On our study tour to Poland last year, we heard about a project that sounded absolutely ridiculous.
Students had created a real-life version of Among Us – the video game where crew members try to identify the impostor sabotaging their spaceship. They’d built it out, with physical tasks, emergency meetings, voting rounds, the lot.
I was so intrigued that when I went back to Poland in May for the Juwenalia festivals, I made a point of going to see it in action. It was chaotic – students were running around a building completing “tasks” while others tried to work out who was faking.
The rules had been adapted and re-adapted, and some of it worked brilliantly while some of it was a mess. I couldn’t tell you whether it was objectively good or not – but hundreds of students were having the time of their lives, and the organisers were learning at speed what to do differently next time.
Then there’s Fuksiseikkailu – “Freshers Adventure” – at HYY, the University of Helsinki’s SU. It’s essentially a city-wide treasure hunt crossed with an orientation programme, where new students in teams dress up, complete challenges, take photos, solve puzzles, and explore Helsinki while being looked after by student tutors.
It sounds like it shouldn’t work. It does.
I’ve seen the minutes from the first year they proposed it – a lot of people said it was doomed to fail, dangerous, not a proven way to induct students. They did it anyway, and now it’s massive.
I have endless examples like this, and what strikes me about them is that most of them would never happen in the UK. Not because they are dangerous – nobody is going to get hurt, nothing is going to catch fire, and I can’t see what the safeguarding concerns would be.
They were just a bit… silly. And UK SUs, for all their creativity in other ways, have become remarkably bad at silly.
A decade or so ago when I worked at UEA, one of the officers came up with the idea of a “sleep in” in the campus nightclub, the LCR – students spending the night there to highlight issues around health, sleep and student wellbeing, and to raise money for charity. We later opened a “nap nook” where students could rest between lectures.
Everyone thought both were irresponsible or dangerous or daft. They turned out to be none of those things – they got people talking, were hugely popular, and they worked.
The confidence gap
One of the things that we notice every time we run a European study tour is the confidence with which continental student organisations try things out. Not reckless things – the Dutch and Germans and Swiss are hardly famous for throwing caution to the wind – but provisional things, experiments, ideas that might not work but are worth a go.
When we talk to SUs back home about why that doesn’t seem to happen here, the conversation often lands on what we might call “induction culture“. New officers and staff arrive, and the implicit message is – here’s how we do things around here, learn the systems, understand the processes, hit the ground running by running on the track we’ve already laid.
The organisational literature has a name for this, distinguishing between socialisation tactics that are “institutionalised” – structured induction, standardised content, clear sequencing, strong emphasis on fitting in – versus more “individualised” approaches with less scripted entry and more discretion. And the research is pretty clear – institutionalised tactics produce faster adjustment but encourage what gets called “custodial” role orientations, doing the job the way it’s always been done.
Blame asymmetry
None of this is malicious – staff aren’t trying to crush the creativity of incoming officers, and vice versa. The problem is that in highly audited or blame-oriented environments – and UK SUs sit in plenty of those – workers learn that the cost of a visible failure is asymmetric.
Routine success is taken for granted; deviations that go wrong attract scrutiny.
The academics call this “defensive practice” – it’s not that people believe catastrophe is likely, it’s that they anticipate retrospective judgement. So the rules designed for rare, high-impact risks drift into everyday decision-making, and safeguards meant to protect against extreme cases become generalised constraints.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard “we can’t do that” in an SU, only to find on interrogation that what’s really meant is “we’ve never done that” or “that sounds like it could go wrong in a way I’d have to explain”. Professionalised domains amplify perceived risk – not because the risks are fictitious, but because they underpin the claim to professional jurisdiction.
Emphasising complexity, high stakes, and liability is how professions justify why discretion should sit with trained professionals rather than volunteers or newcomers.
One brand, two logics
UK SUs are also caught between two organisational archetypes running under one banner.
Clubs and societies sit closer to a volunteer, project-based model – low formalisation, with relatively weak external regulation. Decision rights are devolved to small groups, the cost of failure is local, and these conditions support experimentation, rapid iteration, and high variety – but they also cap delivery capacity because continuity, expertise, and infrastructure are thin.
They allow for exploration without scale.
Then there’s the set of professional services that SUs run – advice, representation, elections, policy work and infrastructure like finance, HR or governance. These are higher-risk, higher-liability, and more interdependent with university processes, requiring consistency, documented processes, safeguarding, data protection, and quality assurance.
Those conditions push onboarding towards “learn the system first” and treat innovation as risk – exploitation with limited exploration.
