Why managing a university is rather like organising the village Christmas lights — and why everybody thinks they could do it better.
My old occupational psychology lecturer, the eminent Adrian Hallmark, had a wonderful way of explaining academic life. The longer I spend working in higher education, the more convinced I become that he deserves to be immortalised in a psychology textbook.
I remember once discussing the prospect of marking 300 examination scripts. Adrian suggested a wonderfully efficient method of achieving a normal distribution: throw the entire pile down a flight of stairs. Those that reached the bottom would receive firsts, those that landed at your feet would fail, and the rest could be graded according to which step they landed on.
An elegant demonstration of statistical theory, requiring nothing more than a staircase, 300 scripts and a reasonably strong throwing arm.
Neither Adrian nor I was seriously proposing this as an assessment methodology. I feel obliged to clarify that, given the possibility that someone on LinkedIn might otherwise call for an investigation into our approach to academic standards.
His observations on managing academics were equally memorable, although rather more useful in practice.
Adrian maintained that managing academics was rather like being the mayor of a village full of independent shopkeepers.
Some people had big shops, others had small shops. Those with small shops invariably wanted bigger shops. Those who eventually got bigger shops promptly complained about the burden of running such enormous shops.
Naturally, the solution was for the smaller shopkeepers to take on more of the work, so that those with the bigger shops could concentrate on the considerable demands of having bigger shops. This had the added advantage of ensuring that the smaller shopkeepers were far too busy to develop their own shops.
And although you might be the mayor of the village, you couldn’t actually tell any of the shopkeepers what to do.
Your job, nevertheless, was to persuade them all to contribute towards the village Christmas lights.
I have spent much of my career discovering just how accurate Adrian’s observation was.
And now that I work as a consultant, I’ve discovered something even more entertaining: occasionally, the mayor invites you into the village, explains that nobody is obliged to listen to you, and asks whether you could have the Christmas lights switched on by Friday.
With no budget.
And preferably without upsetting anyone.
The Impossible Brief
Every higher education consultant knows The Impossible Brief.
It usually sounds something like this:
“We’d like you to help us become a world leader in [insert grand plan]. We’ve allocated three weeks, zero budget, and we’d like this project to be ‘people-focused’. By which we mean ‘staff-led’, so nobody feels imposed upon.”
Translation: do magic.
On paper, “people-focused” sounds noble. Democratic. Collegial.
In practice, you’ve just been asked to organise the Christmas lights in Adrian’s village.
Half the shopkeepers insist they can’t afford to contribute. Some argue that their section of the street doesn’t need lights anyway. One objects to fairy lights on principle, although nobody is entirely clear what that principle is.
And so, naturally, a subcommittee is formed to establish what the principle might be.
Its first achievement is to give itself an acronym: FAIRY — the Festive Appropriateness, Inclusion and Risk Yardstick.
The question of whether anyone actually objects to the lights is deferred to the next meeting.
Meanwhile, the larger shops believe they should have the most impressive displays because they attract the most visitors. It is therefore agreed that the smaller shops should contribute proportionately more towards the cost.
The mayor would like the village to be recognised as an internationally leading destination for Christmas lights, preferably by the end of the financial year.
And your job is to make it happen.
Forget Imposter Syndrome. Let’s Talk Dunning–Kruger.
Higher education is fascinated by imposter syndrome. We run whole programmes helping capable people overcome the nagging suspicion that they aren’t quite as clever as everyone thinks.
Rather less attention is paid to the people who have never entertained that suspicion in their lives.
Enter the Dunning–Kruger effect: the observation that people with limited competence in an area can also lack the knowledge needed to recognise their own limitations. Sometimes you don’t know enough to realise how much you don’t know.
I should declare an interest here. As a statistician, I’m professionally obliged to point out that a fair amount of the classic Dunning–Kruger pattern may be a statistical artefact — regression to the mean, and the curious things that happen when you plot a score against itself.
This is precisely the sort of thing that nobody confidently explaining Dunning–Kruger at a leadership away-day has ever known.
Which is, I’d suggest, the effect working perfectly.
In Adrian’s village, the butcher once attended a ninety-minute webinar on digital transformation. He now chairs the Online Provision Working Group.
He is very clear that online students are exactly like on-campus students, only further away. He has a slide to prove it. The slide has a cloud on it.
The florist, who has quietly run the village’s only successful online business for eleven years, has been invited to join the working group as a “critical friend”. She is not on the agenda.
