Shaping the future together

What are your personal goals for rETHink?
Julia Dannath: I’ve been at ETH for a year now, and I’m delighted that Joël Mesot chose to embark on this project. My personal goal is to foster a community spirit throughout ETH, something that will encourage us all to work together on shaping this university’s future!

Joël Mesot: One of my priorities is to break down silos at ETH. As well as building bridges between the disciplines, I would like to see ETH members at all levels exchanging views, swapping ideas and learning from one another as equals. We need to be thinking all the time about how best to handle discussions with colleagues in more junior or senior roles.

Dieter Schmid: As an external consultant to this project, my goal is to help make ETH even more proactive and to boost the creative freedom that each individual has within this organisation. With freedom comes responsibility, so it’s important that we take steps to cultivate responsibility on all levels. ETH Zurich is a world-class organisation, and I would like to see it become a global leader in management and leadership as well. I very much hope I can help make that happen!

Dieter Schmid, how optimistic are you about meeting your goal?
Schmid: We still have a long way to go, but there are enough positive signs to make me feel confident that we’re heading in the right direction.

Julia Dannath, you mentioned the ETH spirit. Can you already feel it?
Dannath: When I see people working together so closely in the individual rETHink workstreams and delving into key topics, I really feel that community spirit coming to life. But I’ve also been at plenty of meetings where I sense that people are reluctant to come forward and take on responsibility. In many cases, people’s first instinct is to fall back into old, ingrained habits.

Do you notice any difference between discussions inside and outside rETHink?
Dannath: People in the rETHink inner circle knew that the project would require intense teamwork when they signed up, so they’re obviously fine with that. In terms of ETH as a whole, we’ve sown the first seeds and now we must nurture them – but we definitely still have a long way to go.

Mesot: I think that’s about as much as we can expect for now. I’m really impressed with what we’ve achieved so far in the inner circle, which consists of around 600 ETH members from right across the university. Some of the suggestions they have put forward have genuinely surprised me.

Could you give us an example?
Mesot: There have been inspiring moments talking to people about leadership. And I was also impressed with the idea of transforming how we share resources among the academic departments. Putting those ideas into practice could really turn us into a global leader.

That all sounds very promising. Where do you sense the most resistance?

Mesot: I would call it a critical mindset rather than resistance. And that’s exactly what I want to see, because we need people at ETH who are capable of critical thinking. What matters is keeping things constructive, and so far I can’t think of a single moment where anyone has failed to show respect.

Schmid: I haven’t noticed much in the way of resistance either. We completed the analysis phase six months ago, though that’s not necessarily where we expected to encounter resistance anyway. Now we’re delving deeper and developing initial solutions, so the need for discussion is growing. Once we start the implementation phase, we’re bound to see some resistance. Whatever solutions emerge, it obviously won’t be to everyone’s liking, but the key is to take account of as many opinions as possible early on. That way we can build constructive criticism into the mix and ensure that proposals enjoy broad-based support.

Dannath: The moments of greatest tension are when people feel they’re losing their autonomy or being dictated to by others. The solution is to negotiate, encourage critical thinking and listen carefully to each other’s arguments.

Mesot: It’s primarily a question of trust. That’s why we discuss things openly and transparently.

Fostering the ETH spirit, breaking down silos and giving people creative freedom – they all sound like soft goals. Yet this is a project that specifically aims to develop ETH as an organisation. How do you square that circle?
Mesot: There are so many things that ETH is already doing right, so it’s obviously important to protect our strengths. One of those strengths is our ability to produce graduates who excel in their field, which partly comes down to the silo structure I mentioned before. The question is how to develop the right tools within this structure to help us build more bridges. It’s a tricky balance to strike! The moment you start looking at a division of responsibilities between the Executive Board, the academic departments and the professorships, then it all becomes much more concrete. That directly impacts the organisational structure, so it’s far more than just a soft goal.

Dannath: Even the task of creating an ETH spirit seems like a very hard goal to me! If an organisation can foster a community spirit that makes this kind of critical debate normal and enjoyable – while removing people’s fear that they might lose out – then it has achieved a concrete goal that will shape the organisation for years to come.

