I wrote this article a little over 10 years ago and an edited (sanitized) version of it appeared in the April 2000 issue of Business Officer magazine under the title Hard Thinking About Soft Machines and Information Technology. As I work on developing a teaching philosophy, Maslow’s lessons about self-actualization definitely come to mind!
And searching for that article from years ago, it would appear NACUBO doesn’t publish its archives to the web. Here it is:
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When called upon to introduce significant organizational change to a self-described “Machiavellian” management environment some years ago, I reached for a long out-of-print book, Eupsychian Management, authored by Abraham Maslow in the 1960’s. In this work Maslow introduces the term “synergy” and writes extensively about self-motivated teams.
Frankly, I was laughed out of more than one office when I distributed excerpts from this work to managers in the organization. I felt somewhat redeemed when within a few months the Wall Street Journal cited this once ill-fated work as containing the hottest “new” management strategies for building high performance teams. Shortly thereafter, this work was reintroduced and updated with contemporary interviews and case studies under the title Maslow on Management (1998, John Wiley & Sons).
Those of us whose primary exposure to Maslow’s work is to his “hierarchy of needs” might easily (but incorrectly) conclude that his writings emphasize a structural view of human psychology. In fact, his hierarchy summarizes far less “structured” observations that embrace the full range of human factors at play in complex work environments.
Maslow’s motivation for writing Eupsychian Management is indicative of this understanding. He saw that “one patient at a time” psychoanalysis could never cure the ills of all society. Recognizing that people who are happy in their work tend to be mentally healthy overall, he saw supportive workplaces where individuals are valued as the best way to promote mental health for millions of human beings. In his subsequent investigations, documented in this work, he found such workplaces to be more productive from an economic standpoint as well.
But this article is not about whether contemporary workplaces are healthy or not, which readers of Maslow on Management may decide for themselves, but about the expected benefits of technology planning in institutions of higher education. What should be the goals of technology plans? What visions should drive strategic technology planning? How can colleges and universities effectively transform their instruction and research programs to thrive in the emerging networked economy? On this topic, Maslow offers us much to contemplate, though his words were written at a time when computers far less powerful than the notebook I use to write these words filled rooms much larger than my office.
In planning for technology infrastructure and support we face a dilemma not unlike Maslow’s. With millions of users ranging from prospective students to seasoned faculty, we want each individual to have robust capabilities appropriate to their context-specific uses of diverse technologies. Can we plan for each individual’s usage, or anticipate every new context that will surface during the life of our installed infrastructures?
Many technology professionals I’ve consulted with have taken planning approaches that attempt to answer “yes” to this question, epitomized by a “take it or leave it” attitude to user’s experiences using the technology infrastructure that emerges from numerous trade-offs between competing technical priorities. Such plans reflect the very real constraints faced by technology organizations in much the same way Maslow might have envisioned a lifetime of providing individual psychoanalysis to every resident of just one small town.
By contrast, an increasing number of technology leaders emphasize establishing environments within which individuals can work to their full creative potentials without encountering organizational or technical “obstacles” in the process. This planning approach emphasizes maximizing creative opportunities for individuals first and foremost, and managing technical constraints within the resulting environment second. Reminiscent of Apple Computer’s “power to be your best” advertising campaign, Maslow would absolutely favor this approach, and he offers explicit guidance for realizing such a vision – and the resulting synergies – in complex organizations.
Maslow asks us to assume much about each other: first, that “everyone prefers to be a prime mover rather than a passive helper, a tool, a cork tossed about on the waves.” He asks us to assume in all people “the impulse to achieve…(and that they are) against wasting time and inefficiency, and want to do a good job…” Mort Meyerson, speaking of his experience as CEO of Perot Systems in an interview in Maslow on Management, explains it this way:
The question is do I say to our associates, “This is what needs to be done” so it is clear to the person? Do I say “If you choose to do it then I will reward you in the following way?” Or do I say… “Let us create an environment which is good for our people and watch what will happen?” I predict that what will happen in the last scenario will be ten times more powerful than if I tell employees what to do. (Otherwise) we are limited by what is inside my head and my experiences. If we follow the latter scheme I have outlines, I am able to tap into the experiences, the creativity, and the power of everyone in the organization.
It is significant that Meyerson makes these observations from the perspective of a technology company CEO. For to realize these outcomes, it takes more planning for flexibility and less control by constraint for a technology infrastructure to provide an environment that taps into the potential creative power of everyone in a complex organization. The result of watching to see “what will happen” runs very much contrary to the good planning instincts of technology professionals, and with good reason. They will ultimately be held to account for any resulting deficiencies or head-on collisions with constraints; control by managing constraints is thus a much safer planning route to pursue from the perspective of the CIO.
Safety in the short term may yield disaster for higher education in the long term. What new roles will emerge for higher education in the new knowledge economy? To the extent colleges and universities are not positioned to shape their own roles by leveraging their wealth of intellectual capital, they will instead be shaped by external forces that refuse to stand still. Leveraging an organization’s combined knowledge and experience, in this case the vast depositories of intellectual capital contained on our campuses, is precisely the dynamic management process described by Meyerson. How do we harness these vast resources in our own institutions through progressive technology planning?
