Doctrine or Dogma?

Thinking aloud and hopefully allowed:

In a cycle familiar to anyone working at a university, my university is currently working up a new strategic plan, and so there has been an uptick in conversations about strategic direction, vision, values, purpose and so forth. I quite like the process of developing a strategic plan at my university in that it tends to be open, transparent and collegial, even if the decision-making authority is ultimately concentrated among a handful of people. However, as I’ve often argued with colleagues, I think universities are generally pretty good at developing strategy, but unfortunately, they are generally really bad at operationalising said strategy, and I’ve often wondered why. I think part of the problem is how we understand, or perhaps don’t understand, the concept of doctrine and its relationship to a broader ecosystem.

Doctrine tends to be defined in a military-like way as the fundamental principles by which organisations guide their actions in support of objectives (Høiback, 2011). Doctrine is based on a set of assumptions about an organisation and their context and includes varying degrees of theory, culture and authoritativeness (Høiback, 2011). Generally speaking, doctrine is not a hard and fast set of rules but a guide to action that links theory, history, experimentation and practice. Strategic plans could perhaps be broadly interpreted as the manifestation of doctrine in university environments. It is important to understand that strategy is a plan of action to achieve particular objectives, while doctrine is the philosophical framework that encapsulates the strategy.

Perhaps a useful tool to help think about doctrine involves a sports metaphor. In team sports, there are two ways to make the most of the team (Høiback, 2011).

1. We gather the best players we can afford, position them based on their skills and competence, and allow them to exercise their judgement and abilities on the field, with some real-time shouted advice from the sidelines.
2. We pick, position and train the players according to a predetermined plan, and they play in strict accordance to the plan (think of the movie Moneyball).

In both cases, doctrine is the broad recipe that tells us how to play in order to win and encompasses theory (explanations and rationales), culture (the players and their motivations) and authority (who is authorised to do what) (Høiback, 2011). I think the sports metaphor above helps to understand the bottom-up versus top-down application of doctrine but doesn’t scale to an organisational context. A sport will be played on a clearly defined field, with a defined number of players governed by rules that are universally defined, understood and applied. Organisations, like universities, have many more internal and external moving parts and any number of unknown and unknowable variables and influences.

In my opinion, publicly funded universities in Australia lean towards the government end of the government / private enterprise spectrum because they tend to be heavily bureaucratic and are insulated from the adapt-or-die pressures private enterprises face. Arguably, the process of natural selection is less brutal for universities than for private enterprises, so flawed strategy, or flawed attempts at operationalising strategy, are perhaps less impactful than they might otherwise be for an equivalent privately funded organisation. In short, the survival of publicly funded universities is not necessarily tightly tethered to their performance and their ability to operationalise strategy. I would argue that this manifests in some of the “functional stupidity” that we see – the absence of adaptivity, a reluctance to use available intellectual capability, and the avoidance of justifications for decisions (Alvesson & Einola, 2018; Alvesson & Spicer, 2016; Hil, 2015; Paulsen, 2017).

There is, I think, an argument to be made that we are seeing an approach to strategy that somewhat alines with Max Weber’s doctrine of bureaucracy that is characterised by principles like hierarchical structures, with firmly established chains of command, strict regulation, rigid divisions of labour and a strong focus on measurable outputs (Weber, 2016). Consequently, the strict adherence to rules, regulations, policies and procedures has a tendency to suppress creativity, innovation and collaboration and likely accentuates the organisational silo problem (Bento et al., 2020; Cilliers & Greyvenstein, 2012; de Waal et al., 2019; Jeong, 2012). In short, the focus is on stability and maintaining the status quo.

This is not to say that I think universities should all be privatised and turned into for-profit organisations so they can be subjected to Darwinian competitive pressures; far from it. To me, education is a public good and represents an unbelievably valuable long-term investment to society. However, so long as we continue to think that we live in a static, economically rational bubble whereby our strategic plan links neatly into our operational plan, which links to our divisional and unit plans, which links to our individual performance indicators, which are nicely encapsulated by policy and process, we will continue to not evolve. What is missing is an underpinning acknowledgement of the need for adaptability, innovation and change. COVID, AI, the Australian Universities Accord and even the recent report on Teacher Education are examples of how our strategic and operational environments are part of a broader ecosystem that is changing and adapting, often in contrast with our strategy. I don’t think our doctrine, our current ideology and our resulting strategy are necessarily equipping us with the adaptivity we need or are going to need.

Further reading:

The systems view of life (Capra & Luisi, 2014)

The Education Ecology of Universities: Integrating Learning, Strategy and the Academy (Ellis & Goodyear, 2019)

Gravity-free Decision-making: Avoiding Clausewitz’s Strategic Pull (Zweibelson, 2015)

References

Alvesson, M., & Spicer, A. (2016). The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work. Profile Books.

Bento, F., Tagliabue, M., & Lorenzo, F. (2020). Organizational silos: a scoping review informed by a behavioral perspective on systems and networks. Societies, 10(3), 56.

Capra, F., & Luisi, P. L. (2014). The systems view of life: a unifying vision. Cambridge University Press.

Cilliers, F., & Greyvenstein, H. (2012). The impact of silo mentality on team identity: An organisational case study [Systems psychodynamics; physical environment; structure; intragroup relations; experiences of management; intergroup relations]. 2012, 38(2). https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v38i2.993

de Waal, A., Weaver, M., Day, T., & van der Heijden, B. (2019). Silo-busting: overcoming the greatest threat to organizational performance. Sustainability, 11(23), 6860.

Ellis, R. A., & Goodyear, P. (2019). The Education Ecology of Universities: Integrating Learning, Strategy and the Academy. Routledge.

Hil, R. (2015). Selling Students Short: Why you won’t get the university education you deserve. Allen & Unwin.

Høiback, H. (2011). What is Doctrine? Journal of Strategic Studies, 34(6), 879-900. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2011.561104

Jeong, C. H. (2012). Principles of public administration: Malaysian perspectives. Pearson Malaysia Sdn Bhd.

Paulsen, R. (2017). Slipping into functional stupidity: The bifocality of organizational compliance. Human Relations, 70(2), 185-210. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726716649246

Weber, M. (2016). Bureaucracy. In Social Theory Re-Wired (pp. 287-292). Routledge.

Zweibelson, B. (2015). Gravity-free Decision-making: Avoiding Clausewitz’s Strategic Pull. Australian Army.