change in light of how higher education is evolving. We may need to do things a little differently, but our values will remain intact. They’re what defines who we are and where we want to go in the future. New practices and new technologies may make our outward appearance look a bit different. But those practices and technologies will merely help us better embody our unchanging values and more effectively reach our long-standing goals.

The View of Continual Change

As ancient as Aristotle’s classical view of change was, it was by no means the first view of change proposed by Western philosophers, and it is not the only model that can help us better understand faculty resistance to change. More than a century before Aristotle, another Greek philoso- pher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, was fascinated by the idea that even things that seem most permanent to us eventually change. In Plato’s Cratylus (402 a 8), Heraclitus’s views are summarized with the words panta chorei (everything changes), often misquoted as panta rhei (everything flows). Heraclitus’s basic idea was that the only constant in existence is change and that everything around us is changing all the time (figure 2.1). In this way, he paralleled a view that was being developed by the early Buddhists

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Figure 2.1 The View of Continual Change

Change

Change Change

Change

in India at roughly the same time. Even mountains are gradually worn away, coastlines shift, and rivers change their course. Since change is nec- essarily continual, there’s no reason to fear it. It’s a natural phenomenon that we can embrace, and sometimes take advantage of, not an intrusion into a normally static universe. Of course, many observers other than Heraclitus have noticed the uni-

versality of change. The impermanence of all things is a fundamental concept inmost schools of Zen and provides an important theme to works as diverse as Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. Permanence is an illusion, these authors tell us, and those who seek to build structures designed to last forever, no matter whether they’re Valhalla, statues of Ozymandias, or curricular plans, are doomed to failure:

Change is not an event, with a beginning, middle, and comfortable end point. Rather it is an ongoing, organic process in which one change triggers another, often in unexpected places, and through which an interrelationship of the component parts leads to an unending cycle of reassessment and renewal. (Eckel, Hill, Green, and Mallon, 1999, 2)

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As Paul Gaston, Trustees Professor and former provost at Kent State University, has often observed, revising a university’s general education program isn’t like building a pyramid—something stable and monumental that’s intended to last forever; it’s more like building a better felucca, the swift-moving boats commonly seen on the Nile. In fact, what you really want is something that, like a felucca, can respond almost instantaneously to changes in the environment even as they occur. (See, e.g., www.laregentsarchive.com/Academic/Agendas/2003/06/8.pdf; P. Gaston, personal communication, June 12, 2013.) In terms of sheer expediency, the more flexible one’s mind-set is, the more palatable the entire idea of change tends to be:

There is less pressure to build a curriculum if the task is seen as one of building for a period of time, rather than “for all time.” It is enough to create a sound program that continues to grow and evolve. (Gaston and Gaff, 2009, 21)

Since everyone knows that there will inevitably be changes in demo- graphics, technology, social values and priorities, opportunities for fund- ing, and institutional leadership, it’s foolish to assume that the decisions we make today won’t be reevaluated tomorrow. Failure to build bridges or tall buildings that can flex when necessary is often a recipe for disas- ter. The same principle applies to the innovations we pursue as academic leaders: unless our plans can adapt to changing conditions, they’ll end up being torn apart as the inevitable pressure against them builds. Another common metaphor used to describe the continual view of

change is that of a journey or voyage of discovery. As is frequently the case in travel narratives, the destination of a trip can be far less important than the adventures occurring along the way. The journey thus becomes a microcosm of life itself. If you don’t pay attention to each experience as it unfolds, you’ll have nothing but regrets at the end. In certain situ- ations, that’s not a bad way to look at many processes at colleges and universities. We’re never completely finished revising curricula, introduc- ing new forms of pedagogy, exploring different approaches in research, structuring committees, and responding to the need for change. A strate- gic planning process can be less threatening if an institution regards itself as in a constant process of planning and improvement. It’s not that the university is exchanging something new and unfamiliar for something old and cherished (the replacement view of change) or even that it’s modifying something old and cherished so that it takes on awholly different form (the classical view of change). Rather, what’s occurring is that the university is constantly in a state of evolution and growth. Everything is just a draft; nothing should ever be regarded as the final, published version.

