Every year, the President pardons a turkey from being served up for Thanksgiving dinner. So, the same must exist for AV turkeys, right?
I have my share of stories, like everyone in higher ed AV does, about failed products, projects, or poor decisions. Most of those are pretty much the same as everyone else’s. So, I started thinking about when maybe I’ve been the AV turkey and that led to stories that don’t make me look so good… I was less motivated to share those ?. However, I thought of a couple of conversations in the past few weeks that got me thinking about an AV turkey tendency maybe we all have from time to time.
All names are redacted to protect the innocent.
At a roundtable-type event this fall I listened in on an intense back-and-forth between colleagues debating the value of moving to a server-based virtual control and away from individual hardware control system boxes. I’m not here to put my finger on the scale of that debate, I have both in operation. What caught my attention was that it became clear that a few of those arguing against virtual control had never tried it. In fact, they weren’t arguing as much against the new technology as they were arguing for being able to keep what they had in place. In the battle of Change vs. Comfort, they were choosing comfort.
In a conversation about a new initiative at my institution, a discussion was taking place about how aggressive we should be regarding the scale of the effort. One colleague compared our plans to something similar at another institution which is clearly smaller and with fewer resources. They had intentionally made the comparison to attempt to lower the bar of our own expectations and efforts.
My AV Turkeys are those that champion the status quo because it’s comfortable.
I’m not saying that change for change’s sake is valuable or that something newer, bigger, or faster is always better. What I’m saying is that we owe it to our students and faculty to make open-minded evaluations of new ideas and new technologies and if those evaluations tell us it’s time to break our status quo, we should be enthusiastic about doing so.
Here’s the thing, I’m guilty of being this kind of AV Turkey many times in my career, which is why these conversations have stuck with me. So, I’m asking for the AV Turkey pardon this year and re-committing to embracing change when it is the right thing for my users.