Page 132 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Collaborating With a Community College in Post-Katrina New Orleans 101

Another tension in the system that influenced how people approached
the strategy development work, somewhat contrary to the notion of con-
structive tension, was the schism between faculty and administration.
Each facet was necessary to understand and design a whole systems solu-
tion, as distance learning touches all aspects of the college. However, these
differences were seen as a barrier in both access to participate and quality
of contribution. Planning meetings were held in both physical settings and
virtual environments. The thinking behind this process was to accelerate
the planning process by utilizing collaborative software to support plan-
ning discussions during the in-between time of physical gatherings of the
planning group. It also provided an opportunity to expose individuals to
distance learning technologies during the planning process.
Administration found it easier to attend the physical meetings, given
that several faculty participants were teaching at the time of the physi-
cal meetings. Faculty had an easier time accessing and participating in
the DLIT virtual planning environment, given their familiarity with the
technology as online instructors. Faculty also expressed concerns that
administrators had little experience in distance learning and, therefore,
were uninformed, yet they were in a position of authority to be part of
the decision-making process. Rather than focusing on these differences as
diversity that could enrich the discovery, the differences were more often
perceived as negative influences in moving the work forward.
This raises the consideration that at times, bringing the whole system into
the room can be counter-productive. Stacey (2001) discussed the relation-
ship of communities of practice and boundary management, in the context
of what he refers to as patching. Patching is the organization of agents into
subgroups or clusters where the number of connections between agents
within a patch may be high, but the number of connections with other
patches is low. This reduces the number of connections across the entire
system and, therefore, tends to stabilize it enough to avoid chaotic condi-
tions in the wider system. The system stabilizes itself by forming smaller
communities. Stacey (2001) continued to point out that this dynamic has
implications to organizations, as organizations tend to think of enacting
policies and procedures for the whole system, or strategic planners think
in terms of getting the whole system into the planning discussion, or
programs need to be rolled out to the whole organization. He, therefore,
contends that large-scale change and intervention may, in fact, destabilize
rather than stabilize and create coherence. Rather than bringing all stake-
holders into the DLIT Advisory Board structure, perhaps it would have
made more sense to work with smaller subsets of the organization.