Some habits good, and some not. Yet if most habits were not positive and beneficial, humans wouldn’t have evolved brains prone to forming them. Habits let us perform complex tasks without thinking consciously about them: forming sounds when we speak, walking upright, typing without looking, playing the clarinet, or working with others to achieve organizational goals. Once we have figured out the series of actions we need to take to produce a desired result, practicing those actions causes them to become unconsciously automatic. This enables multi-tasking: letting habits help us perform routine actions while we focus our conscious attention on other tasks. If every task required our complete attention, we could do only one thing at a time. Unable to commit required routines to habits, we’d be in a sorry state. Moreover, habits are not just simple responses to simple stimuli, like doodling at staff meetings or feeling good when praised. Habitual behaviors can be highly complex, like playing Beethoven on the piano while thinking yesterday’s meeting or tomorrow’s appointment.

The downside of habits is that these automatic mental programs that make us so efficient may launch and run when we don’t want them to. Breaking a bad unconscious habit ― whether lighting up a cigarette when the phone rings or worrying more about the well-being of your department than about the good of your organization ― is tough. Forming a new habit where none existed before is possible is common, but it can be excruciatingly difficult to dislodge an existing bad habit and substitute a beneficial version. Learning not to ‘clean your plate’ when you’re used to eating everything placed in front of you is tough, and so is listening open-mindedly to new ideas if you typically bristle at suggested changes. Our minds and muscles become comfortable doing things the way we’ve always done them, and both remembering to do them differently and then expending the considerable effort required to actually do things differently takes lots of work. Research shows it takes 18 to 254 days of ‘doing it differently’ to replace unwanted eating habits, and that backsliding, even once, can restart the calendar. No wonder dieting and stopping smoking are so hard. Improving organization culture, where everyone’s individual habits must shift together, is even more demanding, but well worth the effort.

Because a specific habit can be either beneficial or destructive, deciding how to deal with an organization’s culture is no simple matter. An organization first needs to explore and understand what its culture is now — what assumptions, values, and beliefs motivate the way its employees behave. If possible, it needs to understand where these hallmarks of its culture originated, and how widely and deeply they are held. It also needs to determine whether specific current features of its culture help or hinder the organization in achieving its goals.

Take rewarding employees as an example. A culture that evaluates and recognizes each employee separately may be extremely effective in stimulating individual creativity and effort. If that’s what benefits the organization most, great. But if the organization’s advancement depends on teams of individual employees working together, then a team reward system may more effectively stimulate and the group creativity and effort needed to address more complicated challenges, while venerating individual performance may be counterproductive. In theory, Neither a “lone star” nor a “team achievement” reward culture is right or wrong. But one or the other will work better. Given the mission and goals of a particular organization, charting out a course that will shift an organization toward the culture that makes it most successful requires lots of careful mindfulness of the current realities, analysis, discussion, and strategy. Like developing or dropping a habit, changing a culture takes effort.

Stephen D. Spangehl
Plexus International – Higher Education

It’s always sad when hardworking, conscientious organizations make serious mistakes ― acting unwisely, or failing to take action when they should. When Toyota built cars using defective gas pedals, or BP helped pollute the Gulf of Mexico, or Motorola let its competitors out-engineer and steal away the cellphone business it invented, everyone was shocked. The formula for success seems foolproof: find and hire the smartest people you can, because powerful concentrations of brain power will make poor organizational decisions unlikely. Yet blunders happen, much too frequently. “We should have known better” provides little consolation, particularly when it’s clear that many of the individuals you employ actually did know better, but the organization was unable to benefit from their knowledge.

Consequently, we find organizations unable to satisfy those they serve, even when they know their competitors are eager to snatch unhappy customers away by providing the levels of service they expect and demand. We see organizations launch new products or services that fail to find a market, then justify their poor or non-existent market research with “it didn’t seem necessary” and “we were certain this couldn’t fail.” Some organizations hang on to convoluted, Rube Goldberg work-processes that could have been simplified to make them more reliable and less costly. Others fail to rise to the latest challenge when many of their employees, individually, warned “I see this coming.” Why is it that groups of intelligent employees frequently guide organizations that make stupid mistakes?
Often these problems have their roots in a set of bad habits that add up to a dysfunctional organizational culture. Like an organizational version of Alzheimer’s disease, individually healthy brain cells – intelligent employees – can’t work together productively because invisible barriers keep them from collaborating and communicating effectively.

