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.

Management Approaches Within Organized Anarchy

This post is part of a series for a current Itana community discussion of "organized anarchies" -- the idea that the business architecture of some higher education institutions is characterized by "many autonomous actors operating with bounded rationality in an environment with ambiguous goals, an unclear link, between cause and effect, and fluid participation with the activities and subgroups of the organization." [1]

How are universities organized?

If you've worked in higher education for a while, you've heard an "origin story" along the lines of: Lo these many years ago in the Middle Ages, the first universities were founded to enable individual faculty to independently create and preserve knowledge. Since then, universities have been governed by faculty to protect their academic freedom, and this history drives the management culture of modern universities -- even as they have grown to include hundreds or thousands of non-faculty employees in all the functions needed to run a mid size corporation. [2]

While I agree that the universities I've worked in demonstrate characteristics of an organized anarchy, my own take on this is that it's less because of individual autonomy (as in the classic origin story), and more because of a multiplicity of unit-level management approaches. Many units within a university are far from anarchic (try asking your registrar or campus police chief what kind of team they lead.) But at a large university, the sheer diversity of management approaches in play, and their interactions, results in a complex system that is very challenging to steer. [3]

As a business architect, thinking of it this way makes the university tractable to some analysis and planned change (though often at such great effort that the change still isn't worth it). If I believed every individual in the institution were autonomous, I'd throw up my hands at any change involving more people than I can fit in a conference room. But if we can understand and connect up diverse management approaches, then change leaders have a fair chance at larger initiatives (though still at great effort).

So what's really going on inside a university?

Thinking about the many different university units I've worked with, I can see a diversity of management approaches. You may see others, and have different names for them, but here's a range:

There are good reasons for this diversity. It's natural for each unit to shift toward a management approach suited to its missions and strategies. Managers in a unit may consciously choose an approach to execute on a strategy [4], or the approach may be evolving and not "self aware" yet.

So even when a university is an organized anarchy with a very Autonomous management approach overall, it contains a multitude of "enclaves" with their own management approaches and cultures. In a large university a map of a few units and their management approaches might look like this:

These different management approaches are constantly in friction when work crosses units, as in this very common example:

Admissions applications to the university have increased dramatically, and the Financial Aid office is desparate to improve technology for processing financial aid offers. The unit is Process Driven, with a flat organization and specialized roles responsible for each part of an intense process that has hard deadlines throughout the academic year.

When Financial Aid goes to Central IT for help, it encounters a Podular unit, where IT service teams work semi-autonomously within their own service strategies, with just a few lightweight shared processes (for IT service management) and shared functions (such as a Project Management Office). [5] Few of the managers in either unit are self-aware of their unit's management approach or the differences between units.

Over years, each time Financial Aid and Central IT try to work together on major improvements, they drift apart again in mutual frustration. Financial Aid is staffed to focus on its processes, and can't free up resources to do business analysis for IT changes. When Financial Aid does state requirements, it needs results by specific points in the year when changes can safely occur. The Podular teams in Central IT have little practice with hitting hard deadlines, and they don't collaborate often enough with each other to be able to pull together the full package of IT that Financial Aid actually needs. 

Multiplied over many units, initiatives, and years, the net effect for the university is organized anarchy. Senior leaders struggle to understand why obviously beneficial changes aren't executed. Participants grow frustrated with how hard it is to obtain a decision or follow through, and develop defense mechanisms to be less accountable. Key opportunities are missed and the backlog of unresolved problems multiplies.

How can we do better?

I think change leaders (and the architects supporting them) can improve the success of cross-functional initiatives by recognizing the multiplicity of management approaches and applying that recognition as suggested below.

Identify the management approaches in play. You may be the first person to ask this question for the initiative, and the participants may not be self-aware of their management approaches yet. Ask questions about how people expect to see goals set, accountability established, decisions made, and outcomes assessed. Note differences that could be pitfalls for the initiative.

Plan for the extra effort and skills needed to bridge different management approaches. At what points in the initiative will differences be the greatest obstacle? It might be in discovery, design, implementation, or operations -- or in other factors such as enforcing a time or budget constraint. The approaches can be bridged, but it takes time and it takes a team with the skills, experience, and position to do so. If that will be a problem for the initiative, you've identified a major risk to escalate.

Help units and individuals solidify their own management approach. Crossing management approaches is even more difficult when the people involved aren't following a consistent approach within their own units. If you can't help management of the unit clarify their intent, at least help individuals clarify how they are going to work. How will they represent their unit? Contribute to decisions in the initiative? To what degree can they realistically commit to the initiative? How do they plan to participate in the work of the initiative?

