As universities navigate the complexity of financial pressure and restructuring, more and more responsibility is being carried through informal effort, initiative and care.
This is partly a story of doing more with less, but also about work changing shape. Roles are being reinterpreted in practice, while the agreements around authority, support, time and limits often remain implicit.
Under these conditions, the question of what roles can realistically hold becomes harder to avoid. A gulf often opens between what roles were previously able to contain and what they are now being asked to encompass, even as expectations continue to expand.
For many, this shows up in how their role is experienced day to day. This is not necessarily because anything formal has changed – job descriptions may remain intact, and structures may look broadly familiar. In practice, more depends on colleagues stepping in to connect, translate and absorb tension that does not quite sit anywhere else. None of this is new, and under pressure it becomes harder to ignore how much of it sits outside explicit agreement.
Transformation changes roles before organisations notice – work expands, boundaries shift, and new expectations emerge. The challenge is not that roles evolve. They always have. The challenge is whether those shifts become conscious and supported, or whether they are absorbed through goodwill alone.
What compassion and curiosity reveal
We made the case that transformation will only be sustainable if colleagues feel safe, supported, and connected to one another in the work, and that curiosity helps us stay with complexity rather than close it down too quickly.
But what do those commitments to compassion and curiosity ask of roles in practice?
Compassion and curiosity do not sit outside the system. They reshape it. They change what is noticed, what is responded to and what is taken up as someone’s responsibility. Without clarity about role, authority and responsibility, awareness can quietly become ownership, and concern can become an unspoken obligation.
One of the unintended consequences of compassionate and curious cultures is that more becomes visible. We notice distress, tension, inequity, exclusion, broken processes and emerging risks.
Noticing a problem does not create a contract to solve it. The ability to see what needs attention and the responsibility for taking action are not the same thing. When institutions blur this distinction, work expands through goodwill rather than agreement.
The issue is not invisible work. It is uncontracted work
As roles are adapted in response to changing demands, responsibility can begin to accumulate through action rather than explicit agreement. Work often gathers around those who are seen as dependable, who notice what needs attention, or for whom declining additional responsibilities carries a particular cost. This pattern frequently reflects existing inequalities in status, role, gender, race and contract type.
The challenge isn’t that work changes shape. It’s that new expectations emerge faster than conversations about authority, support, accountability and limits.
In the absence of explicit contracting, responsibility can expand by default rather than conscious agreement.
Colleagues are left navigating what has been noticed, what has been assumed and what has actually been agreed. The result is often less a problem of commitment than a problem of clarity. Contracting creates the opportunity for that clarity. Without this, responsibility expands through goodwill rather than design.
The challenge isn’t only practical. It’s emotional. Transformation asks us to work at the edge of what is known, established and familiar. As roles evolve, we often find ourselves carrying uncertainty alongside responsibility: navigating tensions, absorbing concerns and making judgements in situations where expectations are not always clear.
Alongside possibility and purpose can come frustration, doubt, loss and competing loyalties. These experiences are not signs that transformation is failing. They are part of what transformation feels like. The question is whether we acknowledge them and create conditions in which they can be worked with collectively rather than carried individually.
Power is not only structural
Discussions about invisible work often focus on power and rightly so. Existing hierarchies influence whose work we recognise, whose concerns we hear, and who is expected to absorb additional responsibility. Existing inequities continue to shape who can refuse, who feels able to challenge, and whose contribution remains invisible.
Yet power is not only structural. It is also personal.
Alongside questions of authority granted by the institution sit questions of authority claimed by us as individuals. Transformation requires power with others through collaboration and collective action, and power within ourselves; the capacity to exercise judgement, to set boundaries, to challenge assumptions, and to inhabit our role fully.
Sustainable transformation requires both. Our institutions need to provide authority, legitimacy and protection. We need to recognise and step into the discretion, expertise and agency we already possess. Waiting to be fully authorised can be as limiting as acting without support. Neither institutional permission nor personal agency is sufficient on its own.
Making responsibility discussable
Visibility alone does not redistribute work. We need conversations about ownership, authority, capacity and support.
The leadership task for all of us is to create clarity about what is being held, by whom, with what authority, and with what support. This requires greater awareness of how roles are shaped in practice. This might involve pausing within existing delivery and governance spaces to ask what is being progressed, and how the work is being shared.
That includes making redistribution visible. Where is responsibility gathering? Does that align with what has been agreed? Who is carrying work because they care rather than because it belongs to their role? Even brief conversations can change what becomes possible.
Without these conversations, work can be carried through goodwill, care and responsiveness without agreement about who it belongs to.
- What is it acceptable to name?
- Who is able to question how things work?
- Who is labelled as difficult when they do?
These are not questions that sit outside roles. They are part of how roles are made possible. Without intentional distribution, fundamentally collective challenges continue to be carried as individual concerns.
Clarity is not simply about defining tasks. It involves creating shared understanding of what sits within a role, what sits outside of a role, and what requires collective ownership. Healthy boundaries are not a barrier to compassion. They are what make compassion sustainable. As roles evolve in response to changing conditions, these conversations matter because responsibility can otherwise expand by default, without authority, support or agreement.
This is especially true for relational, emotional, and interpretive work; work that enables institutions to continue to function and to realise the benefits of transformation yet often remains unaccounted for. Work cannot be sustained simply because it is acknowledged. It requires authority, permission, support and protection.
The work ahead
None of this is straightforward. It is not about doing more. It’s about noticing where work is already being done and how it is being carried. The question is not whether roles will continue to evolve – they will. The question is whether we consciously renegotiate what they can reasonably hold.
Compassion helps us notice what matters. Curiosity helps us stay open to complexity. Neither tells us automatically what should be carried, by whom, and at what cost.
Sustaining transformation requires clarity about responsibility, authority, support and limits. It requires institutions that provide permission and protection for individuals to act. It also requires us, as individuals, to step into the authority that already sits within our role.
The task is not to carry more. It is to become more conscious about what is being carried, who is carrying it, and whether that remains the right arrangement.
Practically, leaders and teams can ask four simple questions: What work has emerged that was never explicitly agreed? Who currently holds it? What authority accompanies that responsibility? And what needs to be shared, stopped or renegotiated? Transformation becomes more sustainable when these questions become routine rather than exceptional.
If transformation in higher education depends on colleagues stepping forward, responsibility cannot continue to accumulate through goodwill alone. It must become something that is consciously contracted, appropriately authorised, collectively owned and intentionally sustained.
All views expressed in this blog are entirely those of the authors and do not represent the views or positions of any affiliated organisations or institutions.
