There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to assessment in an academic environment: there are the ‘knowledge testers’ and the ‘skills developers’. While both are right in their own way, it is only through combining their approaches that a sustainable and performance-enhancing assessment process emerges.

Some recent research shows that performance measurement is the best way to boost performance and effectiveness – and this confirms the empirical evidence that is so well understood by those of us involved in performance management and so little understood, it seems, by some in academic circles. To boost performance we first need to benchmark the current level and then monitor development as we apply performance-enhancing processes to it.

In the early stages of academic development – the primary and secondary school levels – the process of education is to provide the pupil with data which, when contextualised, can be converted to information and, to a great extent, the pupil is expected to remember this as it forms the knowledge base for their future adult life. There is little focus on ‘academic skills’ (the application of knowledge within context), as the pupil must first establish a foundation from which to work. The assessment process at this stage must, therefore, of necessity focus on measuring the retention of information – in other words, ‘test what they know’.

Towards the end of secondary school, usually at around the age of 16 years, the focus of the educational process has to change from pure information collection and retention towards the application of that information within a context so that it can become embedded as knowledge itself. This is the initial development of fundamental but rather basic academic skills. If the pupil is heading on towards tertiary education at a college or university, these fledgling academic skills are the foundation on which that tertiary educational career is based. Clearly, therefore, the assessment process also needs to change from the measurement of retained information to the measurement of academic skills such as research, academic essay writing, the process of analysis, the weighing up of the evidence and the drawing of safe conclusions.

When the pupil becomes a tertiary-level student, this process must continue so that by the time they graduate with a Bachelors degree they have fully mastered the academic skills and can apply them rigorously, consistently and successfully. The assessment process at the tertiary level must, of necessity, focus much less on the retention of information and much more on skills development and the student’s performance in applying them.

If the tertiary assessment process is properly developed then the results act as a feedback loop for the students so that they can determine what skills they are weak in and can focus on the development of those specific skills. Similarly, the results can act as a feedback loop for the lecturers so that they can modify their lecturing/teaching to ensure that students have developed the right skills by specific milestones in their tertiary educational progress. If lecturers take the time to analyse the students’ results, they can determine whether they are teaching the right things at the right time and in the right way. Perhaps we should acknowledge that when a student fails a course, a programme or a degree in a university environment this is as much a result of inappropriate teaching methodology and misaligned assessment processes as it is of student ability, or the lack thereof.

Unfortunately, many tertiary education curricula are modularised and the courses are independent and self-contained elements in which the lecturer has to deliver specific and defined bodies of information. This tends to apply pressure to the assessment process and push it in a retrograde direction so that it focuses on ‘information (or knowledge) retention’. Of course, such a process is easier from the lecturer’s perspective as it requires less time to mark and, in situations in which group sizes are large, this can be a critical if undesirable factor.

But this has an unhelpful outcome as far as the students are concerned: it pushes them into retrograde learning behaviours in which they ‘study for exams’ rather than develop their skills. This, in turn, adversely impacts their performance in terms of academic skill development. The result, as often seen in university environments today, is for students to be performing like school pupils and failing to achieve academic maturity. If this is not rectified, then the ultimate outcome will be students with a great deal of information in their minds but who lack the skills to apply it as knowledge – and thus they are of little use to future employers most of whom want to employ graduates who can think and analyse and draw conclusions rather than just ‘know a lot of stuff but not how to apply it’. Indeed, if this situation persists, tertiary educational institutes will be failing both their students and society as a whole and that is the start of a vicious downward spiral.

If the institutions are getting caught in this vicious spiral then the logical outcome will be that their graduating students will find it harder and harder to gain appropriate employment – they will not be ‘fit for purpose’ – the institutions’ reputation will suffer and they will find themselves facing a declining number of applications for places. In the end, courses, degree programmes and even institutions will have to close. This will then make for greater competition for places at the remaining institutions resulting in an overall decline in student numbers to the general detriment of society.