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The Intentional View of Change

I can imagine some people arguing, “That’s all fine in theory, but a journey without a destination isn’t really a journey. It’s just meandering. And a change process with no particular goal in mind doesn’t reflect sound strategic planning. It’s simply an abdication of leadership.” In other words, the metaphor of the institution’s journey can itself assume several forms. If the type of journey we’ve already considered might be called change as journey or voyage of discovery, an alternative way to view it is to see it in terms of change as pilgrimage. Although in a pilgrimage, it may be true that the experiences along the way are at least as valuable as the destination itself, the focus of the traveler is always on that destination: it provides the underlying reason for the journey, and people set out on the road with the understanding that something important will occur when the pilgrimage site is finally reached. The intentional view of change lies behind Alice’s often cited (and just as often misquoted) exchange with the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where—” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.” (Carroll, 1994, 64–65)

Simply having a destination in mind doesn’t mean that you’ll always remain at that destination once you get there. In fact, the end of each journey may simply be the start of another, with each destination merely serving as a waypoint along the road (figure 2.2). But the journey is still always a matter of getting somewhere, as Alice said, rather than wander- ing blindly: those on this path are pilgrims, after all, not vagrants. Ken Blanchard, the author of The One Minute Manager (Blanchard

and Johnson, 1982) and Who Killed Change? (Blanchard, 2009) frequently notes that we should think of change as a journey, not a destination, and that we should thus devote more of our energy to “managing the journey than announcing the destination” (Blanchard and Ridge, 2009, 15). That’s a good lesson to keep in mind as we work to bring about meaningful change in higher education. Too often we miscommunicate with our stakeholders about why they should support

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Figure 2.2 The Intentional View of Change

DESTINATION

an idea or proposal. After all, from our perspective as academic leaders, change journeys can seem pretty exciting at times. They’re the way we move forward, make new discoveries, and measure our progress. But from the perspective of our often-unwilling fellow travelers, the journey isn’t so much a matter of reaching new destinations as of leaving familiar places behind. They may have a sense that “we keep reaching our goal, but we never really arrive. There’s barely time to reap the fruits of the old strategic plan before we head off in another direction established by a new strategic plan.” So what seems to us like a fascinating adventure strikes them as involving a lot of packing up, saying good-bye to valued friends, and beginning yet another forced march toward an indistinct horizon. That’s why, when we try to win faculty members and donors over with the argument that the journey ahead will be exciting, our message so often falls on deaf ears. We’d be far better off to take people’s fears about leaving the comforts of “home” seriously and speak about the continuity of our path, not merely the new direction we’re going to be heading in.

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The Visionary View of Change

The last view of change we’ll explore in this chapter is quite different from the first four. Rather than suggesting that change is something a person passively endures or occasionally co-opts, it describes change as a process that people should seek out, embrace, and cultivate. In the words of the computer scientist Alan Kay, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” (www.ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm). As we’ll see in chapter 4, this approach requires making a transition from change management to change leadership. But in light of what we’ve already discovered about the distinctive organizational structure of colleges and universities, that leadership has to be demonstrated in a way that’s appropriate to the culture. Even if you do everything that Ken Blanchard suggests—continually manage the change after you’ve announced the destination—you’ll still encounter significant resistance from many of your stakeholders. Faculty members hate being managed; it makes them feel that they are problems that need to be solved rather than as valued partners in our journey. And that reaction is perfectly justified. In a system of shared governance, the role of the faculty isn’t that of employees who merely carry out the orders they receive from “management.” College professors are highly trained professionals whose insights and expertise are needed in order for any meaningful change to occur. Even the word leadership troubles them at times. No one is fond of being treated as a sheep that needs to be led. But at least we can describe this process in terms of more enlightened models of leadership—such as servant leadership, lateral leadership, centrifugal leadership, and positive leadership (see Buller, 2013)—that better reflect the relationship between faculty and administration than the corporate or military forms of leadership that immediately spring to mind. Our mental image of the person who invents the future and guides

the process of change in higher education shouldn’t be a Thomas Edison, laboring alone in his lab and finding those proverbial “10,000 ways that won’t work.” That’s a nineteenth- or twentieth-century image of what inventors do. Today’s visionary leaders are more like Steve Jobs who might have followed the words of the old Apple commercial, “Think Different,” but who also worked as part of a creative team. In much the same way that Jobs worked with Steve Wozniak and a few others to develop the Apple 1, each member of the team needs all the others. Each person brings different talents, resources, and experiences to the project to create the synergy that produces something “insanely great,”

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in Jobs’s famous phrase. Without the technician, the product wouldn’t be user friendly. Without the visionary, it wouldn’t be groundbreaking. Without the entrepreneur, it would never reach the market. It’s that type of teamwork that’s required for innovative change to occur in higher edu- cation. Faculty, administration, staff, students, donors—in fact, all of an institution’s constituencies—have to be part of a group effort working collaboratively to make a positive difference.

Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frame Model

If leading effective change in higher education means that we must reex- amine the very way we look at both change and organizational culture in higher education, it’s also incumbent on us to reexamine what it is we do as academic leaders. Perhaps the most familiar way of describ- ing this process of reexamination is Lee Bolman and Terry Deal’s notion that we can think of organizations as having four complementary frames (table 2.1):

1. The structural frame, which includes institutional policies and proce- dures, the organizational chart, and the strategic plan

2. The human resources frame, which includes agendas (both open and hidden), individual motivations, and fundamental human needs

3. The political frame, which includes alliances, coalitions, and conflicts

4. The symbolic frame, which includes organizational culture and tradi- tions, institutional memory, and “the way we do things around here” (Bolman and Deal, 2013)

In higher education, change processes can run aground in any of these four frames. For example, a proposed change might not follow logically from the strategic plan (structural frame), conflict with the priorities of key constituents (human resources frame), require the ongoing cooper- ation of two habitually hostile groups (political frame), or require the demolition of a building long seen by alumni as the heart of the institution (symbolic frame). One effective way of exploring how best to implement a proposed

change is to examine it through each of Bolman and Deal’s four frames in terms of where potential resistance is most likely to occur. For example, change processes that range anywhere from slight program modifications to complete realignments of institutional mission, can avoid many of what Paul Gaston and Jerry Gaff have dubbed the “potholes” of

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Table 2.1. Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frame Model

Frame

Structural Human Political Symbolic Resources

Metaphor for organization

Factory or machine

Family Jungle Carnival, temple, theater

Central concepts

Rules, roles, goals, policies, technology, environment

Needs, skills, relationships

Power, conflict, competition, organi- zational politics

Culture, meaning, metaphor, ritual, ceremony, stories, heroes

Image of leadership

Social architecture

Empowerment Advocacy Inspiration

Basic leadership challenge

Attune structure to task, technology, environment

Align organizational and human needs

Develop agenda and power base

Create faith, beauty, meaning

Source: Adapted from Bolman and Deal (1998, 15).

academic change (Gaston and Gaff, 2009) by asking such questions as the following:

STRUCTURAL FRAME

1. Do we have the resources to carry this initiative through to its full implementation?

2. Does the initiative follow logically from who we are right now and who we want to become?

3. Which existing groups, such as councils and committees, will be inte- gral to the success of this initiative?

4. What groups may need to be created in order for this initiative to be a success?

5. Is this initiative something that we can accomplish by means of exist- ing structures and procedures, or would it require a radically new operating procedure?

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HUMAN RESOURCES FRAME

1. Have we paid adequate attention to the responsibility assignment matrix (often known as RAMor RACI)? In other words, have we thor- oughly considered who among the various stakeholder groups falls into each of the following categories?

• Responsible: Those whose active involvement is necessary for the initiative’s success

• Accountable: Those who are involved in a decision-making or supervisory capacity

• Consulted: Those whose opinions matter as the initiative proceeds • Informed: Those who must be kept in the loop as the process con-

tinues

2. What is the likely reaction to this initiative going to be from each stakeholder group?

3. How can the need for this change be phrased in such a way that each stakeholder group understands its benefit to them?

4. Have we laid the appropriate groundwork so that stakeholders’ response to this initiative will be based on its merits and not on the quality of our relationship with them?

5. Which of our stakeholders might have motives that could complicate or derail this process?

POLITICAL FRAME

1. Whose support for this initiative can we count on because they trust us or are early adopters in most change processes?

2. Whose resistance to this initiative should we expect because they don’t trust us or tend to oppose change for its own sake?

3. Whose toes might be stepped on by this change if we don’t bring them onboard?

4. Who are the opinion leaders on campus or in the community whose importance goes far beyond their titles and positions?

