by Robyn Bolton | Jan 10, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“Why doesn’t anyone bring me ideas?”
“Why doesn’t anyone ask questions during my meetings?”
“How can I get people to challenge my ideas?”
If you have asked any of these questions, you are not alone.
I hear these questions from managers to C-suite executives in every industry imaginable because they know that sharing ideas, asking questions, and challenging others are core behaviors in innovation.
The answers vary by person and the company, but all tend to fall under the umbrella of “Lack of Psychological Safety.”
No one wants to hear that the culture of their team or their organization isn’t “Psychologically Safe.” Does that mean that the culture is “Psychologically Unsafe?” That doesn’t sound good. That sounds like a lawsuit. And even if the culture isn’t “unsafe,” what does “safe” look like?
These are some of the questions that Timothy R. Clark sets out to answer in his book, “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation.”
What is “Psychological Safety?”
Academics have studied Psychology Safety since the 1960s, but Amy Edmondson’s 1999 paper ushered it into daily use. Today, Psychological Safety is commonly defined as a shared belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.
Clark goes a step further to identify four types, or stages, of Psychological Safety:
- Inclusion Safety: People feel safe and accepted for who they are, including the different and unique aspects of themselves
- Learner Safety: People engage in the learning process by asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, experimenting, and making mistakes
- Contributor Safety: People use their skills and abilities to make a difference in the team and/or organization
- Challenger Safety: People speak up, challenge the status quo, and pursue opportunities for change or improvement
Each type builds on the other, which means that, as a leader, you can’t have a culture in which people challenge your ideas (Challenger Safety) if they don’t feel that they belong (Inclusion) AND comfortable asking questions AND are willing to work to improve or change things.
That’s a tall order as far as culture goes. Add to that the common belief that all four types of Psychological Safety are required for innovation, and it’s no wonder you feel overwhelmed by the task of creating an innovative organization.
How much Psychological Safety is required for innovation?
That depends on what you mean by “innovation.”
(sorry, I know that’s a lame “consultant” answer, but it’s true, so stick with me)
If what you mean by “innovation” is something that improves what you already do and how you do it (core innovation) or changes one element of what you do or how you do it (adjacent innovation), then you don’t need all four stages.
Contributor Safety is Required
Core and Adjacent innovation aren’t sexy. But, for most companies, they are sufficient to inspire and grow the business for at least 5-10 years.
As a leader, of a large existing business, with hundreds or thousands of employees and customers, multiple sites, and complex operations, you can’t possibly know everything that’s happening everywhere. So you rely on your employees to work hard, do their best, and bring all their skills and experiences to bear for the organization. You need them to ask, “How can we do this better?” and develop an answer. You need them to contribute.
To ensure that your employees contribute to operations AND innovations, you need to build and sustain a culture where people feel they belong, are encouraged to learn (even from mistakes), and contribute their thoughts based on their knowledge.
Challenger Safety is a Red Herring
Radical, breakthrough, and disruptive innovation are sexy. But it’s insanely hard because it requires the creation of a new business model AND the destruction of the existing one.
The good news is that most companies don’t need to destroy their existing business and replace it with something new. As a result, they definitely don’t need employees constantly challenging the status quo. Questioning the status quo by asking, “How can we do this better?” is fine. Asserting that everything needs to be changed or else is counterproductive.
As a leader, it’s a good idea to cultivate Challenger Safety with a small circle of trusted advisors. Even one person who has permission to challenge you is sufficient. That is how you get to the best idea and create the most value.
You don’t need an entire organization challenging each other and everything they do. That is how you get frustration, chaos, and destroy value.
It’s And, not Or
Psychological Safety is an innovation requirement AND a red herring.
If you know the type of innovation you want, what results you need, and when you need them, you can focus your efforts on creating and sustaining the right level and scope of psychological safety required to deliver on those goals.
Which makes me wonder….
What type of Psychological Safety does your team need?
What do you do to build Psychological Safety?
How do you encourage people to share ideas and ask questions?
Share your answers in the comments. I promise to respond to each one AND I’m certain your fellow innovators will thank you.
by Robyn Bolton | Oct 26, 2021 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
A few weeks ago, I wrote that innovation happens in the gaps and offered a few suggestions for finding and closing those gaps.
