Higher Education Change Management for Technology Projects and Digital Transformation:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 308 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Mike Toguchi

Transcript 308: Changing Higher Ed podcast  – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Mike Toguchi

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] Welcome and Guest Intro

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guest today is Mike Toguchi, Chief Strategy Officer at Orchestrate, a division of Tectonic, where he leads platform direction and application management systems that streamline complex processes like scholarships, grants, admissions, and accessibility services. That’s a mouthful. But I’ll tell you, with the 25 years of experience he’s had driving digital transformation for universities, nonprofits, and foundations, he’s become an expert in change management.

[00:01:03] Why Change Management Matters

Drumm McNaughton: Whether you’re making a change in technology or trying to implement new business processes, it all requires change management. Mike has worked with multiple higher ed institutions, including Stanford and UC Davis, and he joins me today to talk about how you too can build and implement technology projects that deliver meaningful impact across divisions without resistance to change.

Mike, welcome to the program.

Mike Toguchi: Thanks. Happy to be here. Excited to chat.

Drumm McNaughton: Me as well.

[00:01:36] Higher Ed and AI Context

Drumm McNaughton: You are the Chief Strategy Officer at Team Tectonic. And that’s a mouthful for me to say, so I apologize if I mess it up. But you guys do a lot of work with higher education, digital transformation, et cetera. Stuff that’s right in the news all the time, nowadays, especially with AI. Before we get into that and the topic today, “how to implement change in a tech adverse world”, I’m wondering if that was designed definitely for higher ed and people not liking technology. Before we get there, give us some background please.

Mike Toguchi: Sure.

[00:02:19] Company Origins and Mission

Mike Toguchi: our company started, around 25 years ago in the Northern Virginia area. This was obviously in the early digital days when no one even had a website, and we’ve watched things evolve and different kinds of, not only evolutions, but revolutions of data and security and, going from websites to CRMs to AI and everything in between.

We started out really with the idea that technology is a, is something that helps people communicate. We wanted to bring think tanks, we wanted to bring their research online. For associations, we wanted them to be able to better serve their members, for nonprofits, how to help reach donors and do mission-driven work, and for universities how to better serve students.

We didn’t want technology to be something that was scary or intimidating or even the focus of a project. It was really more a matter of using that technology as a means to achieve these goals and objectives. And that’s what we’ve been able to do over the years, andwe get to work with a lot of unique and diverse partners, and that’s been really exciting.

[00:03:20] Working With Major Campuses

Drumm McNaughton: Well, some of those diverse partners include Stanford, UC Davis, and the higher ed arena. Those aren’t lightweight institutions.

Mike Toguchi: Yes. Yes, it’s,it’s been exciting seeing the changes. You get to see the way things are implemented, the governance that’s different there. And, we’re constantly trying to help find ways to tailor solutions for each university. Every campus has a different culture, every board of regents has different directives and things like that. So, you have to be able to take some of the lessons that we’ve learned from the various places, over the years, whether it’s in higher ed or not, and help these different departments and groups apply them so that they can be innovative, so that they can find good ways to implement change management.

[00:04:03] Mike’s Path Into Tech

Drumm McNaughton: So tell us about Mike, you’re one of the founders of the company.

Mike Toguchi: Well, I was very, I was a very early employee. It was a one or two person shop, and I came on board very, very early. So I’ve been around for 23 years. Yes, I have a background in political science and communication, and so technology felt like a natural fit as an evolution of helping,folks from an advocacy standpoint, online, from a fundraising standpoint, online, from just utilizing all those research things that we found out there. And so it’s been extremely rewarding the way we’ve been able to navigate these waters, in terms of finding, whether it’s a small two or five person nonprofit that’s kind of fighting their battles out there. Or whether it’s some of the large institutions that you mentioned that are multi-billion dollar enterprises that have to find ways to scale their operations, and everything in between.

