A632.3.3.RB Complex Decisions Lindsey Wilson

Describe the 3 different tools or approaches for dealing with complex, multiple stakeholders, and environmental decision processes in your organization. Reflect on changes or alterations you would consider to ensure the most successful process possible. Describe the elements in detail and make clear the available options and consequences.

 

Understand our Stakeholders:

One of the ways that I would improve on my organization’s decision complex decision making would be to rely less on assumptions and instead increase our listening to stakeholders. Although I think many assumptions are based off of experience and past learnings I feel that at times we are grasping for straws on the problem of bring new students through our doors and how to encourage current students to persist through their degree. One of the reasons I think we rely on assumptions is actually from my action research project from MSLD 500. For this project I looked at student engagement for online students. One of my major findings was that we assume that students do not need hands-on training on how to use their student accounts because the majority of our students use computers on a daily basis. In reality, I found that students were so busy they don’t have the time to sit and figure out their student accounts, and choose to delay enrolling, or rely on us as their advisors to do some of the tasks for them.   

This led me to ask the question: What tools can I use to listen to stakeholders, especially student stakeholders in order to make better decisions? One way that I found that was a little bit of a “duh” moment for me is to harness the power of social media to listen to stakeholders. Student Affairs Today (Talarico, 2018) suggests keeping an eye on social media sights to see what people are saying about the university. Are they complaining about a cumbersome application process? Are they providing positive feedback about a student event they went to? By seeing what students are actually posting on social media we can fact check our assumptions, challenge our frames (Hoch, 2001) and use the data we gather to inform our decisions.

Another stakeholder that the university considers are corporate and community partners. They often stress the need for staff members to go to city chamber meetings, community events to build corporate relationships. I’ve noticed how some people on our team are able to harness the power of these relationships while others seem to not understand how these stakeholders are beneficial to our local campus. The reason I think this is because I have seen how one team member is fantastic at building connections. He seems to understand the frames of the stakeholders’ and is able to communicate how the local campus can help to meet their needs. For example, he often sends us meeting minutes or updates from these meetings and describes how he thinks the university’s role could be with a given situation. In contrast, other staff members go these meetings and express instead how they feel that they have lost valuable work time. This also seems to be an example of some people exhibiting overconfidence with regards to their own frame and undervaluing the relevance of a different frame (Hoch, 2001).  Although I don’t go to these types of events and meeting due to my job title, I do sense that there is a disconnect in understanding the purpose of these stakeholders. As a result, I would recommend that our team has more formal conversations about the purpose of these stakeholders and to give staff practical tools on how they leverage these relations ships. These tools might be advice on how to network, creating an elevator speech, and providing basic background information and data of a stakeholder etc..

Other recommendations that I would make with regards to stakeholders and managing complex problems is to share their information. As the example given earlier, one staff member is great about offering up information to the rest of the team. When I have read his notes it has allowed me to connect the dots to other ideas, to plan and strategize in a different way and to ask questions. If everyone had a similar approach we would create a network of knowledge about our stakeholders which in turn would allow us to make decisions off of information vs. instinct and assumptions. With regards to our student stakeholders I would also recommend that we ask more questions about what their needs are. This could be done through a formal survey, or informal questioning. By gathering this information we can check our assumptions and our framing to make sure that they are aligned with our stakeholders which will allow us to make more informed decisions.

Identify Organizational Capabilities:

Overall, I think my organization has a great structure that allows for enough autonomy to allow individual locations to be creative and meet the unique needs of their demographics, while at the same time providing enough structure and resources to allow everyone to understand the expectations, and vision of the university. However, at the local level I often feel that our frame is focused on constraints vs. possibilities.  Because we are located on a military installation we have to abide by federal policy that makes it nearly impossible for us to advertise or promote our university on the base. I remember a meeting when I first started working with the university where I started throwing out some marketing ideas, and I could barely get the idea out before I was reminded of the federal policy. Somewhat exasperated I said, “So tell me what I can do, vs. what I can’t do!”  I went on to explain that even though a certain idea may not be possible, there may be elements of the idea that are possible if we think outside of the box. Looking back I was witnessing cognitive rigidity due to the stress of the situation (Soll, 2015) and I was asking my team to shift their frame to thinking of possibilities vs. constraints. Along with shifting their frame I’ve also been working on identifying our local organization’s capabilities to help us deal with complex issues. For example, we need to grow our admissions numbers to meet projections, but we have the federal policy as a constraint. However, we can identify the targets or stakeholders that are connected with the military outside of the base and partner with them to advertise and build connections. The university also has a local high school program that we could partner with to build our networking capabilities and to advertise the high school students. We also have marketing, veterans, and career services departments that we could coordinate with to help meet our needs and goals. In this way we would be shifting our focus from, “evaluating isolated decisions to creating business platforms to enhance and support an entire decision context.” (Hoch, 2001, p.129).

Decisions that allow for Flexibility:

The big takeaway from this week’s reading form me was the underlying message that how leaders use to make decisions needs to change and adapt to the complex and every changing society that we live in. Hoch (2001) says, “Managers will increasingly need to prepare the groundwork and capabilities for choice and use these capabilities to confront and deal with the moving targets as they appear in real time.” (p.129). Although this is very similar to what was mentioned above I think Hoch is implying more: leaders need to make decisions that allow for more choices to be possible in the future so that the organization can be flexible to account for the ever changing variables. This made me think of Sun-Tzu’s Art of War where he provides the tactician with the analogy of a snack: “Strike at its head, and you will be attacked by its tail; strike at its tail, and you will be attacked by its head; strike at its middle, and you will be attacked by head and tail both.” (p.213). Hoch (2001) echoes this understanding in the context of an organization making complex decisions by saying, “The decision maker [needs to] prepare to make correct choices in the future rather than nailing down the decision in advance.” (p.128).

I think my organization at the local level could benefit from the overall message of making decisions that allow for flexibility and account for multiple possibilities. An example of this would be to cross train staff. As mentioned in another assignment there is a strict hierarchy and definition of roles. However, if a person leaves the organization, or is gone for an extended period of time there is an information vacuum. By having some overlap in positions it would allow for more the sharing of information, knowledge, skills and for someone else to fill in a role if need be. The consequences making decisions to allow for flexibility would be that the staff would have to be comfortable and open to change. Change causes stress for many people and as a result leadership must be prepared to use adaptive leadership techniques to support their followers (Northouse, 2016). Another implication of this flexibility would be the need for people to check their frame biases (Soll, 2015) and to stretch their frames to allow for new ideas and decisions to prosper (Hoch, 2001).

 

References:

Hoch, S. J., Kunreuther, H., & Gunther, R. E. (2001). Wharton on making decisions (1st ed.). New York: Wiley.

Northouse, P.G.. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Soll, J. B., Milkman, K. L., & Payne, J. W. (2015). Outsmart your own biases. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Talarico, D. (2018). Find out how to really listen to your stakeholders online. Student Affairs Today, 20(12), 1-3.

Tzu, S., Evans, M., & Giles, L. (2017). The art of war. Laguna Hills: Race Point Publishing.