Use: Whether the new initiative is intended for your organization, vendors, suppliers, partners, or customers, it must be simple and easy. Usability drives adoptability; therefore, it pays to keep things simple. Don’t make the mistake of confusing complexity with sophistication.
6. Risks: Nothing is without risk, and when you think something is, that’s when you’re most likely to end up in trouble. All initiatives should include detailed risk-management provisions that contain sound contingency and exit planning.
7. Measurement: Any change initiative should be based upon solid business logic that drives corresponding financial engineering and modeling. Be careful of high-level, pie-in-the-sky projections. The change being adopted must be measurable. Deliverables, benchmarks, deadlines, and success metrics must be incorporated into the plan.
8. The Project: Many companies treat change as some ethereal form of management hocus pocus that will occur by osmosis. A change initiative must be treated as a project. It must be detailed and deliverable on a schedule. It must have a beginning, middle, and end.
9. Accountability: Any new initiative should contain accountability provisions. Every task should be assigned and managed according to a plan and in the light of day.
10. Actionability: A successful initiative cannot remain in a strategic planning state. It must be actionable through focused tactical implementation. If the change being contemplated is good enough to get through the other nine steps, then it’s good enough to execute.
The University of British Columbia (September 2014).
1.5 AUDIENCE
This guidebook is geared toward campus participants. These people include the following groups:
• students: undergraduate and graduate;
• faculty members: assistant, associate, and full professors, as well as instructors, lecturers, adjuncts, post-doctoral researchers, research scientists, and related support staff;
• academic leaders: department chairs, center directors, deans, provosts, vice presidents of research, presidents, and others who shape academic life; and
• administrators: program directors, student advisors, development officers, public relations directors, physical plant managers, accounting staff, government relations specialists, and student service providers.
Working to change your campus’s research could invigorate academic life, raise the reputation of your university, and increase the benefits for your city, state, or region, or even produce global benefits. Improving academic research is a reasonable goal because you can easily find partners among the well-defined community that is your campus. While research is the focus of this guidebook, changes to teaching, mentorship, and service will also be likely outcomes. In fact, since these components of campus life are richly interwoven, your progress on any path is likely to produce multiple advances.
Substantial and sustained changes will also require you to engage with off-campus business leaders and professionals, as well as government policymakers and agency staffers, all of whom hire students and fund research. Durable changes will also require you to engage with professional societies, journal and book publishers, conference organizers, and reporters. Finally, you’ll want to seek out senior colleagues who can push for changes in government-funding agencies and philanthropic foundations, and business leaders. This guidebook describes collaborations that will help produce substantial and sustained campus changes.
Yale University (April 2011).
1.6 MESSAGING
I’ve spoken about these issues at more than 40 events, eliciting enough interest to get invited back and speak to other groups, but also generating pushback from two directions. About 10–20% of my audiences reject the premise that research should produce societal change. This cohort clings to the traditional belief that academic ivory towers are still the top place to work. They want to write theoretical papers and do laboratory studies, with little concern for impact and little interest in teaming up with business, government, and NGOs. I doubt this guidebook will change their minds.
Pushback also came from another 10–20% of my audiences who support these ideas. They felt that they were doing fine already in pursuing the Twin-Win goals of published papers and validated solutions. However, some of these sympathetic supporters still need to learn techniques for choosing problems, forming teams, and promoting their work. This guidebook could help these researchers find the right partners and adapt their strategies.
The remaining 60–80% consist of those who haven’t thought much about these issues. For this cohort, I propose the following message.
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