We’ve Traced the Call, and It’s Coming from Inside the House

According to my internal staff interviews, folks within my organization want to be more agile, innovative, and proactive, and to improve communication. According to my external interviews, staff and faculty want us to be more responsive, to support more tools across different platforms, and to provide more ongoing guidance and advice. So, the good news is that external and internal assessments and goals are somewhat in sync. The bad news is that I’m not sure our current staff can change to the degree necessary. I mean, if they think agility is important, why aren’t they more agile now? What’s the barrier? We will be discussing this at our all staff meeting on Friday.

What I’m really afraid is that we will have “Agility 2008” ™ a new project brought to you by the folks who denied you Firefox until last December…to be followed by Kollaboration Kamp (document sharing through MS Word track changes!), etc.

8 Responses to “We’ve Traced the Call, and It’s Coming from Inside the House”

  1. Sukey said:

    Jun 24, 08 at 8:03 pm

    First of all – Am I the only one actually dumb enough to run a search on “Agility 2008” just to check if it really was some productivity product I just didn’t know about?

    This post reminds me of Larry Cuban and David Tynack’s “Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform” – referring to k-12 educators making minor adjustments here and there to teaching and administering schools based on the lowest barrier to adoption for whatever school improvement initiative being hawked at the time.

    The authors’ essential questions remind me of yours:
    “The basic grammar of schooling, like the shape of classrooms, has remained remarkably stable over the decades. …continuity in the grammar of instruction has puzzled and frustrated generation of reformers …we ask how this grammar came about…why even vigorous and imaginative challenges to it tended to fade, leaving behind a few new practices here and there but not fundamentally altering the way schools are organized for instruction.”
    http://books.google.com/books?id=WCQ8TVEP8H8C

    What is the barrier? Inertia?…water seeking its own level?…? Ferris?…Anyone?

    Finally, just reading the title of this post is enough to give me nightmares!

  2. Kyle said:

    Jun 25, 08 at 4:16 am

    I have one member of my staff who is very supportive of change. For everyone else. As soon as we try and change a process or system which she touches, she goes into a seizure. She’s the middle of the pack. I have one guy who’s worked at the college since the Vietnam War who doesn’t want anything to change and another who’s been here 18 months who thinks everything needs to change.

    I believe I have the definition of an immovable object meeting an irresistible force.

    And I’ve heard similar from faculty. They want all kinds of technology to enable them to keep teaching the same way they have been. I have begun to wonder if folks really understand what change means. Perhaps they are supportive of change because they think they have to be, or that somehow change and efficiency have become synonymous. And just for the record, efficiency to the faculty means fewer staff so we can hire more faculty.

  3. essprit said:

    Jun 25, 08 at 11:55 am

    I was just at a wonderful leadership institute where we had a number of speakers, including a well-known senior faculty person who talked to us to give us “the faculty perspective”. She had a long list of complaints about IT and librarians at her school, to show us how hard it was for faculty to get their work done. Many of her points were really good and gave much food for thought.

    I asked her if she could describe her ideal way of how to get help, or if she would be willing to provide feedback on ideas the IT people, etc come up with, to ensure a good match with her needs. She paused for a minute, and then said “No. That’s not in my narrative.” In a nutshell, she got where she was by protecting her time and not interacting with people about less important matters like these, but somehow wants the “help people” to just know what works best for her and just get it done without bothering her. So the challenge is big, but I guess y’all knew that.

  4. jezebel said:

    Jun 25, 08 at 12:19 pm

    Some things that I think keep good folks from doing what they think they should do — the right thing:
    1. a doubt that their “right thing” is the right thing of someone else who matters (can they trust their “right thing?”)
    2. support of someone who matters (someone who says, your right this is “the right thing! woot woot!”
    3. real support of someone who matters (something akin to, we’ll do this together and we’ll make mistakes, but I’ve got your back regardless.

    I worked in a bike shop and the manager said to me, you’re gonna break stuff — just try to break cheaper stuff and don’t sweat it, you’re gonna break stuff.

    We fail, we make mistakes, it’s how we learn. It helps a lot to have a leader acknowledging that fallibility and supporting everyone along the way.

    But now I’m being far too serious, screw em all, people suck!

  5. kdghty said:

    Jun 25, 08 at 2:51 pm

    re: essprit’s post above

    i guess i have a disconnect. the faculty member described – although she provided some useful insight – sounds like a pompous ass. i recognize i’m in a service industry, but what right does anyone have to gripe that their needs aren’t met if they don’t share their dissatisfaction in a timely and constructive matter? i guess in the lifeblood of a university the faculty are the shizz because it’s all about the money, baby, and they bring it in, but i really appreciate the ones that aren’t disproportionately full of themselves – and i want to hear from the ones that are so i can be prepared for them.

  6. admin said:

    Jun 25, 08 at 5:02 pm

    @Sukey–I’m psyched that I got anyone to Google my made up phrase!

    @essprit–this is discouraging. I wonder if the real issue is that this faculty member doesn’t sound like she actually needs help. If she really needed help then I bet she’d be more patient.

    @jezebel: thank you for these suggestions. I think you’re right. Perhaps Kyle and I can benefit from them? I was just thinking that at Friday’s staff meeting I’ll apologize for possibly imposing a wiki on everyone prematurely. And I’ll ask if that was a mistake. just so we can get people comfortable with disagreement/discussion without conflict. And I had someone tell me exactly the same thing” “It’s okay if you break it–we’ll just put it together again!” The difference is, I wasn’t working at a bike shop. I was working at an archaeological dig and the items I was breaking were ancient urns, which I kept accidentally smashing when I dug them up.

  7. essprit said:

    Jun 26, 08 at 4:46 pm

    @admin – Thinking back on lots of efforts to change on varying scales, it seems like there’s a key difference in the ones that are successful vs. the ones that just churned. The churn ones always devolved into “we really want to change, but we can’t because X, Y or Z”. The successful ones were more along the lines of “we really want to change, so therefore we’re going to try X, stop doing Y, and stay focused on Z (and keep trying even though we’ll probably screw up at some point)”. The primary difference between the two was leadership – not only not allowing the wallowing (beyond the occasional healthy venting), but also keeping people’s eyes on the prize. I’m betting you fall into the latter category. Good luck!

  8. ihateyougoaway said:

    Jul 01, 08 at 6:25 am

    Just give them roller skates and see how agile they can be…


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