As I have completed my first month as President of RISD, I have begun to get a rough sense of the what I have to do. Given that I have roughly three years to get something done I figure that the best way to proceed is to be reflective. It’s something I’ve done with random pre-blog scribbles since around 2002, and then more regularly on roughly the topic of “simplicity” but I did tend to stray and talk about professional life’s complexities.

What do I have to do? Well quite simply I have to understand every aspect of RISD. Given that normal freshmen get four years to become RISDoids I do acknowledge a slight advantage on their part. But I do have something of a competitive streak in me so where I can walk, I will run instead.

How does one understand an entire institution? In comparison, let us diverge to the topic of the Web. When the Web was first invented, it was fairly useless until search engines were invented. Imagine the Web with absolutely no Google or Yahoo! or Ask.com. There. Unimaginable, huh? So the challenge in this first year, I believe, is one of developing a search algorithm to understand the vast majority of RISD-ness I will need to communicate RISD externally and internally.

Google, and any search engine for that matter, leverages hyperlink structures to figure out the importance of a web page above other similar pages. For instance if I have a page about cats that is linked to by a dozen people, versus my friend’s page on cats that is linked to by nobody at all, then my cat page is significantly more “important” and it shows up on the list of top hits. Certain pages might be naturally more important than others. For instance, a web page on cats hosted on the National Feline Society’s website is more likely to be important than Dave Bottomdorf’s page on his 3-year old cat. Thus the popularity and status of a web page matters in the game of search, as could be said about the challenge of understanding a community of people by using popularity and status as a means of assessing individuals or groups. As we know however, Google is not always right. Although popularity and status are excellent correllants to the “importance” of information or a person, there is always room for error.

So although it’s possible to find concentrated ways to pinpoint the right source or nexus in a classic “depth-first” strategy, there’s still something to be said about a more laborious “breadth-first” approach as well. So in the spirit of breadth-first, I continue to chat with random RISD students, faculty, and staff in the cafes, stairwells, lobbies, and elevators around campus to increase my understanding of RISD. I’m also developing the communication links at the highest levels of RISD to enable greater teamwork, shared strategic thinking, and a zest for innovation as we all understand what having a new president can really mean in this new day. Do both and Only connect meet.

I am often told that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and although I wasn’t there I figure that stat is likely correct. So with all of you I continue the search