Universities as partnership models for driving positive change

In his research on small businesses Allan Gibb noticed how important relationships and inter-dependencies were to their success. It informed Allan’s conceptualisation of his Stakeholder Assessment Model (SAM) which proposed that an organisation is shaped by the needs of its stakeholders. For the small business, dependency on key customers, suppliers and stakeholders is a day-to-day reality, and how to respond to these contingent demands and requirements determines business success. SAM reframed organisations as a complex and often dense set of interactions and transactions with other organisations that affected organisational design.

A successful organisation is able to respond to and benefit from these inter-dependent relationships, and as a result logically would design itself around stakeholder needs and relationship management. Allan extended the concept of SAM into other organisations and contexts, particularly the university. Applying SAM to higher education highlighted strategic stakeholder engagement as a means of developing universities as entrepreneurial learning organisations, able to learn from interactions with external partners.

A key concept related to SAM is the ‘task environment’ of organisations. This relates to the tasks that need to be undertaken with partners and so define the activities and transactions that flow through relationships. An organisation’s task environment represents the fulfilment requirements to ensure viability and success, as well as opportunities to learn from key stakeholders. The implication and indeed challenge to many universities is to re-frame themselves around relationships with students, collaborators, funders and community partners rather than focusing on internal processes and maintaining the internal logic of their own institutions.

The importance of long-term partnerships with key stakeholders is exemplified well in responses to Coronavirus over the last few months as well as responses to the world’s trickiest and most wicked problems. We can see the benefit to our society and economy of such partnerships. One example is the partnership between the University of Oxford and Astra Zeneca who partnered together to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Another is the role of universities and their partnerships with government, businesses and the third sector in shaping the agenda with regard to the key decisions to be made by governments from all countries at the COP26[1] conference in November 2021.

The pandemic has offered opportunities for universities but also disrupted some of the relationships they have with key stakeholders. There have been major issues with meeting students’ expectations about their university experience. Questions are already being asked about the role of universities in responding to the climate emergency and the broader imperatives of the Black Lives Matter social movement and the needs of the wider developing world. These strains highlight the inter-dependencies between universities and their key stakeholders are requiring many to re-examine the power and influence they have on university reputations. In doing so, they are asking universities to redefine themselves from the needs and priorities of students and external communities, challenging a business-as-usual approach.

Managing a complex task environment

This series of webinars has unpacked and explored various elements of the complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity of the university task environment. We have considered how universities have responded entrepreneurially to the many challenges they face. The chapter by Gibb and Haskins[2] on the university as a stakeholder learning organisation maps out the elements of what is a vast, complex and uncertain task environment. Table 1 below summarises some of the many pressures and issues outlined in this chapter.

Table 1: List of issues affecting university decision-making

Universities have a complex web of stakeholders, each with their own expectations and requirements. The delicate task of stakeholder engagement, relationship management and responsiveness can push institutions to their limits, especially during times of change and disruption, encouraging or forcing universities to re-think how they interact and strategically respond to an increasingly complex and often uncertain and volatile task environment. Allan’s research with colleagues[3] highlighted the types of stakeholders that universities engage with and how these relationships are dynamic and changing.

Figure 1: A shifting balance in key stakeholders

This shows how the balance of influence has shifted from traditional stakeholders to a much broader group of types of influencers. Given the shift in university funding away from block grants to individual student choice, students and their parents are much more influential in what has become a more marketised sector. Changes to core metrics such as research excellence, the student experience and the employment outcomes expected from degree programmes mean that universities have had to respond to new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as externally imposed measures of excellence. This in turn has not just changed their behaviour, but also changed their orientation towards key stakeholders.

A stakeholder assessment model

Observing the behaviour of small businesses, Allan argued that a firm's success was determined by the extent to which it was able to successfully negotiate and sustain its relationships with its key stakeholders, in particular its inter-dependencies with customers, suppliers, employees, financial institutions and partners. Allan proposed that management of these relationships directly influenced the products and services small businesses delivered to the market.

 Figure 2: Gibb Stakeholder Assessment Model

Allan argued for an adaptive and responsive approach to firm/organisational strategy[4]. This can be equated with ‘adaptive walking’ or being a 4-wheel, all-terrain vehicle with the ability to manoeuvre quickly[5], or indeed to the art of orienteering through a complex and not fully predictable landscape or transactional environment[6]. These metaphors epitomise the stakeholder approach to strategy – being vigilant about the needs of one’s key stakeholders and external environment, and being flexible in meeting stakeholder needs[7].

Applying the Gibb model for stakeholder engagement in a university setting is about more than establishing formal, centralised systems for stakeholder management that are top-down. It is also about:

1. Building strategic awareness at all levels of the university to be attuned to learning continuously from all stakeholders.
2. Building both formal and informal mechanisms for continuous feedback as to how the university is perceived in the external environment.
3. Building trust-based relationships that are focused on being responsiveness to stakeholder needs and helping them to achieve their goals.
4. Building the mutual respect between the university and its stakeholders in a two-way relationship of inter-dependency and value co-creation.

The panellists for Webinar 4 will consider and explore the importance of trust to true partnership working in universities, how universities can be more effective in responding to the post Covid-19 complexity and uncertainty that faces them. They will examine some practical examples of stakeholder engagement, and consider in both a local and global context the role of universities as drivers for positive change.

Note: This Briefing Note was written by Keith Herrmann and Andrew Atherton, with input from Gay Haskins, as part of the SIEF ‘Reimagining Our Futures’ Webinar series to inform the discussion at Webinar 4.

End notes

[1] The COP26 event is a global United Nations summit about climate change and how countries are planning to tackle it. It will take place in Glasgow from 1 to 12 November 2021 with more than 200 world leaders due to attend.

[2] Gibb, A.A. and Haskins, G. (2013) The University of the Future: an entrepreneurial stakeholder learning organisation, in Fayolle A., and Redford D. Eds. (2013). ‘Handbook on the Entrepreneurial University’, Edward Elgar Publishing. An early draft accessed at: www.ncee.org.uk

[3] Coyle P., Gibb, A.A. and Haskins, G. (2013) The Entrepreneurial University: from concept to action, The Entrepreneurial University Leaders Programme (EULP) report, National Centre for Entrepreneurship in Education; Coventry.

[4] Gibb, A. A. , and Scott, M. (1985), 'Strategic Awareness, Personal Commitment and the Process of Planning the Small Business', Journal of Management Studies, UK, Volume 22, No. 6, pp 597-632.

[5] Beinhocker, E.D (1999) Robust Adaptive Strategies, MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 40, No. 3.

[6] Hannon, P. D. and Atherton, A. (1998) ‘Small Firm Success and the Art of Orienteering’, Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 5:2, p102-119. Henry Stewart Publications, London.

[7] Herrmann K. (2004) Guidance Notes on the Application of the Stakeholder Assessment Model. Unpublished