To take one far-too-common example, an organization may have a culture of blame in which any slip or blunder unleashes a hunt for the perpetrator. Like a television crime show, a blaming culture assumes that accidents are never just accidents, but the result of someone taking an action, intentionally or carelessly, that made things end up wrong. In actuality, studies of organizational operations show that human botch-up is the root fault in only a small proportion of such incidents. More often the fault lies with a poorly designed system, filled with unnecessary or conflicting process steps that make mistakes unavoidable, or in a process staffed with employees who never had the training, equipment, or aptitudes that the process requires to be operated properly. Employees who deliberately cause errors, who get up each morning saying “I’ll go to work today and mess things up so that everyone gets angry with me,” are really quite rare. Yet mistakes happen, inevitably. What is not inevitable is how an organization reacts: whether it conducts a witch-hunt and pins the blame on whomever it fingers, or whether it searches for the root cause and corrects it so mistakes don’t return (as is now standard in many weekly hospital “post-mortems”). Cultures that assume a misfeasor lurks behind every fault turn their employees against each other, and increase the number of faults as a result. Bad cultures invite bad performance, and get it.

Yet many cultural problems are so common that it is easy for one organization to assume that it is no different than others, that its bad habits are “the way it is” everywhere else. This view is particularly seductive to those who have been with an organization for years, or have little experience elsewhere: just as “travel is broadening”, so is appreciating differences among organizations. Encountering an organization not mired in a culture of blame — where discovering a mistake or receiving a complaint initiates a collaborative, impersonal search for the root cause that will prevent the same thing from ever happening again — comes as a revelation to those who thought such workplaces existed only in their imaginations.

Because not every group of employees thinks and behaves identically, cultural differences often distinguish successful organizations from their competitors. To get the best from a group of employees, hire smart, creative, enthusiastic people, but nurture the group with a culture that enables individuals to use their talents effectively. A constructive culture doesn’t guarantee an organization will never do dumb things, but it makes it far less likely.

Stephen D. Spangehl
Plexus International – Higher Education

When it accepts the fact that it needs to address a problem, where can an institution seek help? First, it can look to its own existing resources (people and data) and put them to work on the problem. Often this is poor strategy: those resources were available at the time the problem created itself, and they are unlikely to fix and undo what they couldn’t prevent. However, it may be that resources within the institution that were untapped when the problem originated could provide the solution. For example, people from other departments than the one where a problem exists may have the skills and perspectives to come up with insightful solutions.

Often an institution needs to find help outside itself, the same way individuals turn to the healthcare establishment to address physical ailments that won’t cure themselves. Its own people, knowledge, skills, equipment, are insufficient for the task, or its current resources are so stretched and overburdened that the time and energy needed are unavailable. For higher education institutions, outside help can come in different forms: consultation, coaching, training, and outsourcing. Each of these has its pluses and minuses, so an institution must be thoughtful in determining which route to follow to find the help that will benefit it most.

Consulting. Engaging a consultant is the first impulse for many Colleges and universities. Consultants usually specialize in one particular field — accounting, technology, staffing, marketing, etc. — and market their specializations in solving related kinds of problems. An independent outside consultant can analyze and look at and analyze an institution’s weak spots, strong points and identify missing elements and gaps. The consultant will then propose a plan and a cost, and if hired will either tell you what needs to be done — or do it for you. Consulting organizations that include a range of consultant with different specializations may be better able to match their expertise with an institution’s needs.

Training. If an institution possesses employees motivated and eager to solve its problems, but unable to do so because they lack critical expertise, training may be the best strategy. Training can give existing employees new skills and information that they can use to address institutional needs. Unlike other forms of help, training its own employees makes a permanent contribution to the institution’s “capital”. Additional expenses required for training may be high – time off employees’ regular jobs for the training, as well as time to put the training to use on the problem — but the value received may be greater because it not only solves the problem, it creates capacity within the institution to solve future problems. If problems don’t have to be attacked quickly, and capacity building is desired, educating your own employees to become your consulting resource makes great sense.

Coaching. Often essential as the complement to formal training, coaching gives an institution’s employees needed support and encouragement as they apply the new skills they have acquired through training in an environment where they’ve never been used before. Coaching may also be critical when an institution already possesses the basic expertise it needs to address a problem, but needs to help employees use that expertise to solve the problems that currently exists within the institution. This is similar to what happens when athletes with natural ability engage a coach to help them use their natural abilities in the most effective ways possible.

