Facing a dire enrollment decline, a new provost at a liberal-arts college called together a “brain trust” of professors and administrators to come up with new revenue streams. He wanted a robust debate and encouraged the participants to propose creative, unorthodox solutions. Everyone agreed (or seemed to) that the ideas would remain confidential until the group settled on a few trial balloons to float to the rest of the campus.
Within a month, however, it was clear that someone was leaking notes from the meetings, distorting the content, and adding an alarmist spin. The provost was both mortified and irate at the breach. After all, this was just brainstorming. But he had learned two important lessons:
- It’s extremely hard to keep secrets on any campus unless they are only known by a few trusted people.
- Trial balloons tend to be shot down in higher education faster than a World War I dirigible.
Brainstorming is intrinsic to good management but faces unique challenges in higher-education administration. All too often, the rumor mill on a campus incapacitates the planning process by killing new ideas when they are only half-formed.
How to find an answer to a campus problem is as important as the solution itself, as I’ve often sought to demonstrate in the Admin 101 series. This month’s column looks at how to build trial balloons without resorting to Cold-War-era paranoia and secrecy. A follow-up essay will offer advice on how to launch trial balloons to give them the best chance of success.
Choose your speculation partners wisely. We all know that drawing boards can get too crowded. I have a STEM friend who swears her collaborators to secrecy — graduate assistants, postdocs, and co-authors — until they’ve actually drafted the hypothesis, done the experiments, and analyzed the results. As she puts it: “I don’t want to unveil an idea until I’ve backed it up with evidence.” When you are at the early stages of designing a lab experiment, composing a symphony, or diving into a humanities archive, you don’t want to put your hypotheses or first drafts out there for the whole world to comment on.
Yet it’s hard to convince many professors that administrators should enjoy a similar level of confidentiality in their internal speculations about how to fix campus problems.
Faculty and staff members get nervous (understandably) when they hear rumors that “everything is on the table” in some closed-door planning sessions. However, just as the wildest speculation in scholarship tends to be jettisoned if it proves groundless, so, too, does it fall by the wayside in good management planning. But it’s important for even outlandish ideas to be heard and debated as you strive toward sound administrative solutions.
To build an effective trial balloon, then, you need collaborators who are trusted (by you and by others on the campus), smart, and discreet — who understand that young and tender ideas can be crushed by publicity. Take that factor into consideration in choosing who to brainstorm with about campus problems.
Let others do the wild speculating (for now). As a leader, your role in directing the planning process is critical. But ideally, you should do the least talking in meetings with your brain trust. And definitely hold back on sharing your own zany notions. Don’t try to dominate the conversation or steer it toward a particular trial balloon.
Plenty of administrators — and I’m including myself in this group — have paid a heavy price in diminished support by blurting out during a meeting, “I have a crazy idea that just popped into my head,” and then rambling on about it without direction or evidence. Listeners naturally will interpret that “crazy idea” as your strong preference rather than what it very likely is: necessary intellectual speculation.
Certainly, many wild concepts in scholarship have led to Nobel Prizes 30 years later. But being an administrator is a rhetorically different situation than when you were teaching a theory class in your discipline. With your leadership title and authority comes responsibility and, yes, less freedom to blather on about a risky idea that might have serious repercussions for dozens or hundreds of employees.
Try to mull over your out-of-the-box ideas ahead of time. Indeed, many good administrators I know have a policy of waiting until the next meeting to discuss an idea that occurred to them during the previous session. They want a chance to run some numbers, do a little bit of research, and mull the potential outcomes. That’s not playing it safe; it’s realizing you have a duty to avoid confusing or panicking people by prematurely airing half-baked ideas.
Commit to floating multiple trial balloons at a time. When you push your preferred solution to a problem too early in the process, you risk alienating people and cutting off debate. Within your brainstorming group, strive to convey — in fact and in appearance — that you are open to many possible pathways for change.
A department chair told me how — excited by an unexpected windfall for lab renovations — he devoted an entire faculty meeting to a single idea on how to use the money. He didn’t intend for this trial balloon to be the only possible pathway; it was just the one that had occurred to him first. But because it was the only idea raised, everyone assumed it was the one that he was pushing and favored. That wasn’t the case. He just wanted to get the ball rolling and hoped other balls would be tossed into the game. In retrospect, though, he understood how the focus on just one idea seemed to assert an exclusion of others.
So aim for your brain trust to devise a set of trial balloons. The more people feel that their favorite ideas have been given a fair hearing, the more they will feel ownership in the outcome.
Keep everyone’s eyes on the prize. Everybody has served on committees that, despite being charged with a particular goal, get nowhere — and slowly. Usually, the culprits are lax leadership, vague timetables, and tangential thinking.
Your brain trust is yet another arena that requires subtlety and nuance. Intellectuals don’t like to be herded roughly. Be the kind of leader who keeps clarifying “why we are here.” Here are some simple rhetorical practices that may be helpful:
- At the beginning of every meeting, remind people about the group’s charge and about its progress so far.
- At the end of every meeting, review the main takeaways and how far you need to go before declaring that any trial balloons are ready for flight.
- When you sense the discussion about a particular trial balloon drifting off topic, gently steer it back. If someone is wandering in thought, ask, “So how would that apply to [this trial balloon]?”
Basically, you want to maintain an atmosphere and an agenda that suggests “we are here to do a job by a certain date, so let’s do it.”
Correct false or misleading gossip. Be ready for your trial balloons to inspire intense scrutiny and no small amount of rumors. As an administrator, you are limited in how much you can express your exasperation about that. Go ahead and clarify the record. Just be calm and professional when you do.
In one of my previous administrative gigs, I was director of a graduate program when rumors began to spread that the dean of our graduate college planned to eliminate some Ph.D. programs. At a meeting with graduate directors, the dean corrected the misinformation: Indeed he and his brainstorming groups had been talking about doctoral programs but with a view to increase, not decrease, their number. What I appreciated about that incident was his tone. He was neither angry nor peremptory but businesslike: “I want to make sure the facts are clear.” He focused on what, in journalism, would be called accurate reporting with no editorial spin. No blame; just the facts.
Higher education faces innumerable challenges. If the solutions were easy and familiar, everybody would be enacting them, and the pages of The Chronicle would not be replete with tales of budget woes and program closures. Administrators, along with everyone else, must have the freedom to think about, speculate on, and conceive of complex and nontraditional approaches to our problems. The only way to do that is to start small, with groups of people able to brainstorm and design trial balloons without causing an uproar. As an administrator in charge of that process, you have to protect intellectual creativity within management circles.
Next time, we will talk about ways to productively float trial balloons for campuswide scrutiny.