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Anticipate and Practice the Future: Data Gathering and Scenario Building
The future is hard to anticipate, which is why it is vital that we try. A powerful way for academic leaders to clarify their thinking and to test assumptions is to develop their own scenarios or stories about how specific leadership choices might play out over time. Scenario building has been used in industry for a long time – a way to “rehearse the future” and anticipate the impact of a host of forces. There's plenty of advice out there on how to build scenarios if you want a structured method (e.g., de Geus, 1991; Ratcliffe, 2000; Schwartz, 1991; van der Heijden, 2005). Strategic planners sometimes approach the process as though a science, but it can also be a more informal and playful process of looking ahead (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008). If you craft alternative stories for yourself about possible futures based on different choices and assumptions, your sagas may identify interesting plot twists, winners, and losers – things you'd want to know before facing them in real time.
Take Nancy Turner's case. Her colleagues suggested a number of different paths. She might pick a few and construct alternative scenarios about each. Taking on the role of a novelist or playwright, she could, for example, envision one story where she started with creating a vision, and another where she started by getting the right team in place. Playing each out, she might find that one seems much more promising, that her two paths converge eventually, or that she can see ways to do both at the same time. In any event, the process of projecting will help her to think and to communicate more clearly about possible futures for her college. She will be better able to predict and to prepare for the twists and turns of different paths going forward because it will be easier to recognize when the story is or is not going as anticipated. She will also lessen the risk of losing her way – or her footing – in the face of unanticipated challenges.
Many institutions turned to scenario planning as a way to chart an uncertain future as they struggled to make plans for Fall 2020 in the midst of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Harvard announced in June that most undergraduate instruction in the Fall would be online, but sketched three possible “paths” for the presence of students on campus: low‐density with very few undergraduates on campus, medium‐density with 30 to 40 percent, and high‐density where everyone would be invited back. The university then worked to tease out the implications of each scenario before making a final decision.
Step Outside Your Comfort Zone and Break Frame
Albert Szent‐Gyorgyi, the Hungarian‐born, American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937, got it right when he noted, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought” (Good, 1962, p. 15). Reframing is a step on the road to important discoveries for academic leaders. Expanding one's frame of reference requires knowledge about alternative perspectives, appreciation for their potential contribution, and opportunities to practice looking at situations through multiple lenses. It also takes personal courage to break frame – to step out of one's comfort zone and away from the crowd in seeking new options, proposing new explanations, or testing alternative responses. Frame‐breaking can move mountains, and at times leadership requires just that. Consider a news story about a home intrusion that flashed across the wires (Klein, 2007).
Imagine that you are with a group of friends enjoying dinner on the patio of a home. As you are finishing the jumbo shrimp and enjoying an excellent bottle of French wine, an armed, hooded intruder suddenly appears and points a gun at the head of a young female guest. “Give me your money,” he says, “or I'll start shooting.” If you're at that table, what do you do? Quietly hand over your wallet? Look for some way to resist? Something else?
You could try to break frame. That is exactly what one of the guests did when this happened on a warm July evening. As everyone around her froze, Cristina “Cha Cha” Rowan spoke up. “We were just finishing dinner,” she blurted out. “Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?”
The young intruder hesitated for a moment then grabbed the glass, took a sip of the Chateau Malescot St‐Exupéry, and said, “Damn, that's good.”
The father of the young woman being held at gunpoint encouraged the intruder to finish the whole glass, and Rowan offered him the bottle. The robber, with his hood down now, took another sip and then a piece of food from the table. He put his gun away in the pocket of his sweatpants.
“I may have come to the wrong house,” the intruder said before apologizing and backing away, carrying only the glass of wine.
“I was definitely expecting there would be some kind of casualty,” said the young girl's father. “He was very aggressive at first. Then it miraculously just changed. His whole emotional tone turned.”
In one stroke, Cha Cha Rowan broke frame, transforming the situation for herself and others from “We might all be killed” to “Let's offer our guest some wine.” Pretty dramatic. Sure. But there's learning here for us all. Sometimes we just need a new perspective – and an opportunity to step back, take stock, and know that we have options. With calm and renewed confidence, we may find a route that gets us to a better place than we were before. An occasional skeptic has asked if the story is really true. The news accounts and police reports say yes; but even if apocryphal, this tale still makes its point. When you see what everyone else sees but think differently about it, you're on the path to finding more interesting possibilities and becoming a better, more creative leader.
Summary
Sensemaking is at the heart of leadership, and it is particularly important in the complex and confusing world of higher education. It is a personal, interpretive, action‐oriented process involving three basic steps: noticing things, interpreting them, and deciding what to do about them. Intuitively and automatically, we do this by trying to match current information and circumstances to learned patterns or frames. Often, that process works well enough – our take on the situation tells us what to do, and we get results that are close enough to what we hoped for. But sometimes, we get it wrong – we overlook important information and miss what's really happening, misinterpret the data we have, or fail to see our options, and we go down a path to failure. When the world doesn't quite make sense and our actions keep producing the wrong results, it is time to reframe: to examine the world from alternative perspectives, seeking new ways to understand and new strategies to move ahead.
3 Knowing What You're Doing: Learning, Authenticity, and Theories for Action
Sarah didn't want to be department chair, but she reluctantly agreed to take the job. None of her colleagues wanted it, and “someone had to do it.” Now she wondered if she had made a mistake. A few of the “dinosaurs” – all male and all more senior than Sarah – seemed resistant to the idea that a younger woman was their “boss.” Sarah had tried to be cordial and supportive with everyone, but now she had to face the task she dreaded most: annual performance reviews. She stared glumly at one folder in particular: the performance materials for Professor George Hamden, a senior member of the department who held a distinguished endowed chair.
George was a charming curmudgeon – witty, articulate, opinionated, and quick to criticize anything he didn't like. Loved by some, feared by others, he regularly undermined Sarah in department meetings with his entertaining but acerbic comments on almost any new idea or initiative that she brought to the floor. But what troubled her now was Hamden's deteriorating performance. “The truth is,” Sarah thought to herself, “he's been going downhill the last few years. His last publication was five years ago, and it wasn't very good. He claims he's got great work in progress, but where's the evidence? His teaching evaluations are down, and students are complaining that sometimes he doesn't even show up to class.”
Sarah