5. Who are the people who are likely to feel that they own what we’re changing?

SYMBOLIC FRAME

1. How might the proposed change be perceived by some as a loss or departure from values and ideas that are essential to what we stand for?

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2. How will the institution emerge from this process recognizably better off but also still true to its core values and beliefs?

3. What are the key events and ceremonies that can be used to get the word out about the importance of this initiative?

4. Howmight the change message be interpreted differently based on the spokesperson chosen to deliver that message?

5. What metaphor shall we use to describe the type of change we have in mind? A rebirth? A reboot? A natural growth process? A leap into the future? A metamorphosis?

While all four frames are important in order to understand any organi- zational culture, the symbolic frame is particularly important at colleges and universities during a time of profound change:

Academic administrators who bring the imagination to envision new possibilities and the skills to convey a compelling picture of the future enable others to feel positive and hopeful about their work, their institution, and its leadership. Certain roles, like president, chancellor, dean, and director, are by their nature heavily and visibly symbolic. The dean represents the school, the president the college, the director his or her program or center, and so on. Occupants of such roles preside over more ceremonies and get more opportunities to take center stage and to play the role of public leader with gravitas and flair than those who lead informally or without executive titles. (Bolman and Gallos, 2011, 111)

One of the factors that dooms many academic change processes is that administrators forget this lesson. They spend so much time trying to get the vision and the decisions right that they overlook getting the symbols and motivation right. (Recall Krüger’s iceberg from chapter 1.) But sym- bols and traditions are the very things that give people a sense of engaging in a cause that’s part of a higher purpose. If you make a good decision but trample on something that people regard as sacred or that helps them feel their contributions are important, you’re likely to end up creating a far greater problem than the one you just “solved.” As an antidote to this problem, the questions I associated with Bolman

and Deal’s four frames help academic leaders understand how a change process feels different to different stakeholders at the university.Moreover, it reminds us that in higher education, we can’t define stakeholders only in terms of their position on the organization chart. InTheDepartmentChair

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Primer,DonChu (2012)distinguishesbetweenaclosed-systemperspective and an open-system perspective. In a closed system, we limit our view to stakeholders who are clearly inside that system. For example, if we speak to members of a typical academic department and ask them to identify their primary stakeholders, we’re likely to receive an answer similar to the following.

Constituents (Whose needs do we serve?): Students

Engine (Who does the work?): Faculty

Leadership (Who guides the work?): The department chair

But this approach overlooks the very people—like alumni, parents of current students, and donors—who are likely to feel blindsided by a change because we didn’t inform them about it before implementing it. A better approach is to view the system in which we work as a flexible and frequently shifting set of stakeholders, an open system that includes constituents both inside and outside the institution (figure 2.3). After all, if you inadvertently overlook someone who should have appeared on your RACI matrix, you’ll delay and possibly destroy any chance for success you may have had.

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats

Bolman and Deal’s four-frame model is currently the system most academic leaders use to incorporate multiple perspectives into any decision, but it’s not the only model of its kind. For example, six years before the first edition of Reframing Organizations appeared, Edward de Bono, the polymath who also coined the term lateral thinking (which we’ll discuss in chapter 6), proposed that people use what he called six thinking hats in order to adopt different perspectives toward various problems and challenges (see table 2.2). Perhaps the best way of seeing how de Bono’s six thinking hats can work to expand Bolman and Deal’s four-frame model is to consider what both might tell us about an actual process of academic change. Let’s imagine that we’re dealing with the following situation: a new

president at a university proposes moving the institution away from its traditional emphasis on teaching toward a new focus on externally funded research. Here’s what might result from using Bolman and Deal’s four frames combined with de Bono’s six thinking hats:

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Figure 2.3 An Open Academic System

Unit Head

Alumni

Students

Faculty

Academic Unit

Parents

DonorsMedia

Accreditors

Employers

Supervisors

Community

Four-frame model

Structural frame

We’re taking a serious gamble here because we’re hoping that the proposed change will bring us the resources we need, but we haven’t yet identified the resources it will take to implement this change. For example, we’ll need to expand staffing in our division of research significantly. The university’s current strategic plan, with four years left to run, did not address this type of change, and so we haven’t been developing the kind of infrastructure it will take to make this change a success.