But I only told you half of the story.
The gaps I wrote about are market gaps, the ones between what your customers want or need and what you offer.
These gaps are relatively easy to close because they exist through no fault of our own and we have tools like customer research and R&D to help close them. Closing these gaps is simply what we are in business to do.
But there are other gaps. Gaps that are harder close, mainly because no one wants to see them. These are the gaps inside your organization – the ones that exist between what you need, want and are willing to do.
These gaps exist because status quo is more comfortable and certain, and executives have little to no incentive to close them. These are the gaps that create room for disruption and take down once-great companies.
Mind the INTERNAL Gaps
Need: What you must do to stay in business. Need To Dos aren’t glamorous, doing them won’t give you a competitive edge or make you immune to disruption. But, if you don’t do them, you’ll go out of business much faster than if you do.
Want: What you aspire to do. Want To Dos are what you wish your company would do, achieve, or be known for. These are the things you declare at company meetings, the BHAGs, and the visions. They are what inspire and motivate employees. They are also things that rarely happen because…
Willing: What you do in addition to the Need To Dos. If “want” is the talk, “willing” is the walk. Doing the Wants drives your resources allocation and investment decisions, drives the goals and KPIs you measure, and determines the expectations you set with shareholders. Willing is what you commit to and base your compensation, and maybe even job, on
Close the Gaps
Need / Want: The Comfortable Gap
Closing this gap is comfortable because you know how to do it. You know that just doing the basics isn’t enough to survive in a competitive world and you have experience investing in improvements that are almost certain to increase revenues and/or decrease costs in the near-term.
If you have a gap between what you need to do and what you want to do, understand why the gaps exist and invest in closing them.
Need / Willing: The Deadly Gap
Avoiding this gap is what drives most executives and entrepreneurs because this is where companies die. Startups face this gap when they need more capital but investors aren’t willing to provide it or when they need to pivot but are unwilling to let go of their idea.
Giant, successful companies face this when consumer expectations change, technology leaps forward, and the basis of competition shifts. They see it happening, but they are unwilling to change. They cling to their business models, relentlessly focusing on better serving their best customers until they are, ultimately, disrupted.
If you face a Need/Willing gap, you need to decide whether you will let go of the safety of the current business to invest in disrupting it or whether you will “get while the getting’s good” and milk as much revenue and profit out of the business before it finally succumbs. Both options are valid but making a choice requires great courage. Unfortunately, most executives are too afraid to make that choice and their companies become victims of indecision.
Want / Willing: The Heart-breaking Gap
Seeing this gap is hard because it exists as a direct result of decisions made by the very leaders who seek to close it. How many times have you heard an executive declare “We need to be more innovative!” and then embark on a year-long cost-cutting initiative? Or ask people to come up with ideas in their free time? Or shift resources from innovation to core business operations?
If seeing the gap is hard, closing it is infinitely harder. Closing it requires change, it requires executives and employees to do things differently, often doing the opposite of what they’ve always done. It requires smart risk taking and the willingness to learn. It requires prioritizing the next decade over the next quarter.
If you face a Want/Willing gap, you need to look in the mirror and honestly answer two hard questions – Why do you want to be more innovative? What are you, personally, willing to sacrifice to be more innovative?
If your only answer to the first question is, “I think we should be,” or your answer to the second is “nothing,” STOP. The gap is too big to close because you don’t have the will to do what needs to be done to drive change.
But if you have clear and meaningful answers to the first question and you’re willing to make personal sacrifices if required, then you’re ready to do the challenging, frustratingly slow, but profoundly rewarding work necessary to close the gap.
Mind the Gap or Close the Gap?
There are gaps that we comfortably live with, gaps that will destroy us, and gaps that will break our hearts. All gaps can be closed, but each requires different levels of commitment, courage, and time.
Are you willing to close the gap?
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 25, 2021 | Innovation, Strategy
Most people know that 95% of new products fail within three years of launch. It’s often cited as evidence of big companies’ inability to be innovative, keep up with changing consumer demands, and respond to the nimbleness of start-ups.
Naturally, companies don’t want to fail in the market, so they try to get better at listening and responding to customers, more comfortable investing in unproven but potentially market-defining technology, and more willing to question and change their business models.
Yet, the market failure rate stays essentially the same.
