Introducing the DICE Framework for Higher Ed Change Leadership

Leading change in a university involves many kinds of participation at once. In any given week, the same person might chair a committee with real decision-making authority, serve in an advisory role on another, pilot something new in their own teaching, and sit in a conference session absorbing ideas they hadn’t considered before. Each of those is a different kind of engagement, and each contributes to change in a different way.

Over the past several months, working through ideas with colleagues and drawing on research from multiple fields, I have been developing a framework that I am calling DICE: Decide, Influence, Contribute, Engage. This post describes its structure, theoretical foundations, and potential applications. It is a way of mapping how people participate in and lead educational change - not as a hierarchy, but as four distinct modes of engagement that operate across different organizational levels.

The Problem

Several established frameworks describe how individuals relate to change and to systems of authority, but each addresses only a portion of the problem.

Covey (1989) proposed a model of three concentric zones - the Circle of Control, the Circle of Influence, and the Circle of Concern - to help individuals focus their energy where they have the most agency. This model has been widely adopted in both personal development and organizational contexts, and for good reason: the core insight, that energy spent worrying about things outside one’s influence is largely wasted, is a useful one. However, Covey’s model treats the outermost zone - “concern” - as essentially passive. A person attending a conference, learning from colleagues, or staying informed about sector-wide developments is doing something more than worrying. They are participating in a community of practice, and this participation has value that Covey’s framing does not capture.

Arnstein (1969) offered a different model: a ladder of citizen participation, ranging from manipulation at the bottom to citizen control at the top. Arnstein’s ladder has been influential in fields ranging from urban planning to public health, but it arranges forms of participation into a strict hierarchy in which “higher” is always better. This does not describe what happens in universities, where a person may appropriately hold formal authority in one context and participate as a learner in another - and where both of those forms of engagement are doing real and necessary work.

Paulhus (1983) developed the concept of “spheres of control,” distinguishing between personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical domains of perceived control. This work usefully expanded Covey’s single dimension into multiple domains, but remained focused on individual psychology rather than organizational positioning. Paulhus and Van Selst (1990) further validated this multidimensional structure, but the framework does not address the organizational levels at which change is enacted.

What is missing across these models is a framework that treats multiple forms of participation as legitimate and valuable, and that maps them against the specific organizational levels where educational change actually happens. DICE is an attempt to address this gap.

The Four Modes

The DICE Framework identifies four modes of leadership and participation. These are not stages in a hierarchy but distinct ways of relating to a change initiative, each appropriate in different contexts.

Decide. The Decide mode describes situations in which a person holds formal authority to make decisions that are implemented. This is the committee chair, the department head, the person who signs off on a platform contract. Decide draws on the organizational control literature (Eisenhardt, 1985; Ouchi, 1979) and on Paulhus’s (1983) concept of spheres of control, adapted here to describe organizational positioning rather than individual psychology. Formal decision-making authority matters - but it is not the only form of participation that matters.

Influence. The Influence mode describes situations in which a person can shape outcomes through persuasion, facilitation, and coalition-building, but does not hold final authority. Research on distributed leadership in higher education (Harris, 2008, 2022; Kezar & Holcombe, 2017) describes how influence operates through networks and relationships rather than through positional authority. The advisory committee member who frames the question that reorients a discussion is exercising influence, even when the formal decision lies elsewhere.

Contribute. The Contribute mode describes situations in which a person adds value through doing: modelling practices, documenting what works, creating resources, running pilots, gathering evidence. Fairman and Mackenzie (2012) describe this as “contributory leadership” - expanding spheres of teacher leadership action from individual practice outward to broader community engagement. York-Barr and Duke (2004) similarly document how teachers lead through modelling and demonstrating rather than through formal authority. In my experience, the Contribute mode is where the most visible innovation occurs in universities, though it often goes unrecognized as leadership.

Engage. The Engage mode describes situations in which a person participates to learn, to be informed, and to be influenced. This mode is the easiest to dismiss as passive, but it is not. Wenger’s (1998) concept of legitimate peripheral participation, developed initially by Lave and Wenger (1991), reminds us that learning within a community is itself a form of meaningful participation. Workshop attendance, conference learning, reading the field - these are active choices that build the capacity for everything else. The Engage mode is what distinguishes DICE from an earlier three-mode model I was developing; its addition was motivated by the recognition that Covey’s “concern” zone and its derivatives consistently undervalue receptive participation.

The Organizational Levels

DICE operates across four organizational levels drawn from the 4M Framework developed by Simmons (2016) within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning community. The 4M model - itself influenced by Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory - identifies four nested levels at which educational change takes place.

