February 3, 2026 ·
Closing the Change Gap: Agile Change Management for Today’s Higher Education Leaders
43 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
How presidents and boards can apply agile change management to help faculty, students, and institutions adapt to AI, workforce demands, and rapid disruption.
Higher education is facing a convergence of change unlike anything in its history. Within the past six years alone, institutions have navigated three major transitions: political shifts under the first Trump administration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and now a second Trump administration coupled with the rapid emergence of AI. Demographic decline, funding uncertainty, and shifting student expectations compound these pressures. Change is no longer optional, yet many institutions continue to operate as though incremental adjustments will be sufficient. They will not be.
The case for transformational change management draws on the combined perspectives of Dr. Christine Janssen, founder and CEO of Edstutia, an immersive learning platform leveraging virtual reality and AI, and Dr. Drumm McNaughton, a higher education consultant specializing in institutional transformation. Dr. Janssen brings entrepreneurial expertise and a background teaching at Fordham University, while Dr. McNaughton contributes deep experience in risk management and organizational change. Their analysis integrates established change management frameworks with agile development principles to help institutions move at the speed their environment demands.
The central argument is direct. Behavioral change in organizations cannot occur without mindset change. Institutions that treat change as a process to be managed rather than a culture to be cultivated will continue to fall behind. As Jack Welch observed, when the rate of change outside your organization is faster than the rate of change inside, the decline has already begun. Closing that gap requires a fundamentally different approach to leadership, faculty development, and strategic execution.
Change Management Requires More Than a Model
Kotter’s eight-step change management model remains foundational for organizational transformation. Creating urgency, building coalitions, developing vision, and anchoring change in culture are essential components. Yet the model was designed for a more predictable environment. Today’s higher education landscape resembles a chess board floating on water with pieces made of smoke. It is no longer checkers. It is 3D chess on steroids.
Traditional change management assumes you can define the end state and work backward. That assumption no longer holds. Institutions must now manage multiple dimensions of change simultaneously while the external environment shifts beneath them. COVID demonstrated that institutions could adapt quickly when forced. The mistake many made was treating that adaptation as temporary rather than as proof of latent capability. Too many leaders simply wanted to return to how things were before rather than moving forward.
The entrepreneurial response to this reality is agile development, a cyclical model borrowed from software development that emphasizes rapid iteration, continuous feedback, and tolerance for failure. Rather than planning exhaustively before acting, agile organizations deploy quickly, learn from results, and iterate. This flywheel approach enables institutions to move faster than traditional governance structures typically allow. The vision of where you are going may not change, but how you get there almost certainly will.
Mindset Change Must Precede Behavioral Change
A persistent failure in change management is the assumption that new processes will produce new behaviors. They rarely do without underlying shifts in how people think about their work, their industry, and their role within it. The classic unfreeze-change-refreeze model recognizes this, but implementation often focuses on systems rather than cognition.
Learning something entirely new is relatively straightforward. The harder challenge is unlearning something deeply ingrained and then relearning a different approach. Faculty and administrators who believe that higher education’s traditional structures remain fundamentally sound will resist changes that threaten those structures. People must first believe that change is necessary and possible before they will commit to it.
Quantum thinking principles offer a framework for cognitive flexibility. Superposition, the ability to hold multiple contradictory ideas simultaneously, helps leaders operate effectively when outcomes are genuinely uncertain. Uncertainty and action, the capacity to execute decisively while remaining adaptive, addresses the paralysis that ambiguity often creates. Stability and agility are not opposites. Leaders must grasp both simultaneously.
Preparing Students for Jobs That Do Not Yet Exist
There is a high likelihood that students entering college today will graduate to work at companies that do not yet exist, in jobs that have not been created, solving problems that have not yet emerged. This reality is difficult for faculty to absorb. If the future is unknowable, what exactly are we preparing students for?
The answer is more than subject matter. Institutions must prepare students for change itself, for ambiguity and uncertainty, for resilience, and for problem-solving with minimal information under time pressure. Much of this is mindset. Students need the cognitive fortitude to handle what cannot be predicted. But faculty cannot teach this if they have not internalized it themselves.
This is a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Institutions that recognize this will focus less on knowledge transfer, which is increasingly commoditized, and more on developing the higher-order skills that employers actually need. Critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, and practical application sit at the upper levels of learning taxonomies. Knowledge alone is fungible. The ability to apply it is not.
AI Is Not the Problem. Resistance to AI Is the Problem
Faculty concerns about AI and academic integrity are understandable but ultimately counterproductive. The box has been opened. Students will use AI because it is fast, convenient, and effective. In the workplace, finding the best answer as quickly as possible is exactly what employers want. Faculty are using AI too, for curriculum development, assignment creation, and administrative tasks. The double standard is unsustainable.
The productive response is not detection and punishment but pedagogical adaptation. If students can use AI to complete take-home essays, the assignment design is the problem, not the technology. Assessment must evolve to measure what AI cannot replicate: critical analysis, practical application, synthesis across domains, and real-time demonstration of competence. There is nothing wrong with having students use AI and then analyze what is true, what is not, and how they know the difference.
More importantly, graduates who cannot work with AI will be at a significant disadvantage in nearly every field. The distinction is not learning about AI but learning with AI. By the time an institution integrates a new technology through traditional governance processes, something newer has already emerged. That frustration is real, but it is also why the flywheel approach matters. Institutions that fail to integrate AI into teaching and learning are preparing students for an economy that no longer exists.
