I’ve been thinking a lot about questions in recent days. I’ve noticed in my initial months of having strategic responsibility for AI in my faculty that we have lacked places for colleagues to raise their questions. A sociotechnical development like large language models inevitably raises questions across the full range of our practical activities. There are new things staff and students can do, as well as new ways of doing existing things. It leaves us with a whole range of questions which can be held individually or posed to other people. There is a chronic problem, I think, with a lack of reliable containers for these questions.
In many cases these questions just aren’t asked, and they amplify anxiety and uncertainty. They might be asked and receive vague or unhelpful answers, in many cases because the person being asked lacks someone who they can in turn go to for an answer. I’ve suddenly become a nodal point through which these questions are flowing, and at points I’ve felt an impulse to be vague in response, because providing concrete answers is intellectually difficult and organisationally complex. In many cases there just aren’t firm answers yet, leaving it unclear to me how we get into a position where we can provide them. But as I’ve begun to see this as a crucial part of my role, and to design processes intended to hold and address these questions, I’ve become ever more confident that this is organisationally crucial.
There is a stream of questions flowing continuously through the organisation. In many cases these are not legible to leadership because they either aren’t articulated or they are articulated in a way that doesn’t easily register as an organisational concern. The language of practice doesn’t scale easily into the language of management. But I increasingly think that unless an organisational strategy is grounded in this stream of questions, it is going to be fatally unmoored from practice on the ground. It is going to be epistemically deficient because it lacks a foundation in operational realities. It is going to be strategically inadequate because it will steer in a direction that is not reliably grounded in the real-world problems being encountered. The problem is that the system becomes rapidly overwhelmed if these questions simply flow upwards in ad hoc and reactive ways. There need to be mediating mechanisms which hold and review these questions at different levels of the organisation.
I don’t think a container needs a definitive answer to hold a question. To say “we don’t know yet, what do you think?” is a plausible holding position if it is offered in a genuinely dialogical spirit. But the stream of questions should be driving the strategy, rather than being a problem which the strategy is trying to evade. Building an infrastructure for change requires treating that stream of questions as an epistemic resource rather than a block on transformation. Many approaches to digital transformation in higher education assume a priori that existing practice is a block to much-needed change, rather than the point through which sustainable organisational change must pass. This isn’t simply a principled assertion of subsidiarity on disciplinary grounds, but rather an epistemological insistence that decisions which are unmoored from an appreciation of practice on the ground will tend to be bad decisions. They are unlikely to work in their own terms, and they always risk a backlash which then stands as a retrospective justification of the assumption that local practice is a block on transformation.