Micro: the individual. One’s own practice, one’s direct reports, one’s immediate work. This is where most people spend most of their time, and where they typically have the most agency.

Meso: the department, the faculty, the learning community, the working group. Roxå and Mårtensson (2009) documented how informal “significant networks” at this level shape teaching practice in ways that formal structures often do not. The meso level is the critical connector: it is where individual innovations are amplified, where institutional policies are translated into practice, and where networks sustain change over time. In my experience, meso is the most important level in universities, and the most consistently underinvested.

Macro: the institution. Policies, platforms, governance structures, strategic plans. This is the level at which decisions affect everyone, and at which the gap between decision-making and implementation is often widest.

Mega: beyond the institution. Disciplinary communities, national conversations, sector-wide initiatives. Most people engage at this level rather than decide at it, and that is entirely appropriate.

The 4M Framework has been further developed through empirical work examining how SoTL practice operates across these levels (Simmons, 2020) and through institutional applications demonstrating that teaching and learning initiatives require coordinated action at multiple levels simultaneously (Kenny, Eaton, Watson, & El-Hage, 2021).

The 4×4 Matrix

The contribution of the DICE Framework lies in the integration of these two dimensions. Combining four modes of participation with four organizational levels produces a 4×4 matrix - sixteen positions in which a person might find themselves participating in educational change. The power of the framework is not in any single cell, but in the pattern.

To make this concrete: in my own role leading a learning technologies team at a teaching centre, I simultaneously Decide at the micro level about my team’s priorities and practices, Influence at the meso level through cross-unit collaboration and advisory work, Contribute at the macro level by gathering evidence and running pilots, and Engage at the mega level by attending conferences and reading field literature. That is four different modes operating at four different levels at the same time. The framework makes this visible - and more importantly, it helps identify situations in which energy is being spent trying to Decide at a level where one can only Influence, or trying to Influence where the most productive mode would be to Contribute or Engage.

An instructor’s pattern would differ: they might Decide at the micro level about the design of their course, Influence at the meso level through conversations with departmental colleagues, Contribute at the macro level by sitting on an institutional committee, and Engage at the mega level by attending conferences and reading field literature. The matrix gives both people - the team leader and the instructor - a shared language for describing what they do, without implying that one pattern is more valuable than the other.

Developmental Pathways

The DICE Framework describes a natural developmental progression: Engage → Contribute → Influence → Decide. New faculty members or staff typically begin by engaging - attending workshops, learning institutional culture, building understanding. Over time, they begin contributing through their own practice. With experience and network-building, they move into influence. Some eventually take on formal decision-making roles. This trajectory aligns with research on developmental pathways in teaching and learning leadership (Moore, Felten, & Strickland, 2018) and with Wenger’s (1998) description of movement from peripheral to full participation in communities of practice.

This progression is not mandatory, nor is it always linear. A person may Decide at the micro level while Engaging at the mega level - and this is not a failure but an appropriate matching of mode to context. The framework explicitly resists treating Decide as the goal and all other modes as lesser stages on the way there.

The Relationship to RACI

The RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) and its variant RASCI (adding Supportive) are widely used in project management to assign roles for specific tasks. The framework has no single scholarly origin; it emerged from corporate practice in the 1970s and 1980s, variously attributed to work at DuPont Corporation and Ernst & Young. Despite its lack of formal academic grounding, RACI has become a standard tool in institutional governance, including in universities, and I have used it many times.

RACI and DICE are doing fundamentally different things, and understanding the distinction matters.

RACI is task-scoped. It answers the question: for this specific deliverable or decision, who plays which role? It is typically applied at a single organizational level - a project team, a committee, a working group - and maps people to discrete responsibilities. When one builds a RACI for a learning management system renewal process, one is clarifying who signs the contract, who writes the RFP, who is consulted, and who is informed.

DICE is positional and multi-level. It answers a different question: given where a person sits in an organization, what mode of participation is available to them at each level, and are they spending their energy accordingly? DICE is not about who does what on a task - it is about understanding the nature of one’s agency across the full landscape of an initiative or a role.

A concrete example may clarify the difference. A RASCI matrix for course experience survey governance might show that the Associate Director of Learning Technologies (yours truly) is Supportive on survey design and Consulted on reporting access. This is helpful for task coordination. But it does not describe how that Associate Director should think about their relationship to the initiative across organizational levels. DICE does: at the macro level, they might Influence survey governance through advisory input; at the meso level, they might Contribute by building faculty capacity to interpret survey data; at the micro level, they Decide how their own team administers and supports the survey tool.

