I am in Indianapolis attending the EDUCAUSE Annual conference. You can see my tweets from the conference. We had an early start at 8 AM to listen to the first keynote by Daniel Pink titled “The Cascade Effect: How Small Wins Can Transform Your Organization”. It was interesting and there were a few good take home lessons. The talk was mostly about motivating the staff in your organization. He referred to a collection of social science research in his talk the conclusions from which can be summarized as “If the work involves even rudimentary cognitive tasks, then better rewards by themselves don’t improve performance”.
Some of the recipes provided were useful, such as constant feedback, providing autonomy etc. One thing he mentioned was to give the staff an hour a week for them to explore new things. As you see in one of my tweets, I am very happy to say that we already have this in place in LTS at Wellesley where we encourage the staff to take 2 hours a week to explore new areas. He stressed the importance of weekly meetings where feedback is provided, but change every fourth such meeting to talk about something totally different, such as career ambitions etc.
I also attended a couple of other talks, one on digital scholarship and another abut “what’s next in higher education”, both were a bit disappointing. However, during a dinner last night I was talking to a few colleagues from other institutions and what caught my attention was how many times the “What if?” question came up.