Lowering the Water
If you’ve ever gotten to know a Lean expert in a professional setting, you’ll know that they have an arsenal of word pictures connected to their key principles. But wait! You probably haven’t gotten to know a Lean expert in a professional setting because you’re an academic. Finding a Lean expert in higher ed is almost as rare as an error in a six sigma environment! Okay, that was a nerdy joke. One of the reasons, however, we see so few quality improvement professionals in academia is because we tend to be dismissive of “business practices” that we believe were designed to serve profit margins and not people. That misconception makes us recoil at Lean jargon, improvement techniques, and quality philosophy. Whisper the word “customer”, a guiding concept in Lean, and many of us in academia break out in a rash. As a result, we miss out on a lot of highly relevant ideas and practices for improving our work.
I have been fortunate to have had the privilege of working with a very talented performance improvement consultant in academia. She and her colleagues taught me to see our work in academia through new eyes. Most importantly, I came to understand that those suspect business practices and Japanese words were first and foremost about respecting people. Sure, they led to good business, but that was in many ways consequent to a people-centered approach to productivity. So, what does it look like to practice Lean (or other improvement frameworks) in an academic setting? That brings us back to word pictures. One of my favorite improvement concepts is often referred to as lowering the water.
Lowering the Water
Imagine a lake or river on which boats happily float along. The water level is high enough to keep the boats safely above any rocks or debris on the bottom of the river. What happens when the water level is lowered? Rocks and debris are exposed and boats are no longer able to easily and safely float along. In manufacturing, the water is often compared to inventory. Excess inventory hides the inefficiencies, errors, and wastes that are occurring because… “Hey, all of our customers have all the widgets they want, right?”
Once the inventory is drawn down, however, and the buffer of extra widgets is removed, all the things keeping the manufacturer from being more effective and efficient are exposed. Sailing gets hard and risky - that’s the bad news. In quality and improvement thinking, however, problems are opportunities - that’s the good news. Once the rocks and debris are exposed, we can see them and begin working to remove or reduce them. So, how do we translate that into our academic setting? “Water” is really any buffer that obscures our abilities to see our problems and act on them. As Markovitz points out, in an office setting, time is one of the greatest sources of buffer. Is a promotion and tenure review process falling apart? No problem, we work evenings, weekends, and schedule more meetings to hold it together. The availability of time produced by the absence of boundaries allows us to obscure our inefficiency and ineffectiveness by digging deeper into our buffer. As unpleasant as that may sound, if we are honest, it is the norm in most academic settings.
The Day the Plug Was Pulled
Because we don’t exercise many Lean or other improvement concepts in academia, it is rare that we actually see the water lowered and our problems laid bare. But, our moment has come. In the last several months the pandemic has pulled the plug on our industry and a significant amount of resources have rapidly drained out. Now is the moment we are seeing some of our gnarliest problems exposed. None of these problems are necessarily new. They have been there all along but the resources were such that we could always say, “Hey, we’re still graduating students, right?”
What kind of problems are we talking about? Let’s name a few.
Program and curricular change processes that take, at a minimum, months.
Coherent pedagogical models that either don’t exist or don’t articulate well with contemporary digital norms.
Backend software for operational activities (e.g. student admission and registration, student advising, human resources, etc.) that are not adaptable or integrated.
Faculty contracting models that have been “Frankenstein-ed” year after year and are no longer optimized for the future, let alone the present.
Disaster planning and crisis response plans that are incomplete and/or insufficient.
In a previous article, I’ve shared some immediate steps that can be taken to make the most out of this “lowered water” situation. But stepping back, there are larger proactive steps we in higher ed need to consider. Perhaps foremost is our need to go all-in with the adoption of improvement professionals into our industry. More than ever, we need those who are trained in the science and art of organizational change and improvement to teach us and guide us in the process of clearing out our waterways. As we begin rebuilding budgets and personnel plans, let’s plan accordingly.
A final word: There will be those who enshrine the rocks and debris, calling them diamonds and gold, denying that they are obstructions to higher ed achieving its mission. Perhaps with the water at a historic low, we can abandon this psuedo-alchemy and invite to our sides a cadre of helpers, including quality and improvement professionals, to help us clear the debris.
