Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any affiliated institutions unless explicitly stated.
I want to begin with a somewhat surreal, in-person Faculty of Science staff meeting in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. After some opening pleasantries and the initial buzz at being together once more, the energy in the room took a marked dive. The message from the rostrum went something like this: -
‘Whether you like it or not, we’re going to have to adapt…It is difficult to know what the full impact will be, but it is likely to affect almost everything we do…There’s really nothing we can say for sure at this point but we will keep you informed as we learn more…The timeline is uncertain at the moment…You can start preparing yourself now…Please don’t stress.’
What made it surreal, was that this was not about preparing us for an approaching pandemic or one of Auckland’s increasingly frequent cyclones, or any other external threat to our university - it was about our new ‘Curriculum Framework Transformation’ (CFT), a large-scale top-down change initiative instigated by senior management. I’ll say more about the CFT in Section 1.7, but what struck me at the time was the language being used. It’s not uncommon to liken an organisation’s leadership to a pilot or ship’s captain tasked with deftly steering around or navigating through whatever storms lie ahead. But here, our leadership was the storm.
All organisations need to be able to adapt to threats and opportunities through change, including via systemic change coordinated from the top down. This is the stuff that MBAs, management consulting and countless corporate motivational speaking events are made of - enlightened senior managers swoop in and save an organisation from itself. And it’s true, sometimes this kind of change is necessary or, at least, can be beneficial. At the same time, change comes with inherent uncertainty about whether beneficial outcomes will actually be achieved, and organisational change, particularly top-down change management, is incredibly costly. There are upfront costs associated with the design of the intended changes, including often significant internal research and consulting costs, the time of managers leading the change initiative, and the time of all the staff asked to contribute to the design process in some way, not least through successive rounds of ‘consultation’ (we’ll get to that in section 1.4). Following design, there are costs associated with roll out, as the plan is interpreted and implemented at lower levels, new support systems are built, other systems adjusted and staff trained in new processes and procedures. And finally, once the change is up and running there are ongoing costs as the new systems are gradually refined. As a result, large-scale top-down change management at an organisation the size of a university can take years and cost millions of dollars. Moreover, in addition to the financial cost there is the cost to the wellbeing of staff caused by the inevitable disruption and uncertainty, not to mention the opportunity cost of what all the people involved might have otherwise done with their time.
The uncertain gains and certain costs of change management mean that, to be effective, it ought to conform to some very basic guidelines. First, change management should aim to achieve its objectives with minimal disruption to the system. A fundamental engineering principle in system design and control is to begin by testing small, reversible changes where you can. If the aeroplane you are flying is losing altitude in a cross-wind, try some up-elevator and aileron adjustment before you decide to dump the fuel reserves. Even if dumping fuel solves the problem, the small flight control adjustments are a smarter first move - they are fast, cheap, safe and reversible, a priori no less likely to be effective, and if you try them out and they aren’t effective you can easily explore other options. Moreover, you can be pretty confident they aren’t going to create a bigger problem than the one you were initially trying to solve. Likewise, if the problem is persistent, suggesting a design issue, try testing some small modifications before embarking on a complete redesign of the aircraft. This is not to say that a new architecture is never justified, just that any justification has to consider whether the same objectives could be achieved with minimal changes to the current design1. The same principle can be applied in organisation and project management2. If there is a good chance you can achieve your objectives through small, reversible changes, you should test those first and see if they work. This is not to say that large, systemic organisational change should never happen, but it should not be the first choice.
Second, by implication, any decision to pursue large-scale top-down change management needs to be well-justified. If you’re going to ask hundreds or even thousands of people to invest their time and energy in a new way of doing things, you had better have good reasons for it. It should be clear that the current system is fundamentally broken, or financially untenable, or is unable to take advantage of new technologies and opportunities. And it should also be clear before any change is rolled out that the proposed new system will actually resolve these problems, and not a) simply create the appearance of meaningful action or, worse, b) create significant new problems that are at least as bad. If you aren’t sure about this, consider a small, reversible test first.
Third, large-scale top-down change ought to be relatively infrequent. Frequent change management is a sign the two guidelines above are not being followed. Moreover, in addition to the normal high costs of change management, the effects of repeated disruptions can compound, risking widespread dysfunction and providing no opportunity to return to equilibrium and learn the true impact of the changes made - before the implications of one change have been fully understood, another has been proposed. Like an aeroplane in the hands of a novice pilot, this can result in erratic flight, even in calm conditions, as the pilot repeatedly over-corrects their prior inputs just to maintain course.
