Evaluating the EFQM Excellence Model for Higher Education in a global learning society by John Hirst

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Evaluating the EFQM Excellence Model for Higher
Education in a global learning society byJohn
Hirst University of Durham

• As we have come to recognise the limitations on
  rational calculation, planning and forecasting as
  bases for intelligence in organisations, interest
  in the potential for organisational learning has
  increased (James March)

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Focus on whats important !

• People in elite universities have to become the
  intellectual epicentre of society, not just
  maintaining the tradition of research teaching
  but always asking what impact their institution
  is having on the world
• (Sexton)
• It is less important to measure specific
  outcomes than to assess how learning processes
  and events are integrated
• (Harrison)
• People who are transforming education today are
  doing it by building consensus around a common
  set of principles, values and priorities and
  debunking the high degree of specialisation,
  departmentalisation and partisan politics (Covey)

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EFQM Fundamental Concepts

• Focus on achievement of purpose
• Centrality of the student experience (meeting
  basic higher needs)
• Leadership sustainability
• Governance (coherence, integration evaluation)
• People effectiveness
• (rather than efficiency)
• Management - open, creative, trusting, learning
  cultures
• Constructive relationships partnerships
• Relevance responsibilities to society

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Why do we need a model?

• Some people are never convinced by related
  experiences. They see only disconnected
  coincidences
• (OConnor Seymour Introducing NLP)

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Symptoms of failure
Causes
Effects
Bureaucratic management Top-down control Ineffecti
ve decision- making Poor communications
Blaming and undervaluing
Demoralised people
Declining reputation, financial security,
quality of applicants, academic standards
Inaccessible leadership Lack of trust openness
Remote from its students
Conflict inconsistency
Detached from needs of society
Underfunding resourcing
Defensive and self-destructive
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Symptoms of success
Causes
Effects
Effective management Integrated
processes Effective decision- making Good
communications
Affirmation empowerment
Fulfilled people
Increasing reputation, financial security,
quality of applicants, academic standards
Accessible leadership Trust Openness
In harmony with its students
Coherence consistency
Relevant to the needs of society
Investment in resources
Creative and constructive
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Indicators of a successful department

• clear vision leadership
• staff signed up to dept. strategy
• viable size
• appraises own performance
• good feedback from students
• has an improvement action plan
• implements action plans and encourages student
  participation
• has developed appropriate external relationships
• benchmarks against best in field
• excellent in both teaching learning
• performed well in RAE
• commands confidence in the University
• exceeds student expectations

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The EFQM Excellence Model
Enablers (causes)
Results (effects)
People
People Results
Key Performance Results
Customer Results
Policy Strategy
Processes
Leadership
Society Results
Resources Partnerships
Innovation and Learning
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The EFQMExcellenceModel

• The Excellence Model represents a dynamic systems
  process that will take time to master
  discovering how to get the best out of it only
  comes with experience and a determination to make
  it succeed.
• It is futile to try to use the Excellence Model
  in an inappropriate context. It will only work to
  advantage in a culture conducive to complex
  learning in which people openly trust one
  another, share a common vision, and are supported
  even when they make mistakes. A bureaucratic,
  authoritarian culture in which distrust,
  hypocrisy, blame and defensive behaviour abound
  predetermines a negative outcome, especially if
  the Model is used to impose control and
  uniformity
•  
• The Excellence Model can switch-on and train
  the subconscious mind to think systemically. The
  subconscious mind has far greater capacity than
  the conscious mind to make sense of and optimise
  complex interactions and opportunities. The Model
  provides a framework for the development of
  subconscious competence which becomes
  increasingly spontaneous, adept and agile.

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Objections

• distrust quantitative analysis statistics can
  be made to prove anything
• sceptical about any framework that claims to
  reveal the truth target for deconstruction
• feel threatened by emphasis on leadership
• prefer going through the motions of compliance
  to honest self-assessment
• managerial language is offensive
• consumerises staff-student interactions
• good management is that which leaves (me) well
  alone
• allegiance to discipline or college - no love
  lost for the institution as a whole
• Deans are responsible for strategic planning not
  academics
• based on utilitarian/universalist thinking aimed
  at uniformity and control (i.e. someone else
  telling me how to live my life)
• suspicion that its a set-up

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Whatdoes EFQM offer ?