Higher Education Must Listen to Its Customers
In virtually every other industry, organizations that ignore customer needs fail. Higher education has operated as an exception for decades, but that immunity is eroding. Students increasingly evaluate institutions based on career outcomes rather than prestige. Employers increasingly question whether degrees signal actual preparedness. The skills gap between what graduates can do and what employers need continues to widen.
The trend toward eliminating degree requirements for employment is not random. It reflects employer recognition that skilled people exist who did not earn traditional credentials, and that a degree does not guarantee preparation. Bootcamps and alternative credentials are gaining ground precisely because they respond to market needs more quickly than degree programs can. Students who want a six-figure coding job may conclude that a bootcamp offers faster, cheaper, more direct preparation.
Higher education serves two audiences: students and families, and the employers who will hire graduates. Institutions must listen to both and ensure alignment between curriculum, student expectations, and labor market realities. Recent surveys suggest employers appreciate what higher education provides but see clear gaps. Higher education must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it also cannot afford complacency. The era of convincing customers to buy what institutions want to sell, rather than delivering what customers need, is over.
Faculty Development Is a Strategic Imperative
Faculty cannot teach students to navigate uncertainty if they themselves are unprepared for it. Professional development in emerging technologies, pedagogical innovation, and adaptive teaching methods is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for institutional relevance. If students arrive knowing more about technology than their professors, the value proposition becomes difficult to sustain.
The traditional faculty evaluation model, with its emphasis on research productivity, may inadvertently discourage the teaching innovation institutions now require. A typical tenure model weights teaching, research, and service, often at 40-40-20. But why must research focus exclusively on disciplinary subject matter? Research into how faculty can evolve their teaching methods would serve institutions and students far better than the current default.
Visionary leaders like Michael Crow at Arizona State University demonstrate what committed faculty development looks like at scale. Nothing about ASU is stagnant. Resources allocated to keeping faculty current with technology and pedagogy are investments in institutional competitiveness, not overhead. Similarly, Michael Baston at Cuyahoga Community College has prioritized connecting faculty with the communities they serve. The community college model, without tenure constraints, allows instructors to focus entirely on teaching and student success.
Guiding Coalitions Must Extend Beyond the Institution
Kotter’s emphasis on building a guiding coalition remains essential, but the composition of that coalition must expand. Internal stakeholders alone cannot provide the perspective institutions need to remain relevant. External voices, including employers, community leaders, and industry experts, must be integrated into strategic planning and change leadership.
When Michael Baston built his advisory structure at Cuyahoga Community College, he deliberately included external constituents rather than relying solely on faculty and administrators. He needed to hear voices from outside higher education. External perspectives challenge assumptions that internal stakeholders may not recognize they hold. They ensure that internships, career pathways, and curriculum remain connected to actual community and employer needs.
Shared governance remains important, but insularity is dangerous. Faculty understandably resist being told how or what to teach, and academic freedom matters. But higher education is one of the only industries that does not systematically listen to its customers. Course evaluations ask whether students liked their professors, not whether students learned anything applicable and relevant. Institutions that consult only themselves will optimize for a world that may no longer exist.
The Disruption Will Come from Outside If It Does Not Come from Within
The parallel to the taxi industry is instructive. Yellow cabs dominated urban transportation for decades. They were expensive, unreliable, and indifferent to customer experience. Riders had no alternatives, so the industry had no incentive to change. Then Uber arrived.
The disruption came from outside the industry because insiders refused to lead it. Uber listened to problems, challenges, and demands that the taxi industry ignored. Within a few years, rider expectations transformed entirely. Transparency, convenience, safety features, and accountability became baseline requirements. The taxi industry’s subsequent attempts to catch up were too little, too late. Nobody uses their apps.
Higher education is not immune to this pattern. If institutions do not lead their own transformation, external competitors will do it for them. The question is whether colleges and universities will be the disruptors or the disrupted. Waiting to see what other institutions do is not a strategy. It is a surrender. Perhaps the worst decision any institution can make right now is to wait and see or to remain the same.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
- Change your mindset about learning and about higher education itself. Take more risks. Experiment. Be comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, and change. Without this cognitive shift, behavioral change will not follow. You cannot instill change in others if you have not embraced it yourself.
- Change systems to fit students and employers rather than forcing students into existing systems. Listen to your two audiences. Adapt curriculum, pedagogy, and support structures to meet their needs. Round pegs and square holes do not work, no matter how hard you push.
- Remain relevant, competitive, and desirable. If enrollments are dropping, examine why. If other institutions are more adaptive, more cutting edge, more responsive to emerging technology, students will choose them. Be the disruptor rather than the disrupted. You have a choice: lead transformation or get steamrolled by those who do.
This analysis provides higher education leaders with a framework for evaluating whether their change management approaches are adequate for current conditions. It argues persuasively that incremental adaptation is no longer sufficient and that institutions must embrace both the mindset and the methods of agile transformation. The cost of inaction is not stagnation. It is irrelevance.
