July 15, 2025 · Episode 268
Building a Connected College by Aligning Strategy and Services
37 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Build a Connected College that improves student outcomes by aligning strategy, services, and systems without adding complexity or cost.
Most colleges rely on more than 20 disconnected systems to support students. Studies from Tyton Partners and the Lumina Foundation show that these fragmented systems contribute to student confusion, reduced engagement, and lower graduation rates. In this episode of Changing Higher Ed, student experience strategist Elliot Felix joins Dr. Drumm McNaughton to explain how building a connected college—where strategy, services, and systems work together—can improve student outcomes without increasing institutional complexity or cost.
Elliot Felix is the founder of brightspot Strategy (acquired by Buro Happold in 2020) and the author of The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success. He has worked with more than 100 institutions including MIT, NYU, and the University of Virginia. His approach centers on aligning strategy, services, space, and technology using principles from design thinking and organizational systems.
Why Colleges Must Rethink Student Success to Build a Connected College
Many institutions respond to new challenges by layering on additional services, departments, or platforms. While well-intentioned, this additive approach creates operational sprawl, burdens students with complexity, and increases costs. According to Felix, the core issue is not how much support is offered but how well it’s aligned.
Real student success requires systemic coordination. Leaders must shift from growing programs in isolation to designing integrated systems. When departments and platforms operate in silos, students are left to navigate the gaps alone.
Using Design Thinking to Create a Connected College Framework
Felix uses design thinking as a strategic tool for institutional transformation. With a background in architecture and systems design, he emphasizes empathy, prototyping, and cross-functional collaboration. This enables institutions to test changes at a small scale, refine them with real feedback, and scale only what works.
Design thinking reframes student success from a collection of services to an interconnected experience. For leaders, it becomes a method for aligning operational decisions with institutional priorities. Rather than launching top-down initiatives, this approach fosters participation, testing, and shared ownership of results.
How to Break Down Silos Without Major Reorganizations
Reorganizations are often politically sensitive and disruptive. Instead, Felix offers practical ways to improve coordination without structural overhauls. One approach is building a shared understanding of students through institutional data. When departments operate from the same facts, alignment becomes easier.
Felix highlights Purdue University’s Communicators Council as an example of how decentralized teams can align through regular collaboration, shared templates, and consistent messaging. Dr. McNaughton adds valuable insight about successful implementation of cross-departmental coordination through “Student One Stop” (SOS) models, where institutions centralize student-facing services while maintaining specialization. In these models, frontline staff are cross-trained to handle 80% of common questions across enrollment, registration, financial aid, and student accounts, with specialists available for complex cases. This approach keeps students with the same point of contact throughout their process, eliminating the frustrating experience of being pushed between departments.
Governance That Enables Faster, Smarter Decisions
Both experts emphasize that shared governance works only when roles and responsibilities are clear. Felix stresses that more input does not automatically lead to better decisions. Institutions often fall into the trap of expanding committees and meetings while slowing down implementation.
Dr. McNaughton advocates for the RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to clarify who decides, who advises, and who needs to be informed. This framework creates transparency without micromanagement and helps institutions avoid the common pitfall where everyone wants input but no one wants accountability. Felix adds that effective governance builds trust and ensures that decisions are made swiftly and strategically, comparing good governance to well-designed open offices—intentional, varied, and functional—versus terrible cube farms that constrain productivity.
A sobering insight emerges from their discussion: reviewing past winners of governance awards reveals that about half of the recognized institutions either closed or experienced significant difficulties, suggesting that building consensus around the wrong strategy can be worse than making imperfect decisions quickly.
Tie Strategic Planning to Budgets or Risk Irrelevance
Many institutions invest months into creating strategic plans that ultimately don’t guide decision-making. Felix emphasizes that without budget alignment, plans are performative. True strategy requires prioritization, resource allocation, and tradeoffs.
Dr. McNaughton reinforces this point: when budgeting happens in isolation from planning, the CFO ends up making the real strategic decisions. He advocates for a strategic planning process that builds shared vision through stakeholder involvement—both top-down and bottom-up—while ensuring the executive team doesn’t abdicate responsibility for making tough decisions. The process must be “inside out and outside in,” involving key community partners, employers, and peer institutions who can provide hiring pipelines, research partnerships, and real-world project opportunities.
