When we encounter an organisational system that works particularly well, it is easy to assume that somebody must have designed it in its finished form. The different parts fit together, common problems appear to have been anticipated and people seem to understand what should happen next. The system can appear to possess an intelligence of its own, giving the impression that an exceptionally capable person once understood the whole problem and created the complete answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I increasingly wonder whether this is how the strongest systems are actually developed. Careful design, professional expertise and good judgement are clearly important, but complex systems are rarely created successfully in a single step. More often, they develop cumulatively. An initial process is introduced, people begin to use it and experience reveals things that could not have been fully understood at the planning stage. What works is retained, what creates difficulty is reconsidered and the process gradually becomes better suited to the reality in which it operates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This has made me reflect on the way we design organisations and, in particular, universities. We often assume that a good institutional system should be created in advance by people with sufficient experience and expertise. We bring people together, consider every eventuality we can think of and attempt to produce a complete process before anyone has used it. There is nothing wrong with careful preparation, but there is a limit to how much can be known in advance. Universities involve students, staff, technology, regulation and human behaviour, all interacting in ways that are difficult to predict fully. A system that appears entirely logical in a meeting room can behave quite differently once it encounters everyday reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Euro University of Bahrain, this is one reason why our culture places such importance on beginning with a minimum viable plan and then acting. Our informal shorthand is sometimes simply \u201cjust do it\u201d, although that should not be confused with acting carelessly or without thought. A minimum viable plan is still a plan. It should establish the purpose, the people responsible, the principal risks and how the outcome will be assessed. The point is not to avoid thinking, but to recognise when further discussion is no longer producing useful knowledge and the next stage of learning can only come from implementation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once something has been put into practice, it begins to provide information that was not available beforehand. We can see where people become confused, where unnecessary delays occur, where responsibilities overlap and where an assumption turns out to have been wrong. We may also discover that something works better than expected, perhaps for reasons that were not obvious when it was first proposed. The important stage then is the review: understanding what happened, retaining what worked and changing what did not. The next version is therefore not an entirely new invention. It is a modification of what came before, informed by experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over time, these modifications accumulate. A mature student support system, for example, may contain many connected steps and appear to have been designed as a complete structure. In reality, one step may exist because a student once fell between two areas of responsibility. Another may have been removed because it delayed support without adding value. A communication point may have been introduced because staff did not have the information they needed, while a responsibility may have been moved because the original arrangement created confusion. What eventually looks like sophisticated design may actually represent the institutional memory of many individual experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The quality of the eventual system therefore does not necessarily depend on one person having anticipated everything. It depends on the quality of the process through which the system has been developed. Each attempt produces evidence and each review creates an opportunity to decide what should continue and what should change. After many iterations, an organisation can produce something more sophisticated and more closely aligned with its needs than any individual could realistically have designed at the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not an argument against expertise. Experienced people may recognise risks earlier, ask better questions and avoid mistakes that others have already made. Their knowledge can improve the starting point considerably. However, expertise should not become a reason to assume that a system will work exactly as intended, or that its original design should be protected from later challenge. In complex environments, expertise may be most valuable when it helps an organisation interpret evidence and make good adjustments, rather than when it claims to have predicted every eventuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Iteration does not, of course, automatically produce improvement. Organisations are quite capable of preserving ineffective practices. A process may continue because it is familiar, because somebody senior introduced it or because acknowledging that it has not worked is uncomfortable. New controls may be added without old ones being removed, creating complexity that serves no useful purpose. A system can therefore become increasingly bureaucratic while still being described as mature or comprehensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is why review must involve more than asking whether another step should be added. It must also ask whether existing steps remain necessary, whether they still serve their original purpose and whether they create consequences that were never intended. Sometimes improvement means adding a safeguard or clarifying a responsibility. At other times, it means simplifying a process, removing a duplicated approval or accepting that a well-intentioned idea has not delivered the expected result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In practice, this is where the different parts of the EUB Culture Code need to work together. People require ownership so they can act rather than wait indefinitely for permission. We need speed so that the period between an idea, its implementation and the resulting evidence is not unnecessarily long. We need openness because weaknesses cannot be corrected if people feel unable to describe them honestly. We also need an evidence-based approach, so that decisions about what should continue are not determined by status, habit or personal attachment to the original proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Review only adds value when we are more committed to the outcome than we are to defending the plan. This can be difficult because people naturally become attached to ideas in which they have invested time and effort. A process can begin to feel personal, particularly when it was created by an individual or team with good intentions. Yet the purpose of review is not to identify who was right or wrong at the beginning. It is to use what we now know to make the next version better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A clear strategic direction remains essential throughout this process. At EUB, our Strategic Plan describes the kind of university we are seeking to become and gives coherence to the many decisions made across the institution. Iterative improvement then helps us discover the practical route towards that destination. Without a clear direction, trial and error can become disconnected activity. Without implementation and review, strategy can remain an attractive document that has never been tested against the world it is intended to influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The challenge is therefore to combine a stable sense of purpose with flexibility about how that purpose is achieved. We should be disciplined about the direction in which we are moving, but less attached to our first view of the route. This requires consistency because cumulative improvement depends on the cycle being repeated many times. One review, one adjustment or one moment of insight will rarely transform a complex organisation. The effect comes from continuing to act, observe and improve, even when each individual change appears modest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This also suggests a slightly different understanding of leadership. The role of a leader may not be to design every feature of the finished institution in advance. It may instead be to establish a clear direction, create conditions in which people can act responsibly and ensure that the organisation learns honestly from the results. Leadership still requires decisions, judgement and accountability, but it also requires the humility to recognise that some answers only become visible once work has begun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No organisational system is ever truly finished because the circumstances around it do not stand still. Students change, technology develops, regulations are updated and the needs of employers and society continue to move. A process that served the university well several years ago may gradually become an obstacle if it is protected from further review. Continual adjustment is therefore not necessarily evidence that the original system was badly designed. It may be evidence that the organisation remains attentive to the reality in which it operates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I look at some of the systems at EUB that now feel established, I can often see this history within them. They did not appear complete. They developed through attempts, conversations, evidence, corrections and, sometimes, mistakes. Their apparent sophistication is not necessarily the product of one exceptional moment of design, but the accumulated result of people repeatedly trying to make them work a little better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps we should therefore be less impressed by claims that a perfect system can be designed from the outset and more interested in the quality of the learning process behind it. The more useful question may not be whether we can know the complete answer in advance, but whether we can create an organisation with enough clarity, openness and discipline to continue finding better answers as its experience grows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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