Delaying tactics or traps

Much of my academic work arises from how I find the process through which organizations arrive at a decision truly mystifying.  The models of decision making present decisions as events that occur, but in my experience in higher education, those decision points are hard to find.  Part of this is because many decisions emerge, and at some point you realize they are there. It is sort of like the process of becoming an adult.  My 19-year-old stepson declared himself to be an adult on the day he turned 18, which is technically true, but we all recognize adulthood is a work in progress.  At some point we will look around and realize that he is no longer a kid in any meaningful way.  But there will not be a single point at which that occurs.  We may end up with a family story that we understand to represent the passage, and if we were a different culture there might be a formal ritual.  

Part of getting a decision made depends on enough people in the right positions aligning around a course of action, treating it as a desirable or inevitable pursuit.  That alignment is always highly inexact.  You can make the case that it would be better always to act more quickly.  It's a Nietzschean idea--the organization's existence only comes from action, from doing something.  It has no subjecthood outside of its actions. 

The benefits of an action bias seem to depend on what the action is.  If the action idea is to start firing people, there's a problem.  But caution about action has detriments.  Last summer I was asked to support an initiative to grant additional aid to foreign students who could not travel to the US as an incentive to go ahead and enroll for remote classes.  I wasn't exactly the decision-maker, but it would go no where if I did not decide it was OK.  

When the idea was presented, I immediately experienced a lot of equivocality--multiple points of view came up almost simultaneously.  Would the grants have any effect, or would we just be giving back tuition to people who would have enrolled anyway? The threat from reduced foreign students was severe and clear, we needed to do something?  Underspending in other areas might over it.  Would the underspent funds we better used in other ways?  All of these voices were equally present.  What ensued was a process to get more voices from others to help emphasize one or the other, to mitigate risks, and build a political base for the decision.  All of this took a few weeks,

One huge question on this decision was the extent to which the benefit of it was diminished by the delay.  The person who presented the plan had brought it early, before some of the threats were as clear and during a time when other sorts of decisions were the focus.  He was a colleague I trust and respect, and if there were anyone who could persuade me to jump on something almost immediately, it would be him. Even with that being true, I drew this process out. Now there is no way to determine what would have happened if we had moved more immediately.

In a large university, I find the decision as it played out more typical than quick moves to action.  While many people bemoan that tendency, breaking this pattern might on balance lead to so many frivolous and damaging actions as to undermine the survivability of the organization. I would like to see experimental conditions set up by building organizational space in which different rules could apply.  I need to give some thought to that, because I think there are going to be cases where colleges are trying to do that and establishing units or programs in a more rapid prototype organizational mode.