Opinion
With deteriorating finances and increasing demands, the sector will require a huge number of reviews to get itself back on track in years to come – unless some really different approaches are taken now. This article sounds like a pitch for work at the outset but it’s not. It’s saying that rigorous strategic change in professional teams is no longer optional and needs to start right now.
So let me start with an apology. I loved the headline, because it responds to the thousands of people who say consultants are the cause of most of the problems in the tertiary sector. But I realised I was not a consultant a couple of years ago, when I was scraping together just enough money to pay my tax bill and I realised that I charge way too little to be really called a consultant.
I do the work of a consultant, but I am really more of a precarious contractor. But my trade, the thing that I really love is in helping to fix and or strengthen professional teams in HE.
I have conducted more organisational reviews of marketing, recruitment, and/or philantropy teams in the tertiary education sector than anyone else in the country (16 so far). Almost all have occurred one to two years late. That is to say, the reviews were conducted in a timely manner, but with the benefit of hindsight, the request to do them should have been made way earlier, way before everyone internally had given up, or exhausted themselves failing to make progress, or become embittered and angry, or defensively toxic.
If I had been allowed into the tent when the first warning signs, the first issues of underperformance were there, I could have mentored and coached and uplifted and value added, rather than being summonsed to survey a withered husk where a team once sat – leaving the only option to redesign, reimagine and attempt under-resourced renewal. Of course it wouldn’t all have been success, sweetness and light, but it seems to me now there is a much easier, cheaper, quicker fix in most cases to improve and support underperforming teams to be better if the issues are called out early enough.
I believe the sector is scared of consultants because so many have done such a bad job and/or the implementation of their recommendations has been so poor. I have completed half a dozen really good review reports which were shelved straight after or overwhelmed by other organisational conflagrations. I don’t want to do any more of those. Nobody does.
The problem is not contracting in outside help per se. In fact, in my view, asking external advisers to rigorously (and cost effectively) scrutinise work of a functioning team should happen regularly. But sector leaders understand professional staff work so poorly, and view professional staff expertise as so inconsequential that they change leaders, move a couple of people around and expect a turnaround even when the fundamentals are totally shot.
$500,000 in a month
It sounds like a boast, but it’s just reality. I can go into any uni in Australia and identify $500,000 in savings without affecting revenue within a month (bar the 5 least resourced). Probably within a week. The question is not whether the saving is there, but whether staff and/or the executive will allow it to be made. VCs are often blamed here, but in fact these areas of waste are just as frequently found around regular staff – in areas regarded as problem children – best left alone in stasis rather than risk upsetting them and having to deal with the consequences.
University staff in ongoing jobs are frequently very resistant to change. Many feel a deep loss of agency, many don’t understand the changes happening on an international, national or even institutional level and some just like to enforce the maintenance of things like they have always been.
The problem
The problem right now is that the old days have officially gone. Change is well and truly upon us. We have a completely new funding system, a new compliance and regulatory system, new reporting requirements, new compact obligations, new domestic and international enrolment restrictions, and an ongoing black hole where research measurement and funding strategy used to be. Our community is re-evaluating the HE value proposition and everybody – community, prospective students, current students, staff – are just a little bit scared about what AI could mean for their future.
We can already see institutions in trouble, and forecasts of mergers, change programs, sackings and reform.
It is really obvious that in about 12-18 months I will start getting calls to do a review. I like the work, and so I will do them, but if only you call now, or you start to do your own review with an outsiders lens now, you might not need to call.
Strategic change is critical – for everybody
No marketing, recruitment, admissions or fundraising team can claim to be on top of things right now. The same goes for most other professional service teams, but as revenue growth stagnates, the most pressure and focus will be on the attraction-recruitment frontline.
Most teams wouldn’t have a plan you could call proven and no doubt a number would also not be called good. There are so many variables, and we are in such a time of tremendous change and system stress, that new plans are essential – and stress testing them before you put them out there, or even before you socialise them with the rest of your institution is the only viable way forward.
Many of you will be able to do some of this in-house, but it requires rigour, it requires someone strong enough (and allowed) to deliver a strong, evidence-based, constructive critique, and it requires some real openness from all staff. It requires a strong culture which values expertise and action, evidence and strategy and recognises that being right all the time is simply not possible at the moment.
But being strategic, evidence based, analytical and wherever necessary, revisionist is essential if institutions are going to start to chart their way forward in the current environment.
Call me, or don’t call me – in the end, much to my regret, this article isn’t about me or any other consultant. It’s about teams across the sector that need to embrace change to improve chances of not just surviving but even daring to thrive in challenging times.
My point is to raise the issue of urgent agility and strategic revision, based on evidence and openness. A constructive, thoughtful process that will swing your institution in a better direction to weather the challenges of revenue shortages and further policy storms ahead.
Tim Winkler is Director of Twig Marketing and Publisher of Future Campus