Manage expectations with sponsors and key stakeholders. These often come from a management approach that is different from that of the participants or the initiative, and get frustrated as a result. For example, a CFO from a Hierarchical unit sponsoring a cross-functional initiative that works Collaboratively with participants from a variety of management approaches is going to start with unrealistic expectations.

Be clear about the management approach of the initiative. Each initiative needs a defined approach to manage its own work, and it may well be different from that of the participating units. Here are some examples of efforts "layered" onto the sample university above:

The approach your initiative takes is what is most under your control, so pick a viable approach and communicate it clearly, early and often. If necessary, train people in the approach. Time spent "onboarding" participants to how they are going to work together is never wasted.

With that effort applied, the example started above might continue something like this:

A new change leader in Central IT hears about the history of working with Financial Aid and decides to look more closely. She spends time in Financial Aid to understand its management approach and needs, and also takes a skeptical look at how well Central IT is applying its management approach. She finds allies and willing participants, and convenes a sponsor group that is ready to understand the cross-functional challenge and exercise influence accordingly.

A cross-functional initiative is formed with a clear management approach, and the participants understand how they will need to behave differently from their normal ways of working. Though the problem space is still very challenging, the initiative now has a chance of addressing it.

And yes, that is a real-life example and the initiative is still producing results after several years.

Is it worth it?

Is it worth it to do the above analysis? Only sometimes. The kind of change leadership and business architecture work needed to bridge management approaches is effortful and time-consuming. It might not take place for any of several reasons, including:

• The benefits of the initiative simply aren't worth the effort
• The urgency isn't there yet; the stakeholders are fine with letting the initiative "drift" rather than work on being more aligned
• The key decision-makers involved aren't ready to discuss, understand, or recognize the consequences of the multiplicity of management approaches

You might also be asking yourself: Is it worth it for universities to operate this way? In my opinion that's a personal leap of faith, similar to the "glass half full" metaphor. Organized anarchy is an extremely wasteful way for a university to operate -- or a quite reasonable way to operate -- depending on whether you tend to see:

• Duplication of effort -- vs. -- Adaptability to meet local needs
• Costly unexpected course changes -- vs. -- Agility to respond in the moment
• Ineffective use of resources -- vs. -- Setting aside resources for experimentation
• Lack of transparency -- vs. -- Protection from interference
• Lost opportunities -- vs. -- Freedom to pursue diverse goals

And so on. Personally I think a better version of the question is, is the university getting the most it can out of its management approaches? That applies to the overall model, each different approach selected for a different purpose, and initiatives that cross the university. And that's something we can all work on.

So how do you see it?

Endnotes

1. Matthew House, A Career in Organized Anarchy: Building Interpersonal Relationships in Higher Education, ACM SIGUCCS Annual Conference (2018).
2. There are problems with this version of history. For a debunking, see George Keller, Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Education (1983).
3. That is, parts of the system are easily understood, but their multiplicity and interactions result in unpredictable behaviors at the level of the system. See Wikipedia, Complex system.
4. As an example framework for this, see Jay Galbraith, The Star Model.
5. I'm borrowing the Podular label from Dave Gray, The Connected Company (2014). For a good intro to the topic see this blog post by Dave Gray: The Future is Podular (2015).

The University as Organized Anarchy

If you work in higher education (or another large nonprofit), do you encounter situations in which your institution's decision-making seems unpredictable or intractable? You may be working in an "organized anarchy," an organizational model described by observers of higher education as far back as the 1970s.

For our March 8th and 22nd Itana calls the higher education architecture community is discussing a paper on this topic by Matthew House, Enterprise IT Architect at Washington University in St. Louis, titled A Career in Organized Anarchy: Building Interpersonal Relationships in Higher Education (also available for download here) [1]. Matt's paper and presentation wonderfully connect our community with scholarly thinking on this topic.

For me, Matt's research has triggered a lot of thinking about business architecture and change leadership in higher education, including questions like:

• Are there systemic reasons why change leadership (supported by business architecture) faces special challenges in higher education?
• What are the particular responsibilities of a leader or architect in an organization with very limited intentionality?
• What tools does an architect or leader have for working in this context?

I'd like to offer a few blog posts to inspire further discussion and I hope everyone will join in with their own thoughts -- especially on the Itana mailing list, which you can join here. I strongly recommend you start with Matt's paper, which is very concise and packed with great concepts.

So what is an "organized anarchy"?

