Dear Colleagues,

I have worked at TU/e for a long time, starting in 1993. Apparently that doesn't happen too often, because everyone who asks how long I worked here responds with a somewhat surprised “Gee, that's a long time." When I came to work here, I was immediately told that this university is a pigeonhole, where no one works for more than a few years. Whether that has really been true over the years, I don't know, but more than thirty years is still perceived as long, and I don't know many people anymore who started in the 1990s like I did.

Although I did have the occasional temptation to leave, I found TU/e to be such a fine institution and pleasant employer that I stayed. Another contributing factor was that I changed positions about every eight years, each time quite different from the one before. That does keep you busy. I also changed fields of work, from journalism to communications to IT, rather unusual and therefore dynamic.

If you work at the same institution for a long time, certain patterns do emerge. And that's what I want to talk to you about. And I won't do that with a perspective on the past, that's not so interesting, but with an eye to the future. I've enjoyed working here for years, but I'm retiring now. You may be working here for a long time to come -unless the pigeon-hole virus strikes- and for that this institution must continue to exist for a long time.

As far as the latter is concerned, that did go the wrong way at times during all these years. And I emphasize: this is my obviously subjective view of some events, but I still think it is important to share them with you.

I will go back to 1993 for a moment. I then became editor-in-chief of Cursor. I received a letter of appointment, signed by my boss. His job title was Administrator of the Small Units Management Unit. When I read that, I thought: such fine titles are otherwise only encountered in the fairy tale forest. But what does such a seemingly small detail actually reveal? This was an organization that gave absolutely no thought to the functions it needed and how they should be managed. There were -quite a few- small departments -Cursor included- which were not known what to do with and which were put together on the basis of numerical considerations.

I came from a large engineering company in Amsterdam that, with Mintzberg's books in mind, was tightly organized according to functions, staff separated from execution, core tasks in separate departments, with a facilities department alongside. The organizational picture looked tight and orderly, but that of the TU/e at the time was more of a maze. In short, an organization with little self-reflection on its own functioning.

This has improved significantly in the years since, but it did not happen by itself. That lack of self-reflection led to external parties believing in the mid-1990s that the TU/e was in bad shape, while we ourselves felt that all was well. We had less than 7,000 students then, less than 1,000 freshmen, and although universities were all a lot smaller than they are today, those were still worrying numbers. We weren't hammering away, had little connection with our surroundings, but nobody felt the need to do anything about it, because “a Mercedes sells itself anyway".

What happened in the mid-1990s, but what I also saw happen later, is that the university could only be put back on track with a hard hand and firm changes. In the mid-1990s, we had an Executive Board that intervened hard, strengthened ties with the local community (the term triple helix dates from this time), put communication with the outside world first, and deployed an innovation such as the notebook project. The Chamber of Commerce came into our field, TNO Industrie and the Twinning Centre. In short, a hard yank at the wheel to get the outside view back in order.

Some 15 years later, something similar happened. Perhaps not as existential a crisis as in the 1990s, but certainly one following the same pattern. In education, there had been some pretty poor performance figures in the curriculum for a number of years, but with the exception of a few people, no one seemed to care. 'Engineering studies are simply very difficult,' was the argument for doing nothing.

Once again it took a strong intervention from the Board to get the TU/e back on track by implementing a number of radical innovations in education. This time you will probably remember better: with the new bachelor's college more common subjects in the first years of study and then yields rose quite quickly to very acceptable levels. But what stuck with me: it took a long time for the TU/e to come to the conclusion that it could no longer go on like it did, and that required some harsh words.

In the same period, as a result of the educational renovations, I found it remarkable that it took a lot of effort to convince the TU/e that really much more money had to be put into maintenance and renewal of the educational systems than was the case at the time. Compared to other institutions, the TU/e was spending very little money on educational IT, and once again it took a very strong voice -this time from an external party- to point out to the TU/e that things could not go on like this. Something else struck me during that period: in preparation for a teaching visitation, we did a pilot visitation to practice for the real visitation. One of the conclusions of the external trial visitation committee was: you are very informally organized. Apparently you have not realized that the outside world has changed from a high trust to a low trust society. You have to get rid of the informal organization, which makes it difficult to justify your organization to the outside world. Another example of not being connected to the outside world.

So in the long time that I worked at the TU/e I experienced twice, well, two and a half times, that the TU/e had gotten itself into quite a mess by being blind to what was happening in the outside world and, confronted with discrepancies, kept denying them quite stubbornly and didn't come to changes.

In the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho there is a beautiful quote: Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

If something happens twice, it will also happen a third time. Not a physical law, but there is some logic in it I think. So there will possibly be a third time when we do not relate well to the outside world, do not realize that we are apparently out of step. This to our detriment, after which it takes a long time until we finally take action.

Now this is no longer so relevant to me, I am retiring, but you may want to work here for a long time and I can heartily recommend that you avoid that third time as much as possible. For example, it's really no fun to change all the educational software all at once on 1 day with a big bang, that causes a lot of hassle and frustration.

And vigorous actions sometimes result in vigorous counter-reactions. At the turn of the century, there was also a strong counter-reaction to the earlier developments. You have to avoid these kinds of firm swings as much as possible. But how do you do that? In my opinion, there are two pitfalls to avoid:

1. we sometimes tend as an organization to be too introspective more than is good for us and

2. we dislike innovation and change at the central organizational level.

By the way, these two only occur at the upper faculty level and do not apply to the individual researcher/teacher, as BOOST! among others has proven.

These two factors cause us to move periodically toward a Great Reset (after Richard Florida's book of the same name), with much turmoil and fuss in the organization.

How can we avoid that?

1. Stay in touch with the outside world: Make sure that as an organization we stay well connected to external developments. This prevents us from becoming too inward-looking. When I became head of the Communications Service Center, I was told, “If you ever dare to hire a policy officer, we know where to find you.” Sentiments like that don't help keep the outward focus sharp.

2. Embrace innovation: Don't simply say no to new ideas. Ask yourself why you're saying no. No time and no money is ultimately pennywise pound foolish. By systematically cutting off innovations, you are slowly working toward another great reset, something we really want to avoid.

If you don't avoid your pitfalls on your own, you have to take action at the instrumental level to make sure you stay on track.

Instruments for an innovative organization

- Innovation as “chefsache". Reflect annually on innovations, especially in services and core processes such as education. Rule of thumb: 5 percent of the budget to innovation.

- Innovation fund: Provide a fund at the central level for innovations at the corporate level. BOOST! has brought a lot of innovation at the education level thanks to external, earmarked money. In doing so, there was no need to fight for the money that normally goes into the budget and operations.

- University magazine as window to the outside world: Use the editorial team to expose discrepancies with the outside world and critically question the organization.

- Visibility in national and European developments: Be active in initiatives such as Npuls and alliances, and translate these developments to TU/e.

This way, in addition to up to date tools, we create an innovative attitude that allows the organization to respond alertly and quickly to changes. The Executive Board, especially Nicole Ummelen emphasized the importance of resilience in our long- term plan. It would be great if we become resilient through a steady stream of innovations, without great resets. We gloriously weathered the COVID crisis thanks to previous educational innovations and new systems.

Even better is to become antifragile, as Nassim Taleb describes in his book Antifragile: things that gain from disorder. If you are resilient, you survive a crisis. If you are antifragile, you come out stronger. In Taleb's words, “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty.

So become more antifragile and embrace innovations that move you forward.

Photo | Fotodette