Outsourcing. In contrast to training and coaching, outsourcing solves problems by subcontracting them to people who already have the knowledge and training required to solve them. Outsourcing works faster than training internal people might can, and is often the best solution to an institution’s needs when there are no good internal candidates for training or existing staff have so much on their plates that doing anything additional is out of the question. Outsourcing works well when the task needed is something no one internal is qualified to do, or no one wants to do (because it’s disagreeable, boring, or dirty). But even when existing institutional personnel could do a job, outsourcing may be preferable: if a job can be delegated effectively, with clear guidelines that state what acceptable performance is, outsourcing can free those within the institution who have better ways to use the time they save. Outsourcing becomes a wise strategy for a busy higher education institution, especially for tasks that are unlikely to re-occur, and where having internal employees learn to do them would bring no value. Outsourcing can solve an institution’s problems quickly, often more cheaply than any other way.

Stephen D. Spangehl
Plexus International – Higher Education

Both people and institutions find it hard to ask others for help. Deciding to seek assistance can be traumatic. For example, when individuals seek medical help, they have reached a judgment that what ails them won’t go away by itself — and that they cannot treat the problem on their own. Deciding to put one’s future health and welfare into others’ hands is upsetting, and the factors that lead people to that choice are worth considering thoughtfully.
Sometimes there are single indicators – sudden tumors, growths, blood, or pain — that generate sufficient fear to prompt the decision to turn to a doctor or hospital. But often the signs of problems appear gradually — impaired mobility, declining hearing, fading vision, low-level aches or soreness — situations where no single symptom is enough to trigger a decision to seek outside help. It is extremely difficult to recognize the difference between what is and what was (or what could be), particularly when the changes appear over a long period.

For a higher education institution, the sudden signs that intervention is required can come from a cash-flow crisis, an abrupt drop in enrollment, a lawsuit or deluge of complaints, or some other unexpected or unanticipated storm that makes continued smooth sailing impossible. More challenging are situations where an institution needs help because gradual alterations have accumulated to threaten the organization’s continued success and welfare. When each year’s graduates encounter increasing difficulties finding employment that makes use of their education, it’s time to reexamine whether the education the college provides meets its stakeholders’ needs. If 80% of the students select majors in 20% of the programs, there is a need to consider modifying the range of offerings radically. Vocal discontent about standing in registration lines that yesterday’s students would have endured silently is a signal that offices processes have not kept up with people’s service expectations. An organization can, over time, develop an increasingly dysfunctional culture – with little inclination toward better performance, collaboration, innovation – and never grasp the changes that have occurred.

Hard as it is to recognize when an insufferable state of affairs has evolved, it’s even tougher to swallow realization that addressing the problem may require outside help. Data sometimes provides the stimulus. Individuals occasionally recognize the need for external help in losing weight from tables that show “normal” height-weight ratios, or for cardiac tests because of their inability reach the heart-rate ranges printed on exercise machines for various weight-age combinations. Institutions may also recognize that they have strayed to the edges of typical distributions (teacher-faculty ratios, percentage of enrollees who graduate, student loan default rates) and need help to return to the norm.

Excuses and denial are also common: problems lie elsewhere, or don’t really exist at all. People downgrade and deny serious medical problems with rationalizations: persistent sore throats don’t need to be looked at because they could result from talking too much or yelling or smoking, and persistent headaches could come from stress at work or lack of sleep. Similarly for institutions: enrollment declines could be temporary, or might result from uncontrollable external factors (a bad economic climate, much greater competition, the whims of fashion). Rationalizations and denials provide a logical reason to avoid looking inward for ways to change its situation, or outward for help in making the changes required. Instead of doing something to cure their problems, individuals and institutions may simply hope that the problems will go away or cure themselves.

Inviting outside help is particularly hard for U.S. colleges and universities, products of a culture that celebrates independence and self-reliance. For the same reasons that lost drivers hate to stop and ask for directions, many institutions find it tough to admit they can’t manage alone, or can’t manage alone as well alone they could with outside assistance. Like those students who can’t admit to their professors that they are struggling, their pride obstructs them from acting in their own best interests.

Stephen D. Spangehl
Plexus International – Higher Education

Albert Einstein kept a sign in his study that said “Insanity is doing the same things and hoping for different results.” A fundamental quality axiom is doing nothing changes nothing. If you leave the processes that produce your current results untouched, the future results they produce will continue at about the same levels. Or if your current performance levels vary — from high to low, back to high, etc. — that same unpredictable variation will continue. This is true for the performance of any process, whether it’s recruiting new students, assisting students to develop effective study habits, keeping faculty and staff morale high, stimulating innovation, or helping students persist to graduation. If it now takes four months to modify a course, or three years to plan and roll out a new program, or 23 weeks to search for and hire a faculty member — and if you continue to run curricular change, new program planning, or faculty searches the way have before — don’t be surprised when future outcomes continue to take this long to materialize. If 60% of your advanced students can’t write literate, organized research papers, and you continue to teach them to write and research as you have in the past, don’t be shocked when your future students’ writing continues to disappoint you. If you want better educated graduates, more fulfilled faculty and staff, lower costs, faster results, higher morale, a cleaner campus, better parking, or other performance improvements, you have to take actions that will change the processes that produce your current results.

