The Ambiguities and Possibilities of Leadership in Higher Education 35
the thermostat will work. The more interesting issue is what the temperature
means to the family who lives in the house, not just as a measure but as a value,
as part of a way of life, as an indicator of purpose. Assume that the family is trying
to save money on energy costs, so they lower the temperature to sixty degrees in
winter and raise it to seventy-five in the summer. The parents and teenage chil-
dren argue constantly among themselves about the settings, framing the issues in
different ways.
As debates about the best temperature unfold, it becomes evident that the
problem is not the temperature at all, nor the old furnace, and certainly not the
thermostat. The family finds itself involved in a decision that keeps expanding to
encompass wider issues of values, priorities, and purposes. It turns out that the
temperature is only symptomatic of much larger concerns. The region’s cold
winters, high-energy costs, and low salaries surface as the real problem. Given
their vision of the life they want to live, they decide to move to a warmer climate
with a lower cost of living.
This example suggests how strategic thinking probes issues to find the source
of the problem. If we translate the family’s situation into the admissions example
used earlier, we can see the parallels. What may appear to be a minor operational
problem with a lower number of entering students could be a strategic indicator
of the need for a basic change in the college’s academic program. The response to
competition in the marketplace may require not just new programs, but a refash-
ioning of the frame of collegial decision making as well. Cybernetic balance can-
not provide the integrative leadership required to anticipate and to address these
broader forms of change.
In these examples, we learn that the fragmentation of operational decision
making gives way to the systemic patterns of strategic thinking and leadership.
This means that we have to reveal and bring to awareness the values and purposes
that are embedded in the forms of organizational life and in the ways we do busi-
ness as usual. At the strategic level, leadership means systematically making sense
of our organization’s identity and its place in the wider world in order to define its
best possibilities for the future. Along the way, monitoring systems of all sorts
are needed to tell us whether we are reaching our goals, but in themselves they are
mechanisms of management, not leadership. These conclusions make it clear that
it is essential to develop a process of strategic decision making that can effectively
integrate the complex patterns and frames of organizational decision making.
While making sense of purposes and values, it will also have to bind together
complicated forms of knowing and acting. As a form of leadership, it also will be
expected to create a vision of the future and translate it into reality.
DIVERGING AND CONVERGING CONCLUSIONS
Several of the influential sources that we have consulted see the college presi-
dency as weak in authority, albeit for different reasons. In the views of organiza-
tional theorists, the reasons for the weakness are given with the structural elements