Some amateur thoughts on change
Demands for change are a pervasive part of my professional life. Students aspire to make change in the world and demand change to our academic institutions. My colleagues want change to internal processes and aspire to make change through their research and service. My broader academic communities want to change our practices, norms, and values to make our peer review more fair and efficient and our research more impactful in the world. And higher education, as a whole, has always played a large role in cultural change.
And yet, how to make change isn’t most something academics talk about. How do we take a process we don’t like and improve it? How do we nudge aspects of culture in directions that better serve our values? If we’re in a position of power, how do we use our power to make change? And if we’re in a less empowered position, how do we effectively demand and support change?
I’m by no means an expert on how. There are many who are. There are engineering experts who study process improvement, organizational science experts who study organizational change, social scientists of many kinds that study social change, and millions of people worldwide who have practical skills implementing change, sometimes through activism and sometimes through leadership. I’m sure there are countless disciplines I’m overlooking here, and countless others just beginning to think about change.
And yet, despite how pervasive change is, and how pervasive desire for it is, I don’t think I was ever taught how to make it by any of these disciplines. I certainly wasn’t in my K-12 education, where the focus was more on teaching me how to solve well-understood, simple problems. My courses in college, despite being quite broad, only just barely touched on it in a sociology and political science course or two. And in my life, encounters with change came mostly through interfacing with top down change initiatives in government and school, or my occasional bottom up demands for change through activism. My curriculum on change has mostly been hundreds of hours of podcasts, such as This American Life, the Slate Political Gabfest, Fresh Air, and other shows that showed me countless case studies of change.
Since tenure, however, I’ve had many personal experiences with change. Taking leadership positions in academic conferences and journals, administrative positions for academic programs, an executive position at a software startup, and leading social change efforts on CS education policy, have given me many new perspectives on why making change is hard and how to do it effectively. I don’t know that I do it effectively yet, but reflecting on my successes and failures has given me many theories about what change is, what it requires, and why it succeeds and fails.
A theory of change
For simplicity, I’m going to refer to any entity to be changed as an “institution.” This might be an informal social group, an organization, a business, a community, or even a country. Most of my experiences are with changing small groups, small businesses, and small communities.
The major premise of my theory of change is that there are generally two major approaches to change. The first is to modify an institution. This is long, slow, painful, and often thankless work. People can change institutions from within, or from outside. Both are just as hard, but for different reasons. The benefit of changing an institution is that it preserves all of the power of the institution. The cost of changing an institution is time. Pick any kind of long term social change, big or small, and you see these tradeoffs at play. For example, consider a book club that has a discussion format you don’t like. Social change means convincing the book club leader to do things differently, acclimating the participants to the new process, and dealing with the losses that may come from the change. That will take some time, you might not get credit for it, and in the end, newcomers will completely take it for granted. Amplify that to the scale of changing U.S. federal law, and you see the same patterns around civil rights, human rights, gun rights, and so on.
The alternative to changing an institution is replacing an institution. Like changing an institution, this is also slow, painful, and often thankless work — its just creating something new rather than careful surgery on something already built. The benefit of replacing an institution is that you get to shape it with entirely new values, new processes, and new culture, fixing the problems with the existing institution that were so hard to modify. The cost is often instability, the risk of failing to create a viable alternative, and potentially losing all of the original institution’s benefits. Making a new book club rather than changing your current one might fragment the community, might destroy the original bookclub and its benefits, and might also fail, leaving no bookclubs. At the scale of a country, we know all too well the risks of trying to replace one model of governance with another: war, death, and decades of instability. But sometimes we get something better, like replacing monarchy with democracy.
Choosing between changing and making an institution is fundamentally about judging two things:
- Is there a capacity for change in the current institution? Capacity includes time for individuals to understand the change, implement it, and deal with the emotional burden of a shift in their work, their life, or even their identity. If there’s no time, there’s no change.
