All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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could never serve the market that wanted
mobility even at the expense of phone
clarity or perfect coverage. So long as the
old, existing, “sustaining” technologies
were working well, could be improved for
existing customers, and were profitable
for the companies making them, there
was no obvious incentive to try anything
fundamentally different. And since the new
“disruptive” technologies were usually
demonstrably inferior at the beginning, there
was no incentive to worry about them when
companies knew their existing products and
processes were better.
This was and is a mistake. Today we all
know many people who do not even have
landlines, or home stereos, or who buy
only digital format books. Thus, disruptive
technologies like Walkmen (now IPods!), cell
phones and Kindles – even if many could
show how inferior they were to the products
they replaced – have outstripped their
competitors in the marketplace.
For a traditional firm, serving their
traditional customers, making an existing
product better seems like an obviously good
choice. One knows one’s customers and
what they “need.” One does not know as
well, if at all, what noncustomers might
want out of the product or service. It is
not always impossible to find out, but it is
definitely harder. Since these noncustomers
are not buying the product or service, it
also is harder to convince the marketing
department to cater to them instead of
catering to the people actually buying and
using the existing product or service and
improving it to meet their needs. That, as
Christensen and his co-authors suggest,
is one main reason why companies tend
to concentrate on developing sustaining
technologies rather than throwing those
aside and focusing on disruptive ones. The
payoff for developing and implementing
disruptive technologies is not obvious, and
competent managers miss out on sure-fire
opportunities available with sustaining
technologies at their peril.
As Christensen and his co-authors pursue
their analysis of why companies succeed and
fail at adapting to market changes when
new products are introduced, they have
developed some central ideas about how
companies should proceed to make success
more likely. The main approach they take is
through their analysis of resources, processes
and values. As processes and values
solidify into organizational culture, the
organizational culture restricts the way that
companies can identify new opportunities,
take advantage of them, and evaluate their
potential for successful implementation.
If successful organizations want to
implement sustaining technologies, they
likely already have the structure in place
to do it. (This is reminiscent of the old
management adage, “you have the perfect
organization to get the results you’re
getting.”) On the other hand, developing
and growing through disruption requires a
very different approach. This can happen
through acquiring or establishing a new
organization/company that already focuses
on disruptive technologies or services, or
through setting up an entirely new unit
that can operate more or less unimpeded
by the larger organizational culture. From
Christensen’s point of view, once a company
incorporates the disruptive technology into
an existing organizational system used to
developing sustaining technologies, then
the opportunities for growth from the
disruption are doomed. 2
Disruptions at Empire State College
It might be interesting to use the Christensen
framework to examine Empire State
College. One could argue that Empire State
College developed a radically different
type of organizational structure than had
existed in “traditional” colleges. These
included learning centers and areas of
The payoff for developing
and implementing
disruptive technologies
is not obvious, and
competent managers
miss out on sure-fire
opportunities available
with sustaining
technologies at their peril.
study instead of departments, assessment
committees for individualized degrees,
learning contracts as a new “course” form,
and the like. The reorientation of education
to privilege the student’s goals instead of
the professor’s goals; rethinking the role
of advising, mentoring and teaching; the
individualization of entire degree program
plans; and the developmental objectives of
the narrative evaluations are examples of
different, disruptive, processes and values.
Empire State College was an ambitious
effort to challenge many orthodoxies of
traditional higher education. The college
also sought to expand learning possibilities
to new audiences of learners, responding to
the “nonconsumption” of higher education
by adult and other nontraditional students.
One might call this a “disruption” of the
existing, “sustaining,” trajectory of higher
education.
In order to optimize the disruptive potential
for growth, from the start the college
established a decentralized, noncampusbased,
network of locations for students
and mentors to work together. The
college created a “center” and “unit”
structure that maximized access for
underserved populations (i.e., educational
nonconsumers). The college also established
venues like the Center for Collegewide
Programs and the Center for Distance
Learning (CDL). One could argue that
CDL was an arena in which “disruption”
took place only once individualized
student learning became the norm and
characterized general college culture. There
were obviously many students who needed
learning to happen in a flexible manner –
flexible in time as well as in space. The
Center for Distance Learning provided
a way to do that through paper-based
correspondence courses and then online
learning. The disruption that CDL created
was not, it seems, in altering the relationship
between mentors and students; rather, it
was disruption of the manner and timing
of the learning. As the use of certain
technologies (especially systems like Lotus
Notes and Angel) became more taken
for granted across the college, depending
upon online learning strategies and
platforms can now be considered sustaining
and no longer innovative.
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011