It is, therefore, in the enlightened self-interest of all tertiary education institutions to refocus their assessment procedures to ensure that graduating students have the essential academic skills and know how to apply them – this means that lecturers must resist the temptation to assess on a ‘retained information’ basis and must demand that progress is made in academic skills. One way this might be achieved is for the institutions to more clearly define what skills have to be practised and displayed at each level and to rigorously apply these standards and benchmarks. This will require a coordinated assessment strategy within the institution with the acquisition and delivery of these standard skills at each level being prerequisites for progress to the next level. An example of this is, of course, is the dissertation that most undergraduates have to write – failure in the dissertation module means a failure to graduate. Finding someway of doing this at each level in a degree programme must be an imperative if the assessment process is to drive performance and thus deliver the desired outcome of students well equipped for the outside world.

The purpose of strategic planning is to plan strategically – that much is self-evident – and the goal of planning strategically is to determine what objective the organization or company wants to achieve given its physical assets, the skills and competencies of its people, its implicit and explicit knowledge, its intellectual property and its financial resources. An analysis of the various combinations of these elements should enable the company to answer the question: “what should we be selling, at what price and in which markets?”

From this, the competent organisation should be able to derive tactical plans for the delivery of the strategic objective, plans that take into account market conditions, market trends, and the possibility (if not the probability) of positive and negative ‘black swan’ events. (For an explanation of ‘black swan’ events, it is worth reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book that should be compulsory reading for all managers and especially strategic planners.)

Unfortunately, while the strategic objective setting is often done well, the tactical delivery has often clearly failed – one only has to think of Lehman Brothers and the other big banks that crashed the world economy in the last four years. One can also look at General Motors and their appalling record of incompetence that led inexorably to the company seeking protection from their (often very angry) creditors through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. One can also look more recently at BP and the Deepwater Horizon disaster as well the company that built and operated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that has been wrecked by the recent earthquake in Japan (given its site, right on the tectonic fault line, this was hardly an unexpected negative black swan event!)

Which ever way it is looked at, the failure of companies and their managers to develop proper tactical plans and effective execution is lamentable but it is also understandable given the super-sized egos of those managers and directors who have been at the head of these organisations. No matter what ‘they’ might say to the contrary, given the current management styles and centralised power structures, it is exceptionally difficult for young managers and middle managers to make themselves properly heard at this upper and often selectively deaf level. Their careers are at the mercy of the whims of their seniors and it is all to easy to get labelled as ‘not a team player’ if they are brave enough to question the assumptions that underpin the certainties of the commercial barons, many of whom have avidly read Sun Zu’s The Art of War and who see themselves as some sort of modern day war lord. These ‘war lords’ have centralised power to themselves to such an extent that there are no longer effective checks-and-balances in place to ensure that disaster can be averted.

It is, perhaps, inevitable, therefore that those companies with cultures built around the cult of the leader and which have handed CEOs such power should have forgotten the aphorism that ‘power corrupts and total power corrupts totally’ and although these senior managers are not, perhaps, ‘corrupt’ in the modern financial sense they have certainly lost the humility and sense of reality that those in power must have if they are to succeed in the long term.

And perhaps that is the point, ‘succeed in the long term’ has become a joke: one senior manager in a large multi-national bank said to me quite recently “short term planning is about what happens today, long term planning is about what we need to achieve next week” and I don’t think he was actually joking! The entire mind-set of modern western business is so focused on the short term that managers no longer know how to or care to plan for the future. The trouble is, unfortunately, much of western corporate culture does not allow for the flexibility of response nor the understanding of ambiguity that is essential if we are to survive long term.

In truth, perhaps the current western business culture is so corrupted that is was bound to fail and managers and management thinkers are in thrall to some long dead theorist who once believed that since the future is unknowable and the past is unchangeable we should live only in the present. Indeed, perhaps the entire capitalistic philosophy is a sham and Marx and Engels were right, perhaps we are now seeing the inevitable end game of capitalism as practiced in the western world and in those countries that aspire to emulate it.

And who is to blame for this rather parlous state of affairs? Well, the idea of the nation state, the culture of the self and the ego, and the current curriculum of many leading business schools all come to mind.