• a way of managing devolved decentralised
  structures Univ. of Wisconsin breaks down
  barriers and defensive routines
• an organic approach promoting propagation of
  pockets of excellence and pruning dead
  branches
• focuses on whats important starts with final
  ends, assesses impact of decisions, keeps track
  of progress
• encourages people to listen to and trust others
  challenges hierarchy and management by dictat and
  committee assurance is internal to the system
  avoids machine-age obsession with need to
  control
• improves communication shared understanding and
  quality of decisions based on authentic feed-back
• encourages people to be pro-active in developing
  customised just-for-you innovative solutions
  not reactive to uniform, conservative, imposed
  ones
• involves people and values their individual
  collective contributions
• focuses on leadership not managerialism

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4 Steps To Excellence
STEP 4
Develop implement strategic plans reflecting
goal deployment of common purposes through
process framework and improvement plans
Communicate achievement of purpose plans
promoting stake-holder commitment, reputation
governance
STEP 3
Collect evidence to show how the organisation is
working together and how effectively it is
achieving its purposes and learning from
experience feedback
Use range of indicators measures to reflect
desired balance, effectiveness and integration of
human, social structural capital dimensions
STEP 2
Undertake annual self-assessment against
Excellence Model criteria (preferably involving
key stake-holders) to identify strengths areas
for improvement
Assessment methods include workshops based on
work-book pro-formas, questionnaires, interviews
appraisals
STEP 1
Establish values to underpin culture behaviour
throughout institution trust, openness,
inclusivity, learning, cooperation, community
common purpose
Training leaders stake-holders throughout the
institution in values, culture, learning
disciplines purposes
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Student Experience Survey
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Changing perceptions of universities

• 1970s
• Guardians of the spiritual non-material
  permanent values of the life of the mind
• (Joseph Rowntree HE Project)
• 1990s
• Factories for the production of degree-holders
  
• (Will Hutton)
• 2000s
• Disney university or hamburger university
  (Van Looey, Van Dierdonck Gemmel)

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Are things improving?

• 1980s
• Instead of a bright new management-orientated
  culture, there is a danger that what we are
  seeing is a decline in the old beliefs, replaced
  only by the growth of public-sector anomie
  (Pollitt)
• 1990s
• Universities are characterised by
• low trust
• adversarial management
• taller hierarchies
• greater management power
• less responsible autonomy (Jones)
• 2000s
• Government micro-management and inconsistent
  policies are a worse threat than the market. The
  market is one way to allow universities some
  autonomy, but it needs caution because all kinds
  of social factors that are important will be
  neglected and undermine the core business of the
  University and the priorities of those who fund
  things will start to conflict (Harris)

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Political Confusion about Higher Education

• public good or commodity?
• state funded/managed or market-dependent?
• knowledge for own sake or business needs?
• serving the learning society or the market
  society?
• teaching or research?
• academic or moral education?
• social inclusion or academic excellence?
• knowledge as possession or knowledge as
  understanding?
• students as consumers or members?
• degree outlets or learning through ways of life
  as an educative process?

The pursuit of ever more perfect accountability
provides more information, more comparisons, more
complaints systems but it also builds a culture
of suspicion and low morale (ONeill)
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BigIssues

• uncertainty risk
• modernisation
• sustainability corporate social responsibility
• diversity widening participation
• relevance to society
• differentiation - branding/packaging the student
  experience intrinsic/inherent values
• collegiality residence
• commodification of relationships ways of life
• effectiveness of leadership governance
• bureaucratic vs market rationality
• regional assemblies - funding
• mergers economies of scale
• efficiency impact on internal structures
• business management processes models
• employability
• charitable status
• falling population growth-rate
• technology new modes of delivery

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The Silent Takeover Noreena Hertz (Cambridge)

• The growing dependency of Government on
  business, and the blurring of boundaries between
  public and private sector threatens to make
  societal improvements irreversibly dependent on
  the creation of profit
• If government and business become partners, who
  will be there to adjudicate if things go wrong ?
• Low voter turnout, falling levels of trust and
  increasingly visible corruption have contributed
  to a widespread feeling that politics simply does
  nt matter
• If governments are not farsighted enough to
  confront the Silent Takeoverthe world we live in
  will be one in which corporations rule, markets
  are above the law, and voting becomes a thing of
  the past.