To effectively address these issues, whether installing a new financial system or revamping an entire network infrastructure, planning processes must emphasize inclusiveness and communication at every stage of design and implementation. In higher education, there are plentiful examples where this has not occurred and institutions have ultimately paid the price in unpleasant “surprises” including decreased productivity, attrition of valuable employees, and protracted “battles” between technology service providers, users and system owners. How can we prevent these problems? Maslow again offers simple but effective guidance: “…it is almost a basic assumption…to find out what (people) are best at by finding out what they like most.”
My personal experiences in university management strongly support the efficacy of this fundamental assumption. In addition to building teams and assigning work based on what employees “like most,” I have gone so far as to structure positions or departments accordingly. The resulting “plans,” like Meyerson’s “outlines,” seek to create fertile ground for individual creativity and accomplishment. In some cases productivity has subsequently doubled, morale improved, innovations increased, attrition declined, and overall costs declined. Yes, it is possible to do much more with less. The best news for organizations that have not followed such practices in the past is that they tend to be rich in “organizational fertilizer” that, transformed into fertile ground, can unleash tremendous creative potential within an otherwise lackluster community.
Keeping Meyerson’s observations at Perot Systems in mind, and adding Maslow’s insight that “creativeness is correlated with the ability to withstand the lack of structure, the lack of future, the lack of predictability, of control, the tolerance for ambiguity, for planlessness,” the dilemma we face in higher education technology planning becomes clearer. We do not know our futures with certainty, today, besides knowing that the future for higher education will dramatically change with the increased utilization of existing technologies and continuing emergence of new technologies. This we cannot control, nor can we entirely plan for innovations in the long term, given this lack of predictability. So we must turn to our most precious resources, our human assets – faculty, staff, students, alumni, industry partners – and maximize opportunities for all constituencies to participate in the reshaping of the college and university in the new knowledge economy.
But, we might respond, only a few “movers and shakers” or “change agents” in our organizations are poised to come up with creative responses to the new challenges we face. Maslow argues that it is human nature to innovate and create; how do we unleash this potential throughout a complex organization? His answer is to establish authentic identification with the higher purposes of the organization, department or work team among every individual in the community, and to remove the institutional or management barriers to innovation. Management’s role is to define that higher purpose and ensure opportunities for each employee to make real contributions to that purpose. For Maslow, such management overcomes individual differences and allows each person to contribute effectively. Indeed, innovation to promote the team’s higher purpose should be every employee’s daily business as a member of a larger team with which he or she identifies.
Business officers can play decisive roles in bringing these values to the management of their own areas of responsibility, as increasing numbers of successful industry leaders have done, and also by playing leadership roles in describing new visions for the role of technology in higher education. The latter will ultimately determine our future financial roles in the new knowledge economy. Creativity and innovation, rather than constituting “exceptional” events in the life of the organization, should instead become the rule for daily work contributions. I have explained this to employees as simply, “Each day we will strive to do our work more effectively and efficiently than we did the day before. If you see a better way to accomplish a task, do it!” Dealing with the consequences of individual innovation, should it run amuck, is certainly easier than proscribing the limits of creativity in advance.
Tapping into the insights and experiences of “everyone in the organization” entails creating opportunities for each individual in our extended communities to actively participate in the process of transformation. While co-chairing a successful comprehensive technology planning effort at Georgetown University, I found the business officer’s role in such a process to be indispensable in countering the “planning for constraints” orientation of technology service providers. My faculty co-chair, Dr. Martin Irvine, concurrently stretched expectations to maximize flexibility for all users in the resulting virtual community. Indeed, beneath each identified “constraint” lay an opportunity to eliminate a future barrier to unleashing the creative energies of the broader user community.
The keys to success for technology planning efforts rest with how fully the resulting environment constitutes fertile ground for users to introduce new forms of utilization springing from their own creative endeavors. Such work is never “complete,” and is ultimately driven by the unbounded creative potential of the user community itself. It follows that users at all levels must be intimately involved in technology planning processes. In Georgetown’s case, leadership of the process itself was handed over to technology innovators in the “user community,” rather than technology managers, with precisely these outcomes in mind. The results of this planning effort included elevating technology service providers on the organization chart based on their role of empowering others – the user community – to craft new uses for technology throughout the organization.
We must choose our risks. On the one hand, we may create environments where we are satisfied to “watch what happens” when our users are afforded maximum flexibility and creative opportunities despite the difficulties we may face in managing such an environment. Curriculum development centers, faculty ebusiness incubators, virtual classrooms and support for new virtual communities are a few concrete examples of opening the floodgates of innovation to transform higher education for the 21st century. Or, we can proscribe in advance limitations on users defined by our existing constraints and hope for a future within which our campuses will not be tomorrow’s anachronisms.
Planning for a lack of structure, minimal control, and “planlessness”: these seem like bizarre, almost insane objectives for a technology planning process. Such criticisms are not new for Maslow’s ideas about management. But after 37 years of “out-of-print hibernation,” these are ideas whose time has come.
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