I don’t know the rules about blogs….but I’m going to use it for ‘chunks’…pieces of things that I read that resonate and hopefully folks interested in the same ideas will also think about. At the AASHE conference I went to a great workshop by Leith Sharp (formerly of Harvard) and Julie Newman (Yale)
This is cut directly from the following http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol5iss1/editorial.sharp-print.html by Leith Sharp. What wonderful insight….
“Perhaps the most important legacy of the movement to date is the discovery that universities (and most large organizations) operate with a substantial degree of unconscious habit and irrationality and that very few people, at even the most senior levels, actually know how they truly function. This is in part the result of the compartmentalization inherent to large hierarchical organizations. The separation of different disciplines, arenas of responsibility, and tiers of management generally prevent people from understanding the broader context or the overall systems that operate across the institution. The fact that few individuals understand the broader institutional context, its systems and behaviors, has dire consequences for our efforts to navigate toward sustainability. This is because the demands of sustainability are system-wide and involve changing organizational culture, behaviors and the entire institutional context.
Despite our best efforts, experience shows us that planning and decision making are not always rational, and policy implementation does not necessarily follow a logically cohesive pattern that is consistent over time. Moreover, at times the components of the institution do not behave or interact in a predictable or even understandable manner. Compartmentalization, territorialism, complexity, risk aversion, and hidden drivers, to name just a few such dynamics, sometimes conspire to undermine even the most sensible ideas. Despite this, the institution depends upon its ability to appear more rational and self-aware than it sometimes is. I believe that there is a deep institutional culture of denial at play to sustain a myth of rationality, which in turn prevents us from engaging in the depth of institutional analysis necessary for navigating toward sustainability.
So far, the campus sustainability movement has been catering to the ideal of organizational rationality, writing up sustainability master plans, establishing new goals and indicators, adopting annual environmental reporting requirements, and so forth, as if there is a purely rational, conscious organization to take them up. Meanwhile, no attention is being directed toward the more complex, irrational, and unconscious life of the institution, allowing it to lurk under the surface as an ever-present threat to progress. To be clear, I am not advocating that rational planning and management processes do not have a critical role to play, just that they must be supplemented with a more sophisticated approach that works to diagnose and reform the very nature of our organizations. This effort must address everything from governance structures and decision-making processes, change management, finance and accounting practices, hidden institutional drivers and compartmentalization, engagement, capacity building, systems thinking and leadership.
New governance models and decision-making processes must be created to enable effective interdepartmental, interdisciplinary, and multitier engagement in the campus sustainability enterprise. At the executive level of our institutions we need a distributed model of ownership, accountability, and control that would bring vice presidents of finance, human resources, facilities, development, government and community relations, academics, and other departments into a shared state of responsibility and collaboration. Currently, universities do not do well with interdepartmental and interdisciplinary decision-making processes because, for one thing, their success depends upon transcending institutionalized habits of territorialism involving powerful personalities and significant complexity. Instead of addressing these challenges we commonly see our organizations structure the responsibility and leadership for sustainability under just one group or department. In the long term this can create a variety of undesirable tensions and issues resulting from a lack of effective coordination and integration. Developing new governance structures and decision-making processes that distribute and coordinate ownership and responsibility for the campus sustainability agenda requires the leadership of university presidents and other senior executives.
One way our educational institutions can greatly advance their campus sustainability efforts is to better comprehend the emerging role of the campus sustainability professional. The work of enabling the entire university to achieve continuous progress toward sustainability is a professional function not yet well understood. The typical university today might consider employing just one person to coordinate, communicate, and project manage sustainability across the entire campus, generally someone with no change-management skills, structured to report up through the facilities department. Despite their best efforts, passion, and commitment, most of these professionals are quickly overburdened and are without the skills, structure, or staffing level to achieve the necessary broad-reaching institutional engagement and transformation. What we are just starting to realize is that our organizations need to make a sizable staffing investment in a change-management function to drive organization-wide progress toward sustainability. The organizations that make this investment are able to achieve remarkable efficiencies and improvements right across the campus, producing financial and organizational returns that exceed the required investment. Without properly staffing and structuring this important change-management function, even the most progressive universities may become bogged down in a variety of destabilizing factors—political, financial, human resource, technological, or otherwise.
What does this sustainability change-management function look like and what does it do? To use the analogy of the large ship, this change-management function, in the form of a team of dedicated professionals, acts as “the rudder on the rudder,” engaging a critical mass of the university community to steer itself toward a new course. The central role of the sustainability change-management team must be as a resource and catalyst to ignite people right across the university, to take initiative in everything from green building design and operations, renewable energy, environmental purchasing, recycling and waste reduction, green cleaning, alternative fuels, green office practices, green laboratory practices, organic landscaping, and GHG reduction. The structure and skill set of this change-management team must be appropriate for fostering engagement, capacity building, leadership, ownership, communications, and continuous improvement across the entire institution at all levels of management. It needs to have a very senior reporting relationship within the organization, reporting to the President or next in command to ensure legitimacy and enable access to all groups across the institution.
Over many years, I have observed that the common belief that people are innately adverse to change is not generally true. People are not resistant to change, they are opposed to instability, and they simply assume that change equals instability. When people experience stable processes of change they generally thrive on the experience and will readily embrace more change. Furthermore, by having enough positive change experiences, people often undergo a personal transformation, shifting from being passive participants to becoming leading agents of ongoing innovation and continuous improvement in the organization. For this reason, fostering stability during the organizational change process is a key function of the sustainability change-management team because it enables an organization to establish a culture of stable innovation and transformation across the campus. To achieve this stability, the change-management team must be able to engage in sophisticated ongoing institutional diagnostics, creative problem solving and pre-emptive action to address a wide variety of real or perceived risks and barriers. Sources of potential instability that may need to be diagnosed and addressed can include fears of negative reputational impacts, financial approval limitations, managerial backlash, capacity gaps, time pressures, and technological failures, among others.”
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