« Barriers to Innovation Part I: Culture, Leadership, Management »

This multi-part Executive Briefing was prepared exclusively for senior decision-makers and assumes the reader's progressive organizational experience leading to a senior position in a college or university.

Part I examines deeply seated barriers to innovation, growth, and change common to U.S. colleges and universities.

Part II identifies other barriers including the pedagogical barrier created by the fact that we still teach the same as our great-grand professors, ignoring 50 years of learning and measurement sciences which, if applied, would improve student learning and make our work measurably more efficient.

This Briefing will focus on intelligence of potential value to you and may exclude possibly relevant side issues and facts. Additional detail and justification is available via email or a phone conversation.

Observations from the Trenches

For 16 years our firm's sole business has been facilitating innovation in higher education. We do this by working with senior decision-makers to develop the vision for innovation coupled with a concrete strategy necessary to achieve it. In this Briefing, the term "innovation" is used to denote the kind of change that leads to achieving all three pillars of the cheaper/faster/better platform.

These deeply involving longitudinal experiences have given me a perspective that is much different from what would have been available to me on the sidelines. The sidelines may offer vantage for criticism but real change must accommodate higher education's complex environment.

Over the course of my work, I have identified 12 significant barriers to change that limit the innovative actions of leaders in higher education. These are not theoretical barriers. They are the barriers that I experience every day in our work to improve the products and services of colleges and universities. In this Executive Briefing, I will identify three such barriers.

In several places, I will contrast these barriers with the for-profit colleges and universities that make up 11% of the higher education community. My purpose in drawing these contrasts is not to exalt the for-profits - they have different but comparable problems that I have and will continue to address. I use the for-profits as contrast, first, because their solutions demonstrate that solutions are possible and, second, because most of their solutions arise from a culture of innovation that does not depend on a few lines of IRS code that defines how profits will be handled. These same solutions are available to the non-profits that are the focus of this Briefing.

Culture of Followership

The first and most intransigent barrier to innovation is higher education's institutional culture. When discussing a specific innovation, the first question college presidents ask me is, "Who else is doing that?" If my answer is, "No one is dong this yet, you can be the first," the discussion is over.

Higher education's leaders find it necessary to place an unhealthy premium on avoiding mistakes rather than accepting the errors that are part of growth. This necessity, perceived or real but often real, causes leaders to seek the safety provided by following overly worn paths when implementing "new" ideas. This culture of followership has earned higher education it's embarrassing position of dead last in the rate at which institutional types diffuse innovation.

This issue does not apply to the for-profits, which even their detractors agree have led the way in innovation in such areas as learning platforms, pedagogy, curriculum, and student services. For-profits are generally in favor of any innovation that will improve the product and/or reduce costs. Given their efficient management structure, such innovations are adopted quickly.

Absence of Leadership

The second barrier to innovation is that our nation's colleges and universities are governed, rather than managed. The worst form of governance, affecting roughly one-third of institutions, is so-called "shared governance" in which faculty who may or may not be able to manage their own classroom (an open question because there are no effective performance metrics) are presumed to have the knowledge and experience to manage the institution. As a group, of course, they lack this knowledge which is why shared governance institutions are distinctive in their organizational indirection, low productivity, and especially poor service to students.

Whether shared or not, higher education's governance centers on, or strongly accommodates, the wishes of its faculties. College presidents admit privately that the secret to success in their position rests on keeping their faculty happy. Higher education's history, recent and distant, is strewn with the bodies of former presidents who mistakenly believed they could lead their institutions through a course of innovation based on the strength of their good ideas and their ability to reason with people.

We make good natured fun of the defects organic to solutions designed by committees. Camels, we say, are horses designed by a committee. Yet, that is precisely how higher education attempts to innovate and why its solutions are always sub-optimal, if that. Left to their own devices, as they are to a certain extent, faculties will act to make their lives richer and more enjoyable at the expense of the students, their institution's health, and the public. As one small example, I am personally aware of dozens of faculty-led institutional effectiveness committees first developed in the 1980s in response to the still stalled assessment movement. In 2010, these committees are still getting ready to get ready. Their greatest achievement over the years has been managing to agree on several name changes for their committee, with more than a little rancor along the way.