The problem is that the induction-heavy logic of the professional services sphere tends to leak into everything else. Even where there’s no real risk involved – where we’re talking about a pub quiz format or a social media campaign design or a new approach to welcome week – the instinct is to ask permission, check the precedent, and worry about what happens if it goes wrong.
Student ways of knowing
Over the years, the phrase “by students for students” seems to have gone out of fashion – but it is not primarily about who delivers services, it’s about what kinds of judgement are treated as legitimate.
A “by students for students” organisation is one where student intuition, taste, peer knowledge, and lived experience are allowed to shape activity even when they don’t initially meet professional standards of justification. The risk being accepted is not harm to students – it’s embarrassment, inefficiency, or aesthetic failure.
Professionally dominated systems tend to redefine “by students for students” as representational rather than generative – students are consulted, surveyed, or represented, but the criteria for what counts as a good idea remain professionalised. Students are present, but their ways of knowing are not trusted.
What gets lost is permission to be wrong in student ways – that includes being naïve, earnest, excessive, derivative, or playful. Induction-heavy cultures erase this by socialising students and new staff into anticipating objections before they act.
Over time, the organisation becomes very good at avoiding things that might look foolish – but less good at discovering what students actually want, need, or enjoy before it has been professionally rationalised.
The hero problem
The traditional model depends on heroes – student officers who step up, take on positions of responsibility, serve other students, staff who work weekends, stay late at events, volunteer for the committees.
But a lone course rep has little real agency – the role is atomised, time-poor, procedurally narrow, and weakly connected to delivery capacity. Even if the individual is motivated and imaginative, the design gives them little scope to do anything other than relay issues, and innovation is structurally implausible.
At the other extreme, sabbatical officers often sit awkwardly between formal authority and practical constraint. They have symbolic legitimacy but limited tenure, asymmetric downside risk, and strong incentives to protect the block grant and trustee confidence – a combination that encourages risk minimisation rather than experimentation, particularly where the organisation’s financial model is fragile.
And a centralised advice or representation function concentrates risk in ways that produce defensive behaviour – any deviation is experienced as threatening the whole service. Innovation becomes a collective action problem, and no single actor has permission to try small things.
The missing middle
What’s often missing is what the academics call meso-level scaffolding – the level between individuals and the whole organisation, where collective actors exist as teams, associations, and networks with real remit and semi-autonomous capacity.
The meso level matters because it’s where agency, identity, and capacity can be combined in a way that neither individuals nor the centre can manage alone. Individual reps have weak agency – authority, resources, and continuity are all thin, and they can speak but they can’t easily act.
The centre has authority and resources, but discretion is constrained by risk concentration and formal accountability. Meso structures resolve this tension by bundling people together into units that are meaningful enough to act, but bounded enough that failure is survivable.
Think about what five strong academic associations – properly resourced, with continuity and legitimacy – could do as the backbone of an SU. They’re large enough to have institutional memory and delivery capacity, and they’re small enough to retain local knowledge and identity – they can absorb small failures without threatening the whole organisation.
This is why some people scratch their head when their “we have five faculty convenors” model doesn’t seem to generate what they want. Alone and keen to demonstrate they “did it right”, even the best individuals will often disappoint when it comes to experimentation and innovation – groups, not so much.
Zurich’s focus groups
On the Zurich leg of this year’s study tour, we heard about VSETH’s “Focus Groups” initiative. The problem they were trying to solve was that students arrive at ETH with vastly different levels of prior knowledge – some sailed through advanced maths at gymnasium, basically covering the first year or so of the course, while others are first-generation students who got less preparation.
In regular exercise classes – sort of like seminars – this heterogeneity created problems. Students with less family background in HE didn’t dare ask questions, teaching assistants couldn’t pitch the content right, and early negative experiences compounded into dropout rates.
“Focus groups” are “exercise classes” specifically for students who self-assess as having less prior knowledge – teaching assistants spend more time on essential basics, and students know what they’re signing up for. No additional resources are required, just a reallocation of existing tutorial capacity.
It started as a pilot in autumn 2021 with two focus groups in Physics I for first-year maths and physics students. The results – 79.6 per cent of focus group participants passed the exam, compared to 70.6 per cent for the whole cohort, and women made up 52.5 per cent of focus group participants, far higher than the course average.
By autumn 2022, there were 10 focus groups across four departments; by 2023, there were 16. It was a solution designed by students, implemented by students, now winning awards – all some distance from an SU in England asking to be properly consulted on a university’s access and participation plan.
