Leading With an Issue Portfolio

This post is part of a series for a current Itana community discussion of "organized anarchies." I'd like to share a way of thinking about decision-making in large universities that I've gleaned from watching my mentors over the years, and offer a general method.

How do decisions come about?

In a prior post, I quoted Kenneth P. Ruscio describing decision-making in a university as a process in which "solutions chase problems and problems chase solutions. Decisions are opportunities. They come about when various problems attach themselves to various solutions in complicated, unpredictable and sometimes mysterious ways.” [2]

From my experience I think there are patterns in how change happens in a university that has characteristics of an "organized anarchy". Rather than a linear path of decision-making, change is more like a social process of people collecting around ideas. To me it looks like this:

The first thing to recognize is that in many workplaces, what most people think of as a management decision is the choice to take a shared approach to some issue. But not taking a shared approach is also a choice, and it is the one most often selected in an organized anarchy. So what I often see happening in a university is really a progression through different modes [3]:

• Parallel mode: Is it sufficient for people to handle the issue in diverse ways? If so, the issue stays in this mode until some additional urgency arises, or it's no longer relevant.
• Example: To move functionality to the cloud, should teams at our university use Amazon, Google, or Microsoft? What about virtual machines, containers, or functions? Initially, this is up to individual teams to experiment with.
• Associative mode: Is there interest in (and benefit from) exchanging findings and practices around the issue? This often results in converging on fewer (but still several) ways of addressing the issue. Many issues stay here until no longer relevant.
• Example: As teams start using cloud infrastructure in production, they exchange what they've learned. A few options become clearly better for most purposes than others. Maybe some case studies or recommendations get written down.
• Cooperative mode: Is there high urgency for (or value from) a shared approach? If so, people will try to collaborate on one. After some effort, a shared approach may be agreed on -- or not. If not, at least there is broader awareness of the issue and possible approaches.
• Example: A shared service is defined for teams to easily obtain certain kinds of pre-configured cloud infrastructure from certain vendors. The service takes care of shared needs such as identify management integration, default security setup, etc. Teams are not required to use the service, but it becomes the most common approach.

What can leaders do?

For new leaders this kind of decision flow can be very surprising and frustrating. It doesn't map closely to leadership or change management practices that are all about driving in a straight line from a vision to a result. Leaders often end up with burnout that looks like this:

I've seen people I respect greatly and who are great managers leave higher education in frustration with this non-linear decision-making environment. The non-linear pattern resists strong advocacy (especially early on) and does not reward highly visible, structured leadership.

But there is a role for leaders in this non-linear pattern. In each mode, there is important work to help critical issues get attention and advance to the next mode as quickly as possible. Doing this reduces waste, opportunity costs, and risk to the institution. Leaders can:

Note that even if what you achieve as a leader is to more quickly make clear that there will not be a shared approach to an issue, that is a benefit to the institution. It reduces the time others spend on the issue. It completes a decision-making experiment (or "test balloon"), so to speak, so that other experiments can be tried.

Leading with an issue portfolio

For me as an individual leader, there are issues I have a stake in -- whether I'm explicitly accountable for their resolution (rare) or they're related to my general role (more common). New related issues arise all the time, while others become irrelevant (see above).

Think of these issues as an issue portfolio. Some issues have a high risk/reward for the organization, others less. Some issues are getting too little attention, some too much. As a leader my goal can be to shepherd key issues through the organization. Let's say each dot on this quadrant is an issue within my scope:

This approach is probabilistic -- there's no guarantee that the issue I think is most important will reach a shared approach, no matter how hard I work at it. But I can help create the circumstances in which an issue will go from one mode to the next. Tools for this might include personal influence and networking, meetings, and various kinds of groups from less formal (e.g., brown bags) to more formal (e.g., committees).

How is this better for the institution? Even if every individual just clearly prioritizes the top issues they are advocating for, that helps advance the non-linear process. Leaders can also use traditional approaches to build consensus on a vision around an issue, gather allies, and build a coalition of support.

When even a few key leaders in an institution do this, it quickly clarifies which issues are likely to reach a shared approach, and focuses the effort of collaboration and change on those. Likewise, when teams communicate their key issues, useful collaborations can be found more quickly. And so on.

Starting points for leadership in organized anarchy

Based on the above approach, here are some suggested starting points:

1. 
Define the scope of your “portfolio” of issues. What kinds of stuff do you most need to care about? Don’t just react to everything others bring to the table.
2. Know the current issues in your leadership portfolio. What mode is each issue in, who are current and potential players, and what are the experiments and findings so far?
3. Prioritize which issues to expend your limited energy on (based on what you can glean about importance and feasibility).
4. Apply energy to your top issues as appropriate to the mode each issue is in; help each issue move along when it is ready.
5. Prepare to invest more effort into your top issues in later modes (plan and gather support out ahead of each issue).
6. Look for like-minded leaders and take opportunities to build a coalition.
7. Admit when an issue has become intractable despite your best efforts, and shift your energy elsewhere for now.

What are your thoughts? Do you already do something like this for yourself or your team? What's working for you?

Endnotes

1. Matthew House, A Career in Organized Anarchy: Building Interpersonal Relationships in Higher Education, ACM SIGUCCS Annual Conference (2018).
2. Kenneth P. Ruscio, Leadership in Organized Anarchy, Public Administration Review (2016) (emphasis added).
3. I'm borrowing the terms parallel, associate, and cooperative from writing on child development -- see Wikipedia, Parten's stages of play.
4. See Wikipedia, Hype cycle.