Many of you have heard our chancellor talk about radical transparency and radical simplicity. In a conversation with the instructional leadership team, one of them added the third leg of the stool: radical trust.
What is radical transparency? Does it mean we talk about everything? Does it mean we are expected to answer every question? Does it mean we explain every decision, large and small? No. As an obvious example, you can’t talk about personnel matters, or confidential discussions in a leadership team like the Cabinet. So how might we approach the idea of radical transparency?
I can only tell you how I think about this concept. I try to offer perspective and context around choices and decisions – as much as is appropriate for the particular situation. I try to invite varying perspectives into decision-making (for instance, with work groups or ad hoc committees). I try to pass along information as best I can, whenever I can (e.g., the latest data analysis, or agenda topics from a recent meeting), within any context of necessary confidentiality. I try to be available and accessible and have an “open door”. In an institution that places great value on shared governance – a defining principle in higher education based originally on ensuring a meaningful faculty voice in decisions related to curriculum and instruction – transparency is a necessary component of decision-making. How do you see radical transparency? What should you or I do to approach this?
Radical simplicity might seem, on its face, to be … well … simpler. But is it? Some things are hard to simplify – processes, standards, etc. Or are they? Am I so embedded in “the way we do things” that I can’t see a simpler path? Am I so comfortable with our maze-like constructions of processes and procedures that I don’t know how to cut out steps and make things simpler? I do think that for folks like me, who have worked at ACC for decades, it’s too easy to get comfortable with current approaches, and we all need to be reminded that simplicity is beautiful. Because if we can simplify, then we can also enhance transparency. And if we can simplify, then we reduce the “authority” that is embedded in being one who knows the ins-and-outs of complex processes. I welcome your thoughts on what should be simplified and how we should go about doing that in a transparent way.
Can you have transparency and simplicity if you don’t have trust? Perhaps you can, but radical trust serves as an important complement to the first two – and thanks to the members of the instructional leadership team for reminding me that we want a three-legged stool of trust, simplicity, and transparency. Radical transparency can be built on trust, as trust can be built on transparency. Simplicity supports transparency and makes it easier to trust. If we really want to reinvent ourselves and ensure radical simplicity and radical transparency, then we must have radical trust as well. Trust is harder to build – it depends on consistency and commitment to integrity and owning up to mistakes. But I think trust will be the key component of our work in the next few years, and will be the reason that we reach our North Star goal.