Sunday, August 10, 2003

Universities - Where next? 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? More here 4:32:51 PM    comment []

What is going on at Universities? Growing cultural complexity! I have been talking to a number of universities about what their world feels like today. Here are some of my early views. The bottom line - Universities have become too complex for conventional management processes and conventional HR approaches which have a tendency to seek conformity and are based on both a mechanical mindset and the belief in cause and effect. Many enterprises have complexity such as different divisions, but at a modern university the complexity is overwhelming.   What is it about a modern university that is so complex? It is because there are a number of distinct cultures that are on a trajectory of conflict. This conflict is based on scarcity, the need to change the nature of universities completely, which will mean that the conflict will become very bitter.   The dominant culture of the university is the academic culture. In the past the academics also ran the university so there was an alignment between the dominant culture and management. That was a time when universities were like large clubs and were not part of the mainstream of life and high on the government agenda. This is no longer the case. The president is tasked with running the university and the largest group, the academics now play a blocking role. The main culture conflict is between the guild of academics and the President who represents a new culture that is an anathema to the guild - a business culture. The complexity is amplified by what I see as a "slave revolt". At a lower level are 2 grieving groups. A new class of teachers:  the TA and the Sessional Lecturers who are treated like helots by the Guild and who will fight for status. A rising group of administrators who in the past were cleaning staff but now are IT professionals and Lab technicians who also want status.   These groups are all unionized and their issues are being built into a deteriorating negotiating environment and into difficult meetings in the Presidents office where one side tries to win over another.   The President is the only person who can see the big picture. All the groups are hunkering down to win their own battles. This is what the President sees. Fees for undergraduates are already too high as are the total costs of attending 4 years. Now $60,000 for a 4 year term they are expected to be $100,000 in 20 years time. The average debt on leaving is over $25,000. The theory was that with a degree, high paying jobs were a certainty. As the pool of graduates has got larger this is no longer a valid assumption and many are crushed by this debt. They are seeking a better way and will jump at a credited course that does not demand 3-4 years residency. Presidents know that their model of product push on campus will be disintermediated by an electronic alternative. Presidents want to find ways of structurally reducing these costs. The new demography will cut the number of undergraduates severely in Canada in the next 10 years. Between numbers and money something will have to give. Presidents want to look at other groups such as seniors but this does not fit the system. Over 50% of faculty in North America will retire in the next 10 years. Already there is a race to hire. Academic wages are going up to both attract and to retain good staff. Just as Presidents will have to cut costs, the core costs are under pressure to go up. The tendency is to ask government for more - but government will be coping with rising healthcare costs and will back off universities. Or to raise fees! Presidents would like to broaden the type of candidate but the faculty demand that the PHD is the benchmark. Another way to reduce costs will be to change the delivery system of courses from face to face to electronic. The heavily unionized faculty will defend this to the death. Defending IP is their by word. In fact this is a smokescreen. The point is that within the universities, faculty do not understand the new medium and don't want too. They don't pay a great deal of attention to undergrads any way. Their status and pay is determined by where they are on the publishing research track and not by teaching. So they are creating a new underclass the TA and the Sessional lecturer. Presidents need to get into the faculty and help them see that holding on too tight is not in their interests One of the things that faculty hate the most is the idea of a university becoming like a business. They see the President taking the university to that place. They want it to be a club again. Their club. So they still do all their hiring within the confines of their own discipline. The need to replicate themselves and the tenure system. In so doing they will by design add to the costs and the complexity of the enterprise. There are 2 new groups at universities that will increase the complexity and tension in the next 10 years. In the delivery system are the TA and the Sessional lecturer which have become essential in the undergrad world. They both teach and mark. They are the face to face undergrad world. At the moment these are helots - poorly paid and low status. But tensions are rising - after all they do the work. The other group is the ever expanding Administrative world. In my day these were literally servants. Now they are a heavily unionized group of bitter people who feel put upon and without status. Many of them are in the IT area and are lab technicians. We can see the same trend in medicine. The bottom line? The modern university has at least 4 cultures on a collision course. This type of cultural tension cannot be solved at the negotiating table. Some type of visioning process will be needed and a new managment process that can include these forces.   More later 4:26:21 PM    comment []