“Ah-ha!” the experts proclaim, “if companies are doing everything right and 95% of innovation projects are still failing, that means that projects are launching that shouldn’t be. That means we must get better at killing projects before they launch!”
Suddenly, Fail Fast becomes the corporate mantra. More projects start because it’s ok to fail. More projects get killed, a mind-boggling 99.9%, according to one study. Fewer projects get launched.
Yet, the market failure rate stays essentially the same.
Why? Why does the market failure rate stick stubbornly at 95% if companies are doing all the right things, including killing 99.9% of ideas and projects before they even get to market?
Because it’s not enough to do the right things.
You must do the right things in the right ways at the right times.
Here are the three most important ones:
Right Thing #1: Start with a problem
All successful innovators know that successful innovations create value because they solve problems for people willing to pay for the solution. This is why I constantly advise my clients to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
Right Way: Finding a problem that people are willing to pay to solve isn’t enough. Companies need to find and invest in problems that align with their priorities and strategies, not just the passions of their innovation teams, R&D department, or top performers.
Right Time: If a problem does not align with a company’s priorities or strategy, kill it before it even becomes a project. Don’t say, “let’s explore this further. Maybe there’s something there,” or “let’s get something the market and see what happens.” When the company set its strategies, it made choices about what it does and does not do, which means that before the problem was even found, the company chose to kill work on it. Respect that choice and focus scarce resources on problems and projects that support the company.
Right Thing #2: Listen to consumers
“The consumer is boss,” former P&G CEO and Chairman AG Lafley once said. He’s right. If the consumer doesn’t have a problem, doesn’t like the solution you’re offering, or isn’t willing to pay what you want for the solution you designed, then failure is inevitable. Innovation begins and ends with the consumer.
Right Way: LISTEN, don’t talk to consumers. Lots of companies talk to consumers – they tell consumers what they’re creating and ask for feedback, what other companies are doing and ask for critiques, what consumers should want and what they should do, and then ask for money in return. Listening means asking open-ended questions, letting consumers think and respond, and believing and acting on the answer, even if it’s not the answer you want.
Right Time: Always. Constantly. Forever. It’s not enough to listen to consumers at the beginning when searching for a problem to solve or in the early days of designing a solution. Listen to them during prototyping, during the MVP stage, before launch, after launch, and every single day after that.
Right Things #3: Learn fast
F*ck fail fast. Failure sucks. No one wants to fail, no matter the speed. It’s not ok to fail because it means that you made an avoidable mistake, made a decision despite the data, and took an unnecessary risk.
But learning is entirely different. When you make a mistake, you learn, which prevents you and others from making the same mistake. When an experiment results in an unexpected outcome, you make new connections between pieces of data, and that learning opens new possibilities and closes down false ones. When you weigh the data, take a calculated risk, and it doesn’t work out, you learn that chance and luck play a role in business.
Right Way: Be honest about what you don’t know, what you need to know, and what you will do once you know. In the long run, false confidence serves no one and, more often than not, leads to very expensive and very public failures. Make the implicit explicit, state your assumptions, and pursue a learning plan, NOT a launch plan.
Right Time: Early and often. Lean start-up and Agile methodologies encourage companies to surface and test assumptions starting with MVPs because it’s when the costs of progress and failure begin to become materials. But uncertainty exists right from the start. The moment a problem is found, assumptions are made about the market’s attractiveness, a solution’s feasibility and viability, and the willingness of the company to invest. Write them down, share them with key decision-makers, test them through small and scrappy experiments. Start learning from day 1 so you don’t fail at day 1,000.
100% success shouldn’t be the goal. Neither should 5%.
Entrepreneurs and innovation experts will admonish companies that, if they succeed 100% of the time, they’re not taking enough risks and truly innovating. While that’s true, there’s also a lot of space between the current 95% failure rate and the inadvisable 0% failure rate.
Doing the right things – starting with a problem, listening to consumers, and learning fast – but companies need to do the right things, in the right ways, at the right times, to be successful more than 5% of the time.
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 22, 2020 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again and expected different results.”
This quote, often (wrongly) attributed to Albert Einstein, is a perfect description of what has been occurring in corporate innovation for the last 20+ years.
