Being A Good Pinch Hitter

As a kid Mickey Mantle was everybody's hero.  We knew who Phil Linz was, but he wasn't on the top of anybody's list.  Everybody imagined themselves hitting the home run.  Nobody thought of being a pinch hitter who lays down a sacrifice bunt to advance the runner or a utility fielder who substitutes for an injured starter or simply to give the starter a day off. We all imagined ourselves as stars.

The same is true as we become adults and thus have our attention focused on the world of work.  The entrepreneur who starts a new company in a soon to be emerging field becomes our champion.  We esteem the ability to put a vision into practice and having the drive and willingness to put it all on the line in pursuit of this goal.  We don't glorify more established companies where there is progress, but it comes much slower, and where the jobs have more stability.  Nor do we esteem the person who takes over from somebody else who established the company or the job.  We highly value the person who created the work.  The successor who keeps the trains running on time, doesn't get nearly as much credit.

Yet we should value the successor, a lot.  And keeping the trains running on time is an incorrect characterization of what the replacement actually does.  There is creativity in being a good successor.  It's the type of creativity we should teach, if only we knew how.  Let me get back to that and first give some personal observations from having played the successor role and still playing it now.

I came to the realization later in life that I actually was better at being the successor than I would have been as the originator, this in respect to my career as an administrator.  I'm going to try to explain that observation with a few examples.

Creativity in groups is quite different than creativity in a solo effort, such as writing a blog post like this one.  Let's keep that in mind as we work through these examples.

The first experience was when I was brought into SCALE.  I've told the story before, many times.  So I'll be comparatively brief here.   SCALE was the creation of Burks Oakley.  He got the big grant from the Sloan Foundation and with the help of people in the U of I Foundation (the fundraising arm of the university) he got the campus to put in a big match from the Swanlund Gift Fund, which sealed the deal.  Burks had ideas about how to structure SCALE staff-wise, he was ahead of the curve regarding what software to support (FirstClass, not PacerForum, because the former used the then new protocol TCP/IP and was available on both Macs and PCs, while PacerForum relied on Appletalk and was Mac only).  He was also quite connected with the interesting ed tech work being done on campus already and enlisted many of these people as SCALE grantees.  Indeed, he set up the grant program and process, which I thought quite well done and something I emulated when I took over from Burks.

But, of course, there were problems.  There always are.  Some years later, when I learned administrator-speak, I became aware of the politically correct term - issues rather than the incorrect term, problems.  (I think there is a real reason for this language.  Issues can be argued, as in, I take issue with you on that point.  Problems, in contrast, are typically somebody's fault, so involve assigning blame.  Assigning blame is normally counterproductive, especially if the person is still part of the process afterwards.)  In spite of this, I'm going to use problems to discuss matters here, because to address problems one engages in problem solving.  The expression issue solving doesn't exist and I don't see a reason to invent it now.

The immediate problem I confronted as I began to work at SCALE as a faculty fellow (though my official title was Assistant Director) was that the evaluation of SCALE faculty wasn't working and the relationship between Burks and the evaluation team was not good; there was a lack of trust on both sides.  Problem solving in this case involved me and Cheryl Bullock (of the evaluation team) together interviewing SCALE faculty and then having me edit the evaluation document that the team produced.  This produced a workable solution that did improve things.

Let me note two different factors that provided for a workable solution.  The first is an idea called leverage by Peter Senge or, if you prefer, it is about killing two birds with one stone.  I was brought into SCALE to promote ALN (now it is called online learning) and my immediate goal was to build my own people network among the SCALE faculty, most of whom I didn't yet know.  As I was one of those SCALE faculty, this would be a conversation among peers.  So having a chat with them is something I wanted to do anyway, quite apart from the evaluation.  The second is to take those talents you do have that are applicable to the situation and then use them.  In this case, I had learned over the years what being a good anonymous referee does when reviewing a paper.  I applied those skills to the editing of the evaluation report.  This seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn't that immediate in prospect.  The papers I had refereed were all intended to be published in economics journals and one wrote the reports for that audience.  I had no background in reading or writing education documents.  But I did have a sensibility from being a SCALE faculty member the previous year to have a pretty good grasp on the set of issues other faculty members were confronting.  I may not have been confident about it at the time, but it was that knowledge that made the solution work.

The next problem, and it was a bigger one, happened perhaps four months later. Burks has promised the Sloan Foundation that ALN would reduce the cost of instruction by economizing on faculty time - rather than deal with students one-on-one in office hours, the instructor could answer the questions of one student in an online forum, and the other students could go work through that and not need to pose their own questions.  In our evaluation interviews with the faculty, however, mostly what we were finding is that faculty time devoted to instruction was increasing.  These instructors were trying to address the issue that students didn't speak up sufficiently in class.  They hoped students would be more open in an online forum and were willing to devote substantial energy to encouraging that.  Quality of instruction improved as a consequence, but cost did not go down.   If anything, it went up.