Quick Overview
- Higher education faces simultaneous disruptions from demographics, politics, funding, and AI
- Traditional change management models require adaptation for volatile, uncertain environments
- Agile development principles offer a faster, iterative approach to institutional change
- Mindset transformation is prerequisite to behavioral transformation
- Institutions must prepare students for jobs, companies, and problems that do not yet exist
- AI resistance is counterproductive; pedagogical adaptation is essential
- Institutions must listen to both students and employers as customers
- Faculty development is strategic investment, not discretionary spending
- Guiding coalitions must include external stakeholders
- Institutions will either lead disruption or be disrupted
About Our Podcast Guest
Dr. Christine Janssen is the Founder and CEO of Edstutia, an award-winning immersive learning platform that leverages the power of VR and AI for adult learning. Prior to Edstutia, Dr. Janssen was a Clinical Associate Professor and the Director of Entrepreneurship for twelve years in the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University in New York City. Dr. Janssen’s professional background spans several industries, including consumer products, financial services, and technology. She holds a BS in Marketing from the University of South Florida, a Global MBA in Communications & Information Systems and Finance with a specialization in e-Business from Fordham University, and a PhD from New York University, where her dissertation focused on how entrepreneurs learn. Dr. Janssen is a Senior Fellow in the L&D Institute at the U.S. Human Capital Center of The Conference Board; a Member of the HR.com Learning Technology Advisory Board; and an Enterprise Training & Development Advisor with AIXR (Academy of International Extended Reality).
Connect with Christine Jenssen on LinkedIn →
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 297
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
[00:00:31] Introduction and Guest Welcome
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.
Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is Dr. Christine Jansen, founder and CEO of Ed Studio, an award-winning, immersive learning platform that leverages the power of virtual reality and AI for adult learning. Christine is no one who is a stranger to Higher Ed. She was a clinical associate professor and director of entrepreneurship for 12 years at Fordham University in New York City, and her PhD is from the New York University, so well grounded in higher ed.
Chris is an entrepreneur through and through, and she approaches change management in a way that shows both her higher ed background and her entrepreneur background. She’s written a great book, we’ll talk a little bit about on the podcast, but she’s here to talk about change management and how higher ed can and needs to change to make it more relevant for students and for employers.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Chris Janssen: Ah, thank you so much. This is going to be fun.
Drumm McNaughton: I am looking forward to it as well. I think we’re going to have a great conversation. You do change management for your business as part of, I think you pronounce it Edstutia. Is correct? We’ll get into what a studio does as well. When we spoke last week, you were blowing me away with some of the things you said, and so I’m really excited about this.
Before we get into the meat of this, please tell the listeners a little bit about your background, if you would.
Chris Janssen: Ah, you sure? Okay.
[00:02:08] Founding Edstutia
Chris Janssen: So currently, I’m the CEO of an immersive learning company called Edstutia, which I founded actually officially, it’ll be five years, in the next couple weeks. Thank you. And what we have done is we built an entire platform and virtual reality, also integrated AI. And this is completely for adult learning, which to me straddles higher ed and into workplace learning.
And we specialize in business and leadership skills, communication, soft skills. So that’s been my, my, you know what I. Eat about, think about and dream about and sleep about for the last five, six years. And prior to that I was a business school professor, here in New York. I live in New York. And I was a professor at Fordham University for 12 years as well as the Director of Entrepreneurship. And I bring that up because that’s how my mind thinks, always looking for that big hairy problem, and there are a lot of them around us
Drumm McNaughton: Really? Problems in higher ed?
[00:03:07] Challenges in Higher Education
Drumm McNaughton: You’re kidding me.
Chris Janssen: But it was, after being a student for so long and then being in higher ed, I’m all about the future of learning and the possibilities, and that is the fire in my belly. And so that’s what led me to leave higher ed to build Edstutia, because I wanted a, bigger reach, deeper reach, wider reach and to impact what learning can be, especially with integrating emerging technologies. So that’s a little bit, what I’ve been doing the last few years and then also, in higher ed and and in my free time.
Drumm McNaughton: So thank you. That’s good. When we spoke a week or so ago though, what impressed me is what you guys are doing is amazing, especially from learning, but looking at it from a higher level, from senior leadership perspective, you, especially with your entrepreneurship background, it’s about change management.
You’ve got a real specific skill, fact we both do in getting people to change how they think, how they do things. And that is truly one of, if not the most important, leadership skill that we need in higher ed with all the challenges that are going on.
Chris Janssen: Yeah. And higher ed, in general, needs to change, just fundamentally. Because it really hasn’t changed much in decades, because of the systems.
Drumm McNaughton: No, no, no. Not decades. Centuries.
Chris Janssen: Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: when you stop and think about it, online education is the major shift that we have done in the past 10, 20, 30 years. But up to that, and even still now, in many respects, it’s still the sage on the stage.
Chris Janssen: Yes. And while online learning can be, it’s very convenient and efficient, it’s really not the end all, be all. It is not the silver bullet. It is not the best way to learn if it’s just one way passive interaction. It’s just, it’s not the answer, and there’s so much more that higher ed can do to build off of. Face to face has its value, online has value, but we have to pay attention to what’s happening around us and all the disruption happening around us that requires us, as higher ed leaders, to change because our audience, our customers, our students have different needs, as does industry. And if we remain stagnant and the same, we’re doing nobody, good service. And so that’s the fire in my belly.
Drumm McNaughton: Well with that. Oh, I couldn’t tell. When I take a look back at the past 10 years, actually if we want to go back 30 years, online education is a huge transition point. But just recently we’ve had, within the last six years, we’ve had three major transitions, or if you want to even take it to 10 years, T one or Trump one made major changes.
[00:06:14] Impact of COVID and Trump Administration
Drumm McNaughton: Then there was COVID. Now with Trump two funding international students, and then now AI is coming in. These are all major changes, but we’re having three really at one because we’re still seeing the effects of COVID.