In 1997, The Innovator’s Dilemma, put fear in the hearts of executives and ignited interest and investment in innovation across industries, geographies, and disciplines. Since then, millions of articles, thousands of books, and hundreds of consultants (yes, including MileZero) have sprung forth offering help to startups and Fortune 100 companies alike.
Yet the results remain the same.
After decades of incubators, accelerators, innovation teams, corporate venture capital (CVC), growth boards, hackathons, shark tanks, strategies, processes, metrics, and futurists, the success rate of corporate innovation remains stagnant.
Stop the insanity!
I have spent my career in corporate innovation, first as part of the P&G team that launched Swiffer and Swiffer WetJet, later as a Partner at the innovation firm founded by Clayton Christensen, and now as the founder of MileZero, an innovation consulting and coaching firm.
I have engaged in and perpetuated the insanity, but I’ve also noticed something – 90% of what we do in corporate innovation speaks to our logic and reason, it’s left brain focused, and 10% speaks to creativity and imagination, our right brains. BUT 0% of our work speaks to the hearts hopes, fears, beliefs, desires, and motivations of the corporate decision-makers who ultimately determine innovation’s fate.
We spend all out time, effort, and money appealing to their brains when, in reality, the decisions are made in their hearts.
Of course, no corporate executive will ever admit to deciding with their heart, after all, good management is objective and data-based. But corporate executives are also human, and, like other humans, they make decisions with their hearts and justify it with their heads.
Consider this very common scenario:
A CEO announces to investors and employees that “Innovation” is a corporate priority and that the company will be making a “significant” investment in it over the next 3 years. A Chief Innovation Officer is put in place and Innovation Teams start popping up in every Business Unit (BU).
These BU Innovation Teams are staffed with a few people and given budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are told to use Design Thinking and Lean Startup methods to create new products or services to better serve existing or new customers.
Each BU team, excited by their new mandate and autonomy, fan out to talk to customers, host brainstorming sessions, and create prototypes. They pull together business cases showing the huge potential of the new product or service and run experiments to prove early market traction. They meet regularly with the BU President and other key decision-makers.
Everything is going perfectly until, about a year into the work, the company has a bad quarter, or the BU is likely to miss expectations, or an innovation experiment delivers worse than expected results.
Suddenly, everyone is a skeptic. Budgets get cut. Team members are re-assigned to “help” other projects. The team’s portfolio shrinks to a single project. And like that – poof – the Innovation Team is gone.
As apocalyptic as that scenario may seem, the numbers back it up. According to research by Innovation Leader, the average tenure of a Chief Innovation Officer is 4.18 years while an Innovation Manager’s tenure is 3.3 years.
What went wrong? The company did everything by the book – they hired the right talent, established dedicated teams with dedicated budgets, talked to customers and created a portfolio of ideas, built prototypes and made small bets.
Innovation is an investment in the future so one bad quarter shouldn’t be its death knell. But it is.
The reason is that executives know that innovation must be invested in today to produce results in the future, but they do not believe that they will be rewarded for prioritizing the future over the present.
This belief then leads to fear about the uncertainty of future returns and the repercussions of failing to deliver the present, which then leads to fear that their career will stall or that they will lose their job, which then spirals into all sorts of other fears until, eventually, the executive feels forced into a “them or me” decision.
They decide with their heart (fear) and justify with their head (bad quarter).
The solution to this is neither simple nor quick but it is effective – we must dedicate as much time and effort to recognizing and addressing the thoughts, feelings, and mindsets (heart) that executives and key decision-makers face in the pursuit of corporate innovation as we spend on the structures, processes, and activities (head) of corporate innovation.
If this sounds like coaching, you’re right. It is. Just as executives benefit from coaching as they take on new and greater responsibility, they also benefit, in the form of increased confidence and better results, when they have coaches guide them through innovation. This is because innovation often requires executives to do the opposite of what they instinctively do when managing the core business.
Innovation is a head AND a heart endeavor, and we need to start approaching it as such.
To do anything less is the definition of insanity.
*** Originally published on on Forbes.com ***
by Robyn Bolton | Jul 29, 2020 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Strategy
Over the past several weeks, I’ve kicked off innovation projects with multiple clients. As usual, my clients are deeply engaged and enthusiastic, eager to learn how to finally break through the barriers their organizations erect and turn their ideas into real initiatives that generate real results.