I ultimately resolved this dilemma with the SCALE Efficiency Projects.   It turns out that while many people at the time were talking about how learning technology might lower the costs of instruction, there were really very few efforts that actually accomplished this goal.  (At peer institutions there was the LON-CAPA project at Michigan State and the Math Emporium at Virginia Tech.  At RPI, a much smaller institution, there was the Studio Model for teaching physics.)  And because money was flowing pretty freely in the late 1990s, there really wasn't much impetus on campus to pursue cost efficiencies across the board though in certain disciplines, language learning was a notable example, it was viewed as a necessity as a way to address demand growth.   In other words, I was driven by the need to fulfill an obligation made to the grant providers, not by satisfying a well articulated need on campus, nor about an objective I had generated myself.  And I had little to no practical experience that would have helped me come up with and implement the idea, though I did have my formal economics training and my prior experience teaching, which gave me the rudiments of how to think about the cost of instruction.

Indeed, I often felt under prepared for the job of leading SCALE, although nobody else seemed to feel that way about me.  My self doubt arose because I came to my ideas about teaching and learning by seat of the pants methods rather than by formal instruction, as with the economics.  But there was one countervailing factor that made me much more effective, quite evident in retrospect, though not obvious to me at the time and that might often be overlooked by others in considering competence as a pinch hitter.  I was a dad with two young boys at home and that humanized me in a way nothing else could.  Essentially all non-work time was devoted to family activities and I found it easy and comfortable to interact with other parents whose kids were the same age.  (Previously I interacted mainly with economists, in and out of work.)  In addition, parenting involves all sorts of on the spot problem solving where the standard is - good enough so the problem is over for now. I'm pretty sure parenting impacted my attitudes about work and in ways that I yet don't fully comprehend.

Let's jump to the next example, about a decade later.  By this point I was a pretty experienced administrator and had a reasonably well established reputation in the higher education ed tech community. And with that I found a great deal of pleasure interacting with colleagues from other campuses.  I enjoyed the give and take and the camaraderie.  In this case I was asked to substitute for somebody who had gotten ill and couldn't continue working as part of the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Institute.  The person making the request was Kathy Christoph, my friend and then colleague on the CIC Learning Technology Group.  (The CIC is now called the Big Ten Academic Alliance.)  There were supposed to be 7 Institute faculty who would lead sessions and organize the activities.  Kathy was the host, as the Institute was to be held in Madison Wisconsin on her campus.  The person who dropped out was a member of the faculty on his home campus.  Many of the other Institute Faculty were academic technologists on their campuses and in one instance the person was both the CIO and the director of the library at his university.  They needed someone who had real faculty credentials.

The Institute was to be held the following June.  As this is now an ongoing affair, the ordinary pattern is for two or three of the Institute faculty to rotate off and then bring on new Institute Faculty to replace them, with each person serving for three years.   I don't remember this exactly, but I believe the new faculty are brought on in late August or early September and then there might be one group call before there is a face to face meeting of the group at the Educause national conference, which is usually held during the last week in October or the first week in November.   In this case it was already December before Kathy contacted me.  She was in a bit of a bind to find a replacement on short notice, so I said yes, not knowing what I was getting myself into.   Friends help friends when asked.  Had somebody else asked me whom I didn't know already, I might have said no.

There is a lot of planning that goes on behind the scenes for LTLI (behind the scenes from the perspective of those who attend).  As it turns out, I enjoyed the planning quite a bit and I greatly enjoyed my interactions with my fellow Institute faculty members.  The design of the Institute has each plenary session being led by two Institute faculty and each does this for two plenary sessions.  By design each session pairing of faculty members is unique to that session, meaning I had different partners for the two sessions I planned for, Larry Ragan then of Penn State and Heather Stewart then of NYU.  At the other plenary sessions the Institute Faculty would observe from the back of the room as distinguished elders, kibitz among themselves, and otherwise not try to disrupt the session, unless that was deliberate as part of the plan.  Then at meals and during the small group sessions the Institute faculty were there as a resource for the attendees, serving as mentors for the five days when the Institute was held.

As I wrote about LTLI soon after arriving back home in a post called Facsimiles, here I will talk just a bit about the planning.  For the session with Larry, which was on Making Relationships, there already was a quite detailed PowerPoint presentation from the year before.  I couldn't make sense of all of it, so I wanted to make some changes that would be more intelligible to me.  Although I was the rookie and Larry was the veteran, he was quite willing for me to do that.  Apart from that content, I gather that the style of session that we did was quite different from the year before.  (It is described in that post.)  So there was innovation yet within a given structure that was fixed.  For the session with Heather, the session the year before hadn't gone well.  So while there may have also been a PowerPoint for that one (I can't remember if there was or wasn't) we were much closer to starting from scratch.