Structurally credible
The models we see in Europe feel different – and not because Dutch or German student organisations are somehow braver than their UK equivalents. They’ve designed structures that make silliness or experimentation survivable.
A practical diagnostic runs like this – list the key decisions a newcomer would need to make to “try something new”, whether that means process changes, customer-facing changes, budget allocation, or communications. If those decisions all require central approval, the culture may talk about creativity but structurally it’s induction.
If teams hold those rights and have budget and time slack, the “ask newcomers to try new things” line is structurally credible. If you want silly things that can turn into value, you need structures that make silly things possible – that means design choices about scale, delegation, and where failure is allowed to land.
The taxonomy of wrong
A useful exercise is to ask which risks are evidenced, which are hypothetical, and which are inherited from other sectors – legal, social work, regulatory compliance – without recalibration to the SU context. Where induction culture is strongest, these categories are often collapsed together, and separating them is usually a precondition for any credible innovation.
High-stakes domains exist – safeguarding, casework accuracy, statutory governance – these are not places for playful experimentation. But community-building, engagement, communications, campaigning styles, peer-led initiatives?
Those should be. When the boundaries aren’t clearly articulated, the default risk logic of professional services spreads everywhere.
The point is not that risks don’t exist – it’s that their probability and scope are often socially constructed and institutionally amplified. Organisations are much better at articulating downside scenarios than at articulating the opportunity cost of not changing, and the latter rarely has an owner.
The ratchet
There’s also a signalling problem that makes things worse over time.
In most professionalised environments, competence gets equated with caution – newcomers demonstrate they belong by showing they understand what not to do. Nobody ever got fired for flagging a risk.
The ambitious caseworker or the keen new activities coordinator learns fast that the way to show you’re serious is to anticipate problems, raise concerns, ask for sign-off. Over time, an organisation ends up rewarding risk inflation even when nobody consciously intended it.
This creates what you might call a ratchet – each new cohort of staff inherits the risk assessments of the last one, and nobody goes back to check whether the thing that worried someone in 2019 ever actually happened. The form just gets longer, the process just gets slower, and because exaggerating risk is always safer than underplaying it, the direction of travel is only ever one way.
There’s also an inheritance problem – a lot of SU risk frameworks aren’t built from first principles, they’re borrowed from other sectors. Safeguarding language comes from children’s services, data protection practice comes from the NHS, health and safety frameworks come from construction.
All of these are legitimate sources, but they were calibrated for contexts with different base rates of harm. When you import the framework without recalibrating the thresholds, you end up treating a pub quiz like a building site.
The result is that three categories of risk get collapsed together – evidenced risks, things that have actually gone wrong with documented harm; hypothetical risks, things that could go wrong in theory; and inherited risks, things other sectors worry about that we’ve absorbed by osmosis. In a well-functioning system, these would be treated differently; in an anxiety-driven one, they all get the same paperwork.
The real sting is that nobody owns the opportunity cost of not doing things. If something goes wrong, there’s a person responsible – the one who approved it, the one who ran it, the one who should have spotted the problem.
But if something doesn’t happen because it got stuck in risk assessment limbo, or because nobody wanted to be the one to sign it off, or because an incoming officer was told “we don’t do that here”? That cost is invisible – it never shows up in a report, and the students who would have benefited never knew what they missed.
Back to Among Us
When I think about that real-life Among Us game in Poland, or the hundreds of Helsinki freshers running around the city on their Adventure, it’s not that the students involved had better ideas than their UK equivalents. They had permission – structural, cultural, financial – to find out whether their idea was any good.
Some of those experiments fail – that’s the point. But the system has space for them to fail in ways that generate learning rather than blame, and the organisation treats deviation differently depending on the stakes involved, rather than applying a single risk logic everywhere.
Since the inception of trustee boards in SUs, our little sub-sector has been professionalising, developing boards, setting KPIs, and generally making the train set better. There have been real gains – things are safer, fairer, more reliable – but somewhere along the way, we may have lost the capacity for things that look a bit odd at first glance.
The prize isn’t recklessness – it’s organisations where students can be enthusiastic without first being scrutinised, where staff can enable rather than gatekeep, and where the response to “shall we try this?” is more often “let’s see” than “what if it goes wrong?”
Building that requires design work – on the structures that confer authority, the budgets that create slack, and the boundaries that distinguish real risk from inherited caution. Without that scaffolding, “by students for students” remains a slogan rather than a practice.
And without it, the silly things that turn out to be good will keep happening somewhere else.