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Human resources frame

In addition to the new president, early support for this proposal is coming from the governing board and certain segments of the faculty. The student body, alumni, parents of students, donor base, community members, state regulatory body, and main sources of transfer students are less supportive. In order for the initiative to be successful, we’ll have to find a way to meet the objections of these key groups.

Political frame

The new president is currently still enjoying a fairly strong honeymoon phase, and so certain key constituencies (most important, the faculty senate and graduate council) are likely to support the proposal, at least in principle. However, leaders of the faculty union were alienated by the former president, and those attitudes of distrust remain unchanged under the current administration. We should thus expect strong resistance from the union to any initiative proposed by the upper administration and not by the faculty itself.

Symbolic frame

For many years, the university has used the expressions “Teaching First” and “Where Education Really Matters” in all its publicity materials. Certain stakeholders are likely to perceive the new president’s proposal as an abandonment of the institution’s traditional values. It will be important, therefore, for the role that an expanded emphasis on research can have on improving teaching and enriching education to become a key part of our communications with all constituencies.

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Six think- ing hats

White hat In terms of potential benefits that we can document, research institutions in our state are funded at a 22 percent higher rate than institutions like ours where the mission is focused primarily on teaching. In addition, an emphasis on research would bring the university much-needed overhead from federal grants. In terms of potential costs that we can expect, hired consultants recently estimated that the president’s plan will require an initial investment of at least $560,000 of continuing funding (for staff salaries and operating budgets) plus at least $14 million in one-time funding (for infrastructure and facility upgrades) in order for the university to become even minimally competitive for the level of federal grants envisioned by the president.

Red hat There is a great deal of excitement and prestige associated with a move toward greater research productivity. The president and board have been very successful in promoting this initiative among existing donors. Many faculty members remain anxious, however, because they’re uncertain of the effect this initiative will have on the university’s standards for tenure and promotion. Many students have expressed opposition because they fear that resources will be drained from scholarships and educational enrichment in order to fund the initiative. Other constituencies appear to have adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

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Black hat If the initiative is not successful in obtaining access to the level of expanded resources envisioned by the president, the university could actually be worse off financially because of the size of the initial investment. The reputation of the university would suffer due to a perception that it tried to become something it wasn’t suited for. The state regulatory body, which has taken a strong stance against mission creep, could punish the university in future funding decisions. The president’s leadership authority would be compromised by a significant failure.

Yellow hat If the institution is successful in launching this initiative, the increase in revenue obtained from grants would more than offset the initial investment. This additional funding could then be used to improve other areas of the university, including those related to its educational mission. Expanded media attention resulting from cutting-edge research could lead to higher enrollments, which would bring in additional tuition dollars. Faculty and staff morale would increase as a result of being identified with an exciting new enterprise. A larger number of high-ability students, as well as faculty members with more impressive credentials, might be attracted to the university.

Green hat What if we shift the focus of the proposal slightly to promoting undergraduate research, thereby forging a distinctive institutional mission and avoiding direct competition with the four other large research universities already in our state? What if we expand research only in the one or two areas for which the university

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is already well known and that don’t require as large an initial investment? Are we making a false assumption that federal grants are the only potential source of significantly reduced income or that this funding source will remain secure for the future?

Blue hat Because the likelihood and impact of the potential problems so far outweigh the likelihood and impact of the proposal’s potential benefits, it is recommended that the university not proceed as planned. Instead, it is recommended that the initiative be modified as follows: (1) In the short term, emphasis will be given to the university’s distinctive role in promoting undergraduate research, particularly in key areas of proven success. (2) A foundation will be prepared with key stakeholder groups to illustrate the ways in which an expanded research mission will actually enhance the university’s teaching mission. (3) Donors will be sought for naming opportunities that will provide the necessary infrastructure for an expanded research mission. (4) If these preliminary efforts are successful, the proposal will be reconsidered in four years as the university prepares its next long-term strategic plan.