Chris Janssen: It’s funny, the one thing I loved about COVID is that it forced us, I was still working in higher ed, it forced us to adapt quickly and a lot of people didn’t like that, but that was a good thing and we were able to keep the ship moving no matter what. Right? Not easy transition, but unfortunately so many people in higher ed just wanna go back to how it was before COVID versus moving forward. That is frustrating as all get out for me. But, there was some good, in COVID, about change. Right? And we saw we could do that.
[00:07:06] Adapting to Change in Higher Ed
Chris Janssen: So we’re still, yep, we’re still dealing with that. And certainly, a lot of the things that the Trump administration has thrown out, and the Department of Ed dismantling and funding and grants and stuff disappearing, and the pressure on higher ed in so many ways, whether it’s financially, legally, international students, all that.
And so higher ed is facing so much change in pressure right now and every angle, and that’s tough to handle. And we’ll get into that when it comes to change management. There’s so many dimensions to the change right now, and so that’s forcing us to look at change and to manage change in a different way, and certainly
Drumm McNaughton: It’s not checkers anymore. It’s 3D chess on steroids.
Chris Janssen: Totally is. You know what that reminds me of this story I saw Jerry Seinfeld at the Beacon Theater a couple years ago, and he was telling the story about his marriage and how difficult it can be. And he’s like, my marriage is kind of like a chess board. Floating on water and all the pieces are made of smoke.
And so I get it. it’s not clear to you anymore. You’re right, it’s not checkers and yes, it’s chess. It’s very strategic. This is about managing, strategic change, but, oh, we don’t know what’s happening next. How do you handle this ambiguity? And that is the other layer that is making it very difficult for people to, to plan for that change.
Drumm McNaughton: Very much so. And when you throw AI in there and that rate of change is increasing exponentially, we need to be more comfortable with change.
[00:08:43] The Role of AI in Education
Drumm McNaughton: I remember a quote when I was doing a lot of speaking at conferences talking about change management, Jack Welsh, love him or hate him, Jack Welsh, he says, “when the rate of change outside your organization is faster than the rate of change inside, it’s starting to go downhill.” We’ve gotta be able to adapt to these changes because there are changes going on, especially faculty. But the other thing is we’ve gotta prepare students for the unknown. We don’t know what the jobs are going to be in 5, 10 years.
Chris Janssen: No, there are lots of predictions and trend reports on what those jobs may be or where there’s going to be demand, and of course a lot of it is around AI and emerging tech, but oh my God, that is so true.
[00:09:36] Preparing Students for the Future
Chris Janssen: And this is what, when I was still teaching at Fordham, I would speak to freshmen coming in at incoming class first semester, and I would tell them, “there’s a really high likelihood that by the time you graduate in four years, you’re going to be working at a company that doesn’t exist today or doing a job that hasn’t been created yet, or working in an industry that’s still developing. Or even solving problems that don’t exist today”. So how do we prepare students for that? That is mind boggling. I think very difficult for faculty to wrap their head around because, “well then what the heck am I preparing them for?” Right?
It’s more than just subject matter. I think a lot what needs to change in higher ed is preparing students for change, for imminent change, for ambiguity and uncertainty, to be resilient, to be problem solvers and with minimal information and having to do it very quickly. So a lot of that is mindset. In addition to skills, it is having the right mindset and fortitude to handle stuff. And actually, to be able to teach students that, I think higher ed and faculty also need to be, themselves, prepared for that and okay with that, before they teach others.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:10:52] Change Management in Higher Ed
Drumm McNaughton: It’s a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) world. So change management, what we’re going to talk about for the most part today, this has been a great tee up of the subject.
[00:11:04] Kotter’s Change Management Model
Drumm McNaughton: Kotter came out with his eight steps, which, it was groundbreaking because nobody up to that point had really looked at the change management process. We can walk through those, but I would be willing to bet that 80, 90% of the audience already knows what they are. The thing to remember is change is never done and it gets faster. Now you bring in another piece to that, the entrepreneur and business management perspective. Integrate that with Kotter.
Chris Janssen: Yeah, sure. I mean, listen first of all, Kotter’s model is awesome!, You know, whenever I look at that, it’s like “Yes”. The components in it are key and it makes a lot of sense, but let’s go back to that example I just shared about the test board and the pieces being made of smoke. So you can’t just rely on this model. It’s almost like we have to look at Kotter’s model from 3D perspective. There’s all these different levels and layers so it really makes it difficult to just use that model. So one of the things that I, from an entrepreneurship perspective.
[00:12:11] Agile Development in Education
Chris Janssen: There’s a concept called “Agile Development” and it’s a model as well, and it’s a cyclical model. And this comes from the software development industry. And it’s, you wanna throw something out there, get feedback, test it, try it, experiment what in it, take that feedback and iterate and you go through it again and again. But you do it very quickly. This is the flywheel, right? And so if we could take that mindset and that process to be able to manage and handle change and much more quickly, yeah, that’s kind of a little bit of the mindset we need to apply to Kotter, but I think that’s fantastic model and it enables you to do things super efficiently, and be really, when it comes to problem solving or even developing new products and services, managing change, putting plans together, if you can have that mindset and actually being agile, not just talking about it, being agile and having that right mindset. Wow, can you get ahead of the game?
