"Decision-making is one of the most constant demands on academic and professional leaders, and one of the least examined. Most of us learn to do it on the job, by instinct, under pressure, and rarely with the chance to step back and ask why some decisions land well and others don't."
That gap was the focus of the latest session, ‘Decision Making’, in Advance HE's series designed for heads of department and programme leaders, the Academic Leaders Survival Series, led by Kim Ansell, Senior Consultant for Governance and Strategic Transformation.
Kim's central argument is a simple one, even if institutions rarely act on it: good decisions are not only about having the right people and information, but of better systems, clarity about accountability and responsibility, clearer roles, and a willingness to slow down before reaching for a solution. In a session built around live polling, a real-time word cloud and breakout discussion, she set out why decisions go wrong, what good decision-making actually looks like, and the practical tools available to anyone trying to improve it, whether they sit on a committee, chair or sit on a departmental working group, or manage a team/department.
The system beneath the decision
Kim's starting point is that decisions are never made in isolation. Universities govern themselves through three interlocking structures: corporate governance, comprising the court, council or board and its committees; executive management, including the senior team and its working groups; and academic governance, covering academic board or senate, learning and teaching, student experience and research. Her view is that most decision-making ‘stickiness’ is not really about the decision at all, but about a lack of clarity over which of these systems a given decision belongs to, and who within it actually holds the authority to make it.
Diagnosing what goes wrong
Asked to name what leads to poor decision-making, delegates' live word cloud produced answers that closely matched the list Kim had prepared independently: lack of time, rushing, poor communication, lack of understanding, restricted authority, competing demands and personal bias all featured heavily on both. To these, Kim added a longer list of what she calls common derailers: lack of clarity of purpose, breakdown in relationships, poor chairing, gaps in skills or expertise, insufficient scrutiny, an overly defensive or overly passive culture, failure to follow through on agreed actions, and volatility in the wider environment.
The consequences, she argued, are rarely confined to process. Whatever the apparent cause, the impact almost always falls on people. Boohoo's sourcing failures, the Post Office's refusal to listen to its own staff and whistleblowers, and the collapse of Carillion and Lehman Brothers were offered as examples of how decisions made badly at scale cause lasting harm. Closer to the sector, Kim pointed to the University of Dundee, where a financial failure around eighteen months ago prompted intervention by the Scottish Funding Council and a review by Professor Pamela Gillies. The Gillies report's lessons, Kim suggested, apply well beyond court and board level: risk registers need active and critical challenge, curiosity and "innocent questions" should be welcomed rather than discouraged, chairs must remain genuinely receptive to challenge, and papers should never be provided to meetings retrospectively, however confidential the content. Good decision-making governance, as she put it, cannot happen in a vacuum.
A framework for good decisions
Kim's framework for good decision-making rests on three areas. The first is process and enablers: clear terms of reference, properly understood delegated authorities, and transparency about how and why decisions are reached. The second is value add and impact, asking whether a decision genuinely makes a difference, tracks performance, or leaves a usable legacy for colleagues who weren't in the room when it was made. The third is culture and behaviour, an environment in which all perspectives, including the student voice, are heard, and where the wider consequences of a decision are properly weighed.
Underpinning all three, in her view, is triangulation. Good decisions rarely rest on one source of evidence. They draw on board papers and narrative reporting, on data and metrics, and on in-person engagement and conversation, with each checking and balancing the others.
Two tools worth revisiting
Two practical tools anchored the session. The first was RACI, the framework for clarifying who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed on a given decision. Kim is particularly keen on its value after restructuring, where decision ownership has become unclear, in her experience, and is a common and avoidable source of stalled decision-making. Delegated authority schemes, codes of conduct, declarations of interest and whistleblowing policies were framed in the same spirit, not as constraints on decision-making but as the ‘scaffolding’ that makes good decisions possible.
The second, and the one Kim challenged delegates to explore, was the iceberg model: a way of separating the visible events of a decision from the underlying patterns, systems and mental models that actually drive it. She illustrated it with two examples. The first was the persistent underrepresentation of women in engineering, where surface issues such as ill-fitting safety equipment trace back to entry requirements, career advice, and deep-seated assumptions about who engineers are. The second was a sector-wide conversation on decolonising the curriculum, where a lack of agreement and isolated pockets of activity were traced back to systems of data capture and underlying questions of disenfranchisement. In both cases, her point was the same: jumping straight to a fix, treats the symptom rather than the system.
Tested by delegates
Delegates put the model to work themselves, applying it to live scenarios on blended learning and the size of undergraduate portfolios, and several admitted how quickly the conversation pulled towards solutions before they caught themselves. The wider breakout discussion surfaced familiar frustrations: a sense among some delegates that consultation can feel performative, that senior decisions are sometimes made without real understanding of life further down the institution, and that the pressure to move quickly can crowd out the time good decisions need. Kim's response was pragmatic rather than dismissive: rather than dwelling on what can't be changed, she encouraged delegates to focus on where they do have agency, however limited, and to keep asking a simple question of their own decisions: what information am I making available to help other people decide well?
The session closed with a short personal reflection, inviting delegates to consider one thing they might leave behind, two conversations they now wanted to have, and three things they had learned or relearned. As Kim observed, much of what had been discussed was less new information than a reminder of tools and instincts that experienced leaders already have, but don't always make time to use.
Asked to sum up her key message, Kim returned to a theme that ran through the whole session:
"Even where we can't control the system around us, we can model good decision-making behaviours ourselves, make them visible to others and use that to improve not only our own decisions, but the decision-making of everyone around us."