By Ed Rogers
If we liken the university to a guild of craftsmen, what is the competitive skill that our co-location enhances? Let's call it Knowledge Crafting: the designing, making, reproducing and selling of knowledge. As we consider the changing university in the light of modern realities of government budgets and tuition pressure, what type of focus is necessary to enhance our abilities to craft knowledge? And in response to Dean Merten ("Will it happen at Cornell University?" by Alan G. Merten, dean of the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell Chronicle, Feb. 8, 1996, page 8), what will cause mean ingful change at Cornell?
Business leaders are recognizing (finally) that a huge portion of organizational value lies between the work ers' ears. We at universities should know that. We reward, protect and eulogize the successful professor who achieves an outstanding position in a particular knowledge domain. How can Cornell build a collective intent to change with such a diverse independent pool of constituents? Will a customer focus or adjustment to the market realities achieve our vision?
If the administration is here to support academic initiatives, then academic transformation must drive the change process at Cornell. While administrators may groan that our support systems are antiquated, redundant or inefficient (all may be true), the key for mobilizing a change mentality within the Cornell community will not be a call for "cost cutting." Nor can cost-cutting motivations be disguised behind qual ity improvement campaigns. We will not be the best university in the world because we have the best payroll system or most efficient telephone network. Genuine improvement means positive change about what we are here for: crafting knowledge.
As craftspeople, we face change with the need to pick up new tools, learn how to use them, adapt to new environments and be productive under a new reality. Adam Smith did not invent the division of labor and foist it upon Europe. He described a fundamental social shift that was taking place at his moment in history and projected implications of responding to that shift in different ways. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did not invent the desktop computer age, yet it is here. Our task is to figure out how to respond with new tools for our craft so we continue to have a progressive impact on shaping society through our knowledge crafting abilities.
Clearly, the computer, the Internet and e-mail networks have all changed the way we do business at Cornell. These are infrastructure pieces of a new knowledge-sharing culture. We still need individual level tools to enable us to work within the environment of electronic networks and global information to craft knowledge cooperatively. What might some of these new tools look like and how do they relate to successful transformation at Cornell?
First, we need tools that enable us to leverage the collective knowledge of individuals for the cause of organizational learning. Cornell must be a smarter organization because I am part of it, and I must be a smarter person because I am part of Cornell. New tools will make this linkage much more tangible and valuable in both directions. These tools might be new boundaries of work definition, task definition and partnerships internally and externally. The semester in manufacturing referred to by Dean Merten is an excellent example of this.
Second, we need tools that enable us to meaningfully share incomplete knowledge. We cannot afford to just share whole DNA strands of knowledge, but we must develop tools that allow us to share knowledge-bits readily and openly at the macro (universitywide) level. We need social-technical contextual skills to accomplish effective, meaningful knowledge sharing on a much broader scale than we currently are capable of doing. I am investigating the use of concept mapping, developed here at Cornell by Joe Novak in organizational change environments, as one promising tool in this category.
Finally, we need tools for change itself. This kind of tool has been missing from our workplaces. However, there are no ready-made tools for our craft and no easy import of quality programs that may have worked in industry. We can import questions as a place to start, but we will have to design our own tools. Initially, we will need tools just to help us conceptualize the changes around us.
Change is not impossible or even improbable within the university; it is inevitable. We can be led through change driven by cost and resource allocation models or we can employ our skills as craftspeople to design, develop and deploy the new tools we need to facilitate successful transformation into the next century. This requires work, it requires changing the way we interact and it requires a willingness to sacrifice personal and fiefdom interests in order to build a collective intent for crafting an excellent university for all of Cornell's stakeholders.
Ed Rogers is a Ph.D. student in the ILR School's Human Resource Department.
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