Bangladesh HEs needs a Knight in shining armour- VUCA Leaders
To ensure continued economic growth and development, creating and maintaining an environment of competitiveness are essential. Central to this is the institution of education or, for that matter, higher education that provides economic empowerment. For this to happen, education providers must appreciate that market forces drive a buyer-seller phenomenon just like in any other business. Educational Institutions need to have an optimisation focus on customer satisfaction and customer relationship. In other words, ‘quality’ must be inherent in the system. The buyers, i.e., the prospective students, must have this ‘assurance’. This assurance is a continuous process that is audited and evaluated against acceptable standards and performance parameters and is enhanced regularly at intervals, given the environment’s dictates. Bangladesh Higher Education sector is snowballing and has undergone rapid expansion in the recent year. Hence it needs robust & concerted responses from the concerned authorities.
Concerning the overall growth in all aspects of Bangladesh, we have witnessed unprecedented sprouting in Bangladesh’s Higher Education sector, especially tertiary education, since the 1990s. The number of higher educational institutions is already vast. According to the World Bank data, the number of students in this sector reached 2.84 million in 2015, 2.92 million in 2017, while it was only 1.60 million in 2010. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of higher education institutions grew from 1,748 to 2,417 institutions (almost a 60% increase). However, the growth was mainly within the private tertiary education sector. Even though growth was tremendous over the years, access to tertiary level education is still limited in Bangladesh. Only 17.6 per cent of the college graduates could enrol in higher education, and most of them are studying in Universities affiliated colleges (according to UNESCO data).
On the contrary, if we look at the Indian Higher Education sector, it is clear that the sector has enlarged rapidly over the past two decades. According to the University Grant Commission of India, it currently produces 1 in 4 graduates globally and is the largest global talent provider. It is among the top-cited countries globally in cited research output. It has now over 140 billion dollars on R&D spending. There are several Universities/institutions are among the global top 1000 and at least 3 universities are top 200 in 2021 QS ranking; by 2030, around 140 million people will be in the higher education age. However, it is sad to say that we do not have any institutions in Bangladesh ranked as the first top 800 institutions in the QS world ranking. Our education system is still very controlled, rigid and backdated with traditional thinking despite being in the 21st century. The challenges are many but not difficult to overcome. To fulfil the vision 2030, transformative and innovative practices are essential across all Bangladesh Higher Education levels.
What are the main blockages of our Higher Education sector? Any sensible individual could sense the challenges we face in Bangladesh to promote the best quality educational philosophy. At the institutional level, we hardly see any institutional support for innovative practices, be it in teaching and learning, be it in research and development or be it in leadership and management. Our preoccupied mindset does not allow us to think differently, think beyond our thinking or outside the box. Many of our institutional leaders do not want to unlearn to relearn. There is a strong resistance to change at the institutional level. If we really would like to bring real innovation, it requires change. We all know that change is often met with resistance. Can we do something to overcome this resistance? How institutional leadership can influence making a real impact in developing innovative culture across the entire education sector—another problem, especially public sector institutions, lacks autonomy.
To bring a sustainable educational philosophy, various challenges must be addressed adequately. Overcoming blockages are imperative that hinders academic growth and sustainability. Some of these policies and recommendations including nurture an educational culture to innovate; more cross departmental-institutional collaboration, establishing better performance measurement systems at an individual and institutional level, skills development and enhancement training for academic and professional staff; introduction to new learning technologies, showing a clear regulatory framework, and tolerance of degree of failures. Creating and nurturing a culture across the sector to bring innovation to higher education is paramount, which is very insignificant. Institutions must create awareness of the benefits of implementing innovative practices in teaching & learning, assessment, leadership and management, enhancing learners’ learning experiences, research & development, and other areas. This innovation culture will automatically stimulate openness to innovation and minimises resistance to change. Institutions must work.
While institutions should encourage innovative practices within the institutions, they should also empower employees and set clear expectations and targets by establishing a smart performance measurement system. People respond to how they are measured & rewarded. If you want them to behave differently regarding innovation, you must change the performance measurement system. Empower staff motivation by increasing staff reward who engage in innovating educational processes. Cross departmental-Institutional collaboration is vital for successful innovation. We must remember that innovation is different from creativity. Creativity is an individual effort, but innovation is a collective effort. Therefore, institutions should take a bold step to promote collaboration at the local, national, and international levels. Establishing a clear regulatory framework is imperative to ensure appropriate quality assurance mechanisms, high-quality research output by the academic staff, accreditation process for the institutions, intellectual property right systems, fulfilling stakeholders’ expectations and benchmarking process. However, we all must also recognise that individuals learn from their mistakes, and hence institutions should have a high degree of tolerance of failure. Innovation, by definition, means doing something differently or doing existing things better, something path breaking. Unless we tolerate failure, people are not ready to move this forward.
We need a more adaptive and agile education system to thrive and offer better quality educational experiences. Agility is paramount, especially during turbulent times. To navigate and lead in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) environment, aspiring, visionary and agile leadership is essential. Institutional leaders must possess more adaptive and innovative thinking abilities such as unlearn to relearn, problem-solving skills, self-awareness, responding to ambiguity, thinking strategically, an entrepreneurial spirit and discipline.
Irrespective of whether it is a private sector institution or a public sector, this complex phenomenon is common to both. Its application by leadership is crucial to bring out the potential that organisations may have. Taking “institutional leadership” as an example, we can intuitively gauge why we do not have “leaders” ad infinitum in the public domain. Here, the central focus for institutional processes will concern achieving maximum societal good with the limited resources that educational leaders will have in their ambit. Balancing equity and efficiency, pragmatism and ethics - all require excellent persuasive capabilities in institutional leaders. These are difficult propositions even in countries that have excelled in educational fineness over hundreds of years. For developing countries like Bangladesh, the task to bring the finest academic quality to foster a nation of competent workforce and moral society is that much more arduous because leadership in the educational arena remains a scarce commodity.
Bob Johansen, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the future and the author of the book “Leaders make the future” in 2012, proposed an antidote, coined as “VUCA Prime”. A VUCA leader must have the attributes including vision-the ability to communicate a clear intent of the desired future—a counter-response to volatility; Understanding- the ability to stop-look-and-listen—a counter-response to uncertainty; Clarity-quality of being systematic and coherent and can simplify complex situations, clarity is the counter-response to complexity; and agility-being a very dynamic leader who can move quickly to respond to a specific condition, an agile leader will be able to foster a positive power and authority across an organisation that has two way-flow to enable adaptive and rapid decision-making and action—a counter-response to ambiguity, It is but natural to suggest that institutional leaders have to define very seriously as to what their educational vision to create a sustainable, prosperous nation and what strategy they must develop, individually and collectively, to achieve their mission. All this, to build a cohesive society and not a fragmented one.