Universities have existed for more than a thousand years, and this long history comes with no small measure of tradition, history, and honored legacies.  At the same time, universities are the birthplace of new ideas and the launching pad from which graduates go forth full of bright hopes and fresh energies, ready to change the world.  How can educational administrators negotiate between these two poles?  The answer lies in transformative leadership. 

1.       Creativity: The central characteristic of innovation is creativity—beginning with something old and making it new.

2.       Respiration: Innovation is to an organization as breathing is to an organism—we must bring new ideas in, while also pushing our ideas out into the world.

3.       Selectivity:  Not every idea is good, and not every good idea can be acted upon.  We must be intelligently selective, but then fully support the ideas that we choose.

4.       Judgment: Innovation requires an open mind—we must be able to hold our own ideas in reserve, being willing to look, listen, watch, and remain silent in order to learn what others have to offer. 

5.       Irritants:  Ideas often come from sources we don’t expect.  Seek to interact with people who make you uncomfortable, who challenge your core beliefs, who you think are wrong, or whose ideas seem strange.  Just as a pearl begins with the irritant of a single grain of sand inside the oyster’s shell, the most transformative ideas may be equally unsettling.

6.       Radical teams:  The strongest teams are comprised of both veterans and newcomers, of people with opposing points of view and divergent disciplinary backgrounds.  Homogenous grouping may not yield anything but more of the same—the antithesis of transformation.

7.       Human-Centric: Innovation requires thoughtful consideration, reflective contemplation, and a conscious effort to include all stakeholders. 

a.       We must always place human considerations first, using empathy and understanding to guide our actions. 

b.      In higher education, this means bearing in mind that faculty members are as loyal to their disciplinary fields as they are to their institution.  Therefore, we must support transformation of the institution while also ensuring that change will not erode their academic domains.

c.       Transformation must occur steadily, gently, and respectfully.  It must be transparent and consciously include all stakeholders without impeding progress.

8.       Doing: We must have a bias towards action, placing doing above thinking, planning, or maintaining.  We should reward those who take action—whether successful or not—above those who chose the status quo.  It’s not enough to think about thinking, or to spend time planning to plan.  We must act, then evaluate, then act again.

9.       Why? How? What?  Stakeholders need to be persuaded that change is necessary, good, and desirable.  They must be convinced and in support of the Why (the reason for embracing change) before they can accept the How (planning for implementation).  After that, deciding together on the What (concrete actions) becomes simple.  People must come to see that change has personal benefit and that their participation will be rewarded. 

10.   Actionable: Innovation must be able to be implemented—no matter how good the idea, if it cannot be put into practice, it goes nowhere.

11.   Reward Risk:  A sense of safety is essential to the willingness to engage in risk.  Celebrate intelligent failure, expressing a dissenting opinion, or arguing for an opposing point of view.  Use failure as feedback mechanism and a learning tool.  Assure others that engaging in risk is of greater benefit than choosing to do nothing. 

12.   Hire Strategically: People should be brought into your team because they offer something new and can contribute to your organizational transformation, not because they already fit comfortably in the same mold as the rest of your members.  If you’re looking to fill a position with someone who’s an exact copy of the previous holder of that job, your goal is not truly to achieve innovation.

13.   Navigation:  As educational leaders, our task is to motivate and guide.  When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.  If we’re serious about achieving transformation, we need to set a destination and purposefully lead our organization towards that goal.  This requires focus and determination.

14.   Legacy:  A university setting bears a tremendous weight of legacy in its history, traditions, and human resources.  We must honor those characteristics without being bound by them.  We must nurture innovation while also working within existing institutional contexts, systems, and missions.

15.   Dedication:  Change is hard.  There are no two ways around this basic truth.  But it’s sometimes also good, not to mention inevitable.  Is it without risk?  No.  But without risk, there is no progress.  Change is upon us.  The question is: are you ready to be a transformative leader?  Do you have the perseverance and dedication to see this through to the end, no matter how much it upsets the status quo?  Are you in it for the long haul?

For many years, critique in the visual arts has followed a basic formula featuring three key components.  A viewer is first asked to identify the work, then to describe it, and finally to interpret it, attempting to hold judgment in abeyance until the process is nearly complete.  Of course, there are many variations on this theme, but the basic principles remain the same.

After participating in critiques as both a student and an instructor, and as I continue to evaluate artworks I encounter in my professional life, I found myself dissatisfied with traditional approaches.  This led me to conduct research into the ways people form judgments and evaluations about what they see, leading to the formulation of a new model offering a more naturalistic approach to critique.  It takes into account the fact that human beings tend to form nearly instantaneous judgments about what they see, but it also recognizes that the viewer can revise or even reverse his or her initial opinion by studying an artwork more closely.  This process will be the subject of an upcoming book, but in this blog post I’d like to present a brief outline of the way it works.

The first step is Encounter, in which the audience sees a work of art.  This stage of critique is very brief: almost instantaneously, the audience then chooses to pay attention to the work or to disregard it, merely glancing and then turning their eyes elsewhere or continuing to look. 

Following closely on the heels of our initial encounter is Judgment.  If we remain engaged with the artwork after the initial encounter, we tend to make an immediate decision about whether we’re interested and/or whether we like or dislike the work. Our reaction is spontaneous and qualitative, based on our prior knowledge, experience, and individual personality or taste.  It is emotional and intuitive, not logical or rational. 

The steps of Encounter and Judge in the new critique model make sense: we encounter visual objects and judge what we see thousands of times a day.  Even in a place where we expect to pay close attention to what we’re looking at, such as in a museum, we tend to scan over things very quickly, we pass judgment on them (Do I like it?  Does it interest me?), and we simply move on if the answer to those questions is, “No.”

If we decide to keep looking, we move on to the phase of Interpretation.  We make intuitive connections between the artwork and our personal experience or prior knowledge.  These connections allow us to identify the work and perceive its message or meaning.  However, if we have no prior knowledge or experience, interpretation fails—we cannot understand the artwork or perceive the artist’s message if we cannot understand what we’re looking at.

Once we think we understand the artwork and have discerned its meaning, we refine our judgment and interpretation by looking more closely.  This is where Analysis comes in.  At this stage of the process intellect is engaged, emotion is scaled back, and we can consider external data and information linked to the artwork.  If no additional input is available, we might choose to seek it through a third source, such as reading any accompanying materials like captions, titles, or an artist’s statement, or even by engaging in informal research to enhance comprehension.  Analysis of an artwork can reveal new depths of meaning that were not immediately visible in the work itself, or it can provide additional knowledge that allows us to understand the work more fully.

The last step is Evaluation, which typically takes more time than prior levels of the critique process.  Although judgment is an immediate and emotional reaction to the artwork, evaluation is the intellectual, deliberate formation of an informed, rational opinion.  As the result of interpretation and analysis, evaluation may contradict judgment: what we first judged negatively may receive a positive evaluation or vice-versa. 

By recognizing that it’s merely human nature to make quick judgments about what we see, and by working within this process rather than against it, this new model proceeds in a more intuitive, less artificial manner than traditional methods of critique, leading the viewer from an immediate emotional response to a reasoned evaluation.