A connected college aligns strategic goals with resource flows, ensuring execution isn’t derailed by disconnected internal processes. As Dr. McNaughton notes, strategic planning should provide focus and shared vision, with change management (or “implementation science” as Felix prefers to call it) serving as the bridge to actual execution.
Redefining Risk to Enable Innovation and Progress
Higher education often treats risk as something to avoid, which discourages innovation. Felix urges leaders to reframe risk as a condition for progress. Rather than waiting for the perfect plan, institutions should ask what small steps they can take now to test and learn.
Prototyping and piloting allow low-risk experimentation and build momentum. Paired with a clear understanding of change readiness, this approach encourages action without triggering resistance. It also fosters a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
Strategic Partnerships as a Tool for the Connected College
Institutions don’t need to build every solution in-house. Strategic partnerships can expand capacity, speed, and expertise in ways that support institutional goals. Felix emphasizes that partnerships should be seen not as outsourcing, but as multiplying impact.
Examples include working with health systems to offer both care and career pathways or partnering with employers to integrate real-world projects into academic programs. These collaborations help align coursework with outcomes and extend institutional reach without adding internal complexity.
Dr. McNaughton provides a compelling example from his work with Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart at Amarillo College, where strategic partnerships with outside social services transformed student outcomes. By connecting students—particularly first-generation, low-SES learners—with comprehensive community support services, the institution saw persistence and graduation rates increase dramatically from 14% to 65-80% in some cases. This demonstrates how external partnerships can provide crucial scaffolding that institutions cannot efficiently deliver internally, particularly for students facing multiple barriers to success.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
- Create a focused strategy that makes real choices. Move beyond generic strategic plans that say “we love excellence and innovation” to an actual strategy that defines where to play and how to win. Break the cycle of “doing more with less” by focusing resources on fewer priorities – this “less with more” approach provides adequate funding for the things you’re actually trying to accomplish. Most importantly, tie your strategic plan directly to your budget; otherwise, the CFO becomes your de facto strategic planner when budget decisions are made in isolation.
- Break the cycle of fragmentation through systematic consolidation. Stop the additive culture that creates a new center, office, or system for every emerging need. Institutions often have writing centers and writing labs, as well as faculty development and faculty enrichment centers – redundancies that create confusion for students and incur unsustainable costs. Consolidate spaces, services, and systems to curb digital sprawl, reduce training overhead, and enable people to work together more effectively while making operations financially sustainable.
- Reframe risk as a condition for progress, not something to avoid. Instead of entering meetings asking “what do we need to stop to avoid negative consequences,” flip the script and ask “what can we say yes to so we’re moving forward?” This cultural shift motivates teams because progress drives everyone. Adopt a prototyping and piloting mindset – aim for “good enough to try” rather than waiting for perfect consensus. This design thinking approach unlocks innovation and forward momentum without triggering organizational resistance.
Bonus Takeaway
Dr. McNaughton emphasizes that strategic planning must be a comprehensive process that “builds shared vision on the way through by involving stakeholders, top down, bottom up, consensus building around the right direction.” However, he stresses that “the core planning team, the executive team, doesn’t abdicate their responsibility on making the tough decisions. You put a budget behind it and then you put an implementation plan in place so that it does in fact get implemented.” This balanced approach ensures broad buy-in while maintaining decisive leadership and accountability for results.
Final Thoughts
Elliot Felix offers institutional leaders a clear, actionable model for moving from fragmentation to alignment. The connected college is not a theoretical construct—it’s a framework that enables leaders to redesign operations, break down silos, and improve student outcomes by aligning strategy with execution. For presidents and boards under pressure to produce results with limited resources, this approach offers a path forward.
