Mobilizing Collective Knowledge (May 2025)

All universities are complex places. Bringing coherence of purpose and a culture of sharing and collective betterment is difficult at the best of times. It is easy for the operation of a university to occur as a series of discrete tasks, often that operate with little exchange, mutual understanding, or beneficial collaboration. But this siloed approach to organizational work comes with many costs. Successful experiments are not shared. Processes are learned again and again, without benefiting from expertise held in other parts of the institution. Problems persist that could be easily fixed if there were more effective channels of informal communication among those individuals with extensive experiences in the university and its various units and positions. Time is wasted. Resources are wasted. And opportunities for scaling innovations are missed. These costs are even more salient in the context of a crisis, like the current fiscal constraints confronting Carleton and the university sector as a whole face. The need for low cost and sustainable ways to mobilize the university community’s collective knowledge have never been more acute. Our objective was to map and study interventions that could help improve Carleton’s ability to mobilize its collective knowledge.

SIG Members:

• Graeme Auld, Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration
• Anne Bordeleau, Director, Azrieli School or Architecture
• Jane van den Dries, Assistant Director (Academic Initiatives and Operations), Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic
• Joseph Nelson, Director (Enterprise Applications), Information Technology Services
• Richard Sabourin, Assistant Director (Patrol Operations), Campus Safety Services