Things were progressing smoothly during the first kick-off until a client asked, “Who’s my customer?”
I was shocked. Dumbfounded. Speechless. To me, someone who “grew up” in P&G’s famed brand management function and who has made career out of customer-driven innovation, this was the equivalent of asking, “why should I wear clothes?” The answer is so obvious that the question shouldn’t need to be asked.
Taking a deep breath, I answered the question and we moved on.
A few days later, the question was asked again. By a different client. In a different company. A few days later, it was asked a third time. By yet a different client. In yet a different company. In a completely different industry!
What was going on?!?!?
Each time I gave an answer specific to the problem we were working to solve. When pressed, I tried to give a general definition for “customer” but found that I spent more time talking about exceptions and additions to the definition rather than giving a concise, concrete, and usable answer.
That’s when it struck me – Being “customer-driven” isn’t enough. To be successful, especially in innovation, you need to focus on serving everyone involved in your solution. You need to be “stakeholder-driven.”
What is a customer?
According to Merriam-Webster, a customer is “one that purchases a commodity or service.”
Makes perfect sense. At P&G, we referred to retailers like WalMart and Kroger as “customers” because they purchased P&G’s products from the company. These retailers then sold P&G’s goods to “consumers” who used the products.
But P&G didn’t focus solely on serving its customers. Nor did it focus solely on serving its consumers. It focused on serving both because to serve only one would mean disaster for the long-term business. It focused on its stakeholders.
What is a stakeholder?
Setting aside Merriam-Webster’s first definition (which is specific to betting), the definitions of a stakeholder are “one that has a stake in an enterprise” and “one who is involved in or affected by a course of action.”
For P&G, both customers (retailers) and consumers (people) are stakeholders because they are “involved in or affected by” P&G’s actions. Additionally, shareholders and employees are stakeholders because they have a “stake in (the) enterprise.”
As a result, P&G is actually a “stakeholder-driven” company in which, as former CEO AG Lafley said in 2008, the “consumer is boss.”
How to be a stakeholder-driven organization
Focusing solely on customers is a dangerous game because it means that other stakeholders who are critical to your organization’s success may not get their needs met and, as a result, may stop supporting your work.
Instead, you need to understand, prioritize, and serve all of your stakeholders
Here’s how to do that:
- Identify ALL of your stakeholders. Think broadly, considering ALL the people inside and outside your organization who have a stake or are involved or affected by your work.
- Inside your organization: Who are the people who need to approve your work? Who will fund it? Who influences these decisions? Who will be involved in bringing your solution to life? Who will use it? Who could act as a barrier to any or all of these things?
- Outside your organization: Who will pay for your solution? Who will use your solution? Who influences these decisions? Who could act as a barrier?
- Talk to your stakeholders and understand what motivates them. For each of the people you identify by asking the above questions, take time to actually go talk to them – don’t email them, don’t send a survey, actually go have a conversation – and seek to understand they’re point of view. What are the biggest challenges they are facing? Why is this challenging? What is preventing them from solving it? What motivates them, including incentives and metrics they need to deliver against? What would get them to embrace a solution? What would cause them to reject a solution?
- Map points of agreement and difference amongst your stakeholder. Take a step back and consider all the insights from all of your stakeholders. What are the common views, priorities, incentives, or barriers? What are the disagreements or points of tension? For example, do your buyers prioritize paying a low price over delivering best-in-class performance while your users prioritize performance over price? Are there priorities or barriers that, even though they’re unique to a single stakeholder, you must address?
- Prioritize your stakeholder by answering, “Who’s the boss?” Just as AG Lafley put a clear stake in the ground when he declared that, amongst all of P&G’s stakeholders, that the consumer was boss, challenge yourself to identify the “boss” for your work. For medical device companies, perhaps “the boss” is the surgeon who uses the device and the hospital executive who has the power to approve the purchase. For a non-profit, perhaps it’s the donors who contribute a majority of the operating budget. For an intrapreneur working to improve an internal process, perhaps it’s the person who is responsible for managing the process once it’s implemented. To be clear, you don’t focus on “the boss” to the exclusion of the other stakeholders but you do prioritize serving the boss.
