50 Strategic Leadership
One is to complement and supplement other accounts of decision making in
order to provide a fuller description of a complex organizational culture. By going
more deeply into the choices of persons as agents, as participants who enact val-
ues through their choices, we enrich our understanding of collegiate decision
making.
This orientation opens up a number of promising possibilities. It helps all the
stakeholders in higher education to give voice explicitly to what they know tac-
itly, which is intellectually satisfying in itself. But, for many who are caught in
the frustrations of the system—consider again our new dean—the insights also
serve as a kind of cognitive therapy. Conflict is depersonalized when it is seen as
structural, and the natural tendency to place blame on oneself or others can be
transcended. More importantly, insights at this level release energy and open up
possibilities for action. The mind is set free to think of new approaches to the
problem, and novel ways to both understand and reconcile structural conflict.
When the sphere of action is as complex and demanding as the exercise of lead-
ership in a university, the task of designing new approaches needs all the insights
and resources that it can muster. Even though the process will never be complete,
it helps to invest intellectual capital in reconceptualizing the issues.
Our explorations bring to light some of the conditions that must be met in order
for a process of strategic leadership to deal effectively with structural conflict.
Even as I have argued that shared governance needs to be reconceptualized, it
would be illusory to think that the tension between professional autonomy and
organizational authority can ever be eliminated. As a true polarity, both sides of
the relationship are required to address the realities with which academic decision
making must contend. An effective strategy process can mediate the conflict, not
eliminate it.
On a substantive level, it is also an aim of strategic leadership to find and to
articulate shared values that transcend the structural conflict in the culture of
academic decision making. As we shall explore in detail in subsequent chapters,
knowing and articulating the narratives, images, and metaphors in an institu-
tion’s life story are crucial aspects of leadership. In his widely influential article
on the loose coupling of decision making in schools, Weick (1991, 1995, 2001)
notes that a worthy aim of research is to understand how people make sense of
their experience in such unpredictable and ambiguous organizational contexts.
He notes that in constructing their social reality, one would expect members of
educational organizations to use the resources of language to create organizational
myths and stories.
Narratives are indeed crucial in sense making because they carry wider mean-
ing and convey the common values that have shaped an organization’s identity.
Through the discovery of the ways these defining values are incorporated into the
work of the organization, a common set of commitments can be raised to aware-
ness, given voice, and celebrated. As this occurs, diverse members of the campus
community find substantive values that provide worthy common ground for their
commitment, narrowing the gap between autonomy and authority. The common