So go back to what Jack Welch was saying, “if the rate of change is faster, externally to your institution, than internally we got a problem”. So how about trying something such as this flywheel that enables us to move faster? Now, easier said than done because I know there are certain systems and processes already in higher ed and that’s what we’re used to. But we, because of all these external factors and AI and the pressures, we have to do something different.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, absolutely. And you bring up such an interesting point because when you think about the structures that are in place for shared governance. I was a faculty member. You were a faculty member. We understand how we as faculty think. We don’t like ambiguity. We like things to be solid. We want transparency, but sometimes there can’t always be the transparency. It’s not because people don’t wanna share, it’s because they just don’t know. There’s no way of saying, “this is definitively, exactly what it is”. And so getting faculty to work on this flywheel and jointly studying things. I mean, I think you referred to it before as quantum thinking principles. It’s being able to look at things as they might be, try it, and not be afraid to fail.
Chris Janssen: Yeah, this is the piece of change management. How we learn, unlearn something, relearn something you.
Drumm McNaughton: Oh yes. Freeze unfreeze. Oh yeah.
Chris Janssen: So if people are learning something brand new, it’s a little bit easier to adopt because there was nothing for them to reset. But when you’re instilling change in something that people have been doing or thinking or acting on, and for a long time, that’s what makes change so hard. Right? So yeah.
[00:15:11] Quantum Thinking Principles
Chris Janssen: The quantum thinking principles, that I had mentioned, we were chatting before, I just, released a book back in June, 2025, and in the last chapter of the book we apply, and it’s about changing your mindset, about learning, we apply, we take quantum physics principles and we apply it to thinking. And so we came up with, a playbook for how can we actually take certain principles such as superposition and being able to have multiple thoughts and beliefs that understanding at the same, even if they’re contradictory. Try to around that one. Right? Uncertainty and action. How can you actually apply. And it’s not just planning and talking, it’s applying, executing while also being agile and handling that uncertainty. Those are two very different concepts. I’ve got stability, but I also need to be able to change on the fly. And how do we grasp those concepts.
So there’s a bunch of things that we, and I think it’s pretty cool to take something that’s so far out there like quantum physics, but can we drill it down in a way that is applied to how we think?
[00:16:23] Unlearning and Relearning
Chris Janssen: The gist of it is we have to, I’m going to go back to the unfreezing, refreezing, to get people to change behaviors, I believe a hundred percent we have to change our mindsets about things. Because if we’re still of the mindset that this is how it goes here, we’ve always done it like this, and that’s the best thing for this industry. That’s difficult versus, “You know what? We’re in a really crazy world that is moving fast and AI is changing, for example, every aspect of our life, including our jobs and including adult learning, how do we deal with that when we have no idea what it is, how we apply it, and it’s changing and it’s evolving so fast”. So by the time you integrate something at university. It’s going to take months. Right? And get people on board, then something new is coming out.
That’s frustrating for a lot of people. But it’s also exciting. But that’s why you have to kind of reset how you’re going to work and think and execute, because it’s gotta be that shorter flywheel thing. Let’s learn, let’s experiment, let’s iterate and ba ba, ba ba, and keeping yourself set up in a way that allows you to continue that change and to adapt.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. That is so critical. You’ve got to have multiple things.
[00:17:37] Risk Management and Stakeholder Involvement
Drumm McNaughton: One of the things that we work on is risk management and helping institutions plan. And the key we found with risk management, with change management, is creating that shared vision with your stakeholders, getting them involved with the process. That’s critical to do, but even before you get there, you’ve got to get them on board with where you’re going and make them okay with failure. Everything you try isn’t necessarily going to work, but if you keep a strong vision of where you’re going, you can get people past that.
Chris Janssen: Yeah. You know what? It’s funny that you mentioned the failure thing because when I taught entrepreneurship, I would tell my students, ” that’s where the growth happens. When you push yourself out there and you try and you’re going to learn from your mistakes. You learn more from your mistakes than your successes because you take the time to think about it”, but it’s I’m like, “you go home and tell your parents just taught you that you know how to be a failure”. Nobody signs up for that.
Drumm McNaughton: No.
Chris Janssen: But there’s so much value in, so, okay, but we’ve gotta try.
Drumm McNaughton: If you learn from your mistakes. That’s critical. Most people, “oh, we’re not going to look at what we did, et cetera”. But you gave me a couple of really good examples the other day when we were talking about AI and implementation, things along those lines. Because at this point, AI is becoming more and more mainstream.
Higher ed is starting to adapt, and I mean, faculty freaked out when it first came out because students are cheating, et cetera. I remember one project I was doing and we were struggling over creating strategies for a strategic plan, and I just, I went into AI and used that and created exactly what we were looking for, and I gave it to the faculty administration. They said, you can’t use that. You’re plagiarizing. It’s like,
Chris Janssen: Yeah.
Drumm McNaughton: But you’ve got some great examples of AI and how to get people past this concern about various things.
Chris Janssen: Yeah. Okay.
