Helping you learn and grow in your higher ed career – no matter how you do it
As you might have noticed (heard or read) if you followed the High Ed Web New England or Florida conferences, Higher Ed Experts has chosen to support the 5 regional conferences organized by the High Ed Web Professional Association and help them bring great keynote speakers.
Whether or not you get got a chance to attend the High Ed Web WEST conference next week in Orange, CA (but come say “hi” if you do as I’ll be there :-), I also wanted to make sure that you would learn a bit from the conference keynote speaker, Tony Dunn who is “involved in IT planning and project management at CSU, Chico” per his official keynote bio.
But, Tony is actually well-known for something else in the higher ed web community.
He is the author of TFRL, a series of web comics that had quite a following at some point and… some issues.
That’s why I asked Tony to catch up with us.
I also took the opportunity to ask him a tip on internal politics and to tell us what he is going to talk about at the conference
1) What have you been up to since you left the Redesignland?
As the last few TFRLs indicated, I was moved out of web development into project management about two years ago. After a very traumatic experience trying to project manage our SharePoint implementation, I was pulled off of directly managing projects. Our focus is now more on IT project portfolio management and I’m currently leading a couple of projects related to establishing processes and standards in our IT organization to help us better juggle the 200 or so IT projects we are trying to do with an ever shrinking budget and staff.
Of course, that’s probably not terribly interesting to the HighEdWeb crowd, but I’m very excited to be working on something that will hopefully reduce the chronic levels of dysfunction we seem to experience. I’m actually very hopeful that I can make a positive change at the organizational level after spending several years of raking us over the coals for our problems.
2) How do you deal with politics in higher education? Can you share one of your secret tips?
I drink a lot. But I don’t think that’s really much of a secret. However, it does ease the pain. Unfortunately, I really can’t afford the amount of wine, cognac and scotch that I’d prefer to consume.
OK, just kidding. Dealing with politics is incredibly tricky because of their complexity. Different people have different reasons for bringing politics into things. Perhaps they’ve been burned in the past and are defensive. Perhaps they are just power-hungry jerks. Perhaps they really aren’t aware of what they’re doing. Sadly, there isn’t one way to effectively deal with politics because there isn’t just one reason for politics. I’m not sure I have either the understanding or the skills to effectively deal with politics, but I’m certainly getting an education while trying.
In our case, we have a long history of decentralization in our “central†IT organization which has led to a plethora of issues, from lack of communication and collaboration, to a lack of shared identity and goals, lack of trust, cross-departmental competition, and grudges both perceived and real. All of these things have become habitual behaviors, even if the original impetus for those behaviors is long forgotten. And those bad habits have become a big part of the culture of our organization. While there are plenty of good things about our organization and plenty of good people, these things have in many ways poisoned the environment to the point where we sometimes have a difficult time doing our jobs. I’m sure a lot of people reading this are nodding their heads by now, because they face similar issues in their organizations.
3) What is your #hewebWEST keynote about?
I want to talk about changing the culture of our organizations so that we can do our jobs better and make our organizations better places to work. I’m not even sure that’s it’s possible to change an organization’s culture, but a bad organizational culture damages everyone in it and inhibits the ability of the organization to do its job. There’s really no excuse for that, and I personally feel a responsibility to do better.
In my presentation I’ll be giving plenty of examples of organizational dysfunction, but I’ll also try to address at least one small strategy for addressing culture change. A lot of people may think that organizational change has to start at the top, but that may not be possible. The truth is that we all make the culture of our organizations together. And, whether or not we like our behavior, we all enforce and reinforce the norms that make up our organization’s culture. Changing those behaviors has to start somewhere. We can all sit around waiting for someone else to go first, or we can become leaders ourselves and change our own behaviors.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to bring some ideas that can help that get started, but I’m more known as a ‘funny guy’ than deep thinker on culture change, so I would not get my hopes up ;-)
Updated June 6, 2013: Here’s Tony’s slides
