Higher Educational Consulting and Strategy
I design custom programs to help you achieve your goals. I will listen to how you want your organization to change, provide a fresh perspective on your data, suggest policies, procedures and programs that might help and suggest meaningful assessment measures to keep you on track. I will also be your stealth advocate: everything is focused on meeting your goals. I offer practical courses, training and consulting in four areas, all connected through applications of cognitive psychology and behavioral science.
Areas of Work
1. Innovation and Culture
Innovation requires risk and is intertwined with culture and strategy. I teach innovative processes (like design thinking) and policies (like a permission slip for failure) but innovation also requires a culture that has a high tolerance for ambiguity and supports your most divergent thinkers.
2. Inclusion, Bias & Performance Management
An “inclusion audit” of your data and culture can help determine your next best step. My bias training is unique in that I focus on the cognitive shortcuts that all humans take and how this leads to so many poor decisions (in business but also in how we motivate and evaluate people and personnel). The business case is central and the context is broad, which removes much of the usual reticence to teaching implicit bias.
3. Trust, Social Capital and Motivating Teams
The human ability to share knowledge and cooperate is unique. We are motivated by purpose but are also susceptible to groupthink. Leadership is largely about connecting what people do daily in their jobs with the big vision of where the organization is going. Trust is the accelerator for everything from teamwork to managing the conflict that is central to innovation.
4. Strategy, Behavior and Change Management
Strategy is the art of sacrifice, but it starts by understanding the key choices you need to make. Strategy sits at the intersection of your aspirations and capabilities, so it starts with understanding both your current market position and your culture (often the key capability for innovation and change). Equally, strategy ultimately depends on your ability to align behavior and the decisions that others will make.
Interactive Sessions & Workshops
1. Innovation Leadership and the Learning Organization
1a: Innovation Leadership
All management is now change management: new technology has created a learning economy that rewards more adaptable organizations. Leading these new learning organizations (and indeed working with next generation employees) requires increasing engagement, agency and risk tolerance at every level, supporting diversity and more attention to process, motivation and meaning. Leading innovation requires balancing the safe with the uncomfortable, process with strategy, and the autonomous and the collaborative. Great leadership is about making yourself a little obsolete: innovation leadership creates an organization so motivated and engaged that new ideas are created, shared, tested for alignment with strategy, brought to fruition and assessed everywhere at every level every day. Learning everywhere is your real goal.
1b: Making Risk Happen: Leadership Nudging and the Learning Organization
The best coach is not the one who can do the most work or the best push-ups: it is the person who gets others to do more push-ups. Leaders are emotional and cognitive coaches. A convergence of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology suggest a new 3Rs of “Relationships, Resilience and Reflection” (a process, or a new “what” of leadership) and new ways for this to be designed and delivered (the “how”). We can stimulate innovation, develop inclusive teams who can collaborate to solve complex problems, and design, lead and nudge our organizations to become more engaged, flexible, and proactive if we lead by embracing ambiguity, better questions, shared values and a learning mindset.
2. Strategy
2a: Strategy as the Art of Sacrifice
Strategy is about improving your odds for success through difficult choices. The first choices are the most important: exactly who do you reasonably serve, why and how? Strategic plans are often neither strategic nor a plan, and end up as useless wish lists. They are not marketing plans or slogans. It is critical that your organization’s mission, focus and outcomes be distinctive, but also uniquely deliverable by only you. You need a “what” but also an individual “how.” Assessment is key: you are what you measure. Alignment is also key: can you really get everyone in the organization to think about the choices (sacrifices of things that won’t be done) in the same way? Being a strategic leader is less about deciding the strategy and more about building a strategic organization.
2b. Strategy as Alignment: You are What You Do
If you can articulate what is distinctive about your institution’s mission, focus and outcomes, you then need to align resources and integrate services and experiences. Strategy is about collective motivation. Since it impossible, and massively inefficient, to dictate all of the choices that need to be made at every level, every day, strategic leadership focuses on building organizational understanding and capacity to individually make the hundreds of good and small (but cumulatively important) decisions every day that align to move the organization forward collectively. Implementation is not the flip side of strategy: it is alignment.
2c. Assessment as Strategy: You are What You Measure
Assessment should be designed to support and improve your mission, strategy and people. You need feedback to learn: you won’t improve your tennis without a net. This workshop will lead participants through a series of practical hands-on exercises that begin by examining what matters most to your goals, values and bottom line. You will design ways to measure what is most valuable, distinctive and meaningful. The emphasis is on ambitious and meaningful goals, and not just measuring what is easiest or most quantitative. We will design assessment as feedback to motivate changes in behavior.
3. Leading an Inclusive and Innovative Culture
3a: Diversity and Innovation: Leading a Strategic Culture
Creating an innovative culture begins with your dedication to diversity and inclusion. Your own comfort with ambiguity and change is the foundation of a creative and diverse organization that will attract the best, new, and sometimes disruptive and uncomfortable ideas and people. Your leadership of inclusion is fundamental to building a culture that is welcoming of diversity, considers multiple perspectives and is still aligned with mission and able to support strategy
3b: A Future-Ready Process
To build more a culture that tolerates more risk, supports diversity, encourages ambiguity, cultivates multiple perspectives, and supports strategy, you need to create processes and structures that constantly prepare for the future. Building space for the spontaneous formation and progress of teams that will develop, test and share new ideas is one way to ensure that innovation is always being nurtured. It is messy, but also motivating. It also builds risk, which preparation for the future.
4. Developing Purpose and Designing for Engagement
4a: Finding Your Purpose: Creating Meaning in the Workplace
Purpose matters. People who feel engaged and connected to the mission and values of an organization work harder and better. Millennials and Gen Z have especially high expectations for doing work that aligns with their values, and most people will trade money and other benefits for more meaningful work. This workshop engages managers and staff in a two-way conversation about both individual personal goals and how they might better be reflected in the work the group shares.
4b. Finding Your Purpose: Designing Your Life
This version of the workshop is designed for Millennials and applies the design principle of iteration to life planning. It will help individuals see how your organization may (or may not) be helping them achieve life goals and will clarify what values and goals are most motivating.
4c. Learning Spaces, Meetings and other Big Nudges
Technology, architecture, furniture, hours and even how you conduct meetings can all be motivational (or not). The set-up of your space sends lots of messages about culture, who matters and what is valued. Creating a learning environment and culture can increase collaboration and build collective intelligence. Places to share and write are important: screens and walls can now be shared spaces. Meetings for “first exposure” are largely inefficient, but can be redesigned as spaces of disruption, motivation and idea generation.