Universities are capable of change – but they must manage it better

Pick up any university strategy or corporate plan and the chances are it will be festooned with initiatives for change. There is, the narrative will breathlessly explain, a need to make improvements to portfolios and offerings, the student experience, organisational structures, facilities, systems, processes and much else.

Of course, the world in which universities find themselves is changing, so it’s quite right that they change too. The evolution of regulatory frameworks, student demand and expectations about universities’ roles all drive internal change. And new technologies open up opportunities to do things differently that can only be grasped by introducing new ways of working.

In such a world, the ability to change and adapt is a vitally important asset for any university. A key enabler of institutional success is surely the ability to see and exploit opportunities to change for the better, but do so without damaging the underlying essence of what makes a university what it is.

So it must be of concern that in the 40 or so universities I have worked with across my career in the UK and elsewhere, I have so often heard the refrain “this institution is not good at change”. There is a commonly held view that, all too frequently, change projects run late, cost more than they should, unduly disrupt day-to-day teaching and research, and generally fail to deliver their promised benefits.

That view is not entirely without foundation. There are examples of IT projects that have gone disastrously wrong, expansions of programme offerings that have attracted no students, and internal reorganisations that have led to confusion and disruption. The inquests that inevitably follow such projects often show a depressingly similar list of causes, such as failure to make a clear case for change, poor planning and scoping, inappropriate resourcing and insufficient consultation.

But that is not the full story. At a sector-wide level, there is plenty of evidence that delivery of change, far from being a structural weakness, is actually a great strength. The response to the Covid pandemic, which saw universities move most of their activity online in very short timescales, was in many cases an extraordinary example of effective change. Over the years, there have been many other examples – universities’ response to the massification, then the marketisation of higher education has been hugely impressive, for instance. It’s hard to think of any other sector that has embraced change on that scale without widespread casualties among its constituent organisations.

So while the sector as a whole has a history of adapting to new circumstances and changing – not just to survive but to thrive – the experience at institutional level is often very different.

I have sought to explain this paradox in a new Higher Education Policy Institute report, Change by Design: how universities should design change initiatives for success. My experience, from a career helping universities deliver change, is that most of the staff delivering such initiatives are both well-intentioned and competent. The weakness, where it exists, is usually not so much in the delivery of the change but in its design.

To be clear, I don’t mean the design of the state that will exist once the change is completed – the new academic organisation structure, the new admissions system, the new way of organising professional services or whatever it might be. That is, of course, important, but my focus here is on the design of the change itself – all the conditions and requirements that must be met to enable the transition from the current state to the proposed future state. My experience is that these often receive scant attention, rendering success in implementing change a chance outcome.

One of the key design tasks that is often overlooked is articulating how the activities in a proposed change project are intended to accomplish the task. This is critical: there must be a clear understanding of the steps that, if followed, will logically result in the intended outcome. For instance, some IT projects deal with the build, test and deployment of systems and processes but fail entirely to deal with the people aspects of change, so have clearly not thought through everything that needs to happen to make the change effective.

The logic can best be tested by considering the intended end state, asking what conditions need to be satisfied for that to be realised and working back towards the current state to identify everything that needs to be done.

Change, it seems, is the only constant we can reply upon; there is sure to be even more of it in the future given the torrent of demands from government, regulators and students – not to mention the opportunities and risks presented by AI and new ways of working. It is only by changing the way universities design their change projects that they can maximise their chances of successful outcomes. Delivery of university missions demands no less.

Paul Woodgates is the former leader of PA Consulting’s education sector practice. He is now an independent strategic adviser and non-executive board member in the sector. He writes here in a personal capacity.