Currently reading Sundström & Holmberg (2018) on “When implementation falters: The challenge of having peripheral issues stick in organisations”
There are often tasks that everybody agrees are important, but that for some reason do not get implemented. In Sundström & Holmberg (2018)’s paper “When implementation falters: The challenge of having peripheral issues stick in organisations” they investigate this issue in the context of information security, but I am (surprise!) mostly curious about what we can learn from that for teaching for sustainability…
For information security, the biggest barrier to implementation identified in the literature is the lack of support from managers. If something isn’t seen as central to people’s work, to the mission of an organization, it will not get a lot of attention (even if, like in the case of information security, something going wrong with such a task puts the entire organization at risk). Indeed, the literature describes the “hedgehog concept”, where successful companies focus only on the intersection of what their employees are passionate about and what makes them money, their ideally both specific and difficult primary task, and determinedly ignore everything else. At a university, this might be a strong focus on research and publications, sometimes even over teaching or outreach.
Sundström & Holmberg (2018) introduce a model to distinguish between primary and peripheral tasks. They use a Venn diagram of formalized goals, perceived goals (i.e. primary tasks), and work activities. Primary tasks fall typically into the intersection of the three, but there are also activities that are aligned with perceived primary tasks that have never been formalized, formalized goals that are in line with the perceived primary tasks but that have no corresponding work activities, and potential goals that would be in line with primary tasks but that are neither formalized nor picked up in work activities. Peripheral tasks are either formalized goals that are neither aligned with primary tasks nor translated into work activities (so empty commitments to something), formalized goals that have been turned into work activities but are not aligned with primary tasks (and therefore are not prioritized by people who are supposed to actually implement them), and activities that are neither aligned with the primary tasks nor the formalized goals (like “checking your Facebook updates“, but could also be high-risk activities that contribute to the “innovation portfolio”). Peripheral tasks identified by Sundström & Holmberg (2018) are for example information security, gender equality, and social responsibility (i.e., me thinks, sustainability).
I tried to take this model and find examples from my own context for each of the fields, but what turns out to be really difficult is that I am not sure whether my understanding of what it means to formalize something and what primary tasks are, is the same as most of my peers’. In fact, I am pretty sure that it is not, and that becomes apparent in how many examples I can find for “activities that are aligned with perceived primary tasks but have never been formalized”. With the initiative Teaching for Sustainability, we take tasks that we perceive as primary, turn them into activities, and try to formalize them. Technically, all we are doing is aligned with formal goals, but since they have not been officially operationalized, we need to make sure that people see that alignment (by branding things consistently, which we started very early on with our roll-up and blog, where the consistent branding was done to increase perceived legitimacy; by creating regular activities like the Transformation Thursday lunches that teachers come to rely on which we started with the goal of building community; by writing peer-reviewed publications about our work so it also is seen as academically legitimacy). And we put a lot of effort into explaining how what we do is actually aligned with what we perceive as the primary task of any university. Who decides what that is, and how can we change that narrative?
Sundström & Holmberg (2018) then discuss how what happens at the formal level in the traditional leadership trickles down through an “entanglement” of enabling leadership to the informal level of adaptive leadership, where it is affected by enabling conditions and complexity dynamics. Complexity dynamics are for example nonlinearity (for example, which stories get picked up and integrated does depend on how well they can be anchored, but also to how well they are being told and how compelling they are), or bonding (people joining forces based on needs, preferences, responsibilities; not always leading to cooperation, though!). Enabling conditions can for example be dynamic interaction (in the conflicts and compromises that arise around personal goals in the context of ideas, resources, technology, … where the primary tasks are an “overarching but undeclared systemic need“), heterogenity (where the primary task is acting to streamline heterogenity because “it is so ubiquitously and instinctively accepted that it encounters relatively few conflicting constraints that might otherwise push change“), or adptive tension, the external or internal pressure on a system to adjust to something.
