Observing Operations
Learning to See the Invisible
“I have found a way to see in the dark. Close your eyes.”
Learning to See in the Dark
When I was a kid, one of my favorite one-person games was to see how far I could get through an activity with my eyes closed. For example, where I grew up in Michigan, a good part of winter mornings were very dark. Light would break just as I was getting on the bus. On those kinds of mornings, I would leave the lights off, leave my eyes closed, and see how far I could get through the wake-up routine before having to open my eyes. This was usually a ton of fun until I knocked something over and woke up one of my older brothers who would deal out the requisite amount of verbal abuse before going back to sleep.
In playing this game I learned very quickly how important it was to pay attention to what you could feel. Was that my toothbrush or someone else’s? Was that the shampoo or conditioner? Was that the wool sweater or the cable sweater? After a while, I became fairly adept at feeling my way through the morning. A skill that I was pretty proud of… convinced that one day I would need these abilities when I joined Jack Ryan or James Bond in their conquests for good. Wandering around blindly greatly enhances one’s ability to “see” the same world in a different way. Learning to observe operations in a nursing education organization (NEO) requires just this kind of skill.
Learning to See Operations
For most faculty or academic administrators, the push and pull of the day to day environment generally takes up all the oxygen. Call it the urgency, or even the tyranny, of the “now”, we all know what it feels like. There is the stack of papers to be graded, the manuscript to be reviewed, the course content to be updated, the committee agenda to be written, and the colleague to be talked back from the cliff. To begin to intentionally work at seeing operations, we must learn to see our NEO’s in terms of the tangle of processes, structures, and systems that they are. But this is hard. You have to actually stop thinking about all the mission-related activities such as courses, grants, and committees and start focusing on what you, and others, can’t see… Yet. Operations are invisible until you learn to see them.
What’s a quick way into this zen-like state designed to awaken us to the world of NEO operations? Close your eyes! Bring to the foreground of your mind how your NEO actually functions. Push to the background all the mission-driven activity that usually fills your entire field of vision. Don’t ask what needs to be done, ask how are things done? Listen to what your staff, faculty, and students are saying. What frustrates them the most? What causes the most discouragement or anxiety? What steals time away from core mission activities like teaching, researching, and practicing? Be warned. Once you begin to stumble around in the dark like this, most of your colleagues are not going to understand because they cannot see operations either. They will wonder out loud why you are spending time on things that will not get you recognized in academia. If you need a pat answer to that question, just tell them that you love them too much to see their brilliance stymied by dysfunction. That will buy you enough time to return to your blinded state and stumble away.
Nice Word Picture, but What Do You Actually Do?
That is a fair question. If a NEO is just beginning to consciously think about operations for the first time, starting with a broad approach designed to improve awareness and provide future direction is recommended. Three basic tactics can be used like nesting Russian dolls: Surveys, interviews, and simple data analysis and visualization. The results from each tactic are used to increase the specificity of the tactic that follows. Surveys provide a sweep of the environment, a general sense of operational hot spots in the organization. Interviews focus in on the hot spots to understand with greater depth the human impact. Simple data analysis and visualization provide empirical handles to aid in decision-making, tracking, and evaluation. Let’s consider each one briefly.
Surveys. Set aside the issue of survey fatigue for a moment and consider the richness of data that can be captured from a regularly deployed, carefully thought-out, fully-analyzed, and change-driving survey. Gaining insight into operations, because they can be so hard to see in an academic organization, is helped by surveying those directly supporting operations (often staff) and those directly benefiting from operations (often students and faculty).
For example, consider an initial survey containing the following items:
Rank order by effectiveness the following processes (or departments) in our organization: Governance, Admissions, Enrollment, Hiring, Orientation & Onboarding, Faculty Development, etc.
What percentage of your time is spent on activities that are the consequence of poor processes or systems?
If you could decide on one major initiative to improve the operations of this organization, what would you select? (Note that a definition of “operations” will likely be needed)
These questions are designed to help the NEO begin to “see” its operations. This is not the same as measuring operational effectiveness but it provides a platform for beginning to work toward an environment in which that can happen. For the sake of discussion, let’s say that a theme coming out of the survey is dissatisfaction with the level of staff support for academic programs.
Interviews. To further understand the dissatisfaction with staff support for programs, small group or individual level interviews can be used to further drill down on the details. If enough time is taken to listen closely and ask good questions, themes and commonalities almost always emerge. This additional data will improve the organization’s own optics into its operations, provide new insights, and allow for the identification of potential champions for future change efforts.
In a series of small group interviews with faculty, you hear a repeated narrative about disproportionate growth begin to emerge: The student body is much larger than it was in the past but the number of staff available to support faculty has not increased for as long as anyone can remember. Like so many operational problems in NEOs, this narrative points to a potential problem with the allocation of resources.
Simple data analysis and visualization. To explore questions about the allocation of resources, as well as many other issues, there are a host of simple multi-use utility tools. A couple of favorites are the humble ratio and the trendline. These simple analysis and visualization tools help benchmark “then” against “now” and, if an industry is organized, “us” against “them”, in a standardized way. They are not difficult to produce or maintain and with a glance, you can learn a lot about how resources have been allocated.
For example, consider the ratio staff FTEs to student FTEs or to faculty FTEs (staff fte/student fte or staff fte/faculty fte). Most NEO’s will have enough data to produce this analysis on an annual basis for the past 5-10 years. What you may learn is that growth in the student body or faculty has far outpaced growth in staff support. This might be one reason faculty are so dissatisfied or student complaints are so high… and you now have empirics to build the case. What’s brilliant about ratios is that they are simple to tailor to unique situations and not difficult to explain to the average academician. With the pace of change that academia is undergoing since the pandemic, developing several key ratios and trendlines and tracking them consistently can give a NEO great insight into its decisions about resource allocation. Someday, it would be wonderful to see publicly-funded NEO’s regularly benchmarking their ratios against each other.
Close Your Eyes
If operational excellence is to be achieved by a NEO, it must begin by intentionally developing a self-awareness of the processes, systems, and structures that underpin its missions. Surveys, interviews, and ratios are low-cost, high-reliability methods that will go a long way in building self-awareness. Learning to see your NEO in a new way, especially for faculty and some administrators can be a significant challenge. However, if small practical steps are taken such as the ones recommended here, you can be quickly on your way to developing an appreciation for what may be the most important part of your organization, its operations. All that you need to do to get started is close your eyes to the piles of mission-focused activities stacked up around you and learn to “see” your organization in a new way. If you can learn to maximize those moments, when you open your eyes you just may find that those piles are a bit smaller.
