ABSTRACT
When he sought to advance the initiative further, however, through the implementation of an agreed action plan, Kay found that the university had no mechanism for proceeding with such discussions. Instead he was advised to turn his strategy document into specific proposals which could then be considered by relevant committees; a disastrous consequence, from Kay’s perspective, for none of these committees had an overarching brief, and his initiative would be tackled in a piecemeal fashion. Worse still, they were all averse to reaching a definitive conclusion anyway. Indeed Kay discovered that the Oxford committee system had elevated the avoidance of decision-making into an art form. The ‘eight oars of indecision’, as Kay dubbed them (deferral and referral; procedural objection; the wider picture; evasion; ambiguity; precedent; and denial), were all techniques which were invariably deployed by committee members to thwart his proposals (Kay, 2000b).
