Cultivating holistic and systemic thinking on college and university campuses can be tricky, said Ball State University’s Registrar Erin Mason.
In an AACRAO 2021 SEM Conference session, Mason asked attendees what came to mind when they thought about campus cultures; they noted bureaucratic silos as well as a wide range of priorities, many of which are conflicting.
“It’s hard to engage in systems thinking in this space,” Mason said. “That doesn’t mean it's impossible, but it does mean you might need to find your key supporters.”
She emphasized that understanding the cultures within a working space is vital to being able to bridge systems. And in order to change a culture to support systems thinking, institutions need to first build trust and establish psychological safety. This helps establish an environment where staff are open to new learning.
Effective learning, Mason and attendees discussed, is relevant, hands-on, on-demand, and practiced. In addition, Mason said that transfer of training would be more successful if leaders ask staff what they’ve learned when they’ve gone to a training. “It shows you care,” she said.
Mason emphasized that in workplaces today, staff must be comfortable in what they know individually but also be able to learn what others do through cross-functional training and documentation. “First, you have to be an expert in what you do, but you have to go beyond that,” she said.
Mason offered several “connectedness activities” to stimulate learning and foster systems thinking, including asking five whys (for root cause analysis); creating and diagramming mental models to show the number and variety of processes (for ex., how to make toast); diagnostic exercises (such as customer journey mapping); new types of brainstorming activities (that do not require putting staff on the spot); and reading and analyzing case studies (especially for cross-functional teams).
She also suggested questions that promote shared learning among colleagues:
Here is my interpretation of what is going on. What am I missing?
Do you see it differently?
Help me understand how you got there.
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