Their ideas about how to lead are based on implicit and often deeply buried belief systems about what's important and how things work. Those beliefs vary, as we see in the different scenarios offered to Turner.
A key challenge for Turner and any academic leader is how to make accurate sense of complex circumstances, recognize available choices, choose the best path forward, and convey all that to others in a compelling manner. Whether we call this executive wisdom, sound judgment, or reflective practice (Schön, 1983), the lesson is clear. Effectiveness requires untangling the conundrums of the academy and the realities of your current situation, and translating both into sensible actions for self and others. Like all leaders, Turner needs to discern if she is seeing the right picture or if she has tuned in to the wrong channel. This is not always as easy as one would wish.
Cluelessness is a perennial risk, even for very smart people. Sometimes, the information that leaders need is hard to get. Other times, they ignore or misinterpret data right before their eyes. A look at the basics of sensemaking offers insights into why that is so.
Sensemaking involves three basic steps: notice something, decide what to make of it, and determine what to do about it. Humans are pretty good at all three, but they do them so automatically that they tend to overlook three important – and limiting – features of the process.
1 Sensemaking is incomplete and personal. Humans can attend to only a portion of the information available to them. Individuals’ values, education, past experiences, cognitive capacities, and developmental limitations influence what they see. Leaders register some things, ignore others, and draw conclusions – quickly and often tacitly. For that reason, the everyday theories that higher education administrators construct feel so obvious and real to them that they are understood more as Truth and the way the world really is than as the individual creations and interpretations that they are. The five college presidents advising Turner are cases in point. The tacit nature of the human sensemaking process can blind academic leaders to available alternatives and to gaps and biases in their framing (Argyris, 1982). It also leaves them seeing little reason to question their interpretations or retrace any of their steps from data selection through action.
2 Sensemaking is interpretive. When thrown into life's ongoing stream of experiences, people create explanations of what things mean – and often assume that others either see things the same way or are wrong if they don't. Each of the presidents advising Turner offered different advice, and each felt confident that his or her perspective was right.
3 Sensemaking is action‐oriented. People's personal interpretations contain implicit prescriptions for what they and others should do. If you conclude, for example, that your unit's budget problems result from overspending, then you'll cut expenses. If you see the problem as inadequate allocations from central administration, then you might lobby for more. If you bemoan inattention to revenue generation, you'll turn to new program development. If it's embezzlement, a call to the police is in order. Think about Nancy Turner. If she accepts that strong support from faculty is key to her success, then she will start building those relationships. If she concludes that the campus expects her to lead off with a compelling vision, she'll get to work on the big picture. You can see the ease and the potential complications in all this. Academic leaders anchor around their take on a situation and they're off and running before they're sure what's important, what they don't yet know, and where they should be heading.
Sensemaking is a personal search for meaning, governed by the tacit criterion of plausibility rather than accuracy. “We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out,” concludes eminent psychologist William James (Richardson, 2006, p. 5). Finding a “good enough” explanation of the situation will stop our search for other alternatives, even early in the hunt. We need not find the truth or the best of all possible solutions. We just want something that's good enough by our tacit standards to let us move forward and get things done. And we're rarely aware that this is what we are doing.
What's at stake is illustrated in a story from the work of Jerome Groopman on how doctors think (Groopman, 2000, 2007). Groopman tells about a patient he calls Ann Dodge. At age 20, Ann developed a serious eating problem – every meal produced pain, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Over time, she saw some 30 doctors in a variety of specialties, and each confirmed the initial diagnosis. Ann had a psychiatric condition, anorexia nervosa with bulimia. The problem was in her mind, the doctors concluded, but still very dangerous and potentially deadly. Doctors prescribed a series of treatments, including diet, drugs, and talk therapy. Her doctor told her to consume 3,000 calories a day, mostly in easily digested carbohydrates like pasta. Over 15 years, she kept getting worse. In 2004, Ann was hospitalized four times in a mental health facility in hopes that close supervision of her food intake might enable her to gain weight. Nothing worked.
Finally, at her boyfriend's insistence, Ann traveled to Boston to see a highly recommended gastroenterologist, Dr. Myron Falchuk. Ann was reluctant, and her primary care doctor advised that the trip was unnecessary since her problem was so well understood. But Ann went anyway. Falchuk had reviewed Ann's records and knew what all the doctors had concluded. But he put the information aside – literally pushing the tall stack of folders and reports to the far side on his desk – and asked Ann to tell him her whole story again. As she did, Falchuk listened with a fresh mind and felt the story didn't quite add up. In particular, he wondered why Ann wasn't gaining weight if, as she insisted, she really was consuming as much as 3,000 calories a day. Well, he wondered, what if she couldn't digest what she was eating? He did more tests, and eventually concluded that Ann suffered from celiac disease – an intolerance of the gluten commonly found in grains like wheat, rye, and barley. Ann Dodge was being poisoned by the pasta diet her physicians had prescribed to save her. As soon as she shifted to a gluten‐free diet, she began to gain weight. In Ann's view, Dr. Falchuk was a miracle worker. From our perspective, Falchuk illustrates the power and importance of reframing in helping transcend the limits of – and our over confidence in – our own sensemaking.
Here's the point. When a doctor encounters a new patient, he or she tries to frame the patient by matching symptoms and selected pieces of information to patterns that the doctor has learned through experience and training. The process is quick and automatic: it begins with the first look at the patient when the physician enters the examining room. Doctors frame patients all the time.
Expert clinicians can often determine what's going on with a patient in 20 seconds. It's simple pattern recognition, honed by training and experience. But sometimes they get it wrong. One source of error is anchoring: doctors can lock onto the first answer that seems right – or what trusted others are tacitly encouraging them to see. “Your mind plays tricks on you,” says Groopman, “because you see only the landmarks you expect to see and neglect those that should tell you that in fact you're still at sea” (2007, p. 65). Another source of distortion is a doctor's own needs and feelings. Operating under time pressure and wanting to be helpful, physicians want to arrive at a diagnosis and prescription as quickly as possible. They interpret any new data in the light of their current conclusion, and often cling to their diagnosis in the face of disconfirming evidence. Kahneman calls this the illusion of validity: the common and unjustified sense of confidence that people have in their own judgments (Kahneman & Klein, 2009). What is true for physicians is also true for academic administrators. Notice how readily Nancy Turner's colleagues offered her advice. They wanted to help. She expected nothing less.
Daily life for academic leaders presents them with a continuous stream of challenges and opportunities that are even more complex and ambiguous than those facing physicians. They are also more vulnerable to errors because they operate in environments that are poorly designed for learning about the quality of their judgment. Successful leaders develop a kind of skilled intuition that allows them to act quickly and wisely. Kahneman and Klein (2009) argue that this works best in “high‐validity” environments where cause and effect are consistently and reliably connected, which is often not the case in the ambiguous world of higher education. The same comment by a dean at one faculty meeting, for example, may elicit a completely
