In a rapidly changing educational landscape, a university’s scarcest resource is its sensing ability. This means knowing early and accurately what is happening in its classrooms and support systems. Most institutions already employ the people who hold this knowledge. What varies is whether leadership actually draws on it.

Management thinker Peter Drucker observed that knowledge workers usually know more about their work than anyone above them (Drucker, 2012). In universities, this deep and broad expertise about teaching and learning sits mainly with educational developers, learning designers, and centres for teaching and learning. These professionals see thirty programs where a manager might see only one, hearing both enthusiastic leaders and sceptical staff in the same week. Similarly, Ikujiro Nonaka, studying Japanese firms in the 1980s, found that neither end of the hierarchy sees enough on its own. Vision from the top tends to be abstract. Experience on the shopfloor tends to be local. Honda’s president at the time, Tadashi Kume, told him: “Top management doesn’t know what bottom management is doing. The opposite is also true” (Nonaka, 1988). Nonaka placed the creation of new knowledge in the middle, with people who can hold both views at once. In a university, much of that middle is found in the third space: the ground between academic and professional roles. Educational developers in centres for teaching and learning are its clearest example. They work close enough to leadership to know its priorities, and close enough to teaching to know what those priorities ask of people.

Yet, many universities still run on an outdated industrial model. Frederick Taylor made it explicit more than a century ago: the thinking happens at the top, the doing happens below, and the organization chart shows where the brains are and where the hands are (Taylor, 1911). While that works for an assembly line, it fits a university poorly. Henry Mintzberg described universities as professional bureaucracies, where the expertise that matters most sits in the operating core (Mintzberg, 1979). Higher positions bring a wider view and the authority to decide. But depth in teaching and learning sits closer to the ground. A vice rector sees more of the institution in some ways; a learning designer understands more of what happens inside its programs on others.

Ask for Judgement, Not Just Information

Information tells a leader what happened. Judgement says what it means and what might be done about it.

Universities collect plenty of information but often struggle to gather judgement. Leadership typically draws on internal experts in three limited ways. First, the working group, where the agenda is set elsewhere and experts only answer questions others thought to ask. Second, the consultation, where a draft is already fixed and feedback can only polish it. Third, the corridor, an informal call to a trusted learning designer before a big meeting.

The corridor is often the most candid channel an institution has, but it is unreliable because it rests entirely on who happens to know whom. A better approach might keep the corridor but gives it a rhythm. Leaders ask early, before options are drawn up, and ask regularly so that asking does not signal a crisis. Most importantly, ask the questions only the middle can answer: Which pilot has stalled and why? What insights does the professional’s horizon scanning provide? Which colleague is building something that deserves to scale? Whose word will others follow? The most useful answers are often the uncertain ones. What the people closest to the work are not yet sure of tells a leader exactly where to look before committing.

The Cost of Ignoring Expertise

These informal channels are fragile, and leadership transitions test them hardest. When a new rector or director arrives, they bring their own map of the institution, and the people who hold its practical memory are rarely on it. The listening stops, not by malice, but because the new team never learns whom to ask.

Sometimes, a leader starts to treat the expertise of their staff as their own. Picture a newly appointed head who returns from a conference inspired by programmatic assessment. She sets up a working group and asks a consultant to draft a new framework. Nobody mentions that three programs have already spent six years moving in exactly that direction because nobody in the working group knows. The centre for teaching and learning had already helped those programs build assessment plans and painfully learned what the faculty regulations would allow. The new framework arrives with none of those lessons, forcing the most advanced programs to either translate their work into a new language or run two systems side by side. The loss is accidental, but profound. Klara Bolander Laksov and colleagues note that educational development units are frequently unmade and remade when new management arrives (Bolander Laksov et al., 2026), which, given the above, does not come unexpected.

The human cost of this all is a loss of motivation. Self-determination theory tells us people do their best work when three needs are met: autonomy, belonging, and competence (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Autonomy is for example choosing how they work. Belonging is connection to colleagues, the institution… Competence is being good at what they do. Taking over an expert domain damages all three. It removes choice, signals their local knowledge does not count, and treats their competence as surplus. A recent survey of teaching focused faculty found that when these needs are met, staff report more influence on their colleagues as well (McMurran et al., 2026). An institution that claims the expertise of its own experts, however, ultimately ends up with less of it.

Giving Depth a Place to Stand

Judgement only travels if the person offering it is heard. Oddfrid Førland and Torgny Roxå found that recognized quality teachers keep their local networks while gaining visibility in wider ones (Førland & Roxå, 2024). Staff in the third space between faculty and administration rarely get this visibility. Their impact tends to disappear into the success of other people, and Zoë Allman notes how much remains to be done before their voices carry weight in decision-making forums altogether (Allman, 2026).

Structure thus dictates how far judgement can travel. David Gosling described the placement of educational developers as a complex reality (Gosling, 2009). Centralized units see across programs but can feel distant. Embedded units earn trust quickly but only see one discipline. A mix of both is the current trend. The exact placement matters, but so does ensuring the channels of communication run in both directions. Furthermore, a sole central teaching center should never be the only voice leadership hears. Leaders must ask multiple sources, and those experts must say plainly where they stand.

The Deal

Reversing the old hierarchical picture does not eliminate structure; it changes what flows through it. Decisions still sit with leaders, but the understanding those decisions rest on must travel up from the people who hold it.

The craft of a leader is knowing whom to ask and making it safe to answer. James Kouzes and Barry Posner count enabling others to act therefore among the five practices that set exemplary leaders apart (Kouzes & Posner, 2019). When leadership changes, handing over this map of internal experts should be a priority. In return, experts owe leaders their knowledge in a usable form: options with compromises, uncertainty stated plainly, and recommendations someone can actually carry into a meeting. Depth that cannot be used upstairs remains a private virtue.

In slow times, an institution can afford to gradually find out what it knows. In fast times, it needs the people who already know in the room.

References & Further Reading

Allman, Z. (2026). As an academic leader, am I in the Third Space? Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 30(3), 184–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2026.2662891

Bolander Laksov, K., McGrath, C., & Serbati, A. (2026). Educational leadership of, for, with, and through academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 31(2), 165–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2026.2665877

Drucker, P. F., Hutton, W., & Holbeche, L. (2012). Management challenges for the 21st century: Foreword by Will Hutton and Linda Holbeche (Rev. ed). Taylor and Francis.

Førland, O., & Roxå, T. (2024). Establishing reward systems for excellence in teaching. European Journal of Higher Education, 14(3), 451–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2023.2214713

Gosling, D. (2009). Educational development in the UK: A complex and contradictory reality. International Journal for Academic Development, 14(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13601440802659122

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2019). Leadership in higher education: Practices that make a difference. Berrett-Koehler. books.google.com

Mintzberg, H. (1979). The structuring of organizations: A synthesis of the research. Prentice-Hall. archive.org

McMurran, M., Solanki, S., McPartlan, P., & Sato, B. (2026). Teaching-focused faculty: The supports, structures, and policies that relate to their perceptions of influence on their colleagues’ teaching. International Journal for Academic Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2026.2675015

Nonaka, I. (1988). Toward middle-up-down management: Accelerating information creation. Sloan Management Review, 29(3), 9–18. sloanreview.mit.edu

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press. simonandschuster.com

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. Harper & Brothers. gutenberg.org