Trying to draw a few threads together:
Peter – re: Groupthink. I'm not convinced that this is particularly groupthink, but rather a recognition that areas of design – design thinking and service design – are engaged in the application of design-level solutions to exactly these systemic, organisational issues in a number of realms outside academia. As you quite rightly say, "In many ways, university administration and economics pits faculty and programs against each other. Until admin and funding processes change, any reshuffling of programs into new buckets is likely to have a similar effect." This is a design and innovation problem. For some reason we (design faculty) are suddenly struck dumb when it comes to our own institutions, yet at the same time are perfectly willing to expound on design for public healthcare or mobility, for example.
Gunnar - I don't buy the argument that, "one of the several reasons that a system of silos has evolved is that it is an easier structure for the assurance of quality." My experience has been that this kind of management, especially in large academic institutions, offers an illusion of the assurance of quality, but it's far removed from what happens at the coalface. The process of government QA audits is that the institutions prime their staff, send out forms to fill in to assess the quality of teaching and research. Faculty know what they *should* fill in here (and are sometimes coached in this) rather than what the reality is. This gets fed upwards and filtered and presented to an audit committee who hear exactly what they want to hear. It's the same effect as the old joke that the Queen thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint. All the boxes are ticked and management assume everything is working fine, but it isn't. That's why top-down command and control of silos is so often a failure in terms of lived experience of faculty and students.
This parallel universe phenomenon is similar to what Lubomir mentioned with regards to architecture - "architects only talk about their social concerns and considerations and in reality think only about their construction drawings and details. In architecture, if you haven't built, you are not an architect." What matters is the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. I don't know of a single institution that doesn't bill "excellence in teaching" as part of its mission statement, yet it's clear that many systems and practices are motivated towards research success at the expense of teaching, for example. What motivates people's behaviour isn't what’s on the mission statement, but the way targets and assessments affect people's lives on a personal level. That's the message that Human Centred-Design has been preaching for some time, after all.
Thanks Mike - it was very useful to read your structures and the idea of "permeable silos" sounds, at least, like a bridging solution. I'm interested in how you create the permeability on the ground in reality. I see plenty of ideas like this on paper, but simple, human things like locations of faculty offices in relation to each other, timetabling issues, space and budget issues, often seems to kill it off in practice.
(p.s. I fear we're getting off topic for the PhD list, but it's an interesting subject nonetheless)
Best,
Andy
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Hochschule Luzern
Design & Kunst
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Dr. Andy Polaine
Forschungsdozent Service Design
Research Fellow / Lecturer Service Design
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