About Our Podcast Guest
Elliot Felix is a student success author, speaker, and consultant to more than a hundred colleges and universities. He uses his background in design to create better-connected colleges and universities by improving the spaces students learn and live in, the services that support them, and the technology they use. Through this work, Elliot has improved the experience of more than 1,000,000 students and counting. Over the last 20 years, he has spoken at SxSW Edu, taught courses on innovation, and worked with more than 100 universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, MIT, NYU, NC State, University of Michigan, and University of Virginia. brightspot, the higher education strategy consulting company he founded in 2011, was acquired by Buro Happold in 2020, where he now leads the higher education advisory practice. You can find his work in Fast Company, Forbes, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His book, How to Get the Most Out of College, was published in January 2022 and received a blue star from Kirkus Reviews, calling it “A knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide packed with strategies and encouragement.” His upcoming book, The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success, is arriving summer 2025.
Connect with Elliot Felix 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 academic realignment. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide, ensuring his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 268 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Elliot Felix
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.
[00:00:20] Guest Introduction
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.
My guest today is Elliot Felix, CEO of brightspot Strategy. Brightspot’s, a consultancy that focuses on attracting and retaining students by improving the student experience, their spaces, services, and technology. He and his team have done this at multiple institutions, including MIT, NYU, NC State, and University of Virginia, and in the process touched over 1 million students.
Elliot has just released a second book called The Connected College, and he joins me today to talk about the book and how higher ed institutions can improve their enrollment, retention, and graduation rates by redesigning the student experience for today’s student by thinking about the student experience in a holistic way.
Elliot, welcome back to the program.
Elliot Felix: It’s great to be here. Thanks, Drumm.
Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to a great conversation. Before we get there, how have you been?
Elliot Felix: Pretty good. A couple things changing in higher ed. So, I’ve been busy, like, like you and I’ve been busy, in addition to helping universities by day, working on a book and a companion podcast by night. All good.
Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, we’re gonna talk about the book today. I’m excited to delve into it.
Elliot Felix: I thought we might. Yeah.
[00:01:50] Elliot Felix’s Background and Mission
Drumm McNaughton: So give the listeners a little bit of background in case listeners don’t remember it from the first time.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m a student success author, speaker, and consultant that’s been lucky enough to work with more than a hundred colleges and universities to help them understand and improve the experiences that students have and how to make them more successful by looking at the spaces that students learn and live in, the services that support them, and the technology they use. That’s really my mission is student success. So my first book was How to Get The Most Outta College, and that’s sharing the evidence on how students succeed with students and families that we talked about last time. And my next book is really taking those lessons about how students succeed and it’s helping institutions work better together to make it happen.
Drumm McNaughton: How did you get into this area of student success?
Elliot Felix: Well, it’s funny, as you hear about the student experience, you hear, gosh, what students do in the classroom is important, but so is what they do out of the classroom. And I’m like living proof of that because. I like to say I’ve been helping students since I was one and I was involved in student government as an undergrad and in grad school, caught the bug again and I went to grad school at MIT and had an amazing experience during a time of leadership transition. There were some things that students felt like we could improve. And so we got together and we did the benchmarking, we did a survey, we did town hall meetings, focus groups. We defined the problem, brainstormed solutions, and then we went to the new dean and she was delighted that we weren’t just coming to complain, but we actually had some ideas, had some solutions. They were prioritized among the student body and we made a real difference. We increased the pay of TAs. We restructured the course schedule so that it was easier to collaborate and cross enroll, we really elevated the thesis as a capstone project.
And as I think about my work as a strategic consultant, to a hundred plus colleges and universities, it’s actually not that different. We’re doing those kinds of activities to really understand what’s working, what isn’t, what’s missing, and then work together to change the strategy, to change the space, to change the services, to change the systems and make things better for students.
Drumm McNaughton: How did you get your perspective of holistic or systems thinking?
Elliot Felix: Well, it’s funny. I think the ideas that have the most power are the ones where it’s impossible to unlearn them. So it’s like Freud’s theory of the unconscious or, Darwin’s theory of evolution. Like once you know those, you can’t see the world the way you did before, and design is like that for me, where my background is in design and I can’t help but see the world through the lens of design as this amazing way to imagine a better future together and to understand people and to make connections and think holistically and create together and prototype and test and pilot and iterate. And so that’s really my ethos and my approach is using design thinking to enable student success, and it’s served me well. And certainly, my clients as well.
Drumm McNaughton: What did you major at while you were at MIT?
