The Falacy of the Virtue of Quick Decision Making

Perceptions of what constitutes efficient and effective decision making are probably the most confusing aspect of leading in administration. While textbook notions of quick decision making seem to be desired in a theoretical sense, even considered decisions, if not favourable to personal preferences, are often interpreted as ineffective and weak. Owing to the legacy inherited from the bus driver model of leadership in every sphere of life we encounter however, decision making by those in the ranks is never given any importance. As such, most employees live in the dichotomy of not being able to decide and not happy with the decision making of others.

Supervisors are not immune to this disease. Sporting a false sense of guilt each time a decision negatively affects even a single subordinate, supervisors typically distance themselves from the decision making process and instead walk on the thin line between commradarie and supervision. The result is either insubordination of those under them or being at the receiving end of their wrath over unpopular decisions.

Strategy has become of utmost importance in decision making in the organization. One important strategy which I have come to learn through reflection is the opposite virtue of what is given in the textbook: only respond after 24 hours wherever possible! This single strategy has already borne much fruit especially when confronted with seeming impasse and conflict situations.

Leading - as the Bus Driver or the Orchestra Conductor?

The model of leadership most commonly expected in Sri Lankan society in general appears to be the most extreme form of leading from the front – that embodied in the bus driver model. There could be many reasons for this ranging from it being the natural model in a maternalistic society to the general inertia in public sector organizations[1]. In general, a majority in such organizations expect to be led by the top in an almost dictatorial way so that individual thinking and responsibility is minimal. Using the bus driver analogy, most are happy to be passengers who can assume that the driver will take them to the desired destination.

This was one of the few issues I knew I needed to address from the very outset. Making use of my first address to the entire staff of just over 100 employees at the time, I emphasized the fact that I was a very bad bus driver. I did not have the skills required to take the organization where it should go. However, I was confident that the senior staff in the organization could grow into a very potent force in brining about radical change to the organization which would take it to its next level of operation.

As such, I reiterated that the model of leadership would change to the Orchestra model. The main requirement for this was for individuals to excel in different dimensions of the organization’s business with me simply playing the role of the conductor. I am grateful to several senior academics and administrators who appear to have excelled in this metamorphosis to a participatory leadership structure.

Overall however, especially in the lower ranks of the organization, there appears to be some confusion over the model change with a minority even verbalizing their belief that it signifies a weakening of the organization itself.

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[1] It is not uncommon to hear that one of the key reasons for individuals joining the university is its relative ‘laid backness’ and perceived ‘freetime’ to do other things apart from its job security.

To Lead or to Manage

One of the key realizations I had to face was the fact that between the dual roles of leader and manager that one is often called upon to play as a head of a department or an institution in the university system, is that my skill at the latter was at best, below average. While I love to initiate new things and see others initiating new things, continuing such initiatives through after they are proved to work in a systematic way does not come easily to me. For this reason, one of my chief requests in my application for the post of Director of the UCSC was that, if selected, I would need a hard working manager as Deputy Director. While it is unusual for a candidate to a post to make such conditions even before being selected, I am grateful to the Interview Panel and then the Board of Directors for acceding so precisely to this request.

Since being appointed Director of the School in May 2004, I have had to learn fast on the job, the many and diverse lessons of administrative maneuvering in order to get a job of work done. Some of these are quite different from what the typical paternalist Western textbooks posit about them, with most needing to be adapted and tempered to the complex uncertainties of a maternalist Sri Lankan society.

Needless to say, my learning curve ‘on the job’ has still been steeper than it probably ought to have. Administration and management are skills which have as much or more to do with the psychomotor and affective domains than the cognitive domain, so that there can be little substitute to learning ‘on the job’.

Some examples of the disjoint between the textbook and reality which have transpired in my short tenure of just under 2 years as Director of the School include perceptions of the model of leadership, the interpretation of the flat organizational structure, the virtues of instant decision making, and the methods of showing dissent.

Learning Administration on the Job!

One of the roles an unsuspecting academic is invariably called to play sooner or later in one’s career is that of an administrator. That there is no prior training made mandatory for academics in this regard has never been understood as a serious omission in their continuing professional development. My own realization of the inadequacy of possessing such skills prompted me from fairly early on in my academic career to seek training aimed at mitigating this lack.

Owing to the limited training opportunities which were readily available in the areas that were relevant to the university setting, the setting up of the Staff Development Centre at the University of Colombo in the 1990’s was a most welcome phenomenon – providing me and other academics a very useful resource for self improvement. Apart from the learning opportunities it provided, the training programmes conducted by the Centre also brought together like-minded academics who were facing very similar issues.

Even though at the time, I did not hold any major administrative posts, these workshops prompted me to seek institutional membership of the British Council with the express view of borrowing the excellent training videos that started populating the then rather thin video collection. Some of the more relevant material was then shared with my fellow academics at the then Department of Statistics and Computer Science, with sometime for discussion after the viewing of the video concerned. Some of the areas covered in these videos included Time Management, Managing Meetings, Prioritizing Work, and Ethics at Work.

