One way to avoid the consequences of decision-making principles is to mistake them for goals. No doubt, you’ll recognize this move when I provide a typical example:
I was in a guiding pathways conversation with an upper administrator about the need to differentiate workforce students from transfer students early, so that we can help students move forward efficiently. I was in the middle of explaining how students often come in with particular goals but are not always clear about the best pathways to reach their goals, given their educational and life experiences, and the sooner we can get students connected to instructional leaders to help sharpen the pathway, the better. Perhaps realizing (or imagining) the implications of this strategy, this person interrupted me with that knowing-pitying look, and said, “You know, Matthew, all our students are actually workforce students.”
Let me translate: “Because your approach would require a rethink of how we slot students into areas of study, I will reduce your decision-making principles to a linear connection between signing up for college and getting a job.”
There are various ways of parsing the bad reasoning in this dismissal of my line of thought, but I like to call this particular way of eroding complexity linearization. This is how it works: Take a plausible activity at the front end — in this case, signing up for college — and draw a straight line to some point at the other end — getting a job — thus neatly avoiding the need to grapple with any nuance or critique.
First, my apologies to you if your a math or stats person. Linearization is indeed a valuable tool, for instance, if you need the value of a complex parametric function at a given point to solve a problem. But like any elegant tool, linearization can be . . . . misused.
Linearization has been in evidence in some of the comments I’ve received about my posts concerning the mission, intention, and trust framework (MIT) for decision-making. The typical move has gone something like this. (Imagine the knowing-pitying look and delivery for yourself.)
“You know, Matthew, if we only focus on instruction, it will actually be bad for student success and for the institution. Students need other supporting services to succeed, and of course the institution needs to stay solvent to do anybody any good.”
For clarity, let me point out that the front end of the straight line is, of course, my emphasis on the core instructional mission of the college. For efficiency, I’ve rolled two common “endpoints” into one knowing-pitying “explanation”: student success and fiscal responsibility.
Like any good academic, I’m tempted to return to the text of my posts and point out that I never claimed that instruction should be our only goal in the college, nor did I claim that college finances should not be included among the institutional priorities we seek. But I’ll resist reading. Instead, let’s look at the larger pattern of eroding complexity to avoid the unpleasant or unwanted consequences of a line of thought.
Essentially, these forms of linearization presuppose that the MIT framework is something I explicitly said it was not, namely, a set of putative goals. Rather, my claim is that we ought to adopt mission, intention, and trust as guiding values for our decisions — principles for making decisions throughout the institution, decision that obviously must balance legitimate interests we have as a institution, like the forms of support students need, or our need to be fiscally responsible.
ACC is, in fact, a complex organization in which a great many interests must be balanced. But my argument — and the point of the parables that illustrate it — is that there are better and worse ways of making decisions about these competing interests. I went to considerable length (literally, some of you have kindly informed me 😉 to make the point that ACC does do a lot of very good work in the world. My nuanced observation is that this great work is quite often in spite of our decision-process and not because of it. And, to be blunt, I assert that we can do better.
From the perspective of trust — which, please recall, was discussed in terms of confidence-inducing practices — the implication of the examples of linearization above is that, in my naïveté, I have “misunderstood” the dynamics of this organization. I am, of course, aware that decisions do not please everyone — even good decisions — and I have been on both the receiving and the perpetrating end of disappointment in my time as a decision-maker. And so I would turn this criticism around and ask: Since decisions will not please everyone, do we not have a responsibility as an institution to make decisions in ways that are as confidence-inducing as possible, especially to the very people we depend on to carry out those decisions? We can do better — but to do better, let’s stop insulting everyone’s intelligence by drawing these simple straight lines.
Linearization is fundamentally a strategy for avoiding the consequences of an argument by oversimplifying — just as we have done at an institutional level in terms of structures and processes. It’s not enough for us to avoid intending to diffuse our core mission and erode trust; as I said, I don’t believe there’s some nefarious intention to establish the patterns I observe. But if we are committed to doing better, we have to intend to erect structures and processes that are mission-making. We don’t get far by oversimplifying our own institutional complexities and the structures we build to address them — and then oversimplify our way out of any criticism that comes along.
It may come as a bit of a shock when I say this, but ACC’s core mission is not “student success.” Rather, the mission should always be student success at something worthwhile, measured in all the complex ways that students evaluate their own progress and educational achievement in addition to our own metrics. When we reduce this complexity to “success” measured in terms that reinforce our own oversimplifications, we don’t “succeed” at our mission; students succeed in spite of it, if they’re lucky.
The mission-making framework makes the full-blown complexity of genuine student success inseparable from our success, the success not just of the institution but of each one of us at the roles and the functions we are privileged to perform here. Just ask students (and listen to what they tell us): Behind each student’s success story there’s a story about individual people who succeeded at their mission-making function. These are stories about people who “go the extra mile” — or don’t. We need the stories of our failures even more than we need success stories: Our successes reassure us that we’re alright; failures tell us where we can do better at empowering mission-making.
Let’s stop talking about students having an “open mindset” unless we are willing to walk in those shoes, too. Save linearization for where it actually solves problems. Like calculus.