[00:20:05] AI and Faculty Adaptation
Chris Janssen: Let’s go back to higher ed freaking out about students using AI. So first of all, that is never going away. The box has been opened. Okay? And so if there’s a faster way of doing something, good on you students for finding a more efficient way to get an answer. Because if we were in the workplace, that would be what you would do. How do I find the best answer as quickly as possible, right? Although in higher ed, I get it. It’s, the situation is different. We wanna ensure that they’re actually learning something. But I got two things to say about this. One is faculty are using AI too. They’re using it to put quick curriculum together or gimme an assignment ’cause they weren’t prepared. Or maybe they wanna try something different new. So they’re using it just as well because it’s fast, it’s convenient, it’s efficient. Got it. So there’s a double edged sword here.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, well, you’re absolutely right with that. But if you’re sitting there and I’m going to go to levels of learning. If you’re at level one, knowledge and understanding, that’s one thing, but if you’re trying to teach people to analyze, to use critical thinking, there’s nothing wrong with AI, and then making somebody go in and analyze what’s true, what isn’t true, how do you know that. Those are those second to third level skills that employers wanna see versus just knowledge? Because knowledge is a fungible.
Chris Janssen: Yeah. Yeah, what is really important is the practical application piece. Knowledge gain is one thing, and you can use AI for that. You can use AI to aggregate content. Great. That’s quick and efficient. But here’s the thing. AI doesn’t learn for you. You still need to learn, you still need to process that information and make sense of it, or come up with some answers to things.
If you don’t understand that yourself as a student, that’s where the problems can happen, but this is what I’m going to say to faculty. Because that information is available at student’s fingertips, and they’ll continue using it. What that’s going to do is require us to teach in a different way, and to do assessment in different ways.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which gets into the change management aspect of unlearning what you’ve already been doing for so long, relearning a new way, and then refreezing with this new way.
Chris Janssen: Because you’re probably going to have to adopt that again in the very near future.
Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. There was a great example that we were talking about, learning from your mistakes and learning from different things, and of course evaluations, which are usually pretty useless. Do we ask the right questions? Did you like your professor? No. Who cares whether you like your professor or not? What did you learn from the course? That’s another change thing.
Chris Janssen: Yeah, for sure. That’s really funny. Those are like the teacher evaluations at the end of a semester. The students are required to do that, and I always laughed at that because it’s like there wasn’t anything, they would ask, ” how much time did you spend, studying for this class? What grade do you expect? Was your professor prepared? Blah, blah, blah”. But there were never any questions around, “Did you learn? What did you learn that’s applicable and relevant?” Like nothing around that. So it’s like, why? What are we asking them for? Why are we doing that?
[00:23:27] Experiential Learning and Assessment
Chris Janssen: But from the perspective of, forget teacher evaluation, think about the student, the assessments, how we’re assessing whether or not they learn. We have become so programmed to like, read this, listen to a lecture, take this exam, or quiz, whatever. Here’s your grade. Move on. And because that’s what, students are all they care about is getting that piece of paper after four years and what gets them that piece of paper is passing, getting A’s, getting good grades, getting grades, keep my GPA.
So they don’t care if they learned or not. And they will do whatever they need to do to get an A to ensure they get that piece of paper at the end. And I swear there’s some students that could get through those four years, graduate, have that diploma, and didn’t learn a whole hell of a lot. And we’re not even assessing those things.
Sometimes there are, I can’t make a blanket statement for every university or every professor there, because there’s some people that are doing a rockstar job. But if we’re going to continue to keep, go buy an expensive textbook, oh Lord. That’s already outdated by the time you get to class and having a passive learning environment where the professor, the “Sage on the Stage” and you just sit there and listen, maybe have a little discussion, and memorize stuff for an exam. So, I’m a huge fan of experiential learning and that stuff does not work for me.
But when you, say you still wanna give a student a take home essay project. Well, of course they’re going to go use AI, of course they are. And so then that creates problems and you’re all freaked out, “oh, they need to learn how to write, blah, blah, blah.” Yes, they do. But then you come up with a better assignment, a different assignment, a different way of delivering that or assessing their skills rather than that take home essay. OK, that will require you to teach differently and to assess differently. It’s really not the end of the world, but it is, the whole experience in higher ed, is changing. And I know that’s how we, you and I, we went to college, that’s what we did. That’s how it went, but it doesn’t work anymore.
Drumm McNaughton: So, from the change management perspective, we talked about shared vision and how critical that is and there’s two parts. Where you’re going, what you wanna do, generally doesn’t change. The how you get there is what changes. The other piece with that is getting your key stakeholders on board and in a shared governance environment, it’s critical to have faculty on board. We talked a lot about examples about how faculty are having to change their teaching from AI, but the students are also key stakeholders.
Chris Janssen: Mm-hmm.
Drumm McNaughton: They expect us to lead and to teach them. The one thing, and this is where your entrepreneurship comes into play. In business, you’re listening to your customers. Are we listening to our customers?
[00:26:24] Listening to Employers and Students
Drumm McNaughton: I mean, AAC&U just came out with a wonderful survey that says, “employers are very happy with higher ed, but we need to make some changes.” Are we listening to the employers of our graduates to find out what they need? Are we listening to students on how they want to learn?
Chris Janssen: No, we’re not, and this is why we have a skills gap and there are plenty of employers aren’t happy with higher ed, which is why they no longer require a college degree to apply for a job. This is a trend that we’re seeing going on because they’re realizing there’s a lot of great skilled people out there that didn’t get a college degree, or no longer does that degree, depending on the what people study to major in, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re prepared. There is such a disconnect. That is another thing that I have in the book as well, and it’s really sad because you were so right that, take any other industry, I don’t care if we’re talking about shampoo, furniture, cars, accounting services, if you don’t listen to your customers and what they need and give them what they want, then they start looking elsewhere, which is what the students have been doing is I’ll just go to bootcamp and I’ll learn how to code and Python to get myself a rocking job that pays six figures. This is just one of the only industries that just isn’t like playing that way.
