Calendar and Academics: An Adaptive Challenge

Here's a familiar story: an academic wants to meet a colleague in his own department, and suggests making a Calendar invitation. The conversation goes like this:

'Oh, I don't use Calendar.'

'Rightio, when are you available?'

'Send me a few dates and I'll let you know.'

'OK, how about x, y, z?'

'Y sounds good. See you then.'

*1 day before Y: 'Oh sorry I actually have another meeting then, let's postpone.'

Related: half a day spent organising a meeting time between half a dozen people, and a third of them still can't make it.

Stories like this have me gouging my eyes out in frustration. I usually don't extol the virtues of particular tools, but an electronic Calendar of any type is for my money the most immediately useful productivity tool around, especially for organising meetings. I mean, it's not that hard! Click some buttons, check availabilities, communicate clearly!

The problem is that the challenge here is not a technical one. In Heifetz's theory of Adaptive Leadership, a technical challenge is one where the problem is relatively easily identified and were can apply a known solution to it. The problem here is that we don't automatically know each others' availabilities, and the solution is to apply a technology that does the old job of a PA to make a time that fits everyone. Using the tool (from a technical perspective) is a relatively simple task.

The real challenge here is not technical, but adaptive. Adaptive challenges involve problems that are difficult to define (wicked problems), and the solution involves knowledges or processes that we don't already have and need to develop through the process. By necessity these challenges require change: often change perceived as loss and presenting all the hallmarks of the grieving process. They invariably involve identities, values, territories, and egos. You can't make change like this happen, you can only open a space for it to develop through pushing people outside of their comfort zones. It's a type of learning.

So the academic's resistance to using Calendar has nothing to do with the tool itself: it's about academic autonomy, and the tradition of an academic to manage their own schedule. Also privacy: a resistance against perceived surveillance of every minute of our working day. Perhaps an antipathy to a perceived neo-managerialism or technological eschatology eroding the values and quality of academic culture. A general attachment to the independence of the tweed-coat wearing, pipe-smoking professor in his or her fortified office (apologies for the stereotype). Many more things along these lines that I can't imagine or easily describe but may only emerge through deep conversation.

So when we engage in a technical discourse of tools, technologies, training and professional development, this is a type of work avoidance that doesn't address the real challenge at hand. It's actually quite easy to apply a technical solution to an adaptive challenge. We might coerce a few people to use Calendar but the adaptive challenge will remain and certainly appear again in another guise. No I won't do my marking online; please submit your hard copy to the front office.

Adaptive leadership involves creating a situation of distress within systems, and gently facilitating the change you want to see. It can be dangerous: it takes courage, persistence, and a lot of time. It is unpredictable, messy, frustrating, difficult and weird (also a lot like learning). But it really the only way to face the deep challenges that face organisations, and especially Universities, in the 21st century. Technologies like Calendar are just interchangeable tools for deeper, more lasting change.