Overcoming the Resistance to Change

If our universities and colleges are to adapt to the rapidly evolving world, they need bold and progressive leadership to fight the forces that typically resist change.

Some personal insights concerning the academic system are:

• Be prepared to tackle irrational inertia inherent to large systems with creative effort.
  
  
• Recognize the importance of gifted individuals and of keeping their groups small. If you want to accomplish something, gather a few people who really care to do it. In general, larger committees accomplish less because of the conservative nature of the committee process.
  
  
• Provide enough rope. One means of overcoming inertia is through a delegation of responsibility— providing motivation for change by providing “rope.” In other words, give small groups of faculty the flexibility to make changes and revisions in their domain of responsibility.
  
  
• Acknowledge that “naive” young intellects are critical in pushing the system into the future.
  
  
• Employ successful models in order to prove that reforms successfully established at one place can be reestablished at other sites.
  
  
• Use bribes, or “incentive funding,” to create change. Leadership must use limited resources creatively to induce people to depart from their natural path of conservatism— basically, use a carrot rather than a stick to motivate change.

— Bruce Alberts, Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco (from a PKAL Seminar, 1994).