Elliot Felix: In architecture and design.
Drumm McNaughton: Okay, so that definitely, to do it and do it right, you have to be able look at the whole perspective.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I think you have to see the parts in the whole, and you have to see how they’re changing and you have to see how they affect people. And it’s interesting, when I went to MIT 20 years ago, I went there really because of its technical exploration and, its reputation. And I went in an architect and I came out a designer and a strategist with a much deeper appreciation, not just for the technical side of things, but for the human side of things. And I realized places are for people and so are technology platforms and so are events and academic programs, and design was that kind of through line to be thinking holistically and to solve problems for people.
Drumm McNaughton: I understand having flown airplanes, there’s multiple systems, but if you want to keep the airplane flying all of those systems have to work together, and that’s where I got my grounding in that type of thing.
Elliot Felix: Nice. Did you do, what is it, OODA loops. That’s one of my favorite aviation concepts.
Drumm McNaughton: OODA loops?
Elliot Felix: Observe, orient, decide, act.
Drumm McNaughton: Oh no. It was just, immediately you see what was going on and you just did what you needed to do.
Elliot Felix: Oh, well I’ve heard that acronym for the way pilots think, and people have talked about that as like a management theory that all teams can work that way. And the quicker you can observe, orient, decide, and act like the better pilot you are, but also, the better consultant or the better professor or the better administrator you are, so.
Drumm McNaughton: that’s the first time I’ve heard the term, but, it makes a lot of sense.
Elliot Felix: Maybe I made it up in a dream world. I don’t
Drumm McNaughton: You may have, who knows?
[00:07:33] The Connected College: An Overview
Drumm McNaughton: Anyway, your new book, The Connected College, it’s a holistic approach to running a university with the end in mind. Student success.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, that’s, to use your plane analogy, all the systems need to work together, and I think in my consulting work, I’ve found places where it does and places where it doesn’t. And I really wanted to create an encouraging evidence-based playbook for breaking down silos so that students succeed. And so those systems are working better together, and so we’re going from great to awesome.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. So in your book, it’s how systems can work together. Obviously, getting students connected to careers is critical. Partnering with industry is all part of it. What are those connections, because you talk about those in the book, what are those connections?
Elliot Felix: Some of the key ones in the book, I think it starts with belonging. So you have to feel connected to a community, and it might be through an affinity space or an identity space, mentoring, alumni services. We did a project for NYU that I think was really fun to create these spaces that used to be these kind of drab rows and rows of computers. Technology centers. And we created places where people could, the sort of tagline was “connect and create”. And so students were better connected to each other because they’re working in teams on projects that make an impact.
Another one is, is support services. Right? Where you want to connect students with support, to succeed, and it might be writing, tutoring, it could be advising. And I think that’s really about meeting students where they are. We do a lot of work, for instance, turning libraries into student success hubs that bring together all kinds of different services. We did a project at UVA where it was like, “how do you co-locate different advising functions so students can get advice on career, finance, study abroad, mindfulness, whatever it might be, so that they can better succeed.
And another connection is connecting coursework to careers. Right? Things like experiential learning where students are doing real world projects that make an impact and that requires another connection, which is internal collaboration. Where the career office, the alumni office, the Teaching and Learning Center, they’re all working together and you’re partnering with industry, which is, another kind of connection.
So I think at a connected college students feel a sense of belonging. They’re connected to support services to help them succeed. Coursework leads to careers, and everybody’s working together internally and externally to make it happen.
Drumm McNaughton: Those are great ways of looking at it. And I always remember from studying systems theory and systems thinking at graduate work, it was, you’re looking for the levers. What are the levers that you can throw that are gonna make large impacts?
[00:10:50] Institutionl Barriers to Student Success
Drumm McNaughton: But before we get into those, there’s barriers that you see at institutions. Org structure would being one of them. What are some of the barriers that you have to get past?
Elliot Felix: Well, one is I think, it’s sort of a blessing and a curse, but higher ed has deeply embedded in the culture and the DNA, is this idea of access and meeting students’ needs, faculty needs, alumni needs, which I think is great, but unfortunately the, like, the tried and true playbook for meeting those needs is usually to add stuff.
