Why efficiency alone won’t transform higher education

Over the last few years, universities have been getting very good at making themselves smaller.

Across the sector, there is an understandable focus on reducing costs, restructuring, consolidating services, simplifying processes, introducing technology and finding efficiencies.

All of these things matter, particularly when financial pressures are so acute. But there is an uncomfortable truth we need to face.

Making today’s university more efficient isn’t going to be enough.

The recent HEPI report, New Choices: Revisiting Futures for Higher Education in England, makes the point that HE is heading into a future nobody planned for because many of the reasonable assumptions underpinning scenarios for the sector have been rapidly overtaken by events.

Financial pressures have arrived faster than expected. AI has developed at a pace few anticipated. Student behaviour and expectations are changing. Demographic pressures are becoming more significant. Public confidence in higher education has shifted – due to soaring tuition costs, student debt, and doubts about a return on investment – and the policy and economic environment has changed too.

Doing what we do now only cheaper isn’t going to cut it. What got us here is not going to get us where we need to go. The whole environment has changed. Our universities were designed to drive on roads, and to misquote Doc Brown from Back to The Future: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads…”

Problem is, we have no idea what we do need.

So how can universities transform in ways that give them the best chance of thriving in a world with no roads?

I have been working closely with COO of Aston University, Richard Billingham. This article brings together several strands of our recent discussions. We have started some experiments with the team at Aston to reveal and challenge assumptions, and to intentionally design the work ahead of us in ways that increase the adjacent possible as well as delivering the outputs asked of us.

Why efficiency alone won’t transform higher education

Optimisation isn’t transformation

There is an important distinction between optimisation and transformation.

Optimisation means: how can we do what we do more efficiently?

Transformation means: given what we now know, what should we do differently, and what should we stop doing altogether?

Transformation means changing the model itself, the difficulty is that optimisation can look a lot like transformation.

Reorganisations, new systems, service redesigns, technology programmes and changes to staffing structures can involve enormous amounts of activity. But if the underlying model remains essentially the same, you may simply have created a leaner version of yesterday’s university.

That might be exactly what is needed in some areas, but efficiency is not the same as adaptability.

If the landscape is changing faster than your model can adapt, making the existing model more efficient doesn’t necessarily solve the underlying problem.

It can just make you better at doing the wrong thing.

Why future operating models can get it wrong

We naturally tend to imagine the future as an extension of the present. So when people are asked to design the university of 2030 or 2035, they tend to take what we have today and project it forwards.

Today’s courses. Today’s structures. Today’s roles. Today’s academic calendar. Today’s services. Today’s assumptions about students.

They rearrange the components and call it a future operating model.

The problem is that the conditions are changing while you are planning. It’s not simply that you don’t know exactly where you will end up. The landscape itself is changing as you travel through it.

That means there is no map you can create that can reliably get you where you need to go.

But we can use a compass: we need to know what matters, what our purpose is, what we are trying to contribute and what principles should guide our choices.

How can universities challenge the assumptions holding them back?

Question the assumptions behind how universities work

Perhaps one of the most useful questions you can ask at the moment is not “what should our future university look like?”, but “what are we currently assuming to be true?”

Some assumptions become almost invisible because they have been around for so long, for example:

• Why three terms?
• Why September starts?
• Why three-year degrees?
• What does “full-time” actually mean?
• Why are particular services organised centrally?
• Why do we assume students will behave in particular ways?
• Why do we organise work around our internal structures rather than around the experience we are trying to create?
• Why does some software assume the university operates in a particular way?

The point isn’t that any of these things are necessarily wrong, it’s that we may have stopped seeing them as assumptions.

And once an assumption is invisible, it becomes very difficult to imagine doing anything differently.

When organisational differences are actually capabilities

I was reminded of this recently when working with a university going through an efficiency and restructuring process.

As we looked at the organisation, like most HE institutions, it became clear that it wasn’t really one organisation at all. It was a collection of schools, faculties, disciplines and professional communities, each with their own relationships, knowledge and ways of working.

The instinct underpinning the restructure was understandable: make things more coherent, simplify, bring things together, reduce duplication.

But some of what looked like duplication and inconsistency was also capability.