It turns out that prior failure can be liberating (especially if you weren't the cause of the prior failure).  So while we did come up with a set of points we wanted to emphasize for the session, more importantly we came up with a novel way to present them.  We would make a video of a learning technologist (played by Heather) making a presentation to the Provost (played by Perry Hanson) and the Provost's budget officer (played by Kathy).  I played the CIO, the learning technologist's boss.  The video was deliberately meant to be campy, where mistake after mistake were made.  Then after watching the video the attendees were to deconstruct it and identify the errors.  We filmed the thing after the opening banquet of the Institute. Heather and I had to alert Kathy about this ahead of time because we needed to arrange a space for where the video could be captured, we needed a camera, and we needed a server to host the video for subsequent use.  But we didn't alert Perry about it till right before the banquet.  He was a champ and did a great job.   Heather was the star.  She emoted beautifully so the those in attendance could truly identify themselves in her playing the role.  Kathy also made quite a good performance.  I think mine was just so-so, but in that role I did throw Heather's character under the bus to advance my own agenda, so could be thought of as the movie's villain.  They actually re-used the video for several institutes thereafter, including one where I had already rotated off.

I also want to talk about planning for the group activity which was ongoing through the institute, and which culminated in each group making a presentation in the penultimate plenary session.  The underlying activity was largely the same as the previous year, but some of the groups under performed then, so much of our planning when during our ensemble calls was about how to avoid a repeat of that.  What we ultimately came up with is that the each Institute faculty member would observe a group during its process (part of the time, the rest of the time they were on their own).  We could answer questions for them, but weren't supposed to coach them.  I probably broke the rules some on that.  (Some of what I did is explained in that post about the Institute.)  I don't think it was coaching, but it was teaching in a way - by asking some tough questions.  My fellow Institute faculty members weren't pleased that I did this teaching, but we moved past that very quickly.  The group presentations were better this time around.  As a social scientist, I can assert that it is difficult to impute causality here.  An alternative explanation is that we had a better crop of attendees.  Probably both factors mattered, but about their relative importance it's impossible to say.  In sum, on the group activity I went with the flow, but then in the group I monitored, I partly followed the plan and partly did my own thing.  I did serve on LTLI for two more years after that, so whatever mistakes I made weren't fatal that way.

Let me turn to the third and last example, which I'm in the midst of now and which motivated writing this piece.  An organization that I do volunteer work for recently changed its name so it needed a new Website.  This organization is in Uganda.  There is a parallel organization in the U.S. that does fundraising on behalf of the Ugandan organization.  It too needs a Website.  Indeed, we need a Web strategy that anticipates the evolution of these sites as the organization in Uganda performs its function and news of that develops.  Early in the fall last year we brought in somebody from outside our U.S. Board to do Website development.  We've recently severed with that person, for a variety of reasons.  Now we're picking up the pieces.  People on the Board of our U.S. organization are individually suggesting how to move forward, each developing candidate sites for that purpose.  I'm doing likewise.

Ahead of time I had in mind starting from scratch and building a simple site to deliver the message I thought needed to be delivered.  The partial site that had been developed was quite complex, in both layout and the amount of content on it. Yet one of my fellow Board members had expressed a desire to finish the work in that partial site and in that way honor the effort that had been put in.  So I told myself in advance, maybe you'll do this twice.  First try to build out the partial site.  Then build an alternative from scratch.

As Web development is not my thing, this seemed somewhat daunting, but I do a lot of other work for the Ugandan organization so am the one in the U.S. most familiar with its work and aspirations.  For that reason I felt an obligation to do this.    I developed kind of a simple plan.  Use the text areas of the partially built site and rewrite them to my own tastes.  Try as much as possible not to muck around with the site layout, since that might get me into deep water quickly in an area where I couldn't swim.  As it turns out, for the most part I did stick with this, but in one instance in particular, I wrote a bit more than the fixed width and vertical space would allow and then had to confront getting the layout to accommodate that.

Writing for a layout already given I would characterize as a "judo approach."  Indeed, I believe a pinch hitter needs to practice judo, metaphorically speaking.  Once that is recognized, and many people who have not done much pinch hitting might not recognize the need for judo so instead will spend a good deal of time reinventing the wheel, then some decision about what to keep and what to change needs to be made.  The art in the decision making is to make the task manageable and allow the change areas to be those where the person has some strength in doing the work.  In this case, since I'm far more comfortable in writing than I am in Web design,  that was going to be my focus.

I can't say it all went smoothly and without frustration.  Where I did need to muck around with the layout I got stuck and remained stuck for quite a while.  But I didn't want that to wreck what I was doing, which I otherwise thought was a sensible approach to things. So I went into "stubborn mode" in trying to fix the layout. (I've written about getting unstuck before and that it does take sitzfleisch in coming to a solution.)  Eventually I found a work around.  It may not be an elegant solution.  But it did what I needed it to do.  And the effort produced a bit more confidence in me with the site development tools.  As a result I was able to make a few other changes in choice of images to display and the color of some border areas of the page.  Whether the others will like this result remains to be seen.  But I can say I achieved what I set out to do.

Let me wrap up.  In speaking about creativity sometimes we don't distinguish between the possible universes where one might operate, one that offers very broad discretion, the other that is much more limited in the choices which can be made.   An artist or a writer might prefer the broad universe alternative, as it gives maximal freedom of expression.  But within an organization, where others have their views of what should be done, and where the prior work of the organization matters for its present activities, creativity in the more limited universe is often what's required.  That's the skill of the good pinch hitter.  I don't know whether school can teach it.  But if it can, it should.