So there’s a new need, you’re recruiting different kinds of students, your adult learners as well as 18 to 21 year olds. You have more transfer students, you have more first gen students, recruit more veterans. So you create a transfer student center and a veteran student center and a first gen student center. And what do you do if you’re a first gen veteran student who transfers? So I think we just keep adding and adding and adding and adding all with the best intentions, but it creates experiences that aren’t seamless and it creates costs that aren’t sustainable.
So I think that additive culture, we’ve got to break that cycle so we don’t just keep adding and adding and adding and making things more complicated and costly and confusing. I think part of the way we break the cycle is better strategy, which is another kind of barrier. I think everybody has a strategic plan, but very few have an actual strategy where they’re making real choices about where to win and how to play. And so we’re kind of stuck in this cycle of do more with less, but I actually want people to focus so they can do less with more and have more resources to do the things they’re focusing on.
And I think the last big barrier is siloed structures. I opened the book talking about a university that has a writing lab and a writing center, which sounds like an apocryphal story, but everybody’s got their version of it. I talked to somebody the other day and they’ve got a faculty enrichment center and a faculty development center in the same building on two different floors.
Drumm McNaughton: What’s the difference
Elliot Felix: Exactly. So.
Drumm McNaughton: besides the word Enrichment /Development?
Elliot Felix: What’s the difference between a writing center and a writing lab? There is none. It’s just one is in Elliot Hall and the other’s in Drumm Hall. And these siloed structures, they beget separate spaces. They beget redundant systems. Maybe, Drumm’s Writing Center uses a different system to book appointments and book space and manage the relationship than Elliot’s Writing Lab.
Now all of a sudden we’ve got two spaces, we’ve got two systems, the data doesn’t talk to each other. And so I think if we can break the cycle of adding, adding, adding, and look to collaborate, cooperate, consolidate, we can use strategy that focuses us and we can rethink our structures, we help students succeed.
Drumm McNaughton: Easier said than done though, because a lot of these things, for example, you’ve got student support and when an institution gets big enough it gets moved away and out of academic affairs to be its own division. They end up working autonomously and sometimes without consideration for where the students are, which is in academic affairs.
Same kind of thing with advising. Many times they’ll put advising within the college or the school versus an overall group. Talk about that How do you bring those together to where they are truly shared services and they’re specialized enough that they can deal with different majors, et cetera?
Elliot Felix: Well, I think a good starting point, when you’ve got these separate structures or you’ve got this very diffused approach, is creating a shared understanding of the student because, like, silos don’t work for student success and that will lead people toward more cooperation and collaboration.
Also, when you start sharing data on who your students are then you can start sharing data on how you’re helping them and how well it’s working, and I think that also can help. And I think sometimes things need to be restructured and you rethink the balance of what’s centralized and what’s distributed. Sometimes there isn’t an appetite for a reorg, and it’s more about better coordination.
Like one of the stories that I talk about in the book, I wasn’t involved in this but I certainly admire it, is Purdue I think has made amazing strides in how effectively they communicate internally and with students. And one of the ways they did that is they recognized that marketing and communications is such a diffuse subject. You’ve got it in every school, you’ve got it central, you’re talking to families, you’re talking to prospects, you’re talking to current students.
And so they created the Purdue Communicators Council where there’s regular meetings, there’s templates, there’s best practices. So we don’t have to reorg everybody who’s doing comms, but we can get those people to talk to each other more regularly, use the same templates, use the same brand, share best practices, lessons learned, scale things up.
So I think there’s a variety of strategies, but it starts with understanding the student, sharing the data, and then looking for ways to work better together formally and informally.
Drumm McNaughton: That makes perfect sense. One institution I was involved with, they had what they call “Student One Stop”, SOS, and in that group, which was a fairly large group, they had specialization per majors, but it kept the student advisors centralized, they had finance people in the group.
And the nice thing was, many times what I’ve seen in colleges and universities is when a student comes in and says, “oh, we don’t deal with that”, and they push it over to another group. It all stayed there, you had the same point of contact that you talked always, and that one person made sure you got through the process.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I think one stops are a great approach, digitally and physically to doing that. It’s also a good example of you can integrate the front end and then specialize the back end. So what happens a lot with one stops is you get frontline staff that are cross trained. Right?
