Shared governance is a concept that is valued by many in higher education. Through it, faculty, administration, and governing boards are oriented toward working together to achieve the university mission. Having been a member of various higher education institutions, I’ve had the opportunity to see all that shared governance can contribute. I’ve also seen the challenges it can present, particularly regarding organizational change.

Several years ago, I had the privilege of working on a leadership team charged with reimagining a regional comprehensive university in a rural New England town. A new president brought a unique vision; as dean, I was on the team to make that vision happen. It was an exciting and heady time during which we reworked gen ed and overhauled the curriculum to embrace an integrated, project-based approach to undergraduate education. We were on a tight timeline (4 years) to update the mission and remake the institution to enhance enrollment and meet board expectations. It was going to require the engagement of the entire community. We knew we needed to build our organizational capacity for change if we were going to succeed. We needed to find a way to be innovative while respecting past practices.

The change leadership team began our capacity-building efforts by digging into resources such as The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009). That led to attending professional development workshops. The one I found most impactful was offered by Academic Impressions, a higher education-focused professional development firm headquartered in Denver. The workshop focused on collaborative meeting design. We had been learning about various approaches to innovation: Lean, Agile, Design Thinking, but this seminar provided a frame for HOW to design meetings to gather and use input from large and small stakeholder groups to enlist them in the change. 

The experience was so impactful that we brought the facilitators to campus and trained thirty-five faculty and staff in designing meetings to produce specific outcomes using data gathering, problem-solving, and sense-making methods. Methods like affinity diagrams, open space, and nominal group technique.  This expanded engagement, improved the quality of ideas, and ultimately supported implementing some pretty exciting changes. If you are new to collaborative design, I highly recommend Sanaghan and Gabriel’s, Collaborative Leadership in Action: A Field Guide for Creating Meetings that Make a Difference or Lipmanowicz and McCandless’s The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures. 

At Saybrook University, where I serve as Chief Academic Officer, I still use collaborative design approaches to facilitate complex changes. For instance, the pandemic brought about major changes in expectations of students and faculty around in-person learning experiences. There was a lack of consensus on what stakeholders wanted and how we might move forward if we didn’t share an understanding of current (read new) attitudes and ideas about coming together. We used a revisioning process steeped in collaborative design principles to redesign a signature university activity using input from students, faculty, staff, administration, board, alumni, and community. 

Finding ways to engage the community, particularly stakeholders most affected by change, embodies shared governance by integrating change efforts across the institution. I have found collaborative meeting design to be an effective way of capitalizing on knowledge, experience, and perspectives that lead to positive change with high ROI and fewer unintended consequences. The output of these meetings can complement more traditional shared governance structures through the development of proposals for their consideration. I have found it to be a well-accepted and impactful means to develop and implement changes that serve students and aid in institutional well-being.