In 2016, Kenneth P. Ruscio, then President of Washington and Lee University, described his job like this:

“College and university presidents preside, if that word can be used, over ‘organized anarchies,’ … Goals are shifting. The boundaries of the organization are constantly being redrawn. The referees are sometimes making up the rules as the game progresses … 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]

Now that is a pretty remarkable statement for the leader of a venerable institution. Anarchy? Making up the rules?! Decisions are mysterious?!! Strong words, but the situation may sound familiar to you, and it is recognized by scholarly observers of higher education.

The term "organized anarchy" was coined in 1974 in a book by Michael Cohen and James March [3] to describe institutions of higher education with "many autonomous actors operating with bounded rationality in an environment with ambiguous goals, an unclear link, between cause and effect, and fluid participation with the activities and subgroups of the organization." [1] Cohen and March identified five properties of decision-making in this kind of organization, which Matt summarized for us as:

• Most issues, most of the time, have low salience for most people;
• The total system has high inertia;
• Any decision can become a garbage can for almost any problem;
• The processes of choice are easily subject to overload; and
• The organization has a weak information base. [1]

Put another way, I've sometimes described it to peers (before reading about this research) as the "near-zero accountability" organization. A place where people often just walk away from what they don't feel strongly about, can often set aside larger organizational goals (unless they become absolutely critical), and often aren't challenged to inform the choices they make on behalf of the organization.

If that sounds familiar, read on.

Who cares? And what is our responsibility?

Seeing our context systematically described this way is first of all a kind of mental relief to those of us who have worked in higher education for many years, trying to bring about planned change and finding it surprisingly slow going. Over the last 20 years I've regularly had conversations with newer employees (from other industries) in which I reassure them that no, they're not crazy, the environment really is quite unusual. It's reassuring to also affirm that for myself.

More importantly, many of you reading this, and many colleagues I've worked with over the years, are leaders trying to help higher education institutions overcome challenges and change for the better. We feel responsible for some part of the best contributions universities can make to society.

How is that responsibility changed by knowing you work in an organized anarchy -- a place where decisions are often non-deterministic and the institution as a whole has little specific intentionality about advancing its mission and the public interest? This is a professional existential question for leaders when they "hit the wall" of what can be done in a large university. Confronted with organizational anarchy, which path will you choose:

1. Do you regard the organizational model as unacceptable (whether practically for purposes of doing work, or ethically), and walk away from the particular situation?
2. Will you work within the means the system offers, finding the path of least resistance to do what can be done relatively easily?
3. Can you effect structural change within the system that enables it (and you) to work differently?

I've taken all the above paths in different situations. Regarding the first path, I do think there are situations in which a university's organizational model is simply counter to the public interest in higher education, and professionals have to make hard choices. I'm not going to focus on that today (but would love to hear your thoughts!).

Let's suppose we're on the second or third path ...

What tools do we have as leaders?

Knowing more about the institution's organizational model and decision-making properties, we can be more clear-eyed and effective in our work and choice of tools as architects and leaders.

(A) Building interpersonal relationships. In his paper, Matt describes building interpersonal relationships to become more effective in an organized anarchy. This is an essential tool, Matt laid it our really well, and I don't have more to add. I see this as a crucial "working within the system" path, as well as layering some informal structure onto the organization.

Matt also cites several other tactics attributed to Cohen and March [3], including: influencing the system by focusing to spend time and persist on fewer issues; creating visible groups and recognizing their efforts to advance an issue; overloading the system with issues; and analyzing the system to find small actions with big effects. [1]

In subsequent blog posts, I'd like to dig into some of these areas to offer additional tools that I've seen leaders use successfully:

(B) Identifying and connecting management approaches. Though the institution may work as an organized anarchy, not all its units do. (Try asking your registrar or campus police chief whether they run an organized anarchy.) Leaders can support change that crosses units by identifying the different management approaches in play and helping them connect up.

• More on Management Approaches Within Organized Anarchy

(C) Managing an issue portfolio. Leaders can identify a "portfolio" of issues they feel responsible for, and shepherd them through several stages to increase their likelihood of being worked on and resolved. This tool complements using relationships.

• More on Leading With an Issue Portfolio

(D) Forming enclaves. Leaders have the ability (and sometimes an obligation) to form "enclaves" within the larger organization. In these enclaves, key participants are shielded from the surrounding anarchy and supported in doing focused work. This is an example of the structural change path.

• More on this topic soon

I hope this will inspire others in our community to share their ideas and tools, because we all have a lot to learn and can use all the help we can get. I look forward to hearing everyone's ideas!

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. Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, Leadership and Ambiguity: the American College President (1974), as cited in [1] above.