So they can answer a question about enrollment or registration or financial aid, or student accounts and they can answer, say, 80% of those questions that cut across, but eventually there’s gonna be some super obscure, complicated, something about a loan policy for an international returning student, and then that gets referred to a specialist.
But that’s the other thing that I think, can spark collaboration is when you look at, you mine the data on your transactions, so not just what you know, who students are and what they need, but how you’re helping them. You often uncover that a lot of things are related and you find opportunities for cross training.
It might be among students in a peer-to-peer delivery model or might be your frontline folks. But I do think there are ways to better coordinate, consolidate, co-locate, but it’s not a magic wand. It doesn’t fix everything instantaneously,
Drumm McNaughton: Everybody wants that silver bullet, baby.
Elliot Felix: Otherwise they’d all be doing it, I guess.
Drumm McNaughton: And we’d be outta work.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Well, that’d be okay. If I achieve my own obsolescence, then we got a lot of students succeeding and I’d be happy with that.
Drumm McNaughton: Good point. Good point.
[00:19:09] Strategies for Effective Governance and Collaboration
Drumm McNaughton: So collaborate and consolidate is critical, especially with org structures, getting people to work across boundaries.
**Agility is always one thing that higher ed struggles with, especially when it comes to shared governance. Talk to that because higher ed is big on shared governance, which I think is a good thing. But at the same time, many times the governance structures, whether it be the trustees or the internal faculty, shared governance slows things down.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I think governance is neither good nor bad. It all depends on its execution. Right? And I think the good governance is where you’re intentional about what decisions to make, how you’re getting input, how you’re sharing the results, how you’re tracking the progress. And I think a lot of people have a knee jerk reaction that, like, more meetings and more committees and more input is better.
But more isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes more is just more. And I think if you’re really focused then you can get input, you can get lots of input, but still move quickly. We did the IT governance process not too long ago for Colorado State, and it really came down to thinking through what are the big technology investments, where do we need input and now how do we organize groups that provide regular input on those decisions. Maybe some are about infrastructure and some are about learning and others are about research and, others are about student life.
And once you have those defined areas you can organize groups, those groups can meet regularly, so the conversations and the consensus can build over time, and you can move swiftly. I think, to me it’s like governance is like the open office, right? They’re like great examples of open office that are intentionally designed and people have lots of choices and there’s a lot of variety of spaces. Some open, some enclosed.
And then they’re like terrible cube farms. Right? And there’s terrible governance where people are drowning in committees and there’s great governance where they’re really focused and strategic and at the same time, decisive and transparent. And everybody’s engaged.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. One of the things that we typically see is the best institutions as far as shared governance, board governance, in some ways is very different, because boards should be setting direction, holding people accountable, et cetera. When you get to the shared governance piece, that’s where you get the faculty involved and faculty like to, study things, et cetera, which is a good thing.
The institutions that I find are the most effective are those that have an overall policy for **shared governance that reinforces what we call a “RACI model”. Responsible, Accountable, Consult, and Inform. So that you follow that process and it makes so much more sense.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. I think that’s a RACI model is a great way to do it because you’re defining their responsibilities. And what I love about a RACI, or homegrown models, whatever it may be, is you’re also avoiding the micromanagement. because I think the micromanagement is also sometimes how things get bogged down and you lose speed. And to me it comes back to like Andrew Carnegie. Leadership is doing the right things and management is doing things right. And I think people get those conflated and then you can have a lot of people spending a lot of time agreeing on something, which is actually the wrong thing to do.
One of the really interesting tidbits that I found in the book for the chapter on board governance, where I interviewed this amazing guy named Drumm McNaughton. You should meet him at some point I looked at the, I think it’s the AACNU has an award for shared governance.
I was looking at the past award winners of last 20 years, and I’m looking at the list and about half the institutions I don’t even recognize the names. And then I start looking into these institutions and a bunch of them have closed, so they got a lot of people agreeing on a strategy that tanked the institution. So it’s not just all about building consensus and everybody agreeing. It’s not just about doing things right. You got to do the right things. You got to have the strategy too.
Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely, and that comes together with really the two final points on this is strategic planning is to provide focus and a shared vision, and then the change management is how you implement it.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Only, you can’t call it change management because nobody wants to be handled. I think that’s one of my, , lessons in, higher ed consulting adventures is, you don’t call it digital transformation. You actually, you don’t call anything a transformation because then you just get everybody worried and it sounds hard and expensive.
And then the other is, you don’t call it change management. Think of implementation, implementation science, next steps, whatever it might be. But yeah, I think you, you really have to think carefully about what’s the change, and then you have to do some kind of change readiness assessment. What’s gonna inhibit or enable this change? If the change is a new technology system or a new space that’s gonna, if we take the one stop example, what’s gonna hold people back, a sense, their departmental identity. Are they using different systems? Are they in disparate spaces?
Then you need to design a change program. Where through communication, learning, development, experience, exposure, people can get over those barriers. But I think it is really critical and often overlooked. There’s a whole section in the book on change management and all the different change models out there from Cotter and Lewin and more, good old ADKAR.
So, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because it’s really critical as is, the plan that helps you focus, and I think most institutions have a strategic plan, but very few have a strategy where they’re at, where they’re making real choices about where to play and how to win. To use the Roger Martin definition.
Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re absolutely right that the challenge is, let’s throw it all up there on the board. We don’t have to make hard decisions. It’s just a quote guideline instead of, this is what we’re gonna be executing. You’ve got to make the tough decisions when it comes to finances, because you can’t afford everything and you don’t wanna afford everything because not everything is right.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And I know one thing you really emphasize in your strategic planning process, and I wholeheartedly agree, is tying it, at least at some level, to budgeting. Because then otherwise your budget is your defacto strategic plan. You’ve got this document that takes you a year to create and it basically says, you we love apple pie, excellence, innovation, and then the actual decisions about what we’re gonna do and not do are made by the CFO in some corner somewhere when it’s time to do the budgeting. But if you can knit the two together and then tie your decisions to your resources, then it works much better. , Then you kind of have to see the plan as a series of choices.
Drumm McNaughton: You said it very well, it is a series of choices and the process that good strategic planners use is building a shared vision on the way through by involving stakeholders, top down, bottom up, consensus building around the right direction. The core planning team, the executive team, doesn’t abdicate their responsibility on making the tough decisions. You put a budget behind it and then you put an implementation plan in place so that it does in fact get implemented.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and I think in terms of the top, you are absolutely right, it’s top down and bottom up. I think it’s also inside out and outside in. I think what some folks forget, they look internally or they do a kind of a cursory SWOT analysis, but bringing your partners into the planning process, like who are the key companies in the community that you have a relationship with or you’re trying to build a relationship with, because ideally those are companies that are hiring your grads that are sponsoring consulting projects so that your students can do real world projects. They’re sending their execs back for executive education. They’re partnering on research. Maybe they’re even providing services that you need.
I know like, Quinnipiac has a really cool partnership with a healthcare health system where, they’re providing healthcare and then they’re also providing a talent pipeline because they’re hiring the grads.
So I think you really have to involve those key, could be some peer institutions and a consortia, but I think look inside, out and outside in too.
Drumm McNaughton: You’ve heard me talk about Russell Lowry Hart when he was at the Amarillo College and they had these kind of partnerships with outside social services. They took their retention numbers, their persistence numbers, graduation, they tripled or quadrupled them. From 14% up to 65, 80% in some cases, because of these partnerships that when a student had a challenge in going through, especially the type of students that they were recruiting, first gen, low, SES, et cetera, they would have challenges going through, they had the services there to be able to scaffold what needed to be done.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and I think there’s lots of cases where partners can do things better than you can, and I think we sometimes have this knee jerk reaction that like, markets and missions conflict. But I think there’s room to partner with the private sector. There are things they can do better than you can yourself because they’ve got scale. And because there’s a kind of a network effect. Right? Where all of a sudden you can benefit from them having done it with a hundred other institutions and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and you get expertise and efficiency in one.
