The Coyote Effect

Wile E. Coyote (c) Warner Bros.

When the Coyote makes his mistake and runs over the edge of the cliff, he hangs there for a little bit.
We all know he's going down. He know's he's going down. It just plays it for laughs for a few seconds and gravity takes hold.

Organisations do this too. They run off a cliff, into a place where the rationale that kept them up is gone. They hover their, legs kicking the air for while, sometimes years, until down they go, ACME rocket boosters and all. Sometimes they see it coming and slip in a double take. Sometimes not.

Know any victims of the Coyote effect?

It's really hard to tell. Unlike Wile E Coyote, the bigger something is, the longer it will hang in mid air before crashing. There's too much mass and inertia. Too many people are involved in the little details, no one can see that the ground isn't there any more. Those that can, probably don't think it's their job to tell anyone. Who would listen anyway?

In the private sector, economics enforces gravity. If customers stop coming, the balance sheet goes bad, and one fine day the boss finds he can't make payroll next week. Down she goes, without too much delay.

Sometimes, even in the private sector an organisation is so big it distorts reality around it, and can draw in other resources. Because no one really believes something so big can be broken, or can contemplate a world without it, or they believe that it's just a temporary problem, it gets bailed out by someone. This happens to banks a lot these days.

In the state funded sector, it takes a long time for the Coyote effect to kick in, Decades, perhaps centuries. For example, in Ireland, we still have an office of the Chief Herald*. Killing state supported enterprises is politically difficult. No one wants to shoot the dog. Easier to keep feeding it taxpayers money and let the next government sort it out.

Universities are particularly prone to the Coyote effect. The combination of state supports (especially in Europe), their hold on the public imagination, and their special relationship with time mean they can float in this air for a century after running off the edge of their reason for being.
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Universities haven't leapt off that edge yet, but the road is winding, and there's a lot of ACME equipment strapped on just now. But if they do go over the edge, the Coyote effect means it will be some time before anyone notices. A generation at least, perhaps two. But sometimes, for the lucky, the Coyote effect is no bad thing. It can carry you over a leap of faith. By time we all realise it, the other side of the canyon might be in reach. Or indeed, they may have grown wings.

Related Posts
University Time

Note
* I know virtually nothing about this office. It may, for all I know, do something extremely important, and contribute substantially to the state coffers. I cite it as an evocative per example only, and mean it's staff no offence.

The Natives have landed

This is a momentous month in Tertiary education, but it will be another five years before people notice exactly how, and what it means.
This month, in campuses all over the world, the first cohort of true digital natives are arriving, children who never lived in a world without web. The web became a publicly available service on August 6th 1991, and this is the first year where a substantial proportion of the new cohort were born after that date. They were four when eBay and Amazon was born, nine when the dotcom boom crashed, and ten when Wikipedia was born. When they turned to adolescence, Facebook and Bebo were waiting for them.
They are the first generation who always went online first when looking for information. Facts, for them, are things to be retrieved in seconds, not memorized or held in a revered old head. The limits of geography are to them a fading anachronism of the old days, slain by Ryanair and Skype. Their social networks connect them into an extended collective mind. New ideas flash across it, flower and die in hours. It's long term implications are unknown.
Much has been written about this generation web, generally by older academics, who don't hold with That Sort Of Thing, (whatever it is this year) or starry eyed prophets who see revolution on the wires, any minute now. Both will be shown to be wrong as this new generation transition to adulthood and find their own voices. They will be a generation like no other before them. Handle with care, and expect to be surprised.

Old Media Never Dies

"The Strange Survival of Ink" The Economist, June 10th 2010

The Economist notes that the death of newspapers, so recently foretold, has not come to pass. A little while back, in an interesting survey on the state of Television, we learned  that it's doing just fine too.

Champions of the new media might think this impossible, a dead cat bounce, the coyote hovering in mid air for a doubletake before plunging to doom.. They forget that old media never dies, it just fades away. In the age of the plasma screen, cinemas still make steady money. In the age of iTunes, CD shops still struggle on.. Radio, the original broadcast media, still commands vast audiences, and advertising revenue.

