The most valuable college education is an agile education.
No one would deny that the value of higher education is being challenged today. Numerous articles and news segments have been telling this story for the last couple of years. This paired with challenging demographic trends, crippling higher education debt, and a string of college closures have many higher education institutes on edge and rightfully so.
The question that potential students are asking themselves is whether the return on the investment is worth it. How applicable is the degree to my future success, especially in a World that is rapidly changing technologically, geopolitically, and economically?
I believe higher education institutes can drastically be improved by becoming enterprise agile. Enterprise agility is the capability for an organization or enterprise to be able to act and respond quickly to customer input creating innovative products and services of higher value. According to the McKinsey & Company report Enterprise agility: Buzz or business impact?, organizations that have adopted enterprise agility have shown significant increases in employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and operational and financial performance. Each of these categories would be wonderful key performance indicators (KPIs) for any college or university today to help with recruitment, retention, and fiscal stability.
The key ingredients that colleges and universities will need to become enterprise agile educational institutions are:
Let’s open each of these boxes, shall we?
Culture:
Peter Drucker is alleged to have famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” All the strategy in the World has no value if the organizational culture will not implement the strategy. The same goes for any enterprise agile educational institution. The key to developing an enterprise agile culture is to focus on these five aspects of your organization (ACM, 2023).
1.???? Focus your efforts on your customers (students and their future employers).
2.???? Enable and support the autonomy of your employees (faculty & staff).
3.???? Be flexible in your process (not bureaucratic) and solicit regular feedback.
4.???? Don’t command employees instead facilitate conversations to guide the team to solutions.
5.???? Instill the idea that there is more than one value to the organization and that these values are evolving. This nurtures a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset in an organization where failure is seen as a learning opportunity.
?
I believe that the hardest of these three components is organizational culture. To establish the right culture, it takes concentrated effort from leadership regularly demonstrating and communicating these values while also consistently encouraging/supporting staff behaviors that reinforce the enterprise agile culture.
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Discovery:
Tidd and Bessant’s Managing Innovation, has three chapters (5, 6, and 7) dedicated to building an organization that can search out and discover innovation from multiple sources (Tidd & Bessant, 2021). It is here that I think that colleges and universities are already designed to be successful. Most higher education institutions (ideally) have students from multiple backgrounds and walks of life, knowledge experts in specific fields, and they believe in the free and honest exchange of ideas and feedback. This makes colleges and universities optimal for becoming knowledge networks and connectors and using technology in a way that helps share information in a smart, quick, and transparent manner.
The most critical component to discovery is to make sure that as a college or university you have a clear vision on how you will execute your institutional mission. Having a clear vision will allow you to identify challenges and potential projects and actions to overcome those challenges (ACM, 2022).
In this discovery process it is critical to make sure that you are including not just faculty/staff, but also students and their potential employers. Make sure that the challenges, actions, and projects you are discovering add value and address their concerns. Keep the customer in focus not the provider!
A good example of where this disconnect is occurring today is in the AI / education space. Dan Meyer mentions in his blog post, Teacher Goals for Their First Day With Students, that many AI technologists and the teachers who will be using their products are experiencing a large disconnect. In reading Dan’s article, it becomes clear that the critical innovation discovery step that the technologists are missing is getting that clear feedback and inclusion of the key user group (teachers) in how the technology could serve them in teaching ALL students and not just the self-motivated learners. This is a great example of organizations being provider focused versus being customer focused.
If the customer centered approach is used appropriately then it is likely that incremental, if not radical, innovation will be discovered which leads us to the final component of becoming an enterprise agile educational institution.
Implementation:
To implement agile solutions as an organization it will require assigning autonomous teams with the authority to tackle the project. The team project should have clear and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) that show success towards achieving that goal. It tends to be the case that what is measured is what will get managed and be the focus of the efforts, so setting appropriate KPIs is critical at this juncture.