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Bowling Alone Robert Putnam

• massive decline in social trust
• rise in fear and loneliness
• collapse of associations clubs
• break-down of marriage family
• fragmentation of institutions of civil society,
  including education
• loss of interest in politics
• increase in transaction costs (especially due to
  liability insurance legal fees)
• increase in violence, crime and abuse
• conflict between values and life-styles

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Globalization the 2 Faces of Liberalism

• The enlightenment western liberal ideal failed in
  the face of incommensurable difference. Free
  market imperialism has revived it but is it
  sustainable in the new global order? If not,
  where does that leave us?
• Liberalism as universalism - shared concept of
  what is good within a common social order
  dedicated to tolerance justice. Closely linked
  to relativism our worlds are so different from
  one another that they are mutually unintelligible
  can only enjoin them by bureaucracy, markets or
  military intervention
• Liberalism as individualism - autonomous
  individuals and institutions dedicated to
  tolerance justice. Closely linked to
  subjectivism and emotivism people have to rely
  on their own individual preferences or wants to
  determine what is good and gain influence over
  others

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Modus Vivendi (ways of life)

• Modus vivendi continues the liberal search for
  peaceful co-existence but it does so by giving up
  the belief that one way of life, or a single type
  of regime could be best for all
• (John Gray)

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Universities as models of modus vivendi

• Ways of life must be practiced by a number of
  people, not only one, span the generations, have
  a sense of themselves and be recognised by
  others, exclude some people and have some
  distinctive practices beliefs
• (J. Gray)
• Sustainable ways of life are those through which
  you discover who you are, what you want to be and
  where you want to go, in relation to everyone
  else - Aristotles profound reality

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Bias towards intellectual development

• in contemporary English speaking society, and
  within higher education institutions
  particularly, the systematic bias towards the
  intellect and the analytical is most pronounced,
  leading to a lack of emphasis on the whole
  person (Brennan Little)
• academic procedures fail particularly in the
  matter of shaping dispositions and attitudes
  (Bobbit)
• purely intellectual development without
  commensurate internal character development makes
  no sense whatsoever (Covey)

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Managing sustainable ways of life
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Relevance to the needs of society

• teach sustainable ways of life based on
  reflection on the common life as an educative
  process (R. Williams)
• build the social capital necessary for civil
  society - societal responsibility (CSR)
• develop attributes that contribute to social
  economic sustainability
• sense of belonging
• thirst for personal growth learning
• concern for the well-being of others
• desire to give-back to society going beyond
  individual self-interest
• ability to accept responsibility and be a good
  leader (principle-centred leadership)
• (these are also the defining characteristics of
  the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For)

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Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For

• Over the past 5 years, the best companies would
  have earned an investor a compounded annual
  return of 12.1 compared with a 5.8 decline for
  the FTSE All-Share Index as a whole
• Over the past 3 years, the best companies
  returned 3.6 compared with a 15 decline in the
  FTSE

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Society

• Universities are responsible to society as a
  whole, of which they are an integral part. They
  operate by public consent in order to serve the
  needs of society, to the satisfaction of society
  (van Marrewijk)

Societal Focus
Stakeholder Focus
Owner/share-holder Focus
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CSR

• The aim of Higher Education should be to sustain
  a learning society
• (The Dearing Report)
• You rarely see a coherent societal strategy in
  Higher Education
• (Sir Michael Bichard)
• CSR is a new and distinctive phenomenon it
  requires organizations to fundamentally re-think
  their position and act in terms of the complex
  societal context of which they are part (Marcel
  van Marrewijk)

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Dearings 4 Purposes

• personal effectiveness and fulfilment (to achieve
  self-realisation through learning-how-to-learn,
  i.e. by transcending ones in-built and often
  subconscious limitations)
• intellectual capital (to promote knowledge and
  understanding)
• learning and innovation (to sustain a
  knowledge-based economy)
• social capital (to shape a democratic, civilized,
  inclusive society)

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Whats wrong with market logic ?

• The paradox of competition is that it is benign
  only when counterbalanced by habits of
  co-operation. A purely competitive world begins
  by being creative but ends by becoming
  self-destructive
• Society depends on the existence of certain
  relationships that stand outside economic
  calculations these are the institutions of
  civil society and they have become seriously
  eroded in consumption-driven cultures they are
  endangered by the intrusion of the logic of the
  market-place
• (J.Sacks The Dignity of Difference)

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Commodification

• Higher Education has little if anything to do
  with the values of a market society and
  everything to do with moral principles good
  deeds, caring relationships, a willingness to
  make personal sacrifices for the common good,
  belonging to a community dedicated to certain
  ideals. These are the values that give continuity
  and dignity to life (J. Sacks)
• Higher Education is suffering a steady attrition
  of resources and imagination, and is at every
  level under pressure to give priority to narrowly
  functional concerns it is treated politically as
  a consumer good to be marketed to parents or
  students. In the long-run this is bound to weaken
  any sense of corporate responsibility and public
  intelligence (R. Williams)

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Clash of ideologies

• In the West people seek their own advantage from
  behaving towards others they encounter in
  business without full exercise of trusteeship,
  justice, consultation and loyalty. Western
  organisation theory, finance and accounting
  theory promote human relationships which are
  somehow deficient in terms of these principles
• They produce organisations with structures that
  limit the operation of basic principles of
  common-sense behaviour
• They never tire of repeating that a combination
  of free markets with democracy is the only
  sustainable model of development
• In Islam the manager must give the same weight to
  moral, social and environmental considerations
  as to purely financial ones
• (T. Gambling Business Accounting Ethics in
  Islam)

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What is Excellence?