These are general principles that apply to change in all organisations. However, universities have some important features that mean any top-down system-wide change may come with fewer benefits and even greater costs than in most other organisations. Universities are in the business of innovation across areas of research and teaching that are both highly specialised (requiring years of study) and incredibly diverse (touching on every aspect of our lives). Expertise in these areas is necessarily found not at the top of the leadership hierarchy, but distributed across the organisation in departments and schools. This is one reason (there are others, which we’ll get to later) for considerable autonomy in university departments and schools, relying on distributed leadership, allowing flexibility and experimentation across units and encouraging independent strategy development and decision making, rather than relying on university-wide diktats. In the university context, then, there are just fewer benefits to top-down change and a greater risk that such changes will not only squander local expertise, but stifle or disable it.
In addition, top-down system-wide restructures in the corporate world frequently emphasise the need for centralisation and standardisation, but such an approach is likely to be less suited to an organisation like a university. That’s not to say that it should never happen, just that there is a balance to be struck and, in a university context, the costs are often higher and the benefits fewer. Centralisation and standardisation can increase efficiency by allowing role specialisation, easier flow of information and people across the organisation, and economies of scale. But they have costs too, like requiring all organisational units to conform to a structure that may be less than ideal for any one unit and making it harder for individual units to respond nimbly to change. As a result, centralisation and standardisation work best in organisations that deliver a standard array of products and services as cheaply and reliably as possible. Think McDonalds. Competing in the burger franchise industry is all about centralisation and standardisation, from supply chains, product design, marketing and finance, to recruitment, training and the cooking time of every burger patty. Centralising and standardising these processes across franchises leads to massive efficiency gains and, since every franchise is doing basically the same thing, the costs associated with this are limited. But universities are not like burger chains. The faculties, schools and departments that make them up are inherently diverse, varying in size, student composition, teaching needs, research focus, research needs, connections to industry professional bodies, and level of external funding. In such a diverse organisation, the benefits of centralisation and standardization are fewer and the costs greater. Moreover, the greater complexity of the system means that, even if you decide centralisation and standardisation of some aspects of the organisation is the way to go, it is just harder to get it right.
So, to summarise, effective, top down organisational change ought to be targeted, tested, well-justified and infrequent. Systemic change of this kind can indeed improve and strengthen an organisation (though not as often as many managers might like to believe3). There are, however, costs as well as benefits, and in the case of universities, the benefits may be harder to achieve and the costs more keenly felt, even more so for change focussed on centralisation and standardisation.
The kicker here, then, is that if you really wanted to inflict damage on an otherwise functional university, one great way to do it would be to push through top-down change that fails to meet the above criteria and ignores unique features of the university environment - that is, to repeatedly carry out sweeping changes with little justification or testing, inadequate involvement of local expertise and a blinkered focus on centralisation and standardisation. This would be how not to run a university. And yet, this is exactly the approach to change management being deployed at my university.
Plane-spotters might want to suggest Boeing’s 737MAX as a tragic counterexample to this interpretation of the aircraft redesign metaphor. In order to stay competitive with the phenomenally successful A320 from Airbus, rather than develop a whole new aircraft, Boeing updated their 50-year-old 737 design with the 737MAX. To compensate for other changes intended to improve performance, they introduced an (arguably) small change to the navigational system (MCAS) that ultimately resulted in two fatal crashes. While this serves to illustrate that small changes can go wrong too, it’s worth emphasising that the failure here wasn’t with pursuing a small fix (the 737 could have been safely upgraded, and is now, as far as we know, operating safely) but with the fact that it was rolled out hastily and at scale without sufficient testing – Boeing’s executives put their design and quality control engineers under immense pressure to complete the redesign and get the new MAX into production quickly.
Toyota’s well-known Kaizen philosophy is one example of this working in a very large firm.
Nobel prize-winner, Daniel Kahneman summarises some of the evidence for this and the reasons behind it in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). See, especially, Chapters 19 and 20 on ‘The illusion of understanding’ and ‘The illusion of validity’, respectively.