Efficiency, we’re told, is vital. It’s the key to balancing the books. To delivering value for money. To securing a sustainable future for our staff, for our students, for our universities and for the sector as a whole. And this is all true. But it’s only half the story.
Because while it’s good to be efficient in what we do and how we do it, efficiency comes at a cost. By eliminating spare capacity and taking slack out of the system, it makes us leaner and more focused. But it also leaves us less resilient, less able to respond when things go awry.
In search of efficiency
Efficiency is about doing more with less. It’s about maximising the outputs from an activity while minimising the inputs. It’s about making sure that we’re doing the right things and that we’re doing them in the right way. With no mistakes, minimal waste and zero unnecessary effort.
In practice, this means rethinking how we do things. It means sharing resources, taking advantage of digital tools and striving for continuous improvement. But is also means getting the most out of what we already have. It means ‘sweating’ our assets. And, increasingly, our people.
Efficiency is not, of course, an end in itself. Even if it can sometimes be portrayed as such. Rather, it’s a way of using our limited resources to get more of the things we value. But it’s a double-edged sword. Because the more efficient we are, the more we sweat our assets, the less resilient we become.
Responding to setbacks
Resilience is our ability to withstand changes in the environment in which we operate. It’s our capacity to handle things when they come up. To absorb the shocks while keeping the organisation running. Quite simply, it’s our ability to bounce back.
In today’s volatile world, resilience is crucial. The modern university is a highly complex operation. And the number of plates that it needs to keep spinning at any one time is huge. It’s not a question of if something will go wrong, but when. And we need to be ready for it.
But if we’re to respond effectively when things don’t go to plan, we need to be able to divert resources, without creating more problems elsewhere. This means having slack in the system. Spare capacity. Deliberate redundancy. A built-in element of inefficiency, waiting for when it’s needed.
In this respect, efficiency and resilience are two sides of the same coin. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. We need to find the right balance.
Resilience in practice
Take, for example, academic workload. From an efficiency standpoint, it makes sense for each member of academic staff to have a chock-full calendar of teaching, research and other value-creating activities. But who will pick up the slack when a colleague is ill or when a student experiences a mental health crisis and needs additional support?
And on the estates front, efficiency demands that we fill offices, teaching rooms and student accommodation to capacity. But what do we do when an office springs a radiator leak, a lecture theatre suffers a power outage or an accommodation block gets invaded by ants?
In each of these cases, and many more, building in a little spare capacity, whatever efficiency might say, gives us the time, capacity, headspace and resources to handle the problem. It gives us resilience. It gives us the ability absorb the shocks and to keep things up and running.
Balancing efficiency and resilience
So how do we strike the right balance between efficiency and resilience? For starters, we need to embrace efficiency without getting sucked into the idea of efficiency at all costs. Stay focused on your university’s objectives. Look after your people. Stick to your values. Do the right things well.
And while it’s sensible to measure how efficiently we do things, we need to weigh this up against other factors, too, such as academic quality, staff wellbeing and the student experience. We also need to identify where things could go wrong and to build in capability and capacity to deal with them when they do.
I’m not denying that efficiency is important. Because it is. And we can all do more to improve the efficiency of our activities. But we mustn’t do so at the expense of our resilience. Because when things get hairy, it’s our ability to withstand the challenges we face, and to bounce back from them, that makes all the difference.
Simon Perks is the founder of Sockmonkey Consulting and an advisor to organisations across the public, not-for-profit and social enterprise sectors.
