TITLE: Debunking Christensen?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 26, 2014 11:12 AM
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BODY:
A lot of people I know have been discussing
<A HREF="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_lepore">
   the recent <EM>New Yorker</EM> article</A>
"debunking" Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive
innovation.  I'm withholding judgment, because that usually
is the right thing for me to do when discussing theories
about systems we don't understand well and critiques of such
theories.  The best way to find out the answer is to wait for
more data.

That said, we have seen this before in the space of economics
and business management.  A few years back, the book <EM>Good
to Great</EM> by James Collins became quite popular on my
campus, because our new president, an economist by training,
was a proponent of its view of how companies had gone from
being merely steady producers to being stars in their markets.
He hoped that we could use some of its prescriptions to help
transform our university from a decent public comprehensive
into a better, stronger institution.

But in recent years we have seen critiques of Collins's theory.
The problem: some of the companies that Collins touts in the
book have fallen on hard times and been unable to sustain their
greatness.  (As I said, more data usually settles all scores.)
<EM>Good to Great</EM>'s prescriptions weren't enough for
companies to sustain greatness; maybe they were not sufficient,
or even necessary, for achieving (short-term) market dominance.

This has long been a weakness of the business management
literature.  When I was an undergrad double majoring in CS and
accounting, I read a lot of case studies about successful
companies, and my professors tried to help us draw out truths
that would help any company succeed.  Neither the authors of
the case studies nor the professors seemed aware that we were
suffering from a base case of
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias">
   survivor bias</A>.
Sure, that set of strategies worked for Coca Cola.  Did other
companies use the same strategies and fail?  If so, why?
Maybe Coca Cola just got lucky.  We didn't really know.

My takeaway from reading most business books of this sort is
that they tell great stories.  They give us posthoc
explanations of complex systems that fit the data at hand,
but they don't have much in the way of predictive power.
Buying into such theories wholesale as a plan for the future
is rarely a good idea.

These books can still be useful to people who read them as
inspirational stories and a source of ideas to try.  For
example, I found Collins's idea of "getting the right people
on the bus" to be helpful when I was first starting as
department head.  I took
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-02.html#e2007-02-18T16_31_37.htm">
   a broad view</A>
of the book and learned some things.

And <EM>that</EM> said, I have speculated many times here about
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-06.html#e2009-06-11T20_24_02.htm">
   the future of universities</A>
and even mentioned Christensen's idea of disruption a couple
of times [
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2012-04.html#e2012-04-20T15_14_18.htm">
   1</A>
|
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2013-02.html#e2013-02-17T12_16_01.htm">
   2</A>
].  Have I been acting on a bad theory?

I think the positive reaction to the <EM>New Yorker</EM> article
is really a reaction to the many people who have been using the
idea of disruptive innovation as a bludgeon in the university
space, especially with regard to MOOCs.  Christensen himself has
sometimes been guilty of speaking rather confidently about
particular ways to disrupt universities.  After a period of
groupthink in which people know without evidence that MOOCs will
topple the existing university model, many of my colleagues are
simply happy to have someone speak up on their side of the debate.

The current way that universities do business faces a number of
big challenges as the balance of revenue streams and costs shifts.
Perhaps universities as we know them now will ultimately be
disrupted.  This does not mean that any technology we throw at
the problem will be the disruptive force that topples them.  As
<A HREF="http://computinged.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/argument-for-disruptive-innovation-in-universities-is-wrong/">
   Mark Guzdial wrote recently</A>,

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Moving education onto MOOCs <B>just</B> to be disruptive isn't
valuable.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's the most important point to take away from the piece in
the <EM>New Yorker</EM>: disruptors ultimately have to provide
value in the market.  We don't know yet if MOOCs or any other
current technology experiment in education can do that.  We
likely won't know until after it starts to happen.  That's one
of the important points to take away from so much of the
business management literature.  Good descriptive theories
often don't make good prescriptive theories.

The risk people inside universities run is falling into a
groupthink of their own, in which something very like the status
quo is the future of higher education.  My colleagues tend to
speak in more measured tones than some of the revolutionaries
espousing on-line courses and MOOCs, but their words carry an
unmistakable message: "What we do is essential.  The way we do
has stood the test of time.  No one can replace us."  Some of
my colleagues admit ruefully that perhaps something can replace
the university as it is, but that we will all be worse off as
a result.

That's dangerous thinking, too.  Over the years, plenty of
people who have said, "No one can do what we do as well as we
do" have been proven wrong.
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