Momentum: The Responsibility Paradigm and Virtuous Cycles of Change in Colleges and Universities

by Daniel Seymour

Overview

An era of accountability has swept over the higher education landscape. Everyone it seems—legislatures, think tanks, newspapers, magazines, books, and bloggers—wants to “hold colleges and universities accountable.” They are attaching strings to budgets; producing reports that read like exposés; developing clever systems to rank and sort us; and writing books and articles that describe the end of college as we know it.

According to them, we need to be reformed, reimagined, and rebooted.

Momentum changes the conversation from how others are holding higher education accountable to why colleges and universities need to embrace the need to demonstrate their own responsibility. The responsibility paradigm that emerges fundamentally shifts the dialogue from fixing to preventing, from reacting to creating, from surviving to thriving.

To implement this new paradigm, the dynamics of virtuous cycles are introduced and described. These upward spirals build on their own successes and result in growing confidence—a sense of vitality and resilience. The future of these institutions isn’t the result of outside pressure or reformers. The future is something that can and should be created by those who take responsibility for it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475821031
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/07/2015
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Daniel Seymour is a professor, administrator, and consultant to colleges and universities who has written 15 books in business and higher education including the best-selling Once Upon a Campus and Noble Ambitions.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: On Perilous Conduct
Chapter 2: Bold Imaginings
Chapter 3: Man’s Search for Meaning: Striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal
Chapter 4: The War Canoe: Aligning people and processes
Chapter 5: The Accumulators: Deciding what assets you want to grow
Chapter 6: Icebergs: Understanding what lies beneath the surface
Chapter 7: Bootstrapping: Managing the Angle of Approach
Chapter 8: Peripheral Vision: Sharing knowledge about how a system works
Chapter 9: The Examined Life: Embracing feedback to learn and grow
Chapter 10: Gumption Junction: Demonstrating the courage to create
Index

Editorial Reviews

Seymour offers a thoughtful analysis of the opportunities facing higher education institutions today and urges a strategic call to action.

Lori Gaskin

Seymour provides a realistic, effective framework for planning and executing major change in a college or university. It should be required reading for every institutional change-leadership team that intends to succeed.

Ellen Chaffee

For decades as a university administrator I applied a simple operating principle: good enough is never good enough. Being content ensured a certain passivity which, in turn, interfered with the imperative to regularly assess the changing environment and continually transform the institution. Eventually, comfort catches up to you.

I never realized that this basic idea could be developed into a framework for decision-making until I read Daniel Seymour’s Momentum: The Responsibility Paradigm and Virtuous Cycles of Change in Colleges and Universities (2016).
The premise is that when the rate of change outside our institutions exceeds the rate of change inside, we either gain traction and evolve or lose ground and diminish. Standing pat is no longer an option.

But exactly how do we gain momentum? The virtuous cycle, or upward spiral, is introduced as a tool for colleges to create their own futures where each success becomes the platform for more successes. The core chapters describe a set of spiral dynamics that are at the heart of this relentlessly pragmatic exercise.

My own discomfort with comfort has been affirmed in the pages of this book.

Michael D. Young