Agility – Innovation – Empowerment

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My work on Agile-based organizational design in higher education is about three things: Agility, Innovation, and Empowerment.

By Agility, I mean a college or university’s ability to notice what is changing around it, whether it’s enrollment patterns, funding, regulation, technology, or what students and families expect, and to respond in weeks or months rather than semesters or years, without exhausting its people or losing sight of its mission. By Innovation, I don’t mean the splashy new initiative announced from the top, but the steady, practical improvement of how the work actually gets done. And by Empowerment, I mean trusting the people who already know where that work breaks, such as the registrar’s staff, the financial aid counselor, and the department administrator who has quietly maintained the same workaround for a decade, to help fix it.

Most of us have seen the alternative. A bold initiative is announced, absorbs several months of committee time, and quietly fades. Meanwhile, the same approval chain, the same duplicate form, and the same bottleneck are still waiting for the next student or colleague. The problem is rarely a lack of talent or commitment. Our institutions were built to be careful and stable, but the world around them no longer is. And an increasing number of higher education employees tell us they are likely to look for a new job within the year, taking with them the knowledge of how things really work.

The human and organizational toll of all this, at a time when our industry is in crisis, cannot be overstated.

A body of ideas and methodologies has helped organizations do exactly this over the last twenty-five years. It is called Agile, and it began in software development. At its heart are a few simple convictions: work in short cycles (called sprints) so you learn (and fail) early, listen closely to the people you serve, trust those closest to the work, and adjust as you go rather than waiting for a perfect plan.

You don’t need to know anything about software, product development, or its vocabulary to put these ideas to use. Where a term or concept is unavoidable, I’ll explain it in plain language as we go. What matters most is the question underneath it all: How can we build institutions that are more responsive, more efficient, and places where talented people choose to stay?

If you lead, manage, or work in a college or university in any office, at any level, this guide is written for you.

Organizational Misconceptions

It is puzzling how many leaders still view an institution of higher learning as a machine that amounts to nothing more than the sum of its parts. In this view, any employee is easily replaceable, inconvenient voices questioning the status quo are silenced, and “innovation” is conceived and dictated solely by people of positional authority who often lack the expertise to create truly sustainable and meaningful improvements. At the same time, once decided, change initiatives are often implemented in a black box, following a strict, predetermined long-term process and with minimal input from those doing the ground-level work.

What many of these leaders – well, managers, really – habitually fail to see is that our institutions of higher learning are living, breathing, complex, and socially adaptive ecosystems with people as their driving forces. I will address this issue and its many implications in detail in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say, though, that without honest consideration for the needs of our employees, irrespective of rank, title, or degree, our colleges and universities will be hard pressed to capitalize on their innovative potential – with potentially drastic effects on students, enrollment, financial viability, and public opinion in an already supercharged political climate.

While I acknowledge that not all institutions reflect the somewhat bleak, albeit often realistic, description above, I believe that there is a universal truth here that this guide seeks to tackle: much of the work on our campuses is buried under mountains of organizational debt and inefficiencies – processes, procedures, workflows, reporting structures, bureaucracies, and policies (whether real or imagined) – that once made sense but have long since outlived their usefulness. At the same time, many leaders are unaware, or even dismissive, of both the myriad obstacles, frustrations, and distractions these deficiencies create, and the ability of front-line staff to tackle said hurdles to organizational efficiency.

The Numbers

Foundational research by management experts Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, published in the Harvard Business Review, estimated that excess management, redundant approval hierarchies, and internal administrative bureaucracy cost the United States economy roughly $3 trillion annually.

Translating these findings to higher education and quantifying the dollar impact of organizational debt in our industry is, unfortunately, difficult and requires correlating macro spending data, time-allocation studies, and operational benchmarks into aggregate national figures. According to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States accrue over $700 billion annually in total operating expenditures in 2020-2021, with non-instructional administrative and academic support overheads accounting for approximately $150 billion to $200 billion annually across U.S. higher education institutions.

If we apply Bain & Company’s cross-industry workforce productivity research directly to the operational structures of higher education and assume that what they call organizational drag – the collection of institutional processes, bureaucratic structures, and cultural norms that waste faculty and staff time, misallocate talent, and drain institutional energy through redundant workflows, multi-tiered permission chains, manual workarounds, and fragmented inter-departmental handoffs – consumes 20% to 30% of an institution’s productive staff and administrative capacity, we are left with a potential waste in the amount of a staggering $30 billion to $60 billion per year spent managing systemic institutional friction rather than delivering direct educational or operational value.