At first glance, all of these old media should have been swept away by the New New Thing. That they remain casts doubt on similar portents of doom for Education. But look in detail and you can find a subtle logic for the persistence of old media. Newspapers cover local news nobody (much) blogs about. Television controls broadcast access to live sport, and everybody wants to watch the world cup final. Radio is easy, pattering on in the background, creating the illusion of company for solitary drivers and workers.

There is also a survival bias. We forget old media that has lost the battle. Newsreels are the only example that come to mind, cinema shorts, and Radio Dramas, slain by television. I'm too young to remember others. We also forget that the media that survive evolve. The Sun newspaper is a very different beast from it's forebears in the 17th century.

Universities too can evolve, at least those that survive. Just like TV and newspapers, they can find niches in the new age and grow into them, as Television found salvation in live broadcast sport. The danger is time. Other media operated in the private sector. The transition for newspapers will last perhaps a decade, with titles that don't get it going under. Universities, in Ireland at least, don't go bust. As essentially public sector organisations, they have a deep insurance policy, and a capacity to ignore shifting realities. Sometimes this is a strength, protecting them from the need to chase fads. But sometimes, it is a deadly weakness.

Don't do Strategic planning on tactical timescales

Most Universities conduct strategic plans with a five year time horizon. This is too short. Most degrees take three or four years (allowing for repeats, long medical degrees, interminable PhDs etc) so five years is a little bit longer than one 'product cycle'. A car takes, perhaps, a few weeks at most including components. Could you imagine Ford or Toyota having a 3 month strategic planning horizon? No. It would be ridiculous. You would argue that the analogy is false, that what Universities produce is much less tangible, and more embedded in society than a mere car. Correct. So our planning needs to be even longer term.

As I have argued in previous posts, the time steps in education are long. A University reputation takes decades to built or destroy - witness the long march of Ireland's newer universities, DCU and UL to credibility, and the mixed outcomes of the UK former polytechnics. A good research department takes years to mature, building the capacity and credibility to attract lead researchers and fat grants. Technological shifts are, in practice, marginal over 5 years. Public policy fashions take that long to go from the catwalks of the OECD to the statute books of the Dail.

Strategic planning is about vision, it's about where you want to be in the long term. It needs to encompass an idea of where you want to be in the long term. That means hard thinking about the long term, and where you want to be, not just making a to do list for staying put, wrapping in the pseudo corporate language of the day.

The Collapse of Universities? Not so fast.

"The Collapse of Complex Business Models" Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com Accessed April 12th 2010

Much talk on the web about Clay Shirky's recent blog post. Shirky draws on Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies to make inferences for complex business models. The idea goes that societies get more and more complex, and the benefit of each added complexity reduces until eventually a break point is reached. The layers of complexity make the society inflexible and incapable of change, so when confronted with external strains, it collapses. I haven't read Tainter's work, but Shirky, as ever, provides a sharp précis, and draws inferences for the future of conventional, complex, media organisations. 

This was widely praised and argued across the web. While Harold Jarche talks about the differences between 'Complex' and 'Complicated' , Christopher Sessums draws the inference over into the educational space, moving on to argue that

"The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. "

Steady on there.

While to many commentators working within the walls of a University, it may seem that the University, their University, is in fact a Complex Society, in the same sense as Ancient Rome, Maya, etc. and is thus doomed.

This is not the case. Universities are closer or organisms in an ecosystem than a self contained and isolated society. An organisation, or an organism exists in an ecosystem, as one of many. A society, almost by definition, occupies an entire ecosystem, and has limited interaction, if any, with other societies. Most of the collapsed societies on History (and I think of those listed in Jared Diamond's work 'Collapse') existed in near isolation.

As organisms in a system, universities evolve. They eat up smaller institutions to dominate a niche, or split of side campuses to enter new spaces. They relentlessly share their DNA, as Universities heads look over their shoulders and shamelessly copy the innovations of others. Universities fight for resources, funding, students among themselves, where a Society usually co-opts all of the resources in it's zone of control and operates without competitive challenge.

Make no mistake, Universities are dinosaurs. They can crush you, outrun you and outbreed you. They dominate their ecosystem to the exclusions of all others, existing in astonishing diversity, and repeatedly adapting to environmental change. What it took to get rid of the dinosaurs wiped out almost everything else as well. The same is true here. If Universities become non viable institutions, then their collapse will be the least of our worries.