There’s a section of the book on partnerships as well, because I think that’s, like change management, that’s one of these big ideas that I think is everybody’s job.
Drumm McNaughton: What impressed me the most about the book was the holistic approach that you took. It wasn’t, student services needs to do this. It’s like student services needs to be involved with enrollment, with recruiting, all of those things. You look at it, the college as connected, hence the title. I really like that. But also too, not only connected, but you look at it as a whole entity. Systems thinking. Kudos to you for that.
Elliot Felix: Thank you very much. Yeah, each chapter is a function of the university. So there’s academics and athletics and advancement and career, IT facilities, governance, student affairs, academic support, libraries and, and then an intro that sets the tone and a conclusion, that guides you, that gets you started.
And each chapter starts off with a profile of a higher ed innovator. So you get a sense of somebody who’s leading a connected college or university, or the function within one. Has three big ideas for transformation and and then has a bunch of tactics about who you can work with to make it happen. So I tried to structure it and find those connections without propagating or propping up the silos we’ve got. because I’m very much hoping I can help people break some of those down.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, if they read your book, they certainly will be, a good start. So I wanna thank you for being on the program. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.
[00:32:09] Three Takeaways for Presidents and Boards
Drumm McNaughton: We spent a lot of time on what colleges need to do to get there, but let’s summarize it. Three takeaways for presidents and boards. What do they need to do to become a connected college?
Elliot Felix: So I think that a strategic plan that makes choices on where to play and how to win that provides focus. So we break this cycle of doing more with less and we get in the mindset of how do I do less with more? How do I have more resources for the fewer things I’m focusing on?
Second, I think it is time to consolidate spaces and services and systems. I think we’ve got to curb the digital sprawl where there’s a new tool or system for everything, and that system begets more training, more support, more communication. We got to end the everything gets a new space and consolidate so that people can work better together and the costs are sustainable.
And I think the last thing is really a cultural thing, which is really about reshaping or rethinking your relationship to risk, because I think a lot of leaders are worried about the future, and I get it because times are uncertain, but you might go into a meeting thinking about, “what do I have to stop so that it doesn’t have these negative, consequences to manage the risks”.
But if you go into the meeting saying, ” let me like flip the script on that and say ‘what can I say yes to so, that we’re moving forward’, we’re making some progress, however small it might be’. I think that’s really healthy and really helpful because it’s motivating for the teams, because progress is what drives us all. And then you can move into this kind of like prototyping and piloting mindset and that’s what design thinking is all about instead of aiming for perfect, aim for good enough to try and that can be a real unlock to move some of these things forward.
Drumm McNaughton: Those are great takeaways. Thank you. Always take into account the culture, what you’ve got, because a lot of times the culture needs changing,
Elliot Felix: Absolutely.
[00:34:25] Conclusion and Farewell
Drumm McNaughton: So what’s next for you?
Elliot Felix: Well, the book is coming out in July and I’m very much excited for people to get their hands on it and then roll up their sleeves and start breaking down silos so students succeed on their campus. And I’m excited to keep doing the work with innovative and interesting institutions that are really focused on transformation and whether it’s, working with industry in a innovation district or whether it’s adopting active and experiential learning on and off campus, that’s what gets me up every day. And in the fall there’s gonna be a book tour centered on variety of academic libraries across the country. So I’m excited to do those where there’ll be a book club and a workshop and a talk, and getting folks in a position where they can make progress.
Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, thank you again so much for being on the program, and thank you for a copy of the book. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I wish you all the best with it. Where are you going for your book tour, first stop?
Elliot Felix: It might be Cambridge, Mass, we’ll see.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, that would be a good place considering you’ve got ties to MIT, so.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, well actually I’m wearing my MIT shirt listeners can’t see, but, I’m wearing my
Drumm McNaughton: I was wondering what that was.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, it’s, it, the logo looks like it comes from the future, which I think is appropriate.
Drumm McNaughton: There you go.
There you go.
Elliot Felix: Thanks again sir.
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure, Elliot. Take care.
Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Elliot Felix, CEO of brightspot Strategy. Elliot, it was a pleasure having you back on the show. I look forward to the next time our paths cross.
To my listeners, thanks again for listening. See you next week.