Among the sins common to college and university governance are "flexible" time lines, where months slip into years, and diffused accountability where no one is responsible because everyone is responsible. Little happens and little happens because of it.

Here too, for-profits fare better but some fare too well. The vertical management structure of for-profits defines a single person accountable for each function and initiative. At times, this normally healthy accountability may not leave enough room for the plodding digressions of academic debate and problem solving. Time is money and for-profits favor speed. An example: In the halcyon days of the University of Phoenix (1978 through the IPO in 1994) considerable pride was taken in the University's "51/49" principle, a platform in the culture giving purely academic interests equal leadership and equality at the management table. In the rare case that agreement could not be reached at the level of leadership or management, the business perspective broke the tie. While the 51/49 principle was often mentioned in discussion as a point of pride, it was seldom invoked. Why? Because representatives of all university functions knew that, to succeed, they had to secure the cooperation of leaders in all functional areas, whether academic or business. This was the team that built the solid infrastructure and business rules that made the university a success. This delicate balance of power quickly eroded after the IPO. Today, the University of Phoenix is run by former Credit Suisse bankers whose impeccable timing got them off Wall Street just before the crash. These individuals are now hiring their Wall Street colleagues in large numbers, building the most bloated administrative empire I have witnessed in higher education, public, private, or for-profit. The investment bankers rely on their spreadsheets and have relegated the academic function to second class advisory status. Time will tell how wise they are. My personal view is that this icon institution that defined a new way to deliver and manage higher education is on an irreversible decline in preeminence. In the interim, my guidance to leaders of all institutional types is to implement your own 51/49 principle and make it real. Keep the academics and business people in close touch with each other and don't let either get the upper hand.

Informational Vacuum

The third barrier to innovation is that virtually every college, save the for-profits, operates in an informational vacuum with respect to mission-critical accounting and institutional performance metrics, including academic metrics. For each academic program they offer and in each market in which it is offered, college and university leaders are largely ignorant with respect to market share, growth rates, competitive position, operational and service costs by category, margin, learner satisfaction, retention rates, learning outcomes (the scientifically valid kind), and productivity.

Because they possess only a primitive picture of each program's behavior in each market, they (presidents) can only make educated guesses as to how each program should be managed. Accordingly, they manage all programs and departments the same when the precision management of differences is called for.

It is common in times of budget shortfall for presidents to impose across the board cuts when informed leadership would increase the budgets of high growth/high margin programs. Two barriers prevent informed action: a paucity of metrics and timely reports that would otherwise make the right decision the obvious decision, and faculty governance that will not support leadership in making the right decisions if it means losing support for their pet programs, whether or not these programs meet the needs of students.

The net impact of this barrier is that college and university leaders "manage" much the same as congress makes laws, by skillfully adjudicating the desires of competing special interest groups to sub-optimal or phantom solutions.

These solutions place the consumer at the bottom of the list of considerations. True and lasting innovation cannot take place until college leaders develop and learn to use modern enterprise-level accounting and decision-support systems.

How do the for-profits fare on this issue? On balance, they lead the way in creating an enterprise-wide network of integrated metrics and timely decision-support with which to manage the institution. The for-profits fall short in gathering and aggressively managing academic process, outcomes, and impact data. Like their not-for-profit colleagues, they measure very little of it. Second, with the exception of learner satisfaction data, they manage most such information poorly, if at all, because it is not in their short-term financial interest. There are a few noteworthy exceptions on both sides of the profit isle. I will highlight them in a subsequent Briefing.

Part II will continue by examining the barriers to innovation that can be attributed to these three barriers.

Robert W. Tucker is President and CEO of InterEd, Inc.
He can be reached through this forum.
The expression of other views by leaders in higher education is encouraged.