The differences between parts of the university represented different knowledge, relationships and ways of solving problems.

The issue wasn’t whether everything should remain different, it was whether some useful options were about to be removed without first understanding what they were contributing.

That feels like a broader question for universities:

What assumptions about your current organisation are limiting your imagination about what it could become?

How can universities prepare for an uncertain future?

Expand the adjacent possible rather than predict the future

I was first introduced to Stuart Kauffman’s idea of the Adjacent Possible in Sahil Bloom’s newsletter.

The Adjacent Possible is about how the future works, but it’s not about forecasting. It is about the things that become possible because of what exists now: innovation and change come from combining what exists now in ways that we could not have predicted.

So for example, a new capability can create new possibilities. A new relationship can create new opportunities. A new technology can make something possible that wasn’t possible before. A new way of working can change what the organisation is capable of doing.

If the future emerges partly from what we create in the present, then perhaps the question isn’t how accurately we can predict it, but what we can do now to expand our options later.

And instead of asking: ‘What will our university look like in 2035?’ a better question would be: ‘What could we build now that gives the university more interesting choices in 2030?’

That feels like a much more actionable question. It takes us away from a reliance on sketchy prophecy and grounds us firmly in the practical present.

It changes the leadership task from prediction to preparation, from blueprint to experimentation, from trying to know the answer to increasing the range of possible answers.

And it doesn’t mean abandoning strategy. Quite the opposite.

It means being clear about what is important while being less certain about exactly how you will achieve it.

What does transformation look like in practice?

If you cannot reliably specify the future operating model in advance, then perhaps transformation needs to become more iterative.

Rather than: Strategy → Design → Implement

it becomes something more like:

Purpose and principles → Experiments → Learning → New capabilities → New possibilities → Further choices

This isn’t an argument for endless pilots or for allowing things to emerge without direction.

There still has to be choices, for example to answer what is distinctive about the institution and needs to be strengthened? What should be common and standardised? And what does not.

Where does technology fundamentally change the work?

What capabilities need to be developed?

Where might partnership be more useful than ownership?

What should stop?

And perhaps most importantly, what are we learning that changes what we thought was possible?

It’s not about the grand blueprint, it is about deliberately creating the conditions in which the organisation can discover better ways of operating.

What does leadership look like when the future is uncertain?

Build the conditions for organisational adaptability

When things are uncertain, the instinct that leaders have to control is understandable. Projecting certainty about the future is an old school leadership trait and these days it’s starting to look hopelessly naive.

When the environment becomes less predictable, it can feel safer to add more process, more direction, more detailed plans and more central oversight.

But you can’t control the level of complexity, urgency and pace that we are seeing right now simply by trying to control it.

At some point the leadership task has to become about creating the conditions in which people can respond intelligently to what is actually happening.

That means building capabilities, strengthening networks, making local knowledge visible, creating room to experiment and giving people enough authority to exercise judgement.

It means being willing to learn quickly from what happens, scale what works, stop what doesn’t and move resources towards emerging possibilities.

This is also where the distinction between agency and authority matters.

You don’t create an adaptive organisation by taking judgement away from people. You create one by giving people the capability, context and authority to exercise it well.

Four questions to help rethink university transformation

We don’t know what the university of 2035 will look like. And pretending that we do may give a false sense of certainty.

Perhaps the more useful questions are:

• What is our compass? What purpose and principles should remain genuinely core?
• Which assumptions can we let go of? What are we doing because it is necessary, and what are we doing because we’ve always done it this way?
• What could expand our Adjacent Possible? Which capabilities, relationships, technologies and experiments would give us more and better choices?
• What are we prepared to stop?

Because transformation isn’t just about adding new things to the old model. If the future is different, some things from the past will have to be relinquished.

The task, then, isn’t to predict the future university.

It’s to build a university capable of responding to whatever comes next.

Turning the possibility of transformation into action

At ThenSomehow, we work with higher education leaders and teams to explore the challenges they face, question established ways of working and develop the collective capability to make change happen.

Through facilitated team development, organisational development and practical tools, we help people work across boundaries, build stronger connections and find new ways forward.

If you’re thinking about how your university can become more adaptable and better equipped for what comes next, we’d welcome a conversation. Get in touch here.