Drumm McNaughton: It’s too insular.
Chris Janssen: It is. And the thing is, they have two audiences that they need to serve. They’ve got employers. Okay? Because what’s the point of going to college, right? It’s to prepare them for careers. But they also have the students and their families. And so this is why you hear two audiences that you have to listen to and give them what they need, and you’ve gotta make sure that that matches.
Again, we used to live in a world that, take I don’t know, Tide Detergent. You would see commercials and all they would do is convince you, you need to buy that detergent. It’s not like that anymore. It’s a buyer’s market. And this is also going to start, it already is, impacting higher ed. Lower enrollment, if you’re not going to gimme what I need and want and to prepare me for success in my career, why am I coming here and spending bazillions of dollars?
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.At the same time, I think higher ed needs to be very careful that they don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Okay. Employers, and this is up, I think the number was like 70 or 80%, very much appreciate higher ed or somewhat appreciate, they say the skills that they’re being taught are right. They’re not teaching everything that they need, but there’s not a lot of retraining that has to happen when they get out, so that’s a good mark. The thing is, is everything is changing so quickly, how do you keep up with those changes and make sure that your institution and your faculty are keeping up and teaching the ability to develop new skills as well as the knowledge that’s necessary? Honestly, it keeps coming back to faculty and the culture. Like,
Chris Janssen: are we putting enough money and resources to supporting professional development for our own faculty members? If the students come into college and they know more about technology, then the professors do, which has kind of been happening anyway. Again, where’s that value, and it just. Yeah, I think the big sticking point is getting faculty to be the ones that are leading the change, that are leading the skills development and preparation for those students. That is going to change from year to year to year. You can’t just dress up your curriculum from last year and teach the same stuff. It’s just, we just don’t live in that world anymore. So again, yeah, that, that rate of change is a big component. And for anybody who’s listening to this, who’s a faculty member, I get it, nobody likes to be told how to teach, what to teach. You’ve got a lot of this academic freedom as to what you wanna include in your curriculum and your courses and how you do that. But unfortunately, we are in this time that we have to change for the sake of the students. The students have to be the center of it all. And if we’re not giving them what they need, we’re just doing, a huge disservice. So going back to how do we get faculty on board, I do think that they need to understand why this change, what’s in it for them, what happens if they don’t change? Educate them a little bit more on emerging technology and different mindsets and resilience and comfort with the unknown. That’s a lot, and you can’t switch overnight. But if you give them agency to be a part of, say we’re adopting AI, have them be a part of it, how they wanna integrate it.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Chris Janssen: I would never say AI should replace everything that higher ed’s doing and, face to face interactions and the student discussions, at all, but you have to look at it as a way to enhance what you’re doing and not ignore it. Because we don’t wanna be the institution that’s cranking out graduates that don’t know, oh, I say this a lot too, it’s not just learning about ai, it’s learning with AI.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes.
[00:31:45] Visionary Leaders in Higher Ed
Drumm McNaughton: We’ve got a couple of really good examples of leaders of higher ed institutions who model good change management practices. I know in your book you interviewed Michael Crow.
Chris Janssen: I sure did. Actually in the book I interviewed 15 people, thought leaders, in the space of adult learning, experiential learning, technology, authors, chief learning officers, education professors, et cetera. And it was an awesome experience. and yeah, definitely one of my favorites was President Michael from ASU. He’s such a visionary and he makes stuff happen and he puts his money where his mouth is and he carves out so many resources to ensure that his faculty, staff, everybody that’s a part of that community is they’re moving forward. There’s nothing stagnant about ASU.
Drumm McNaughton: Right, and one of the big things is he makes faculty training a priority. I mean, as we were talking a minute or so ago, what came to mind is, the typical model for faculty going up for tenure is, 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. I think we’re doing a disservice by saying 40% research.
Why can’t the 40% be research in your particular area on how you can evolve your teaching? It doesn’t have to be just research in your subject matter expertise. There’s all sorts of different ways to do that. You mentioned another one that we talked about, Michael Baston.
Chris Janssen: Yes, yes. Another visionary. So Michael Baston is the president of Cuyahoga Community College, which they fondly call Tri-C. And he’s another one, I’m like, “oh, I shoulda worked for you”. But I don’t know a ton about two year institutions. ’cause I worked in a four year institution. And one of the great things about community colleges is they don’t have to deal with tenure.
So that opens things up a little bit, that the instructors, the faculty there, are all about teaching. They’re all about the student in the classroom and all that, so that’s just a different model, which there’s value to research. I can’t diss that. That’s not what I’m saying. But that shouldn’t supersede, if we don’t have students, we’re not business folks. Right? He has so many great stories, and one thing that stuck in my head is that when he took on this new position, I think it was a year or so ago, he had to put together, like this support committee, to help him stay in touch with the community, making sure that, he’s putting internships and things like that together and really connecting the greater community with the students. ‘Cause these are non-traditional students who are there, probably have families and they’re there to upskill, to get better jobs. Right? It’s very different. They’re not there to go to football games and go to frat parties. But he said he deliberately put together a committee, he’s like, “I didn’t go and find just faculty members and administrators, I brought people in from outside of the institution because I needed to hear their voices, they needed to be a part of the solution”. And I just thought that was brilliant, and I don’t see that happening regularly.
