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The Art of Anticipation

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By Russell C. Carey

The rape allegations leveled against athletes at Duke University this past spring will undoubtedly be the inspiration for case studies and lessons learned for years to come. And so will a number of other high-profile campus crises that made their way into the national news this year (including one on my own campus).

Investigations and reports are a common response to such crises, and for good reason. They not only help the affected institution to learn from, and move beyond, the crisis, but they also make valuable contributions to academe at large. After all, while the facts and circumstances may vary, few institutions have been spared the challenges of a spiraling crisis played out on the public stage.

As administrators, we watch with a sinking feeling as the talking heads on cable-news shows dissect what they know -- or don't know -- about a particular campus response to an incident. It happened there, but it could have happened anywhere. Every administrator in any position of responsibility should be asking himself or herself, What will I do when it happens on my watch?

The answer, of course, depends -- on the campus, the leader, the facts, the students, the media, and a thousand other variables no one can control. What leaders can do is prepare to answer that question by developing the critical ability to anticipate.

Anticipation in the administrative context is more than a hunch or a feeling about what may come next. It is the developed skill of imagining all the possible outcomes that could unfold from a single act, assessing the relative probability of each occurring, predicting the multiple implications for the campus of the most likely outcome(s), and planning a response to manage the outcome to the best interests of the institution.

It is a skill that can be learned and taught, and one that is certainly burnished by experience, but it is rarely discussed or ranked among the attributes of successful college and university administrators.

It is seductively easy to look back at any one scenario and identify the confluence of warning signs -- class, race, gender, alcohol, athletics, community tensions, and so on -- that could have portended the scope and scale of the outcome, and conclude that the administration should have seen it coming. What is much more difficult, but necessary, is the ability to see those possible outcomes on Day 1, 2, or 3 of a developing situation in which the facts and data are incomplete and highly fluid.

At those moments the patterns have not yet emerged and the implications of any course of action, or even the natural unfolding of events, are almost hopelessly unclear. The role of an administrator is to think and act in the immediate best interests of the institution, and not with an eye to how his or her actions will appear to a review team looking back at the controversy some weeks or months in the future.

The necessity of acting in the present, however, invariably leads to decisions that are short-sighted and may hinder rather than help the institution manage the crisis. What can campus leaders in those scenarios, in the earliest hours and days, do to improve their capacity to anticipate?

Practice. Practice. Practice. Building a culture of anticipatory skill-development into the leadership environment of the campus should begin well before a crisis occurs. The pressure of a middle-of-the-night telephone call from a police officer, or a meeting with a parent of a student in crisis, or the few minutes before an emergency meeting with the president are not the occasions for reflective thought and considered forecasting. Acquiring the skills needed to anticipate effectively under pressure must be part of any institution's professional-development program for administrators.

It need not be overly complicated: The routine and consistent discussion of case studies at staff meetings or retreats can go a long way toward encouraging administrators to think carefully about what they would do when faced with any range of crises. How would they react? Whom would they call upon for help? Whom would they notify first, second, third? What signals, problems, and issues would they identify as the most important, and what can be set aside, at least temporarily? Who on the campus has the most experience and best judgment for the crisis at hand?

There is no shortage of engaging and topical cases to stimulate such a discussion and provide role-play scenarios every year.

Challenge what you know. A common recommendation in the wake of any major crisis is that the university develop clear protocols on who is responsible for collecting and sharing information. While that is certainly important, it is only a starting point. How the information is shared and handled is as important as who gets it. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which every administrator at a college gets the same information, yet each fails to act or to recognize the seriousness of the problem.

Challenging assumptions, scrutinizing the credibility of information, and examining what is unknown as critically as what is known should be part of every institution's ethos and crisis-management plan. Because once a decision is made based on incomplete or incorrect information, it is difficult to recover.

As an administrator, you must learn to anticipate when and where you will need to push especially hard to ensure that your information is correct. You must learn to instinctively think about what you do not know and about what may be wrong with what you do know. Those skills are as important as any communications flow-chart.

The governance system is your friend. Anticipation works better in groups than it does alone. While every college and university is different, most administrators have access to one or more advisory councils or groups. Use those bodies as sounding boards, reality checks, and sources of information and perspectives that are different from what you will find within the walls of the main administration building.

On an individual level, every campus has at least one person who sees things completely differently than most -- use that person to test your perspective and judgment about what is important, what is not important, and what the possible consequences of any decision or occurrence may be.

Every crisis is different. Every crisis is the same. While the facts will vary, there are common elements to incidents that have the potential to erupt quickly into moments of great conflict on college and university campuses.

Race, gender, class differences, and community and neighborhood relations are foremost among those elements. The presence of one or more of those factors in a developing controversy should be a brightly flashing warning sign to any experienced administrator.

That is not to say that differences in race, class, or gender between an alleged assailant and victim should drive an institution's response. It is, however, undeniable that the incident will be characterized and driven by the presence of those factors. Anticipation as a management tool involves seeing those elements, or, better yet, actively looking for them, at the earliest possible moments and incorporating their presence into the university's response.

Don't speak too soon. Don't speak too late. A delay in issuing a substantive response to a crisis can contribute greatly to the perception that the university administration is missing in action or, worse, trying to cover something up.

Every leader must face a delicate balancing act: speaking too soon without enough information to have something of value to say versus speaking too late and being seen as uncaring and unaware. In the absence of communication, people write the worst fiction, filling in the administrative silence with conspiracy theories and often false assumptions. That dilemma is aggravated by our 24-7 news cycle, especially when a story slides into the national media milieu.

There is, unfortunately, no magic answer. Effective and thoughtful communications take time. The letter or statement to the community that is made three weeks after an incident will be different from one made in the first few days or week. Leaders must be exceedingly deliberate about when to speak publicly, but try to do so as soon as possible given the facts and circumstances of the crisis at hand.

Often what is needed is an early, almost immediate, communication that informs the campus that the senior leadership is aware of the matter. Such communications provide assurance that steps are being taken to gather and assess the information, caution against a rush to judgment in the absence of facts, and tell the community what to expect next. They can be a calming influence in a volatile situation, especially when they come from the institution's president, and will provide the administration with some, albeit not much, time to work on the problem.

It is easy to pass judgment on other people's misfortunes. Our colleagues embroiled in crises that become media sensations no doubt feel besieged by second-guessers from around the globe. The point, however, is not to criticize their response for its own sake, but to examine what took place, apply the lessons learned, and hope to do the best you can when faced with the inevitable crisis on your own campus next fall, next spring, or some future academic year.

The crisis will come; we would do well to anticipate its arrival.