Happy Halloween! As I recover from a bout with COVID and prepare to dress up as Chewbacca tonight, I have a bunch of items for you all.

First, the Christensen Institute just published a new white paper I authored titled “How leaders can successfully manage change in colleges and universities.” The paper uses the Tools of Cooperation, a theory that Howard Stevenson and Clayton Christensen developed, to help college presidents navigate the shifting sands in their institutions.

The central insight of the theory is that there are lots of leadership and management tools available to leaders—but most of them don’t work most of the time. Knowing your organization’s level of agreement on its goals and cause-and-effect can help navigate the terrain.

In a world in which the tenure of college and university presidents has shortened dramatically and yet the need for change on campuses is urgent in many cases, my hope is that this paper will help leaders see their way through the big changes that they need to make.

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The white paper contains four case studies of leaders and institutions using different sets of these tools in different circumstances to help readers make sense of the theory in action. The case studies center at Yale University with Richard Levin; Northeastern University with Richard Freeland; Simmons University with Helen Drinan; and Southern New Hampshire University with Paul LeBlanc.

brown concrete building under white sky during daytime — Photo by Joey Genovese on Unsplash

Levin wrote to me after the piece was published with some additional thoughts, which I’m including here because I think they add helpful nuance to the use of the framework after you’ve read the white paper:

You mention that dynamics are important, but I think you underemphasize the point. Internationalization was an upper left quadrant issue for me. But many other initiatives began in the so-called power quadrant, but I used leadership tools, first, to move people toward consensus on goals, and then to move forward despite lack of consensus on cause-and-effect. This was true for engagement with New Haven, for transforming labor relations, and for strengthening engineering, for example.

You can download the paper here.

Speaking of Change in Higher Ed…

It's not often that a new university president talks about how degrees are being devalued and how higher education must align with workforce needs, but that's exactly what new Temple University president, Jason Wingard, did when he joined me and Jeff Selingo on Future U. to discuss his book, “The College Devaluation Crisis," and what's next for Temple. Wingard, who has worked at Penn, Columbia, and Goldman Sachs (among other roles) and played football for the legendary Bill Walsh, doesn’t mince words.

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Will change follow? That’s the question. Listen to the episode, “Disruption in Higher Ed,” (his words, not mine!) here.

That School Pilot You’re Running? It’s Not Actually a Pilot…

In the latest edition of our Class Disrupted podcast, Diane Tavenner and I dig deep on what a real pilot looks like in a school and why correctly structuring a pilot is critical to its success. Diane and her team at Summit Public Schools were kind and brave enough to share a live case study of a pilot they are running right now so that we could dissect and break it down. It’s also one that we’ll revisit throughout the season to see how they’re doing and pull out other lessons from it.

We didn’t just delve into a real-life and ongoing example. We also bring some theory and guideposts to bear so you know how to do a pilot—and we leveraged some frameworks like Lean Startup and Discovery-Driven Planning in the process.

Check out the episode, “What Does a Real Pilot Look Like in a School,” here or wherever you listen to your podcasts. My hope is that schools pick up on the framework so that the word pilot is no longer equivalent to a four-letter word in education.

Some Reflections

On the Problem with Acting in Line With Your ‘Core Competency’

I recently was teaching my students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education the problem with the “theory of core competency.” The idea of the theory is that if something lies inside your core competence, then you should do it yourself. But if it isn’t core and someone else can do it better, then you should outsource it.

The problem with this line of thinking is that what an organization’s core competency is today might become less important in the future, and what is a noncore activity today may become a critical competence in the future.

A recent ChangingHigherEd.com podcast with host Drumm McNaughton and edtech analyst Phil Hill caught my attention (via Phil Hill’s terrific newsletter) because they spoke about how, in their view, many universities didn’t know what their core competency was when institutions started moving to online learning.

I have a slightly different view, which is that institutions thought they knew what their core competency was—and it wasn’t online learning… But the core competency theory arguably failed them, because what wasn’t core today became core over time. And many institutions had outsourced that capability to online program managers (OPMs) rather than skating to where the puck (the value) would be.

For all sorts of reasons this is debatable because of the capital and scale needed to (arguably) do online learning well, but it’s clear that institutions like Southern New Hampshire University saw where the puck was going and are in much better stead as a result than they would have been had they made the decision to partner.

What Should Schools Do With All That Money?

Hat tip to John Bailey on this one. According to the Washington Post, schools received $122 billion in emergency money last year, but less than 15 percent of the “Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund III” dollars were used in the 2021–22 school year, according to data the newspaper analyzed from Edunomics, an education finance group at Georgetown University.

Of the 211 districts the Post examined, where “Edunomics estimates students are the furthest behind,” about half spent less than 5 percent of their ESSER III funds. Indeed, many districts are still spending from the first tranche of $67.5 billion during the Trump administration.

This raises the question of whether a lack of resources is really what’s holding back schools in the wake of the dramatic decline in NAEP test scores. But if you didn’t see it earlier, here’s my take in the New York Sun on what schools should also be spending on to reinvent themselves, such that they don’t create future liabilities that they can’t maintain whenever it is that they exhaust the federal dollars.

If you’re reading this and you’re at a school district, it’s time to use these dollars to leapfrog what we’ve always done for each and every student. On that topic, if you want to see what that could look like, I highly recommend New Classrooms’ and Transcend’s new paper, “Out of the Box,” along with an afternoon of programming dissecting just what this means for schools and what new models of learning should and can do. I moderated the opening session, but you can check out the whole program here.

Different Students Have Different Goals

Not surprising, but students enter college in different circumstances desiring different outcomes. They have different definitions of what progress means for them—or different “Jobs to Be Done” in our parlance. Bob Moesta and I laid out just what these five different Jobs to Be Done are in our book Choosing College.

But that’s just a starting point. Once you know the Jobs—or what’s motivating students to enroll—segmenting them by demographics and different programmatic desires and the like makes sense to better serve them. Indeed, one community college president told me recently that they have 12 different profiles in their customer relationship management system to help optimize how they serve students who have different goals and enter under different circumstances. To serve some of these profiles, they’ve been doing more and more with non-credit-bearing, competency-based courses.

That’s worth watching.

From Reopen to Reinvent

Finally, more reviews on From Reopen to Reinvent from my Christian Talbot, the president of Middle States. Check out “From Everything-to-Everyone to Jobs to Be Done” and “From Hygienic Factors to Motivational Factors.” And then get a copy of the book here—and please remember to review it!

Thanks as always for reading, writing, and listening.

You say you want a revolution in higher ed…