INTRODUCTION
by Sukhwant Jhaj
Portland, Oregon
THE GENESIS OF THE PROJECT
The inspiration for this project came from a retreat sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the Frontier Set, a select group of colleges and universities, state systems, and supporting organizations committed to significantly increasing student access and success and eliminating racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in college attainment. This convening of university presidents and chancellors took place in March 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona, where I joined the president of Portland State University to brainstorm with others about solving large-scale problems in higher education.
In July 2016, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded my proposal to develop “visual case studies” to highlight institutions and their approaches, with the hope that insights into their successes would be valuable for anyone interested in the evolving story of higher education. I invited seven leaders from the Frontier Set to participate in our research so we could highlight their unique leadership, processes, and institutional strategies. I partnered with XPLANE, a Portland, Oregon based design consultancy firm which specializes in design thinking and cooperative facilitation, to facilitate the field research and develop this visual case study.
My desire to lead this research was driven by the belief that higher education institutions, as we have conceptualized them, are neglecting key segments of society. The accepted best practices for student success are not reaching many students who could most benefit from access to the ladder of education. I have always understood that the mission of higher education is to provide such access for the improvement of the communities these institutions serve.
This belief is connected to my own journey. My father first sought education as a young man of 14 at a village school in India, literally under a tree. His educational journey expanded his possibilities and in turn opened a world of opportunity to me. In my role as a faculty member and academic leader, I am acutely aware of what happens to students and their families—and future generations—once they partake in education, study, and complete their degrees. The students and their families follow a different trajectory. As an architect, I believe that form must always follow function. Institutions likewise must ask the question: is our form following our mission, our institutional function and purpose?
I chose these seven institutions as exemplars in improving access, increasing graduation rates, building innovative programmes, designing advising and student support services to facilitate greater student success, and using technology to improve learning. I interviewed the institutions’ executives to explore how they approached problems for their specific institutions and how they lead transformation.
METHODOLOGY
I traveled to each institution, interviewing executive leaders and asking them a series of questions about their path to leadership, challenges faced by their institutions, their leadership style, their approach to ideas like innovation and change, and how they understood and communicated a vision for their institution. These interviews have been transcribed and edited for inclusion in each case study.
In addition to president and executive interviews, we also facilitated group discovery sessions with project leaders from each campus, with the design team at XPLANE videoconferencing to visually document these discussions. Using design methodologies in our discovery sessions, the groups were able to quickly convey the essence of their work. The result of these sessions are illustrated in the visual case studies.
WHAT WE DISCOVERED
Leaders who managed to transform their institutions did not begin with a detailed road map. They began with questions that allowed them to shift perspectives and move things forward. A common defining moment among these institutions was when these leaders reframed their problems as opportunities, reflecting the mantra of Marcus Aurelius: ‘The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way’. They walked toward the challenge and found that in the obstacles lay the path forward. They changed the point of view—the barrier is the way.
These leaders were also conscientious about approaching questions of institutional transformation as questions of values. How do we serve all students? How do we approach disparities? Emerging from these studies was the importance of cultural framing, the vision around which people can rally and which motivates change and provides clarity. In each case the institution’s needs and the leader’s approach were symbiotic: leaders’ personal journeys informed their leadership style, which aligned with problems faced by their institutions.
We did not discover, however, a set of solutions to be universally replicated. Each institution has its own unique history and challenges and therefore its own unique solutions. We uncovered a process of igniting transformation that was common to all the institutions, and we believe this approach to problem-solving can be applied to various schools regardless of their disparate challenges.
Spark
Every leader interviewed faced some kind of major challenge when they joined their institution, whether it was a budget crisis, changing political agendas, or a mandate to better serve their students. Regardless of their specific issues, these leaders reframed their challenge as a spark of opportunity to advance their institution’s mission.
Sense-Making
To better understand issues facing their institutions, leaders listened to those around them. In some cases, that meant meeting with students, faculty, and staff to better understand their challenges; in other cases, it meant involving the community in creating a shared vision for their school. Successful leaders guided these discussions and helped define the focus.
New Vision
For some schools, the new vision that emerged represented a new direction for the institution, such as centering the student experience or using student data in innovative ways. For others, it was a matter of refining their vision to better align their services with students’ needs.
Team/Mandate
To realize their new shared vision, departments and teams were empowered with a high degree of autonomy and decision-making authority. Leaders limited their school’s focus to a few projects at a time, encouraging collaboration and delegating responsibilities across the institution.
Iteration
As employees witnessed successes across their organization, they were emboldened to take more risks toward improvement and to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, leading to even more successes and a sustainable culture of innovation.
THE POWER OF DESIGN AND VISUAL CASE STUDY
We used design methods, techniques, and habits of minds of designers because we wanted to demonstrate the value of design practice beyond the common design context of architecture or product design. In the creation of visual case studies, we used key design practices: user centered approach, problem framing, visualization, experimentation, and prototyping. We believe a designerly approach can reduce ambiguity when discussing large scale change projects.
The design problem facing higher education is the simultaneous action of making existing functions of an organization more effective while seeking disruptive innovation for long term success. A parallel exists between institutional effort (working on two opposing ideas simultaneously, i.e. focusing on both short- and long-term goals) and the kind of exploration that is central to design. Designers, and design theory and practice, can play a role similar to that played by social science researchers and social science over the past three decades—to design solutions to higher education problems: initiatives, curriculum, support services, learning space, and the design of the organization itself. In the postsecondary setting, where most employees who engage in change initiatives are non-designers, they can benefit from the application of design theory, concepts, and techniques to better understand problems and create solutions. Many of the institutions profiled found unity through a type of design: getting a plan and vision on paper. The agreements and conversations necessary to produce that document can be a key step in designing the future.
I hope these case studies will serve as a call to action. If we are to deliver on the promise of democracy in the United States and beyond, it will require deep and sustained transformation of the educational institutions in this country. Through the case studies that follow, we discover that clarity of purpose, for both public and private institutions, can be transformative, and institutions must transform themselves to serve all citizens. We also hope to inspire readers with the evidence that when the purpose becomes clear—although the path might be strenuous—and you build community around the challenge and work together to design new solutions, it is a joyous undertaking.