• Traditional approaches to strategy based on the
  economic model of the firm involve a centralised
  body making choices aimed at increased
  shareholder value by short-term profitability at
  the expense of long-term sustainability.
• Organisational excellence aims at long-term
  sustainability by understanding and responding to
  the multiple, often conflicting, expectations of
  society, regulatory bodies, students and
  employees and relating them to the myriad of
  interactions between people, policies
  strategies, technologies and markets.

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What is Organisational Learning?

• managing complexity
• accommodating diverse purposes and ways of life
• discerning profound realities
• sustaining values and ideals
• managing boundaries relationships
• mediating moral conflicts
• building trust and discretion
• developing knowledge as understanding
• operating in morally opposed environments
• managing interdependency
• developing character and competence
• building social, moral intellectual capital

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Why is organisational learning vital for HE ?

• political confusion modernisation or modernism?
  
• globalization
• the silent takeover
• bowling alone
• values-pluralism
• modus vivendi
• quality of the student experience
• differentiation brand-equity
• moral education
• trust discretion
• systemic management vs micro-management
• re-connecting social, moral, intellectual and
  economic planes
• social/societal sustainability

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Moral education

• Morality does not mean discerning the difference
  between bad and good but discerning what ways
  of life lead to the long-term good of humanity.
• Moral education is neither the imparting of
  rules in a vacuum nor the discussion of how
  students think they decide issues, but is bound
  up with roles and responsibilities actually and
  actively learned in the corporate life of an
  institution (R. Williams)
• Moral education is integral to the ecology of
  hope for the future because it locates social
  change at a level at which we can make a
  difference through the acts we do, the principles
  by which we live, and the relationships we
  create. It sees us as something other than
  replaceable parts of an economic system. It
  provides a counter-point to late-modern Western
  culture that tends systematically to dissolve the
  values and virtues that give meaning to life (J.
  Sacks)

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Why is moral education so important ?
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Learning-how-to-learn universities as
educational processes

• belonging to an inclusive community
• learning relational skills friendship types
• developing ethical awareness (principles of
  truth, justice, equity, respect, and ethical
  decision-making skills)
• living in a multidisciplinary community within
  which different disciplines are applied to common
  concerns
• experiencing multi-cultural living in a community
  with different cultural ethnic narratives
• integrating the social, moral, intellectual,
  economic spiritual planes, developing virtues
  values
• developing companionship through peer-group
  mentoring, communal living and dining, recreation
  and looking out for one anothers safety
  security
• learning to reconcile individual self-interest
  with the common good
• developing self-awareness self-belief
• practicing interior learning processes
  (intuiting, sensing, feeling, thinking,
  perceiving, judging)
• participating in roles responsibilities
  actually and actively learned in the corporate
  life of the institution
• experiencing democracy as a means whereby people
  with different outlooks reach common decisions
• learning social trust on which democracy and
  civil society depend

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Sustainability

• Institution-level
• Organizations which continue to improve their
  quality ultimately have to adopt a more social
  management style, in other words move towards
  higher levels of corporate sustainability (van
  Marrewijk)
• Sector-level
• Sustainability is dependent on a reconnection
  of the social and the economic (Hertz)
• Global-level
• The UN World Declaration on Higher Education
  emphasises the primacy of social exchange values
  over economic exchange values (Hirst)

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(No Transcript)
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Learning Organisation Characteristics

• capitalises on uncertainty ambiguity
• embraces change
• decentralises decision-making with
  empowerment/discretion
• promotes a holistic organic view of the
  organisation in terms of systems processes
• creates new knowledge with insights intuition
• identifies learning facilitators
• gives opportunities to take risks and learn from
  them
• links staff development training to learning
  improvement
• has a culture of disclosure openness
• sees communications as opportunities for sharing
• spreads trust throughout the organisation
• encourages involvement in the community
• networks internally externally
• promotes a holistic organic view of the
  organisation in terms of its relationships
• sees relationships as opportunities for learning
• promotes a shared vision combined values
• resists bureaucracy

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Creating a Learning Culture
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Trust

