Throwback

This is a sidebar really, loosely on a theme of remembered know-how.

Various posts recently have focused eloquently and urgently on the state of play financially at the present time for licensed providers of UK higher education. With a certain air of speculation, some flag possibilities of provider closure or mergers or contraction. Others wisely counter this with caution and realism about what matters for those routes to be successful.

Some have written to bulk up appreciation of smoke signalling that they feel are noticeable from the current Government about quid pro quo where the 'quo' of so-called 'greater' efficiency is set against the prospect of more quid from the public purse. For higher education providers largely operating as low-margin people-intensive autonomous private enterprises in receipt of significant public funding with strings attached, it's almost inevitable that a long hard look gets taken at fixed and variable costs - with a brush of so-called 'value for money' consideration. Recent posts on this theme have rightly called for pursuit of efficiency to be:

• strategic, not reactive; and
• about effectiveness as well; and
• as part of more holistic approaches to how a provider sets about its mission through use of its assets of various kinds, processes, people and technologies.

These recent posts and articles have also underlined how often, in the past few decades, that higher education providers - as a sector - have faced similar circumstances of addressing significant income shortfall but in ways that allowed for continued academic endeavour and the basis for re-growth in the future. The pattern of exposure to these circumstances across providers varies according to a variety of factors, including government policy, provider-specific operating dynamics as well as demand for their provision. Widespread risk of large-scale 'cutting of cloths' however is not a familiar position for providers, nor for many decision-making individuals faced with the responsibility of working out what to do for their provider. Mission groups, sector-specific consultancies and other sources of help will be needed.

Efficiency as an enduring strategic organisational need

Any good driver is constantly glancing in the rear-view mirrors - checking for risks in changing direction for example; or scanning for an update on the rear view from the last glance where things may or may not be closer than they appear. Or perhaps just appreciating what's been passed. What's come to my rear-view perspective is a checklist of 'ideals' for organisational arrangements that emerged from preparing a literature review a long time ago to support institution-wide discussion about re-organisation.

These 'ideals' reflect some simple principles around strategic organisational needs that still make sense. These are/were:

• The strategic 'differentiation' emphasis to be known, or not, for creativity and innovation.
• The strategic 'differentiation' emphasis to be able to adapt quickly.
• The enduring need for the pursuit of efficiency.

The checklist presented in Figure 1 above became my 'boil in the bag' fakeaway for the many elements of an holistic approach to organisational arrangements that speak to the more wholesome take on the pursuit of efficiency that other writers have called for. These elements are cast at different levels of the organisation and different areas, where the whole is much greater than the sum of the elements. Putting it here I hope offers food for thought and ideas of what to do, or not to do.

Alignment & cascade

Figure 1 implicitly echoes other principles that support an integrated approach to business objective planning, budget planning and risk management. Taken further, business objective planning creates the set of prioritised authorised mandates for programmes and projects of change and transformation, however these be funded. It's a good way to see the complementarity of strategic & KPI-linked business planning with project portfolio & benefits realisation management. For adherents or advocates of the 'Managing Successful Programmes' framework, disciplined progressive delivery could be the name of the game.

These principles for business planning, as echoed in Figure 1, are:

• Alignment: Through, for example, an integrated planning, budget and risk management approach, business units are progressively aligned vertically to organisation-wide priorities and rolling 3-year objectives, with strategic key performance targets to plot the course to strategic outcomes. Additionally, business units and the whole organisation are aligned horizontally, to reduce duplication and internal conflict of approaches to delivering strategic priorities, and to ensure key enabling services and infrastructure are facilitating the needs of the rest of the organisation.
• Cascade: Using the discipline of integrated planning with its accountabilities, commitment to mobilisation and shared endeavour, organisation-wide priorities and objectives are translated by top level leaders into priorities and objectives for their areas whilst retaining accountability for collective success. This form of cascade then goes further through departments and teams to individuals, with each cascade moment involving translation to produce meaningful objectives for the next level down. Everyone gets to know how they are contributing to institutional success from one year to another. Supporting this cascade dynamic is a critical responsibility of leadership, middle management and every individual.
• SMART objectives: Clear objective setting throughout the cascade process, with as much specificity and realism as possible to help people commit to achieving them, find ways of how to track success, and see the road ahead over time. Progress in achieving these objectives is shared through both an up and a down cascade sequence, throughout the year and especially annually. For some, this supports an alignment of reward and recognition policies and systems to create incentives and accountabilities for success.
• Dynamic: The nature of the operating environment demands everyone to be ready to adapt agreed priorities, and to develop maturity in deciding what to slow down, stop, re-schedule in favour of what else to bring forward, accelerate or expand. This element brings a risk of arrhythmia to the organisation, and therefore the mechanisms and support for adaptability, flexibility and change become particularly salient.

Overall, it is important that organisational arrangements for governance, leadership and management are in step and in tune with each other since, therein, are borne the behaviours that often make or break organisational self-confidence to succeed in difficult times.

Practising these principles routinely in the life of an organisation contributes greatly to meeting the enduring strategic organisational need for efficiency. Many providers of UK higher education (if not many other types of organisations) will readily be able to demonstrate their application of these principles given the decade long accumulation of real terms loss in many categories of publicly funded higher education activities.

Balanced scorecard

Another 'boil in the bag' fakeaway piece from some time back was Figure 3 below. This sought to apply and combine the balanced scorecard concept with the service value chain concept. The idea behind it was again to support recognition of the elements of discussion and decision-making that would make a difference to organisational efforts to not only deliver value for stakeholders and students, but to also do so in a way that reflected an holistic view of the organisation. When used in times of financial pressures where the need might be to cut back on costs, it offered a different framework for thinking through risks and opportunities associated with that decision-making.

It's certainly not everyone's cup of tea but, as with Figure 1, perhaps a start point for some.

Throwback as reminder of past experienced learned

Making umpteen picnic sandwiches during recent holidays triggered a memory of the advice from a very seasoned catering supervisor many moons ago. 'Put it on, scrape it off!' was the steer for buttering the bread at pace. This gave rise to thoughts about the sharing of tacit knowledge in our age of social media, AI adoption and intergenerational discourse; and how having the means and atmosphere to capture know-how like this could be important now.

The thoughts and possible checklists surfaced here are only useful as prompts in truth. Many decision-makers will just see them as conceptual pieces, overly complicated if not even naive. But surfacing them here is an act of recalled know-how that has come from research and interpretation of that into something potentially useful.

There will be many within higher education providers who are expert in handling the kinds of decision pressures faced by many providers at the present time. There will be still more who have endured these situations before and have insight into what worked or not in view of the impact of decisions made. The extent of financial pressures facing some providers may simply drive decisions on size, shape and operating costs regardless because time and cash may not be onside.?

The tacit and explicit know-how carried by all these people will be worth finding and attending to for the benefit of shared belief in decisions to be made, and an eye on organisational health 'for afterwards'.