Late last year I wrote about Burton Clark and the notion of “organizational sagas” ; that is, the stories people in organizations (in this case, universities and colleges) tell themselves about the organization they belong to and the way these stories turn into a kind of shared history.  Knowing these stories is a way of understanding not just how members of a community understand their shared history, it’s also a guide to the way they understand success.  Not just what it means, but how it comes about.

I also argued a little later that when it comes to engineering major changes at an institution – say through a strategic plan – institutional leaders need to pay very close attention to organizational sagas.  Propose a strategy with too much dissonance with the stories that make up the saga and you’re likely proposing a strategy no one believes in.  And that will come back and bite you in the behind come implementation time.

(I raise all this because – if you’ll pardon the advertisement – we at HESA do a fair bit of this kind of planning, and this insight is central to our approach.  We’re Saga-Aware Higher Ed Consultants.  If you like that kind of thing, hire us.  If not, I suppose there’s always Deloitte).

Anyways, because I think about stories, I have been reading Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots.  It’s about the curiously universal nature of storytelling, the deep structure of story arcs, the recurrent character types, and so on, but mostly it’s about how the world really only has seven basic stories: “Overcoming the Monster”, “Rags to Riches”, “The Quest”, “Voyage and Return”, “Comedy”, “Tragedy” and “Rebirth”.  Naturally, I’ve been thinking about which structures best fit university and college sagas.

A few of these types you can rule out pretty quickly.  Nobody interprets institutional success as being the result of a series of misunderstandings (hilarious or otherwise), so comedy is mostly out.  Unless you’re on the brink of insolvency due to hubris, tragedy isn’t really an option either (Antioch College maybe.  Or, so I hear, possibly a couple of the smaller Alberta colleges).  Quest stories (e.g. The Odyssey, Watership Down) don’t really work in the sense that they are teleological – there’s only one end, and the story is programmed to get there in the end, after a series of hazardous encounters – and higher education never has just one end.  And Rebirth (think Snow White) doesn’t really work either because it’s usually about redemption from without, which almost never happens.

“Rags to Riches” (think The Ugly Duckling, Aladdin or David Copperfield) sortofworks for a few colleges.  But not many “suddenly” hit it big, and certainly not because they stuck doggedly to their principles until they were finally noticed and rewarded for their virtue.  Tufts, or Ryerson, maybe.  Waterloo.  Not many others.

So that leaves us, intriguingly, with just two basic plots for higher education institutions.  The first one is “Overcoming the Monster”.  This one is surprisingly common.  Most universities have some shadowy antagonist whose machinations must be overcome if they are to reach greatness.  Often, that shadowy antagonist is government or some representation of government.  For instance, at most Ontario universities which got their start in the 1960s, the monster for most of their existence was the funding formula.  Sometimes, it’s another bigger, older, and nastier university nearby which is trying to keep a younger, sprightlier rival down.  It works in the sense that everyone in an institution recognizes that there is an external threat against which they need to pull together, but it is neutral as to the weapons used to defeat the Monster (though if government is the bad guy, the weapon of choice is almost always revenue diversification). 

And that brings us, finally, to Voyage and Return (e.g. Gilgamesh, Peter Rabbit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).   This is, in many ways, the most natural of the higher education plot lines because it’s the one most closely associated with the learning process – you go on a voyage, get into scrapes, and come home wiser – usually.  And you can tell the story of almost any institution as a series of such journeys in the sense that most developments in universities have a pendular quality, moving in one direction and then retreating somewhat, usually pour mieux sauter.  The issue is whether or not the institution actually learns anything from these journeys, collectively speaking.  Good ones do and they use those stories of success and failure to inform their futures; weaker ones don’t.  Which is why not all institutions can viably use a Voyage and Returnnarrative.

If you had to pick a story arc for a strategy, you’d always want to pick Voyage and Return if you could, because it’s really the only one that relies on wisdom and maturity.  The problem is it means the university collectively actually has to learn lessons; but while universities and colleges are “learning” organizations in the sense of generating and transmitting knowledge, many are actually quite bad at modifying collective behaviour in light of new knowledge and experience. 

To put it plainly: good plans need widely accepted stories.  But the quality of collective stories reflects the quality of collective learning.  If an institution doesn’t provide occasions where people learn collectively – that is, reflect honestly on successes and failures – it will have a weak saga and, in turn, little on which to build broad consensus for change.

Stories.  Sagas.  Learning.  Planning.  There’s an underlying unity here that smart leaders should promote.