What comes out of allowing for a little over-complication

I was going to title this post "Someone who overcomplicates everything makes an arguably self-justifying case for doing so."  That impulse tells a lot. 

I tend to see myself as someone who gravitates towards complexity, often in ways that I or others find problematic.  It seems like the world more often needs the people who can quickly break things down into very simple pieces, rather than those who see the richness of the experience. Higher education administrators are certainly looking for let us say clarity.  From a critical perspective, you could say that this tendency, this character of "good management" is part of the habitus of the current social order, that allows unspoken values to have definitive, locked in control of actions in an organization.  That is, part of the vehicle through which governmentality acts.

I did a webinar yesterday with a colleague, a smart, experienced, witty, thoughtful man. Our paths crossed years ago briefly, and it was a pleasure to do some work with him.  We were asked by a participant about what assumptions one uses about revenues and expenses.  On one level this is a tough question because different institutions face different contexts--they have different sources of revenue, different spending issues. Nevertheless there are some answers.  Everyone needs to have some way to talk about what enrollment might be in the future, and in most cases there are places to go for some leading indicators.

My colleague talked at one point about activity drivers for costs.  This idea from management accounting is that behind any activity, something drives costs.  For instance, if you manufacture something, the number of units will determine how much materials you need, how many workers on the line.  Theoretically simple--it gets a little complicated, which is part of the fun of operations management.  You have fixed, periodic and continuous costs on a production line, and you can do math to calculate each and bring them together. 

This example is pretty simple conceptually.  Any enterprise, particularly a bureaucracy, has a lot of activities removed from the production line, or the classroom. Administrative and support activities, overhead. Budget people have been thinking about the drivers for these activities for a long time, and at this point there are some basic starting points--you use things like the number of staff, students, accounts, or square feet--and my colleague made that point and gave the example of a registrar's office where you use number of students as the activity driver. 

The registrar's office does a number of critical things.  They register students for courses.  They receive and record grades.  They issue transcripts.  They maintain the systems through which instructors are assigned to classes, and I think in most cases manage the schedule of classes and classrooms.  They also do some more arcane things that are critical to having a good record of student performance, such as deciding on course numbering conventions and coding courses for things like instructional method, prerequisites, and whether it fulfills specific curricular requirements.  Since it depends on student records, they work on systems to track student progress, which are critical to other units like advising and financial aid. 

All of this activity is related to the number of students.  If you're a little older, you remember standing in line to register.  More students, longer lines, more staff needed at the other end.  Pretty simple. A school with more students will have a bigger registrar's office.

But wait. I was working on identifying critical metrics for administrative functions at Portland State, and started with number of students.  Thing was, the registrar--again, an experienced and effective administrator--pointed out problems with this.  Thanks to automation, their staff can handle more students with zero to little marginal additional effort.  And if enrollment goes down, their effort does not go down.  There is some step function, but it's at a pretty dramatic level, maybe a 25% or 50% change in enrollment.  The registrar made the case that what consumed staff resources was developing, implementing and maintaining their core systems, and helping on projects, something the office was asked to do frequently. The registrar argued that the function is essentially a fixed cost, and any effort to incrementally decrease ran into that problem.  

At the end of the day I was determined to have some metric to frame budget conversations for every function, and we didn't come with anything better than number of students. Within the framework of simplicity-privileging values, this was wasted effort. To me, the results of this side trip into alternatives shows the problem with a cut to the chase approach. The back and forth on my arguably heavy-handed question brought out much more about the economics and operations of this unit, at least for me, and the emphasis the registrar put on systems and projects rather than transactions is very important. 

I don't know if the registrar felt the discussion was useful and felt their perspective was given real voice, but I have no doubt that direct imposition of the simple metric would have had the effect of erasing the registrar as a voice.  The registrar would see this metric as a pure imposition, with no validity--not that the validity of it was very high in the end.  But for me, what is more important is that it would have undercut this person's person-ness in their organizational experience.  Someone else would speak about their work as if they did not exist and would not open the process to their experiential and cognitive contributions.  It would be dehumanizing.  

The dehumanizing effects of experience within organizations, these supremely human manifestations, are the result of many small actions like this which accrue profusely and quickly acquire heavy phenomenological weight.

This does connect back to the Pandora's Box problem or non-problem.