An extended ‘double-term’ sabbatical in 2001 and 2002 helped me in numerous ways to glean some of the essential skills and practices which were going to be extremely important upon my return to accept the headship of a department in the newly formed University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC). While much of the learning happened through reading and finding resources on the Internet, the Human Resources Service Centre at the Carnegie Mellon University provided an excellent environment for concentrated learning of a wide cross-section of administrative and academic topics. Some of the areas of key importance included workshops and sessions on Emotional Intelligence, Conflict Management, Personality Types, Problem Based Learning, Peer & Student Evaluation, and Curriculum Design.

Since returning to the UCSC in 2003, I have had to play a progressively increasing administrative function commencing with being appointed the Head of the Department of Computation and Intelligent Systems. Several short periods as Acting Director of the School also helped equip me with some of the finer points related to administration in the Sri Lankan context, often requiring the adaptation of modern management practices of the West which dominates much of the literature and training content.

Level 3 Teaching for Deep Learning

In an increasingly competitive world, obtaining qualifications at any cost has come to be considered more important than gaining deep knowledge. A focus on getting a task over with in minimum time and with lowest possible effort characterizes surface learning. The skills thus practiced are the lower-end cognitive skills and do not usually have the effect of changing one’s behaviour at the end of the process.

The motivations for deep learning stem from a self-perceived desire to know something for ones self. A deep approach to learning is necessarily intrinsically motivated and results more often in some change in the behaviour pattern of the learner concerned.

McGregor’s (1960) categorization of human trustworthiness in the context of the enterprise can apply to the teaching-learning climate in the classroom. Teachers operating on the basis of Theory X assume that students are inherently lazy, they will always try to cheat at exams, they will not attend lectures, and they won’t make an effort at learning. So, strict attendance criteria, careful monitoring of examinations, deterrent punishments all become the modus operandi of the teaching process. Theory Y teachers on the other hand assume that students do their best when given freedom to take control of their own learning. As such more opportunities for self-learning, take-home assessments, peer-evaluation are provided in order to make them flourish.

John Biggs’ (2003) classification of 3 levels of teacher focus helps to clarify the different attitudes most commonly encountered in the teaching-learning environment. In this classification, a Level 1 teacher focuses on what the student is. In other words, the teacher sees him or herself as the transmitter of knowledge in a constant kind of way and leaves it up to the students to catch or miss what was meant to be transmitted. If learning does not happen, the reasons usually attributed to it are the students’ low Z-scores, lack of motivation, bad school background, and other innate weaknesses. This is fundamentally a blame-the-student theory of learning and is similar to the Theory X view in organizations described before.

The Level 2 teacher focuses on what the teacher does to achieve good learning in students. The responsibility of ‘getting through’ to the students in this view rests largely on the teacher. Hence the focus is to find better ways of performance in order to achieve better results. Plenty of preparation, variations of technique, use of multimedia, and in general a good management strategy of the teaching process characterize this kind of learning environment. In short this is a blame-the-teacher model. The results achieved through these means however often are not satisfactory enough to justify the effort and soon the teacher could be discouraged with the limited effect they have on learners.

A Biggs Level 3 teacher concentrates on what the student does rather than what the teacher does or what the student is. Here teaching is seen as supporting learning. So, like a level 2 teacher, a variety of techniques would be employed typically in this case too, but each with a specific purpose of engaging the student in learning. In level 3 teaching the fundamental epistemological questions are rephrased as “what does it mean to understand content the way we want it to be?” and “what kind of teaching-learning activities must the student be exposed to in order to achieve such understanding?”.

Changing me, Changing others

Reflective practice in the context of the ASTHE programme also afforded me the luxury of looking back not only at my teaching, but also on my thus far unstated philosophy of teaching and eventually my fundamental values and underlying worldview. It is with this very core personal value system, that I start the journey of my portfolio and travel through my philosophy of teaching, my teaching and learning practice, my more recent administrative role, my research experience and my efforts in fostering continuing professional development and towards ensuring a sustained commitment to continuous improvement at the institutional level.

While several of the lessons learnt by applying the principles of reflective practice were for problems faced personally by me, several overflowed into areas common to other academics, and more importantly, to areas which needed to be strengthened at the institutional level.

This last aspect was particularly pertinent for me as I had assumed duties as the Director of the School of Computing (UCSC) in 2004, and so was in a privileged position to see through some of the reforms being put to practice. The School’s own move from teaching to learning with the introduction of e-Learning in blended form with internal undergraduates and in online mode with external degree students contributed to, and benefited by my involvement in the ASTHE programme.

More than one year after the coursework component of the ASTHE programme, I am pleased that my commitment to continuous improvement in teaching and learning has not waned. On the contrary, thanks primarily to several juniors from the UCSC who have helped keep the momentum going, we have collectively been able to subvert the dominant culture of resisting change by inculcating pockets of good practice and thereby influencing the way we think and plan academic activities at the School.