The two frameworks are complementary, not competing. RACI helps organize a well-structured project. DICE helps one understand where one stands in relation to an initiative - and whether one is expending energy in the right mode at the right level. In my experience, most frustration in university committees comes not from unclear RACI assignments, but from people operating in the wrong DICE mode: trying to Decide when they can only Influence, or trying to Influence when the most productive thing would be to Contribute or Engage.

Using DICE for Planning

The framework is most useful as a diagnostic and planning tool. For any initiative, one can ask:

1. What organizational level am I working at?
2. What mode can I realistically operate in at this level?
3. Is this the right mode for what I am trying to accomplish?
4. Where am I spending energy trying to Decide when I can only Influence - or trying to Influence when I should be Engaging?
5. Who on my team or in my network can operate in complementary modes?
6. Are there gaps? Where are they, and who can help to fill them?

For teams, the framework helps map coverage: who can Decide, Influence, Contribute, and Engage at each level? Where are the gaps? Where is the team over-indexed? Is anyone burning out trying to operate in a mode that does not match their actual authority?

Future Directions

DICE is a work in progress. I am developing it through a combination of theoretical grounding and practical application in my own institutional context. I have begun using it as a planning tool with my team and as a lens for understanding how digital learning initiatives move - or stall - across organizational levels.

Future work will explore specific applications: how DICE maps to platform governance, how it can structure a team’s strategic planning, and how the critical meso level functions as a connector between individual practice and institutional direction. I am also interested in the question of whether the sixteen positions in the matrix can be empirically validated through observation of change initiatives - and whether the framework’s predictions about mode-level mismatch align with reported experiences of frustration and effectiveness in institutional change work.

If you work in educational development, learning technology, or academic leadership and any of this resonates - or provokes useful disagreement - I would be glad to hear from you.

References

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225 — Open access PDF

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press. Harvard University Press — Google Books

Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. Google Books

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1985). Control: Organizational and economic approaches. Management Science, 31(2), 134–149. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.31.2.134 — Open access PDF (Illinois)

Fairman, J. C., & Mackenzie, S. V. (2012). Spheres of teacher leadership action for learning. Professional Development in Education, 38(2), 229–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2012.657865 — Open access PDF (UMaine)

Harris, A. (2008). Distributed leadership: According to the evidence. Journal of Educational Administration, 46(2), 172–188. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230810863253

Harris, A. (2022). Distributed leadership: Taking a retrospective and contemporary view of the evidence base. School Leadership & Management. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2022.2109620

Kenny, N., Eaton, S.E. (2022). Academic Integrity Through a SoTL Lens and 4M Framework: An Institutional Self-Study. In: Eaton, S.E., Christensen Hughes, J. (eds) Academic Integrity in Canada. Ethics and Integrity in Educational Contexts, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83255-1_30

Kezar, A. J., & Holcombe, E. M. (2017). Shared leadership in higher education: Important lessons from research and practice. American Council on Education. Open access PDF (ACE)

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815355

Moore, J. L., Felten, P., & Strickland, M. (2018). Developmental pathways and approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In N. L. Chick (Ed.), SoTL in action: Illuminating critical moments of practice (pp. 163–173). Stylus. Stylus Publishing

Ouchi, W. G. (1979). A conceptual framework for the design of organizational control mechanisms. Management Science, 25(9), 833–848. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.25.9.833 — Open access PDF (ResearchGate)

Paulhus, D. L. (1983). Sphere-specific measures of perceived control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(6), 1253–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.6.1253

Paulhus, D. L., & Van Selst, M. (1990). The spheres of control scale: 10 yr of research. Personality and Individual Differences, 11(10), 1029–1036. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(90)90130-J

Roxå, T., & Mårtensson, K. (2009). Significant conversations and significant networks — exploring the backstage of the teaching arena. Studies in Higher Education, 34(5), 547–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070802597200

Simmons, N. (2016). Synthesizing SoTL institutional initiatives toward national impact. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2016(146), 95–102. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20192

Simmons, N. (2020). The 4M framework as analytic lens for SoTL’s impact: A study of seven scholars. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 8(1), 76-90. Retrieved from https://ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2F4m-framework-as-analytic-lens-sotls-impact-study%2Fdocview%2F2412494752%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D9838

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803932

York-Barr, J., & Duke, K. (2004). What do we know about teacher leadership? Findings from two decades of scholarship. Review of Educational Research, 74(3), 255–316. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074003255