Small enterprise agile project wins help build up the momentum. Make sure that these successes are celebrated and highlighted. Success will lead to further success and continue to solidify an enterprise agile culture. That culture in turn will lead to more open communication and feedback which will then kick off further discovery and learning which will lead to further innovations being implemented. The three components are synergistic and feed off one another.
This transformation into an enterprise agile education institution is one that will have systematic and lasting impacts on an organization's structures, people, processes, and technology (Brosseau, D., Ebrahim, S., Handscomb, C., & Thaker, S., 2019). When all of these aspects of an organization are impacted and the students at your college are immersed in this culture it becomes a critical part of their formation and education.
That’s where the value is. Regardless of if they studied English, biology, business, or forensic science the agile process will have been baked into their educational experience. It will be a process that will follow them into the workforce and into the various projects that they work on. That then adds value to their future employers and society around them. The most valuable college education is an agile education and the college that adopts this model will not have to worry about their future success.
References:
Aghina, W., Handscomb, C., Ludolph, J., Rona, D., & West, D. (2020, March). Enterprise agility: Buss or business impact?. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Organization/Our%20Insights/Enterprise%20agility%20Buzz%20or%20business%20impact/Enterprise-agility-Buzz-or-business-impact-vF.pdf
Association for Computing Machinery. (2023, February 14). Cultivating enterprise agile [Video]. ACM-Percipio. https://acm.percipio.com/courses/a84a8e80-b054-11e8-997e-931a1bb6436d/videos/ca541690-b054-11e8-997e-931a1bb6436d?tab=overview
Association for Computing Machinery. (2022, September 12). Building agile capabilities in your organization [Video]. ACM-Percipio. https://acm.percipio.com/courses/9f1346f0-ddd6-11e7-90ec-11f6152fbbd3/videos/da1a3560-ddd6-11e7-90ec-11f6152fbbd3
Brosseau, D., Ebrahim, S., Handscomb, C., & Thaker, S. (2019, May 10). The journey to an agile organization. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-journey-to-an-agile-organization
Meyer, D. (2024, August 7). Teacher goals for their first day with students. Mathworlds. https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/teacher-goals-for-their-first-day\
Tidd, J & Bessant, J. (2021). Managing innovation: Integrating technological, market and organizational change (seventh edition). Wiley.
Luke, the transformation of agile into project management across different types of projects was a precursor the complete enterprise becoming capable of change. Like other innovation challenges, it becomes difficult to pull all managers and leaders along. this is where change processes like Kotter's 8 step plan can help. For organizations in the education, renewal may need multiple layers of change from leadership down (Prosci, n.d.). Reference Prosci. (n.d.). Organizational change requires individual change. https://www.prosci.com/methodology/adkar
Owner at IDEAS & ASSOCIATES
3 个月Insightful
High-performing creative problem-solver who generates innovative solutions and excels in complex detail-oriented tasks. Swiss Army knife of professional skills.
3 个月I'm so happy to hear that you support the Enterprise Model for higher education. It has really paid off at Unity Environmental University. Here is some information about our enterprise model - https://unity.edu/about/reinventing-college/enterprise/realizing-an-enterprise-model/ I'm sure Dr. Melik Peter Khoury would be happy to answer any questions you have about how to implement the enterprise model in higher education. It's one of his favorite topics and there he has many articles and podcasts on the subject.
Senior Manager ERP Operations at Tyler Technologies
3 个月Awesome holistic article. Love the focus on building a culture and the connection to the positive impact a innovation center culture has on the organization.
Cost Analyst Cianbro Corporation
3 个月I have always thought that you get what you put into it. Such is true when pursuing a degree from a higher education institute. Higher educational institutions are failing their students by allowing them students to receive a diploma without taking away the skills they need to succeed in a career of their interest. If more education institutions took agile approaches in developing their programs, perhaps the value of the higher education certificate would be higher. Nice article Luke!