Bringing these two models together, Sundström & Holmberg (2018) suggest that issues supported by the primary tasks increase personal and shared relevance, and align and streamline efforts, thus embedding the issue deeply into system memory, supporting bonding through aligned needs, preferences, etc., and attracting more people and efforts. Issues that are not supported by the primary task, however, are perceived as not aligned with personal or shared goals and needs, efforts are undirected and there is no political push to act on them. This leads to few and weak bonding opportunities, weak memory in the system, and less appeal than issues which are supported by the primary task. Compensation for the lack primary task support would have to be both resource-intensive and permanent. Sundström & Holmberg (2018) that “[u]nless peripherality is properly understood and accounted for, this will likely seem inexplicable, and the resources required to get lasting results startling– maybe to the point of seeming unjustifiable” (which I think is the case for teaching for sustainability: despite efforts, not so much has happened in the last two decades since Lidgren et al. (2006)’s assessment, and even asking for resources to invite teachers for coffee is being perceived as unreasonable).
They continue “Also, if there is a risk that a stigma of inefficiency might (unjustly, but nevertheless) attach itself to managers charged with these frustrating issue areas, problems will be compounded as people will actively avoid becoming burdened with what look like career-impeding concerns.” This is a problem that I have seen in the teaching for sustainability literature: That teachers do not want to label their efforts as “sustainability”, because it is such a buzzword that they — even though their own mission might be aligned with the concept — don’t want to be associated with. And it feels like this is a concern in academic development, so that there is reluctance to adopting unpopular missions, like for equality, inclusion or sustainability. “One way to at least alleviate these problems [of lack of perceived personal relevance] might be to bring together people charged with the different but similarly afflicted issue areas“, which is something that we can leverage even more that we are currently doing. Last November at the Ett LU för alla conference, Terese and I made the point that the “teaching for sustainability” and “inclusion” communities at LU should join forces since we mostly want the same, and we are continuing conversations. But maybe we should look out for other peripheral issues and connect!
Another of Sundström & Holmberg (2018)’s conclusions is to jump on windows of opportunity that present themselves for example in crises; “These situations offer unusually good opportunities to connect issues that have been (in our proposed sense) peripheral, because people are generally readier to re-evaluate set beliefs and routines that are suddenly called into question by an organisation-shaking incident“, and such big events will end up in collective memory and influence sensemaking. “Astute managers will likely attempt to harness this potential to drive change in desired directions, e.g., by means of strategically inserted reminders how a particular event impacted, or was impacted by, this or that organisational aspect– and how things might have been better.” Now, I am obviously not hoping for a sustainability crisis that is so big (and so localized in space and time) that it can have that impact. But, for example, we will not be able to continue climbing in the QS sustainability rankings (since we are currently number 1), so if sliding down in the ranking is perceived as a crisis (albeit probably not a super major one), that is something that we should be prepared to leverage for the initiative Teaching for Sustainability.
Reading this paper, though, it feels like we’ve intuitively picked good strategy with the initiative Teaching for Sustainability. We are working to “instill and/or heighten[] agents’ perceived personal needs related to the issue” by offering certification of pedagogical training or of attendence of events or increasing visibility of efforts by inviting guest posts on on our blog, but also by focusing on alignment of personal values and what people do every day at work. We are also working to “highlight[] “sharedness”of related personal needs, making genuine interaction more likely” (which I feel is working quite well!) and trying to stress the relevance of our shared efforts to increase adaptive tension. We are also to some extent, but mostly inadvertently, decreasing heterogenity by publishing good practice examples and advertising some approaches over others, but I feel like we should be very careful with that, since sustainability is about diversity of voices and approaches, and therefore we should not streamline things too much. But we are also working on improved system memory by telling and reifying our story, creating boundary objects with the blog, presentations, publications; on supporting bonding through meeting spaces like Transformation Thursdays; on strengthening the attraction by making sure that efforts become visible in the currency that counts for the primary goals, for example by adding participation in events to the LU system that tracks achievements of all sorts.
Reading about this model is definitely helpful food for thought for future development of our work with the initiative Teaching for Sustainability’s strategy, especially for how to shape a narrative where teaching for sustainability is an essential part of LU’s primary task, and for how to make sure that our work is supported by formalized organisational goals. Plenty to think about!
Sundström, M., & Holmberg, R. (2018). When implementation falters: The challenge of having peripheral issues stick in organisations. Journal of Strategy and Management, 11(2), 224-240.
Featured image and pics below from yesterday’s walk.
It is so pretty!