- Create an action plan for each stakeholder. Once you’ve spent time mapping, understanding, and prioritizing the full landscape of your stakeholder’s problems, priorities, and challenges, create a plan to address each one. Some plans may focus on the design, features, functions, manufacturing, and other elements of your solution. Some plans may focus on the timing and content of proactive communication. And some plans may simply outline how to respond to questions or a negative incident.
Yes, it’s important to understand and serve your customers. But doing so is insufficient for long-term success. Identifying, understanding, and serving all of your stakeholders is required for long-term sustainability.
Next time you start a project, don’t just ask “Who is my customer?” as “Who are my stakeholders?” The answers my surprise you. Putting those answers into action through the solutions you create and the results they produce will delight you.
Originally published on March 23, 2020 on Forbes.com
by Robyn Bolton | May 21, 2020 | Customer Centricity, Stories & Examples, Strategy
D-Day is less than 2 weeks away. On June 1, high school seniors and recent graduates will decide which, if any college to attend in the Fall. But, for most, they still won’t know where they’ll be living first semester.
Higher education, like so many other industries, has been rocked by the Coronavirus pandemic – classes are taught entirely on-line, students moved out of dorms and back home months before they planned, campuses are closed, and thousands of employees have been laid off or furloughed.
Like most other industries, colleges and universities have scrambled to respond and to prepare for what’s next. Most pushed Decision Day back a month, from May 1 to June 1, to give prospective students more time to learn about schools offering admission and to assess their own ability to pay for and attend schools when classes resume.
But colleges and universities are facing a challenge that most industries are not.
Their customers are rebelling. They are filing lawsuits. They are asking a fundamental question, “What does my tuition actually buy?”
Before the pandemic, people though they knew.
It was only 30 years ago that most high school graduates opted to go to college. According to research from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, in 1970, only 26% of middle-class workers had any post-high school education. By 1992, it had jumped to 56% and 62% in 2018.
Today, prospective students, and their families believe that a college education is the cost of entry to a middle-class life. You hear it in the Jobs to be Done (problems to be solved, goals to be achieved) they express when you ask why they want to go to college:
- “I want to get a good job when I graduate” – functional Job to be Done
- “I want to make a good living” – functional Job to be Done
- “I want to have more independence” – Emotional Job to be Done (i.e. how I want to feel)
- “I want to be part of something bigger than myself” – Social Job to be Done (i.e. how I want others to see me).
In response, colleges invested huge sums of money to convince students and their families that they offer the best solution to all of these Jobs to be Done.
- Functional Jobs to be Done:. “I want to get a good job when I graduate” and “I want to make a good living”
- Elements of the “College Solution”
- Strong reputation
- World-class education
- Renowned faculty
- Access to alumni network
- Active Career services department
- Relationships with employers
- Emotional Job to be Done: “I want to have more independence”
- Elements of the “College Solution”
- Location near a major metro area or a fun college town
- Access to student housing
- Access to food
- Social Job to be Done: “I want to be part of something bigger than myself”
- Elements of the “College Solution”
- Student clubs
- Social clubs
- Diverse student population
- Championship athletics
- Great living facilities
These elements and more are marketed in beautiful glossy brochures, recruiting roadshows, and campus tours.
The message is clear, “All of this and more could be yours if you are accepted and willing to pay.” And pay the students and their families did.
But here’s the rub.
When America went on lock-down in mid-March, colleges and universities were forced to close their campuses and send home students. Classes were moved to virtual settings with little to no training to help faculty adjust to the new format. Overnight, almost all the elements of the “College solution” disappeared or were compromised, leaving a list that looks like this:
- Functional Jobs to be Done:. “I want to get a good job when I graduate” and “I want to make a good living”
- Elements of the “College Solution”
- Strong reputation
- World-class education*
- Renowned faculty
- Access to alumni network*
- Active Career services department*
- Relationships with employers*
- Emotional Job to be Done: “I want to have more independence”
- Elements of the “College Solution” – n/a
- Social Job to be Done: “I want to be part of something bigger than myself”
- Elements of the “College Solution” – n/a
(* = significantly compromised due to moving to a virtual setting or to economic conditions)
Yet the price of the “College solution” did not change. What happens when the customer thinks they’re paying for one thing (long list of elements) and the seller gives them something less (short list of elements) and refuses to refund a portion of their money? Lawsuits. As Mark Schaffer, the parent of a George Washington University student, explained in his Washington Post Oped:
“When my daughter was deciding where to go to college, we were persuaded by George Washington University’s promises of an extraordinary on-campus experience. The school’s recruiting materials tout a dazzling array of opportunities — to engage one-on-one with renowned faculty, join more than 450 clubs and organizations, or explore passions in high-tech labs, vast libraries, and state-of-the-art study spaces.
