An a-ha moment

Sometimes it takes me awhile to catch on. I just realized that this is a book by an administrator for administrators. I keep reading it from the perspective of a teacher, and that is not who O'Banion's target audience is. All of the case studies in the book are written by chancellors, superintendents, and presidents. This would be a great book for someone in the community college leadership Ph.D program. I keep wanting it to be more like Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do, but that's just not going to happen. I find it pretty ironic that O'Banion keeps pounding on the "putting the student first" message, but there's not one word from a student in this book -- at least so far.

I'm reading the chapter written by Lee Howser and Carole Schwinn of Jackson Community College in Michigan, and I like the tone so far. Howser, the new president, has a self-deprecating wit and has successfully carried his "boiling frog" analogy through the chapter. In other words, when taking over the college, he realized he didn't have the sense to jump out of the pot; the temperature just kept getting hotter. In his quest to remake the college, which ultimately was successful, Howser introduces the idea of interactive design. The process, he says, begins with "'formulation of the mess,' or an understanding of the set of interacting problems" faced by the college (p. 129). I love the mess imagery. Although Jackson could have stood on its laurels for quite some time, it didn't. Instead, the college looked critically at the challenges facing it and discovered:

• Faculty and staff were aging. Who was going to take over?
• Equipment was aging. Some was 30 years old.
• Curriculum was not being updated.
• Enrollment was dropping.
• The area was losing jobs.
• Employee morale was decreasing.

This no-holds-barred approach helped Jackson reinvent itself from the ground up. Have you ever been involved with an organization that went through a similar "formulation of the mess" process? If so, how did it go? What was the result?