None of this makes the butcher a bad butcher. He is an excellent butcher. That’s rather the problem: being very good at one thing turns out to be a wonderful foundation for being very confident about another.
Build It and They Will Come
Perhaps nowhere is this misplaced confidence more apparent than in the wonderful higher education tradition of build it and they will come.
Back in the village, someone proposes installing a giant inflatable reindeer in the town square.
It will be the biggest reindeer in the county. Possibly the country. There is talk of international recognition.
Nobody has established whether anyone actually wants to visit a village with an enormous inflatable reindeer. Nobody has considered parking, transport, marketing or what visitors might do once they’ve admired it.
But these are operational details.
The important thing is that the reindeer will be world-leading.
A business case is produced, largely based on the assumption that visitors will arrive because the reindeer exists. The projected visitor numbers are ambitious, but everyone agrees that ambition is important.
Someone suggests conducting market research.
This is considered unnecessarily negative.
The reindeer is approved.
Six months later, visitor numbers are disappointing, and a working group is established to investigate why the marketing department has failed to capitalise on such an outstanding opportunity.
The reindeer, meanwhile, has been nominated for an internal innovation award.
Psychologists would call this optimism bias and the planning fallacy. The village calls it the reindeer.
The Trouble with Being Different
Not everyone supports the reindeer.
The butcher points out that his customers are fundamentally different from those of other shops. The baker agrees, although for entirely different reasons. The florist insists that the village’s approach fails to recognise the distinctive nature of flowers.
All three are convinced that the principles applying to every other business in the country cannot possibly apply to theirs.
Universities are particularly accomplished at this. Suggest an approach that has worked elsewhere, and someone will explain why their institution, department, discipline or students are different. Sometimes they are. The trouble starts when being different becomes the reason nothing needs to change.
Social identity theory would say the shopkeepers are protecting the group that gives them their sense of who they are.
The shopkeepers would say the theory doesn’t apply to them.
Because they’re different.
Which brings us back to the bigger shops. Social comparison theory explains why everyone wants one. Loss aversion explains why nobody has ever voluntarily handed one back.
Everyone agrees that developing the next generation of shopkeepers is a strategic priority.
A mentoring scheme is launched.
It is run by the smaller shopkeepers.
The Committee Will See You Now
Eventually, someone suggests that the Christmas lights might benefit from a coordinated approach.
This is an excellent idea, and therefore requires a committee.
The committee agrees that the village needs a shared vision. A consultation exercise is commissioned. The consultation identifies broad support for Christmas lights, although there are concerns about the proposed approach, the allocation of resources and whether the lights adequately reflect the village’s distinctive identity.
A working group is established to consider these concerns.
By February, there is an agreed set of principles for the Christmas lights.
By April, there is a draft implementation framework.
By June, the village has developed a Christmas Lights Strategy 2030.
The lights themselves remain in storage.
A process can be perfectly rational at every stage and still produce a thoroughly irrational outcome.
The Final Irony
Of course, consultants aren’t immune to any of this.
We can arrive in Adrian’s village convinced that we’ve seen it all before, that we understand the problem and that we know exactly how to fix it. Some of us even arrive with a slide.
Occasionally, the slide has a cloud on it.
Then we discover that the mayor has no authority, the shopkeepers have competing interests, the Christmas lights belong to a different department and nobody can find the extension lead.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson from Dunning and Kruger, artefact or not. Expertise isn’t simply knowing things. It’s knowing where your knowing stops.
But every so often, someone quietly points out that perhaps the village doesn’t need the biggest inflatable reindeer in the country.
Perhaps it just needs some decent Christmas lights.
And suddenly things begin to move.
And if, despite everything, the Christmas lights eventually go on, the shopkeepers are happy and the mayor takes the credit?
Well, that’s probably a successful project.
Although somebody will undoubtedly complain that the lights were better last year.
One Last Confession
At this point, I should probably confess that I’ve spent a surprising amount of time wondering whether this article might offend anyone.
Which, given that I’ve just written fifteen hundred words about the difficulties of getting anything done in higher education for fear of upsetting someone, is an irony not entirely lost on me.
I briefly considered seeking feedback from a few colleagues, but I think we all know where that would lead.
I’d have to establish a working group.
And before long, FAIRY would have a publishing subcommittee.
I suspect Adrian would have enjoyed that.