- Is there opportunity for change? Opportunity includes an idea for change, some evidence of benefits of the change, and sufficient belief and desire for change.
Sometimes there’s both capacity and opportunity in an institution, and change is possible. People can spend the bit of excess time they have adjusting to change, and they’ll be motivated because they see some benefit from the work. These are the kinds of institutions that both leaders and participants want to be part of. These are institutions that adapt and thrive.
But in some institutions, there’s so little capacity or opportunity for change that any effort at change word cause stress, burnout, distrust, frustration, and potentially abandonment, destroying the institution. In these cases, when the change is important enough, one possibility is to first make the smaller changes necessary to create capacity and opportunity for change, so that bigger changes are possible later. In the worst cases, it might be faster to make a new institution entirely, either replacing the old institution, or competing with it until all of the power and resources are shifted.
Making change partly means carefully analyzing which of these paths is more likely to be fruitful. The challenge is that every individual gets to make their own judgement about this, which can fragment and erode opportunity for change. And waiting to make change for too long risks squandering opportunity. So timing is everything.
But even when there is capacity and opportunity for change, it can be just as important to make both capacity and opportunity visible. This is hard, because it’s institutions and their machinery are rarely visible. Newcomers to an institution, for example, may need a year before they even see the basic outlines of an institutions processes, key players, culture, and values. Once you’ve been there, and seen the institution from the middle or the top of its hierarchy, the capacity and opportunities for change become visible. But if you’re on the bottom, and the people in the middle and top aren’t good at communicating about change, there can be large rifts between how people at the top, bottom, and outside of an institution see the potential for change.
I’ve seen these change communication failures unfold in some predictable ways. People from the bottom want change and see opportunities for it, but often lack the capacity for it. The people at the top don’t accurately see the opportunities and overestimate the capacity for change. So the bottom, out of frustration, usually decides to either protest or make its own institutions. And the top, surprised about revolt, tries to make change, but too quickly and too sloppily for it to stick. And if the bottom decides to create its own institution instead, they eventually find themselves at the top, realizing how hard it is to make change, and how hard it is to communicate to the new bottom how to make change. Repeat.
This begs the question: how do you build an organization for change, to avoid this vicious cycle? There needs to be capacity, and process for acting upon it. That way, an opportunity comes along, the institution can follow their process and implement change using its excess capacity. And that capacity has to be protected ruthlessly. (Much like Google’s 20% time used to be).
Change in academia
While all institutions can be built this way, in some ways, academia is in some ways an exemplar for change. First, most of the members of academia have capacity for change built-in to their job descriptions. Tenure-track faculty, for example, have ~60% left undefined for research and service, which leaves open a huge potential for implementing change within academia, but also outside of it. This requires faculty to see opportunity for change, which is hard, but academics do have the time if they decide to make it: academia is largely shielded from the costs of failure in research and service. Not making a discovery by a certain deadline doesn’t bankrupt a college or university.
Academia is also built to constantly monitor for opportunity. It’s full of people oriented toward seeking out and developing new ideas and new perspectives. We also spend considerable amounts of time in research, teaching, and service deliberating on these new ideas.
And yet, because academia is heavily shielded from capitalism, it often lacks the motivation to implement change, even though it has capacity and sees opportunity. It’s still a mystery to me as to why. Sometimes I think it’s because we get blinded by our desire to fully understand problems or find the “best” solutions to things. Other times, it’s because we’re so focused on particular passions in research, we leave no room for passion about the problems in our own institution.
But the biggest one, I think, is that academics aren’t taught about change. We don’t know how it works, or how to do it, and so we sit there, feeling powerless to make change, when the reality is that we’re the most well-positioned to do it, certainly in our own institutions, but likely in the world as well.
Of course, this doesn’t describe all of academia. The academics I respect most are the ones that are relentlessly and selflessly focused on change both in and outside of academia. They are the ones fully exploiting academia’s unique capacity to change the world. They are the ones I aspire to be.
