Cognitive biases that prevent real change on campus

More than any other barrier, “the way we’ve always done things” impedes change on campus. While there may be pockets of innovation and excitement around reform across the institution, without general receptiveness to change, leaders are fighting an uphill battle to reap true transformation. Despite the best strategic planning efforts, leaders report faculty and staff feeling initiative fatigue, even when the real change hasn’t yet manifested.

A neglected barrier to creating an effective strategy is the mindset. Cognitive bias is a systematic inclination toward thought patterns that deviate from formal logic. These biases, or mental shortcuts, lead us to make judgments and decisions in ways that conserve mental processing capacity. This mindset causes our planning processes to lead to goals that are influenced by external trends and cause us to practice incremental progress instead of true transformation.

We held a roundtable event, Hidden Enemies to Strategy: Five Mindsets to Defeat Incrementalism, to help presidents, chiefs of staff, and directors of institutional research/effectiveness understand how to prevail over the most common cognitive biases that derail college leaders’ discussions, and decisions, and ultimately sabotage their strategy. Explore the takeaways below or jump to the next steps.

Review the Key Takeaways

Understand the three hindrances to effective change in higher ed

Three types of barriers to change

1. The first is psychological, which often leads to an over-reliance on current and internal factors when institution leaders are planning and making crucial decisions. The impact of focusing heavily on contemporary factors causes leaders to avoid initiating change.
2. The second barrier is cultural, leading to risk-averse campus cultures that are driven by one of the cornerstones of our current higher-ed system: consensus-based, highly participatory processes that hinder change.
3. The final barrier is structural, where most institutions don’t have the decision-making paradigms, capacity, or incentives needed to drive change. Internal siloes can further complicate change adoption and implementation.

How barriers to change and biases limit higher ed strategy

Many higher-ed leaders described discontent with the process of creating a strategy, citing that the thinking is incremental and lacks a clear desire for change. Campuses deduce that strategy fails to drive engagement because they have an unclear mission, legacy culture, a lack of vision, etc.

Our conversations with institutions indicate that the leaders driving the process of creating strategy unintentionally minimize the odds of success. This revelation shows that the elements of creating successful strategies on campuses were present, but the mindsets of those leaders act as a barrier. This pattern of thinking manifests itself in boardrooms and committee meetings, town halls, and classrooms. It produces incremental visions, poorly articulated goals, and a general inability to envision the world—and the institution—as different in the future.

These blind spots in the decision-making process that produce incremental visions, poorly articulated goals, and the inability to evolve our thinking arise from cognitive biases.

The most common hidden enemies to strategy in higher ed

The Here and Now Fallacy

The “Here and Now Fallacy” is simply an over-reliance on current and internal-state information when planning for the future.

The best way to defeat the “Here and Now Fallacy” is to immerse themselves in the future. One of the most effective tools to do so is through scenario planning, which is a future planning practice of developing an agile and responsive strategy for a multiplicity of future environments.

Stay the Course Syndrome

“Stay the Course Syndrome” is an adherence to a widely shared vision, even when that shared vision is unsound. One of the most common manifestations of this in higher ed is in strategic plans. Once that document is published, there’s a tendency to treat it as a static document until the next planning cycle, rather than continually reevaluating and refining it.

One of the most effective ways to avoid “Stay the Course Syndrome” is to articulate assumptions and build in tripwires (objective thresholds indicating that certain assumptions have been violated such that immediate action is warranted) at the outset.

The Paradox of Participation

The paradox of participation occurs when higher-education leaders seek to get diverse and representative input but instead end with a narrowly focused vision.

The best way to achieve diversity of thought is to organize meetings so everyone in the room considers as many perspectives as possible and those different perspectives are heard.