7 Questions with Higher Digital's Joe Gottlieb and Joe Moreau

• 04/18/23

CT: Is there a right or wrong way to be transparent and talk about change?

Gottlieb: Don't oversell change by understating its complexity. That's really, really important. Transparency begets trust. Be clear about challenges and build that team trust and resilience through experience. This is where short iterations help, because it allows you to take smaller risks, and even fail, and then learn from that small failure — versus the big failure that happens when you try to take the big swing for the fence but you don't have enough steering input along the way to know whether it's going to be good or bad.

CT: Any advice for institutions that are struggling with, to quote Educause, "the culture, workforce and technology shifts that are central to digital transformation"?

Moreau: Six or seven years ago, I was part of the workgroup at Educause that actually came up with that definition of digital transformation. So I wholeheartedly believe it. And assuming that you believe those are the components of digital transformation — and I think most people who are talking about it seriously probably believe that in some form or another — I would say to my friends and colleagues that technology is the easy part. Culture and workforce are the hard parts. And of those two, culture is the hardest part.

Gottlieb: Culture is the starting point. Understand your culture first — not just as an institution, but also as an organization. There are certain aspects of our culture that we inherit from our commitment to delivering teaching and learning. And that's amazing. But we also should be honest about who we are as an organization. What is our culture and how much capacity for change do we have? How might that change over time? Understanding your culture also means knowing how the culture might be viewed differently by different departments and different people. And that's where the data really helps. It helps us turn culture into an asset, versus this mysterious, unspoken force that we know is having a huge impact but we aren't in touch with because we don't have data.

Think about this in the context of the people you have. When you're planning, forecast capabilities needed relative to what you have, and deploy in parallel with other known efforts and the known staffing that you have. It could be process, system, and data change all at once — you should coordinate that. Do it in small pieces, so you can help drive greater success in the adoption. Pay attention to the adoption success and iterate from there. If you're thinking about this as a people exercise, you'll be in a much better position to know who you need to hire when headcount opportunities arise, or when people retire and you have an opportunity to bring someone in new. Taking this people-centered approach gives you a much stronger feel for what you have in terms of capabilities — not roles in the organization, but capabilities — and therefore what you lack and what seems to be emerging on the frontier.