How broad is the project’s reach right now?
Mesot: We launched rETHink in 2019, before the start of the pandemic. I’m tremendously glad we did, because it gave us a ready-made framework to address the various topics that came up as the months went by, from desk sharing to new forms of learning. If you wait until a crisis actually hits, then it’s much harder to take action. A striking example of that is the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force. If we’d already had that kind of scientific advisory body in place before the pandemic, there probably wouldn’t have been quite such a degree of mistrust between politicians and scientists. Personally, I think ETH has some hard times ahead. Switzerland’s debt level will have very real consequences, as will our relationship with the EU. But for now, at least, we have a framework in which we can discuss specific topics as they arise – even if not to quite the same depth as in the rETHink workstreams. That’s why this process is so important to me, and I can only hope that some part of it will live on in the future.

Schmid: We’ve enhanced ETH’s ability to evolve – that’s the greatest benefit of rETHink. And it’s also something that ETH is going to need again and again in the future. It’s a lot of fun, but also hard work!

Mesot: Colleagues of mine who’ve been here for a long time say we’ve developed a new kind of discussion culture.

Schmid: That’s exactly why I’m so confident about the progress we’re making. It’s palpable and great to see!

The project is set to finish one year from now. What do we need to achieve by then?
Mesot: The analysis phase confirmed that ETH is already doing a lot of things right, which is why we’re so successful. But we also received lots of suggestions for improvements. The Executive Board drew up a list of priorities, which were then translated into an action plan that we’re now in the process of implementing. A year from now, we aim to have completed the initial steps in this implementation process.

Dannath: Right now, the project is in a phase of translation from concept to realisation. The workstreams are developing specific proposals on how we should put these ideas into practice. This input will then be forwarded to the organisation and discussed by the relevant units. Proposals that get the thumbs-up will be translated into a new process or a new structure.

How do we shift this translation process from the rETHink inner circle to the university as a whole?
Mesot: The analysis phase already saw an intense collaborative effort by 600 ETH members to eliminate silos and nurture a new spirit. But thousands more participated in that process via sounding boards or surveys. The ETH-wide culture discussions were – and still are – open to participation by all ETH members. We’ve kept people informed on a regular basis through in-house news articles and town hall meetings, and we’re planning to organise a bigger event which we hope will attract as many employees as possible. We’ve successfully raised people’s awareness of rETHink within ETH, and the project is even garnering interest outside the university walls. I’m already getting invitations to present the project at universities in Switzerland and further afield.

The 600 members of the inner circle have certainly lived through an intense process, but it’s hard for someone who wasn’t involved from the start to get the full picture. Can news articles and the occasional town hall really fill the gap?
Schmid: The implementation process is bound to cause some upheaval in the system. We’re throwing a lot of pebbles into the organisational pond. Wherever they land, that causes ripples, which then create circles that eventually overlap. As the discussion penetrates a little deeper into the organisation, more and more people get drawn in.

Mesot: Exactly. The discussions will continue in the Executive Board and in the academic departments at ETH.

Dannath: We launched this project with tremendous energy. People who were already very busy with teaching, research or other work have made a huge extra effort – it’s not like they were just sitting around idly until this project came along! You need to make waves with this kind of project: we’ve already had a big wave of initial energy, but it will take time for that to build and propagate. As it does, we’ll see more and more people at ETH getting 
involved and helping to shoulder the task of realising this project. We also can’t expect ETH members to maintain the same workload indefinitely.

Mesot: It’s all about riding the wave.

Dannath: Right, but we can’t always be on top of that wave. It’s also important to have calmer periods where we can catch our breath, a bit like the peaks and troughs of a sine wave.

Will that also apply in the post-rETHink era?
Dannath: By the time rETHink comes to an end, some things will be so firmly entrenched in the institution that they will remain in place – whether or not the current Executive Board or project manager are still there! The question is how to get them firmly anchored in the first place. Structure and culture are our two main points of leverage – and we’re on our way to establishing the culture we need.

Mesot: We’ll keep injecting new momentum, but it won’t be quite so intense. I see us transitioning to a situation where we’re tackling one topic a year. We’ll also need to have an ongoing discussion about our culture, because values change over time.