• Trust or the lack of it is at the root of
  success or failure in relationships and in the
  bottom-line results of business, industry,
  education and government (Stephen Covey)
• Trust is one of the most powerful factors
  affecting a countrys economic health. Where
  trust is low, individuals and organisations are
  more wary about engaging in financial
  transactions which tend to depress the national
  economy (Steve Knack World Bank)
• Without stable associations with others we fail
  to acquire the habits of co-operation which form
  the basis of trust on which the economics and
  politics of a free society depend (Jonathan
  Sacks)
• Trust is the foundation of virtue
• (Matt Ridley)

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Steps to Organisational Learning

• transform individual and organisational concepts
  of learning
• create knowledge-based partnerships
• develop and expand team-learning activities
• change the role of managers to coaches
• encourage experiments and risk-taking without
  blame for failure
• create structures, systems and time to facilitate
  learning
• build opportunities and mechanisms for sharing
  learning
• empower people
• circulate information throughout the organisation
• develop the five disciplines, especially systems
  thinking
• create a learning culture and a positive
  relational context
• develop the vision for organisational excellence
  and personal fulfilment
• root out bureaucracy

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Obstacles to Organisational Learning

• bureaucracy is a manifestation of control that
  stifles trust, learning and innovation
• competition emphasises selfish individualism
  leading to impoverished relationships
• instrumental control results in low-discretion
  and low-trust cultures that prevent learning
• impoverished relationships result in poor
  communications, defensiveness and mistrust
• poor leadership neither preaches nor practices
  learning and promotes skilled incompetence out of
  fear of loss of control
• rigid hierarchies maintain silo mentalities in
  order to retain control
• (Marquardt)

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Defensiveness

• an anathema to excellence
• (Sir Michael Bichard)
• we cling to this dominant paradigm (instrumental
  control), despite all the evidence to the
  contrary, because it is our main defence
  mechanism
• the purpose of managing the context is to create
  an emotional atmosphere in which it is possible
  to overcome defences and test reality. In other
  words, the context must be managed to create a
  culture that enables complex learning
• (Ralph Stacey)

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Learning Disciplines (Peter Senge)

• Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing
  wholes. It is a framework for seeing
  interrelationships rather than things, for seeing
  patterns of change rather than static
  snapshots. It begins training people to think
  systemically.
• Mental models reflect peoples perceptions and
  beliefs that determine not only how they make
  sense of the world but also how and when they
  take action. This discipline involves uncovering
  hidden assumptions and developing new paradigms.
•  
• Personal mastery is a personal discipline of
  self-knowledge and personal development. It
  raises awareness of the subconscious being and
  the underlying beliefs that condition ones
  behaviour. It provides the impetus for creativity
  and a vision beyond self-interest

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Learning Disciplines (Peter Senge)

• Team-learning is a collective discipline that
  involves developing the practices of dialogue and
  discussion and how to deal creatively with the
  powerful forces that oppose productive dialogue
  and discussion, such as conflict, defensive
  reasoning, game-playing and avoidance routines.
  It encourages people to develop shared
  understandings about complex issues, coordinate
  their activities and share best practice.
• Shared vision provides the focus and energy for
  learning. When people care deeply about something
  they develop a vision they can truly share which
  helps to connect them to it and binds them
  together with others in pursuit of a common
  purpose or cause.

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4 Stages of Learning
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Leadership

• tell a story in which everyone has a part
• enlist dissidents
• differentiate between final ends, other ends and
  means to ends
• enthuse as well as inform
• emphasise self-awareness (MBPTI) and authenticity
  derive identity from relationships not tasks
  (gender issue!)
• develop relational quality (RP)
• provide opportunities to experiment
• keep in touch with reality focus on whats
  important
• instil a common vision and build trust and
  discretion
• develop helicopter vision
• replace bureaucracy with systemic ways of working

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3 Dimensions of an HE Institution
Structural Capital
Admin Departments
The University
Schools Departments
Colleges Societies
Social Capital
Human Capital
The Double-Warrant
Hirst, 2002
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Management
Trust
Schools/Depts.
Colleges/Societies
The Double-Warrant
Integration
Learning
Governance
Administration
Hirst, 2002
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Governance
Achievement
Evaluation improvement
Methods
Application
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Conclusion
The advance of science technology is an
unstoppable process but it has no built-in end
or purpose. In every area of policy there are
choices to be made. Thinking of modernisation as
a single unidirectional process has the effect of
narrowing these choices . in the monocular
neo-conservative view of modernisation, every
society in the world will eventually follow
America in becoming a secular democracy (John
Gray)