Being Human

The story these numbers – as impressive as they may be – don’t tell is the human toll on employees, often in low-level student-facing offices or roles that directly affect the effectiveness of educational delivery and research support. Many affected individuals work under enormous pressure and deal with inefficiencies and overwhelming bureaucracy firsthand every day. All too often, this leads to overwork, stress, and burnout.

When paired with pervasive traditional leadership and top-down command-and-control management structures, many make the painful but inevitable decision either to leave their institution or, at the very least, withdraw to doing the bare minimum their job requires – a phenomenon that has since been dubbed quiet quitting – adding even further to organizational waste.

Many leaders fail to grasp that losing or ignoring an employee with deep institutional knowledge of how work actually gets done not only leaves a gap in the org chart, but also creates more work for those who stay behind and costs money to hire and train a replacement. The departure of such vital sources of organizational insight and information, including how to use workarounds and where to find help to solve the most pressing and time-sensitive problems, also weakens an institution’s ability to learn, improve the way it operates, and ultimately provide greater value to its many internal and external stakeholders, from students and their families to donors, faculty, non-academic support staff, and the community at large.

While the most recent (2025) CUPA-HR Employee Retention Survey has identified a decline in employees likely or very likely to look for new job opportunities in the next year since its initial 2022 study, that number still hovers around 25%, with attrition hotspots in research and sponsored programs/institutional research (28%), academic affairs (27%), and student affairs (26%).

Granted, one out of four employees on average may not seem like a large number. But when you factor in evidence – admittedly largely anecdotal – of often huge discrepancies between campus units and entire institutions in their ability to retain and foster valuable talent, it comes as no surprise that many campuses struggle to keep up with the persistent onslaught of demographic, regulatory, societal, and political changes.

Agility

So, what does all this have to do with (capital-A) Agile and institutional agility in general?

When we break it down, institutions of higher learning, like all organizations, are made up of human individuals: complex human beings, each with their unique needs, aspirations, fears, and – I choose to believe – the desire to do something meaningful in their professional lives.

When we create and maintain environments where strict adherence to outdated processes, hierarchies, and bureaucracies supersedes the human need for purpose and discounts the immense innovative potential vested in employees across campus – irrespective of rank, degree, and title – we are ignoring the greatest source of power to help our colleges and universities adapt to ever-changing political vagaries, regulatory pressures, and societal expectations: the people who know how our institutions truly work and how to improve them.

And this is where the core principles and values of Agile come into play.

After all, organizational adaptability and efficiency are a function of human capacity to focus on what matters most – supporting students, research, and various communities in a fiscally sustainable fashion – while also having the space to experiment with new ways of doing the important work. And this requires not only investigating and removing what holds us back structurally but also taking a critical look at employee agency, well-being, and motivation.

About the Transformation Strategy Guide

In Chapter 1, I draw on fundamental, proven approaches to creating value embedded in an Agile-based approach and value proposition, opening the door to a leaner, more efficient, and more humane way of running our institutions of higher education. By necessity, and after delving into the complexity conundrum that stymies many a leader (Chapter 2), I briefly cover Agile as a project management tool suited to creating and incrementally delivering value to our customers (Chapter 3). Chapter 4, then, outlines my Three-Cycle Framework for organizational transformation in detail.

New to this edition of the Strategy Guide are Chapters 5 and 6, where I unpack salient metrics we can use to assess and guide our transformation work and provide an overview of both change management and change leadership in support of this important work, including the strategic and tactical deployment of artificial intelligence (AI).

In the end, the framework and related strategies outlined in the Guide ultimately answer a pivotal question for today’s leaders: How can we activate and leverage the expertise among our staff (and, to some extent, faculty) to create better, more efficient institutions capable of rolling with the proverbial punches, while also creating great places where the best talent wants to work?

Ironically, and despite widespread confessions to the contrary, most colleges and universities have by now both solidly embraced and institutionalized – more or less successfully – a corporate or business mindset and adjusted their leadership and administrative structures accordingly. For this reason, I believe it’s logical to apply both contemporary industry thinking and proven practices to the higher education enterprise.

If you are familiar with Design Thinking (DT), a human-centered, iterative framework for solving complex, unstructured problems, you will also find significant overlap in how DT reframes problems around empathy, collaboration, multi- and cross-disciplinary solutions, and iterative experimentation.

This Guide offers a structural, leadership-centered, step-by-step approach to standing up transformative change teams around work that matters and then diffusing meaningful innovations across campus.

As you will see, we can learn a lot from Agile and find a satisfying answer to the pressing questions of our time in its fundamental assumptions.

So, let’s dig in!

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