The Strategy Might Be the Tradeoff

A professor I know well recently spent five hours in a strategy session run by an outside consulting group. I’m going to leave everyone unnamed to protect the innocent. And perhaps myself.

The session ran from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with different groups assigned to different university goals. Her group spent the entire time in the same room working on research excellence. The university wants to substantially improve its research standing, potentially reaching R1 status. What could it do to get there?

The exercise started by removing the usual constraints. Imagine you had essentially unlimited resources. I believe the number thrown out was $500 million. What would you do?

Then the group was supposed to work backward. Take the ideas generated with $500 million and figure out what could actually be done with far fewer resources.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that exercise. I teach innovation, and I use exercises that separate divergent thinking from convergent thinking. Temporarily removing constraints can help people consider possibilities they would otherwise dismiss too quickly.

The problem was that the group never seemed to establish what it was actually trying to solve.

“Research excellence” is an aspiration. So is becoming an R1 university. Neither tells us much about what is currently preventing the university from getting there.

Maybe faculty don’t have enough time for research. Maybe the university lacks enough doctoral students and postdocs. Maybe grant support is inadequate. Maybe hiring has not been concentrated in the right areas. Maybe faculty spend too much time on administrative work. Maybe existing research resources are poorly allocated. Or, perhaps most likely, several or all of these factors contribute.

Figuring out which of these things are actually getting in the way would lead to a very different conversation. Instead, the group started generating ideas for reaching a desired outcome without first examining what was preventing the university from getting there. Five hours is a long time to brainstorm solutions when you aren’t quite sure what problem you are solving.

I also find an assumption built into the exercise problematic. It seems to assume that somewhere out there is a clever way to dramatically increase research excellence without substantially increasing the resources devoted to research.

There may be ways to use existing resources better. Some investments will produce more research than others, and universities can (and often do) make it unnecessarily difficult for faculty to conduct research. Removing some of those obstacles could help without requiring another $500 million.

Research, however, still requires resources. Faculty need time to do it. In many fields, it also requires labs, equipment, databases, travel, and research staff. Large research universities have doctoral students and postdocs working alongside faculty, as well as people supporting grants and administering research infrastructure. None of this is particularly mysterious.

So, what innovative solutions did the exercise generate? After beginning with an imaginary $500 million and gradually working their way back toward something the university might actually consider doing, the group eventually arrived at an idea.

Hire postdocs.

That might be a good idea. Postdocs could increase research capacity and help faculty produce more research. It’s just not particularly surprising or innovative. After five hours considering how a university could become substantially more research intensive without relying on substantially more resources, the answer was to hire more researchers.

There was another outcome from the session that probably won’t appear in the consultants’ report. At least one participant left more discouraged about the university than when the session began.

She was already stretched thin. Research competes with teaching, service, administrative work, and all the other things faculty are asked to do. Spending five hours talking about research excellence while largely taking additional time and resources off the table did not leave her energized about the university’s ambitions. Mostly, it left her wondering why she had spent five hours there.

Her frustration is also revealing. Someone already struggling to find enough time for research was asked to spend much of a day brainstorming ways for the university to produce more research without substantially increasing the resources devoted to it.

I do not think universities are unusual in this regard. Organizations often decide they want an outcome, realize that getting there would require resources they would rather not commit, and start looking for a creative way around the problem. Occasionally that probably works. Constraints can produce genuinely useful ideas. But frequently the constraint is exactly what needs to be addressed.

A university that wants substantially more research may need to give faculty more time for research. It may need more doctoral students or postdocs, or better research infrastructure. Some of that might come from reallocating existing resources, and some might require additional spending. Either way, something has to give.

That is the strategy question.

Calling research excellence a priority is easy. Deciding what the university is willing to devote to it is harder, particularly when doing so means putting fewer resources somewhere else. Leaders in other organizations face the same problem. There are always more worthwhile things to do than there are resources available to do them.

That’s why I’m convinced the answer is typically not another brainstorming exercise. The harder work is deciding which priorities really matter, what resources they require, and what the university is willing to give up to pursue them. Brainstorming can generate possibilities, but it cannot make those tradeoffs disappear or substitute for making them.

There most likely is not a magic idea that makes hard choices disappear.