Of course, not all applications of this approach will result in a recom- mendation not to proceed with the proposed change as occurred in our hypothetical example. It’s far more likely that the institution will come away from this reframing process with a decision to continue the initia- tive, but with a better understanding of the challenges that lie ahead. Even more important, the application of analyzing proposed initiatives through Bolman and Deal’s four frames and de Bono’s six thinking hats is likely to result in a much more realistic road map for the future. Academic leaders will gain from this exercise an understanding of which stakeholder groups they need to win over, which arguments are most likely to resonate with

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Table 2.2. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats

Hat Color Association

Focus Relevant Questions

White hat Purity Objectivity What are the facts? What is indisputable? What do the data indicate?

Red hat Fire, anger Emotionality What’s our gut reaction? How do the facts make us feel? How might other stakeholders feel about it?

Black hat Devil’s advocate

Negativity What could go wrong? What’s the worst-case scenario? What problems might we encounter along the way?

Yellow hat Sunny optimism

Positivity What could work out unexpectedly well? What’s the best-case scenario? What benefits might occur because of this idea?

Green hat Vegetation Fertility, creativity

How can we be creative and think about this idea differently? What unnecessary assumptions have we made? Have we considered all imaginable “What if?” scenarios?

Blue hat The sky “The 30,000 feet view”

If we put the previous five perspectives together, now what? How do all the details fit together into an overall pattern? Based on what we know and feel, shall we proceed? If so, how?

each group, which strategies may cause people to see the change in terms of loss instead of improvement and growth, which aspects of the initia- tive must be emphasized immediately, and which rhetorical approaches are likely to backfire and bring the proposal to a prompt and inglorious demise. Reframing change helps academic leaders see the way forward, not just as they themselves see it, but as it might be viewed throughout the open system that is essential to the initiative’s success.

Ten Analytical Lenses

Despite all the advantages of the four frames and six thinking hats, they do have limitations. They’re designed for general use in any type of organization, not just for the unique organizational culture of higher

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education that we explored in chapter 1. As I suggested in Positive Academic Leadership (2013), Bolman and Deal’s four-frame model simply doesn’t go far enough in helping academic leaders see the full context of their decision. It doesn’t help them as well as it could to identify their options in light of the mission and vision of their units, all the stakeholders who compose their open system, the strict practicalities of working within a system of shared governance, or the idealism and dreams that often guide academics in their work. De Bono’s six thinking hats, which were revolutionary in 1985, seem rather dated today. With our current level of multicultural awareness, I’ve seen faculty members and students angrily refuse to consider any approach that, even unintentionally, equates perspective with specific colors. (Think about it for a moment: How is a multicultural audience likely to respond to a system that identifies white with purity and black with negativity? How is a politically liberal audience likely to regard a system that identifies red with letting our emotions run wild?) For all these reasons, academic leaders need a way to reframe proposals for change in higher education with an approach that borrows from the best of the Bolman and Deal and de Bono models while avoiding their limitations. I call the resulting approach ten analytical lenses through which to examine academic change (table 2.3). These ten analytical lenses bring multiple perspectives into focus.

❍ The 20/20 lens is similar to de Bono’s white hat thinking. It con- sists of seeing a proposed change objectively and clearly, assessing what is known about our situation, and interpreting documented evidence without subjectivity or prejudice.

❍ The concave lens causes us to pull back a bit and try to see an issue in its entirety. It represents a conscious effort to avoid getting so caught up in details that we overlook the overall impact of what we’re proposing.

❍ The convex lens allows us to take the opposite view. Rather than permitting us to be swept away by the excitement of our hopes and dreams, it causes us to look at relevant details and ask what steps would need to be taken, in what order, and at what likely cost.

❍ The telephoto lens gives us a chance to glimpse the distant future. It urges us to look at trends, demographics, and our own strategic goals in order to determine the best way to journey from where we are to where we want to be. This lens also includes the creative ele- ments found in de Bono’s green hat thinking because it causes us to realize that there may be more than one way to get from one point

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to another; there may even be a more desirable destination that we haven’t yet identified.

❍ The bifocal lens allows us to see more clearly what’s right in front of our eyes. It urges us not to ignore existing infrastructure and resources, no matter whether those are pieces of equipment, facili- ties, sources of funding, or people. This lens cause us to take Bolman and Deal’s structural frame into account, but it also includes ele- ments of their symbolic frame. In other words, by using our bifocal lens, we’re paying attention to everything that affects our current environment: things, people, ideas, and cultural context.