And how can this be fixed? Well, not easily is probably the most honest answer, but a change to more collaboration and less egoism, more working with others rather than blind competition, more acceptance of responsibility and less rule by diktat, and a greater understanding of the behavioural aspects of management would all help. This at least would be a start and it is the business schools that must lead the way if they are to remain relevant in the modern world. For the last sixty years, the MBA and undergraduate business management curriculum developed and promoted short-termism, ‘analysis of the numbers’, and the scientific approach to management and we are currently reaping the bitter harvest of being wrong. A new approach to business education is sorely needed and it must start now! Only then will business climb out of its current reviled state and once again be seen as the way to a better world.

I started this series by saying that I had been sent a link to a website entitled How to use Twitter for marketing and PR, a hot topic if ever there was one that, from its title, sounded like an interesting read. Frankly, it was both more prescient and a great deal more full of insight than one can imagine – it simply said ‘Don’t’. But is this true? And that is a very good question.

At one level, the users of social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn proclaim that these tools are for ‘social’ networking and not marketing but this begs the question: isn’t networking also a form of marketing? According to many practitioners the most effective marketing is word-of-mouth and with the rise of the interconnected, fully networked life, word-of-mouth is being replaced by word-of-mouse. Social networks are a place where people talk about what interests them, things they have found to be good and those they have found to be not so good and, as with the vocal word-of-mouth, this ‘conversation’ has ‘influence’ on those who ‘hear’ it (or read it). Marketing professionals have long been aware that a consumer’s purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by the information that the consumer receives from those whose opinions they value (and, I might add, they are uninfluenced by those whose opinions are not considered valid). Opinion leaders and opinion formers are, therefore, critical to the purchasing decision.

To have influence as an opinion leader or opinion former is something that many people set out to achieve by forcing their opinions on anyone and everyone who can be persuaded to listen (or read). Critics abound and to find two who agree on any subject is often a real challenge and so the consumer is left to make their own decisions as to who to listen to. But for a critic, commentator, or anyone else to be seen as an opinion leader or opinion former it is necessary for them to be seen as having ‘authority’ on the subject because everyone seems to have an opinion on everything but whether that opinion is of value is dependent on the person expressing the opinion having valid experience in the field, having access to the relevant information and having the knowledge necessary to interpret that information (and even then it remains just an opinion).

Assuming the consumer can find an opinion leader or opinion former whose opinions they trust as being valid, then the opinions expressed (by whatever means) will have influence. The danger with social networking applications is that they allow even the extremely uninformed and the painfully ignorant to express their opinion on everything and to do so frequently, vehemently, and widely. Simply by the frequency of posts these people can become influencers (the assumption being that ‘if they have so much to say, they must know what they are talking about’) despite their often evident biases, prejudices, and ignorance. Unfortunately, if such people are challenged, they frequently become abusive, adopt high-and-mighty tones and, occasionally, start ‘flame-wars’ in which they bombard the participants in the conversation with posts – and this has become one of the major ‘downsides’ of the social networking and Enterprise 2.0 scene.

And this is not confined to just social networking sites, it also all too frequently happens on websites that encourage users to post their comments in the form of forums, blogs and wikis. For example, a recent check on a well-regarded book review website revealed that two commentators operating under the names of ‘Blob’ and ‘Squid’ had taken it upon themselves to be unpleasantly negative about a book and to post comments (never a review) that were totally at odds with all other reviews of that book. This might have been a valid contribution to the discussion about the book had the writers had the courtesy and self-confidence to use their real names – when book buyers were asked for their opinion about these two commentators, they were dismissive and observed that Blob and Squid were clearly not to be taken seriously because they lacked authority – demonstrated by their use of avatars (assumed names/characters for use in cyber space) – and where thus dismissed as unreliable.

This points up two important points: if you wish to influence the ‘conversation’ you need to be a trusted contributor and that takes time to achieve, and secondly, it is essential that those hoping to use Enterprise 2.0 for marketing communications of any sort need to monitor the cyber world on a consistent, frequent, periodic, and committed manner – it is vital to know what is being said about your product or service at all times so that you can reinforce and positively influence the ‘conversation’ and counteract negative or misinformed comment.

If you would like to engage in a discussion with Alasdair White on this subject, then please feel free to email him.