How do you know whether an existing process should be re-engineered to produce better results? There are many potential signs, but complaints, from your students or from your own employees, are an indicator that you’re not living up to people’s expectations of how things ought to be working. Whether it is how long it takes to receive a transcript, order a book in the bookstore, process a refund, grade a test, or find and fill an open position, complaints help you identify those processes that are not working optimally. People complain when their actual experiences differ markedly from what they anticipated would happen. Sometimes their expectations may be unrealistic, but more often their experiences elsewhere – in other institutions, with other faculty or other office staff – set their notions of what to expect in similar situations. If one or more of your processes now disappoints your stakeholders regularly, you need to make repairs.

How do you fix a broken or ineffective process? Alternative ways to achieve current goals never simply step up and shout “Do it this way instead!” In order to discover the preferable options, you need to pinpoint what is currently underperforming, put together a group of employees who can look at the situation creatively from a variety of perspectives, and charge that team to come up with improvements. Simple as this sounds, it works! Because higher education institutions are filled with people hired for their intelligence and creativity, turning their talents loose on the institution’s problems is both logical and economical. And, since employees are the people ultimately most affected by how well the institution operates, giving them the responsibility to make it operate better is the quickest way to build their loyalty and end their griping. Morale rockets when faculty and staff see their ideas and solutions adopted.

Plexus International’s higher education division offers training that enables project teams to create and implement institutional process improvements.

Stephen D. Spangehl
Plexus International – Higher Education

Institutions of higher education regularly invest – far too heavily for their own good — in strategic plans that they then fail to execute. Unless they are implemented, even the most creative, innovative ideas do nothing to help an institution advance, but it is in carrying out their plans that too many colleges and universities crash.

Quality experts often criticize organizations that plan and implement initiatives without ever looking back to see how effective those actions were, institutions forever trapped in the Plan-Do portion of the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle. Quality guru Phil Crosby mocked then as “P-P-Do-Do” organizations, proud of the “movements” they leave in their wake, but neither conscious nor caring of whether all those activities actually accomplished the goals for which they were intended.

Although many higher education institutions share in this blame for failing to check whether the changes they make are actually improvements, even more are prone to get stuck at the Plan stage of PDCA, never even advancing to the Do (much less Check). This should be no surprise: thoughtful academics are more drawn to theory and expansive concepts than to the mundane drudgery of figuring out how to put ideas into action. Recruiting faculty for positions on the planning committee is always easier than getting volunteers for workgroups charged with putting others’ plans into action. These PPP (Plan, Plan, Plan…) institutions often generate wonderful ideas and visions, but freeze up before their visions become real.

What’s an institution to do? One solution that has worked for select colleges and universities involves building the discipline to converting serious plans to action projects. In effect, these institutions have embraced the mantra “plan what you do, do what you plan” through the use of projects that lead to action. Such projects, however, don’t just spring solely out of good intentions: faculty and staff must possess specific skills and follow proven procedures for projects to be able to transform plans into actions. In many enterprises outside higher education, project management refers both the set of skills and the group of practitioners that are essential for organizations to accomplish what they envision. Project managers know how to assemble a team that can tackle a particular project, how to identify an idea that can become an actionable project, how to articulate deliverable outcomes that give the team a target (and the rest of the institution a means of knowing when the project is successful), and other essential skills. Institutions that have acquired or developed people with these skills see their plans becoming realities that moved the institution ahead. And other institutions find themselves carrying the same goals from one strategic plan to its successors. This might be OK if the rest of the world stood still, but if the competition is awake and moving forward, the institution that stands still actually falls behind.

Good action projects don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere: they come from an institution’s recognition that there are things it hasn’t done that it needs, things it never did that it need to start doing, things it has done that it shouldn’t have, and things it currently does that it could do differently or better. Sometimes these are specified in strategic plans (“Have friendly, live person answer the phone in admissions by the third ring”), but more commonly strategic plans name new desirable destinations (“Increase enrollment of well-prepared freshmen,” “Increase the number of funded research grants”) rather than the steps required to travel to those endpoints.

Plexus International’s higher education division offers training that enable teams to create and implement action projects for institutional improvement. Our fundamental purpose is simple: helping the organizations we serve to improve their performance. Because we see improvement projects as the keys steps to take to improve performance, we therefore want institutions to take on as many significant action projects as possible, and do each one as quickly as possible.

Stephen D. Spangehl
Plexus International – Higher Education