❍ The rose-colored glasses are similar to de Bono’s yellow hat think- ing. They involve taking an optimistic view and exploring the bene- fits that would accrue if everything goes well.

❍ The sunglasses are similar to de Bono’s black hat thinking. They involve taking a pessimistic view and asking about the damage that would be done if things go poorly.

❍ The rearview mirror helps us avoid forgetting where we came from. In administrative terms, it helps us keep our mission, vision, and core values in mind. It also prevents us from losing sight of any com- petitors who are speeding up behind us and helps us avoid being blindsided by external threats and pressures.

❍ The contact lenses are similar to Bolman and Deal’s human resources and political frames. We might conceptualize this approach as follows: most people wear contact lenses not because they receive any medical benefit they wouldn’t get from ordinary glasses; rather, they think these lenses make them look better and improve their social interactions. In the context of a change process, we might be said to be using our analytical contact lenses when we scan our system to look for those who might be affected by a proposed change and consider how we should interact with them to make them understand why this action is necessary.

❍ The wide-angle lens is similar to de Bono’s blue hat thinking. It involves putting each of the first nine perspectives together into a single broad picture and drawing conclusions from what we see.

These ten analytical lenses thus offer a technique to understand the full complexity of a proposed change before we get so far into the process that we cause irreparable harm. They alert us to questions we still need to ask, the feelings of constituents we need to consider, and the important groundwork we need to prepare. They help us compensate for our own

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Table 2.3. Ten Analytical Lenses

Lens Focus Relevant Questions

20/20 lens Provide clarity and objectivity

What are the facts? What is indisputable? What do the data indicate?

Concave lens Correct for myopia

How can we see the forest, not just the trees? What is the big picture? How might we get too caught up in petty details?

Convex lens Correct for hyperopia

How can we see the trees, not just the forest? What details do we need to see before we can proceed? How might we get too carried away by remote possibilities?

Telephoto lens Scan distant horizons

What is far off in the distance? What is the territory like between here and there? How can we sharpen our view of what lies ahead of us?

Bifocal lens Permit close analysis

What has been right in front of our faces all along? What resources and assets do we see around us? What information do we need to see clearly before we proceed?

Rose-colored glasses

Take an opti- mistic view

What could work out unexpectedly well? What’s the best-case scenario? What benefits might occur because of this idea?

Sunglasses Take a dim view What could go wrong? What’s the worst-case scenario? What problems might we encounter along the way?

Rearview mirror

Bring the unseen into view

Where have we come from? What is looming behind us? What might we be overlooking?

Contact lenses Enhance social interactions

Who are the people around us? What do they want and need from us? What do we want and need from them?

Wide-angle lens Take in the whole picture

How do all these views fit together? How do we feel about the overall landscape? Based on what we see, should we proceed?

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individual limitations as academic leaders. Some of us are vision people who can find the idea of a new initiative so exciting that we fail to take care of all the details necessary to be successful. Others of us are detail people who can become so fixated on the day-to-day steps in implement- ing a plan that we ignore the big picture that excites donors, prospective students, and funding agencies. Like the four-frame model and the six thinking hats, the ten analytical lenses help us decide whether to proceed with a change process and, if we choose to proceed, what actions are needed to increase the likelihood of our success.

Conclusion

Since the organizational culture of higher education is different from that of other institutions, academic leaders can’t effectively promote change without viewing their proposals from certain key perspectives, most notably that of their wide range of stakeholders. In hierarchical structures, change can flow more easily from the top to the bottom. A brilliant corporate leader—such as a Jeff Bezos, Estee Lauder, or Elon Musk, the cofounder of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors—can transform an industry through effective top-down management. (As we’ll see in chapter 8, however, there’s usually a lot more going on even in those cultures than just the vision of a brilliant visionary leader.) But since colleges and universities have organizational structures that aren’t the same as those found in businesses, armies, and committees, the lessons corporate leaders teach us about change management don’t always apply to a university setting. In higher education, academic leaders have to work within a much more open system and examine proposed changes through a larger set of lenses than are needed elsewhere. What ten analytical lenses can reveal to us is whether an innovation is likely to succeed or fail, which approaches are best adopted when exploring the idea with each stakeholder group, and even whether there’s a valid need for change. It’s the last of these topics—the validity of the need—that we turn to in the next chapter.

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