The university promises that living at the school opens the door to “world-class” internships, lifelong friendships with neighbors and roommates, and the chance to “become a part of the nation’s capital and make a difference in it every day.” In exchange, GWU expects around $30,000 per semester. As college campuses across the country have shut down to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, most schools, including GWU, have offered only online classes since mid-March. The reason for the shift is not the schools’ fault. But this remote education is nowhere near the caliber of the on-campus experience students were promised. For this reason, I and other GWU parents have requested a partial refund of this semester’s tuition and fees. Unfortunately — and offensively — the university has refused these requests. This is why I am suing GWU for damages to compensate my family for losses suffered because of the school’s breach of contract, and why I am seeking to represent all families similarly harmed by the school through a class action.”
What happens in the Fall is unclear
As lawsuits against GWU, Northwestern, University of Chicago, NYU, Columbia, and other schools wind their ways through the legal system, everyone is scrambling to figure out what happens in the Fall. Most schools haven’t made decisions and the few schools that have seem to be falling into 3 buckets:
- Return to pre-pandemic normal by resuming all on-campus classes, activities, and operations: Brown University (as advocated by their president in a NYT Oped), Purdue University
- Proceed cautiously with a phased approach to resuming on-campus operations, classes, and living: UC Berkeley
- Stayed closed and continue virtual classes: California State University (the largest university system in the US)
Students are also struggling with their decisions. Without clarity as to what the Fall semester looks like and certainty as to their families’ financial means due to the economic downturn and rising unemployment, many students are considering taking a gap year or enrolling in a lower-cost option, such as a community college or public university.
What happens in 2021 and beyond is much easier to predict.
Certainly, the impact of decisions made about the Fall semester will reverberate for years to come as colleges cope with lost revenue from enrollment and a fairly high fixed costs base.
But the greater impact will come from students’ and families’ sudden awareness of the Mt. Holyoke Phenomenon and the role it’s played in their decision making.
First witnessed in the 1980s, the “Mt. Holyoke Phenomenon” reveals that “charging higher tuition leads to a greater number of applicants, as well as academically higher quality applicants.”
The impact of this phenomenon is simple – higher tuition attracts better students, better students demand better education and experiences, better education and experiences improve the school’s brand, a better brand means schools can raise tuition and make more money.
Given that college tuition has increased 260% since 1980, compared to the 120% increase in all consumer items, it’s reasonable to assume that, more and more, tuition is buying access to the college’s reputation.
And, as the lawsuits and declining enrollments suggest, people thought skyrocketing tuition paid for a lot more and, suddenly aware that it doesn’t, may no longer be willing to pay the premium.
The result will re-shape higher education as we know it.
Instead of getting into the most prestigious school possible and relying on financial aid and loans to pay for it, high school seniors will consider a wider variety of post-high school options, including:
- Trade schools which lead to high-paying and highly in demand skilled work
- Community colleges that grant Associate’s degrees and/or a path to transfer to a 4-year college
- Co-op programs that allow them to gain work experience at the same time as a college degree
Colleges, too, will step away from their all (on-campus) or nothing solution to offer a wider portfolio of options. In fact, some schools already have:
- Miami University has several campuses, one in Oxford offering a traditional, residential 4-year experience, and two other campuses nearby that offer part-time associates and bachelor’s degrees
- Harvard University offers a traditional 4-year college education, and undergraduate and graduate degrees through the nonresidential Harvard Extension School, and online certificates through Harvard X
- SNHU famously offers online and campus degree programs and a special “Military Experience” that offers generous tuition discounts, credit transfers, and support programs to active duty military and their spouses
It will take years for demand (what students want and are willing to pay for) and supply (what colleges and universities can offer) to reach equilibrium. But that equilibrium will look very different than it does today. Mt Holyoke taught us that in the 1980s. The coronavirus reminded us.
