Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

my career as a manager came back. Especially because some of my colleagues made
me feel an empty headed money manager. I longed for some intellectual space to
reflect on the experience that for change management the behaviour of human beings
is crucial, different and very complicated. Before I got totally stuck I changed position.
Some of my new responsibilities
My new position came into being in a changed context. Sometime before the managers
and the board had opted for an organization in which co-creation should get a
chance instead of the regular top down approach. The choice for co-creation was a
settlement of the years before. I assume that for the at that time appointed new
President of the Board the choice for co-creation also was a possibility of developing
good working relations with the managers. The concept of co-creation was loosely
defined as doing things together with advice and influence of all parties. Advisory
boards of managing directors for the board were established. Faculties were invited to
form platforms of cooperation. As leaders of the UAS we wanted to bring about a
learning organization, presumably fitting in the dominant organizational discourse at
that time (Peters, 2009; Wierdsma, 2005).
In 2008 I became responsible for the design of the overall strategy of the UAS. Point of
departure was that according to the new President of the Board the UAS had to be
more aware of social developments which are or will become influential for Higher
Education. In line with the propagated co-creativity I organized a process of developing
our midterm strategy in which inside and outside stakeholders were invited to
think with us about our future. As an input I developed four scenario’s, together with
the reassurance that the outcomes of the discussions were and would be undefined
until the end of the project. This project came to be known as the wiki-project because
alongside conferences, a blog, discussions and presentations I used a wiki as a
medium for exchanging information and opinions (Simon, 2008).
I was inspired by the concept of the wisdom of the crowd (Tapscott and Williams,
2008). I worked within a social and economic definition of the concept in which is
proclaimed that in this age of participation we should be aware that “winning in a
world of co-creation and combinatorial innovation is all about building a loyal base of
innovators that make your ecosystem stronger, more dynamic, and more expedient
than the ecosystems of rivals in creating new value for customers. To achieve this,
your organization - regardless of the sector or line of business - needs to identify and
open up platforms to enable mass collaboration.” (Tapscott and Williams, 2008: 210).
My project aimed at cooperation, acceptance and loyalty regarding the new strategy.
The result was a 4 year-strategy with which a lot of managers and colleagues identify
themselves, at least in a way that they could recognize their main concerns in the
strategy. The focus of the strategy was on the core business (education and developing
research) and not on some fancy futuristic perspective.
3. My taken for granted assumptions as a researcher | 77