Universities are not going to go gently into the night. They won't wave their hands in the air, cry that it's all to complicated (or was it complex?) and shut their doors. Some will no doubt go under, but most will adapt and survive, ruthlessly ripping out the DNA from models that work and re-engineering themselves for Internet Age. They will do it in University Time, not Internet time, but they have enough inertia for that not to matter. In fact, a slower response to change will insulate them from short timescale fads (Would you wish you had bet the farm on CD-ROMS? WAP?). 

It may not seem so from this blog, but overall I'm bullish about the likelihood of Universities surviving the next century. So long as there is a need for people to be educated to a high level, beyond what can be learned in a self directed way, Universities will be doing that business.

University Time

"Universities Never Change!" denounce the critics. It it true? If so, is it bad? We can't think about the future of Universities without thinking about how quickly they change over time, and what controls that process.

Every organisation has its rhythms. Prior to working in a University, I worked in the research arm of a large ministry. It had clear rhythms. The daily tap tap of the news cycle, which may or may not put your project on the front page, or draw on a dreaded oral Parliamentary Question. There was a quarterly reporting cycle, an annual drumbeat of budget bids, and the long bass beat of the election cycle. In the background was the slow, almost unheard syncopated beat of the economic cycle. I've worked in the private sector too. There the beat was strong and quarterly, like a galley drum, with a longer drone of a product lifecycle, and, again, the strange irregular whalesong of the economy.

When I started working in a university, I listened hard, but I couldn't hear the beat. It took a year to realise that the fast rhythm was a term, the main beat took a full year, and main bass rhythm was the term of office of a Professor or President - decadal and generational.

An organisation can only dance as fast as it's rhythms. The Private sector ("Short sighted! Only focused on the quarterly results!") generally dances fast. Household names come and go in a few years. Government is a bit slower ("Short sighted! Only focused on the next election") but governments rise and fall as politicians and policies fall in and out of fashion.

Universities dance too, but to a slow rhythm. Short term factors like news cycles and product cycles are simply irrelevant to them. Changes of government are an annoyance - by the time the incoming Minister has mastered his brief and brought reform legislation to the floor and had it implemented, she's the outgoing Minister. The economic cycle is heard, but it's effect is marginal - a tenured academic is as insulated from it as a Benedictine monk. In a downturn, while funding is tight, demand for degrees goes up. Except in extreme circumstances, Universities do not go bust.

The time scale is also keyed to what the University makes - graduates. A newly minted degree will be in use, if only as a foundation stone of the resume, long after the graduation suit no longer fits and the graduates starter home is sold on. Importantly, it will still be in their memory when their own children are decided if, and where to attend University. Universities are one of the few organisations whose 'product' holds value and influence for so long.

Internal change in Universities is generational too. A new junior lecturer comes in, hot with new ideas. Slowly they rise the ranks, implementing some while losing enthusiasm for others. Somewhere in their late forties, as new blood comes in from below, departmental politics obliges them to become conservatives to keep the up and comings in their place. By the time the pension comes into reach, some of them would lecture in Latin if they thought could get away with it. Over the generation change does occur. The radical ideas of 2010 become the Orthodoxies of 2050.

If we want to understand how Universities will change over the 21st century, we have to accept that it will be slowly. Learning technologists, often early adaptors where 18 months old ideas are dead and buried often have trouble seeing and working with this. Barring a 'black swan' event that upsets that patterns (and the advent of the internet is not, I think, that event) Universities will change no faster than this over the next century - perhaps even slower as retirement ages rise over the century.

This is not such a bad thing. In a world of short term institutions, there is advantage on taking a longer view. Immune to short term fad ("I can't get the Head of Department on Twitter!) the University acts as a sort of weighted average of the thinking of the last 30 years. In many ways, it's a clearer indicator of what's going on in the world than the fast changing private sector - just the same as a long term average of a commodity price is much more instructive about the fundamentals of that commodity than yesterdays spot closing.

The risk is, of course, in those "Black swan" events. The same features which protect Universities from economic cycles fashions and fads and help them create a long lived brand make them as blind to rapid change as we are to the flap of a wasps wings. Fast paradigm shifts, whether out of the blue, or as sudden tipping points in previously gradual processes present a real threat to the core operating model of the University moving forward.

I could tell you what I think those will be, but you wouldn't believe me.