Drumm McNaughton: No, it isn’t.
Going back to Kotter. You talk first two steps, an urgency for change. You’ve got to have that, and we certainly have that now. But the second step, putting together your guiding coalition. Higher ed needs to look at the guiding coalition, not only as the internal change piece, but the external to find out what do your quote customers need? I mean, that’s, to me important.
If we keep doing the same thing, it’s that definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We’re at a point in the higher ed, we’re at a tipping point, and we need to make sure that these things are changing, that they get anchored in the culture, and that we can operate in a VUCA world. VUCA being volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and I forget what the A is ambiguous, I think.
Chris Janssen: See, I love that. I love those words. I kind of thrive with disruption and change. I find it very exciting and I also understand that I’m not normal. Ha ha..
Drumm McNaughton: I would never say that to your face.
Chris Janssen: No, but I think that’s where the entrepreneurial mindset comes in. It’s like, if there’s a better option out there, better possibilities, why not change? Why not adapt? Actually, you know what I have a great, I’m going to share the story that I have in the book as well.
I gave the example of the yellow cab industry in New York City and, they just kind of rested on their laurels. This is what you get. It’s expensive. There’s mystery fees and charges that show up and very difficult to hail, especially when it’s raining or especially when you’re trying to get to the airport. I mean, that’s what we dealt with for years.
Enter Uber. It took an external constituent to drive change in a stale industry.
[00:37:08] Disruption in Higher Ed
Chris Janssen: I sit here and look at this, just think about this from the standpoint of higher ed, higher ed’s, the yellow cab. Something else came about, because you know what, they listened to all the problems and the challenges and the needs and the demands of customers, of riders, and they gave them what they wanted. The yellow cab industry was just like sitting fat and happy and like, “well to bad, what you see is what you get”. So you take something like Uber that totally disrupts, and this is what we expect now. I wanna know when you’re shown up. I can reserve the car. I know how much it is before I get in the cab. There’s safety features, all sorts of stuff. And and then the Yellow Cab industry is scrambling, “oh, we have an app too”. They’re so behind, nobody uses them anymore, they just don’t. So this is a perfect example. The disruption came from outside the industry, a whole new entity, and it has changed, like obviously for the better the user experience. But now it’s, our expectations have changed. This is what we expect from transportation. Right? I could just see the same thing happening in higher ed. If they don’t get on board and drive the change themselves, and they have the opportunity. We all do equally. Every institution. You can make that decision.
Actually, no, I just think one of the worst things that any institution can do right now is not change, is just sit around, wait and see, or I hear people within higher ed, “Well, let’s see what other institutions are going to do”. Quite that, that’s not a good strategy,
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, we’ve got to do it and that is, are you going to be the 800 pound gorilla who dictates things like Michael Crow and ASU or are you going to be the also ran and you’re going to continue to see your enrollments drop. Thank you.
[00:38:54] Final Thoughts and Takeaways
Drumm McNaughton: Three takeaways for presidents and boards.
Chris Janssen: Oh geez. We could sit and talk for hours. This is a really fun and interesting topic. Okay, couple takeaways here. I, and this is the fire in my belly and kinda the reason I ended up writing my book, because it is all about, we’ve gotta get people, first and foremost to change their mindsets.
So that’s going to be my first takeaway here is, let’s change how we think about learning and how we think about our industry, about higher ed. Let’s be more risk takers. Okay? Try experiment. If you don’t even make that effort, like how are you going to instill change? How are you going to unlearn?
Right? So it’s, take some more risks and be comfortable with uncertainty. Be comfortable with ambiguity. And I understand most people don’t like that. It’s said than done, but this is, we gotta start somewhere, right? Let’s start taking those steps and I think overall, being comfortable with change, okay, this is a whole different dynamic to consider when we’re talking about change management, how about we be comfortable with it. Right? Versus the thing that we either ignore or push away. So change in mindset is one thing.
Secondly. Without that change in mindset, it’s very difficult for people to change their behaviors. Okay? So go back to that change management model. We need to do a better job in serving our students and our other stakeholders, and in order for us to change our systems and processes and how we learn, I’m going to go to point number one, change your mindset, and then rather than fitting students into existing systems, what if we flip that around and we change our system to fit the demands of students as well as employers? Right? Round peg square. Okay. This is all about adapting. And then I think the third thing is really about remaining relevant. Any institution you need to remain relevant, competitive, desirable. If enrollments are dropping for you, think about why. And if other institutions are being more adaptive, adopt, integrating AI, and you’re not, you can bet your bottom dollar that students are going to be going to those institutions that are much more cutting edge. Right? So you need to remain relevant and I’m of the ilk of, I would rather be the disruptor vs the disrupted. You have a choice. Okay? Get out there and take those chances and risks, or you know, be the one that gets steamrolled.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s it. And I will add to that, leadership comes from the top. You’ve got to be a visionary. You’ve got to know where it is you need to go. Your vision may not change, but how you get there more than likely will change.
Chris Janssen: That’s a good point. And those leaders I mentioned earlier, those are people who are, they’re visionaries and they’re great at execution. Yeah, we need more of those in higher ed.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. Chris, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I appreciate you taking some time with me today.
Chris Janssen: Super fun. Let’s do it again.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely.
Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Christine Janssen. Chris, thanks for being on the program. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, especially all the talk about change management, and I look forward to the next time our paths cross.
To my listeners, thanks for tuning in, see you next week.