I love working with folks and trying to find creative problem solving ways to help them and their staff in ways that create a balance between being agile and innovative and taking risks. And also understanding that you have to have like, seamless and smooth operations and you have to, kind of be steady with that. So, I really just really enjoy those challenges and having a different one each day.

[00:05:19] Liberal Arts Advantage

Drumm McNaughton: Here’s an off the wall question just kind of came to me, so you know, pardon me if this doesn’t work. You were a liberal arts major, political science. How has that helped you in the technology area?

Mike Toguchi: Well, to me everything comes from a foundation of critical thinking and approach. Wanting to be extremely research oriented, finding out how things work, learning. And in particular, if you’re in Washington DC you want to know, you know, there’s this side and that side, and even though things have changed a little bit over the years, there’s some great value in having the kind of mindset of wanting to explore all the options that are out there, even the ones you don’t understand or don’t agree with. And then that might help you better hone or craft your solution, your a side of an argument, your approach for doing things, and you might uncover things that you didn’t otherwise, and it reduces some of the barriers to change. It reduces the risk averseness that people might naturally have.

And so, again, political communication, being research oriented, critical thinking, argumentation, those things to me are writing skills. Those are invaluable. They are across any industry, and as it relates to technology, it’s helped us bridge technology to leadership, and being people centric and having the kinds of skills that, anybody can say they’re implementing HubSpot, Salesforce, some SIS or something along those lines. You can be a tool person, but having the kinds of skills you need in order to have the staying power with it,to create the plan that operationalizes it, that creates integrations across departments. Those are all things that they don’t come from, ones and zeros in computer science. They come from people skills, from liberal arts, from soft sciences.

Drumm McNaughton: A great explanation. Thank you.

[00:07:15] Tech as Operations Enabler

Drumm McNaughton: And you touched on something about technology enabling operations. You’re seeing in the marketplace now a transforming of definitions, outcomes, the balancing of messaging and implementation. Talk to that just a little bit.

Mike Toguchi: Sure.

[00:07:36] What Scaling Really Means

Mike Toguchi: People are waking up, some more rudely than others, to the idea that it’s a now or never time to start scaling things. To use, whether it’s AI or other tools to create efficiencies to streamline things to…

Drumm McNaughton: Need to interrupt you just a minute. What do you mean by scaling? Because a lot of listeners may not understand what that term means.

Mike Toguchi: The scalability of a solution is its ability to be replicated and in order to fit, if you’re talking about a university, for example, like a department might say, “Hey, look, congratulations. We are extremely successful using, again, insert some tool or some technology.” But if all the related departments use different processes or different tools, that’s not a scaled solution. That’s a bunch of little fiefdoms and there’s no way for leadership to be able to say, “Hey, we have good, validated data to understand how things, our systems are working across our campus”. They just have a bunch of different little projects that are operating. Even if they’re operating efficiently, they’re not scaled.

So scalability of something is the ability to create a process, an operation, a workflow, anything that can be then replicated in a broader scheme, across your, organization, university, whatever you’re dealing with.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and that is one of the big.

[00:08:58] SaaS vs Spreadsheet Reality

Drumm McNaughton: Reasons why so many institutions go to a SaaS system or an enterprise resource management, that type of thing, to have these ubiquitous processes across an entire institution so that leadership has view into what’s going on versus having to call up Joe or Mary and say, what is your Excel spreadsheet?

Sorry. Didn’t mean to slight you on that. What is your Excel spreadsheet or your Google sheet say for your, how many students you’ve got and what classes they’re taking. That’s important.

Mike Toguchi: Absolutely.

[00:09:37] Reframing Tools to Time Back

Mike Toguchi: The way it ends up playing out is even sometimes when you have those SaaS tools, people create their own little tribal processes, and it’s not always the fault of the employee. Sometimes Joe and Mary are like being told, “Hey, this is the data that I need”, and they don’t have an easy way to extract that from whatever system or systems they’re using.

And so, they spend their days mindlessly trying to call information from multiple sources, some using Google and Excel and trying to then aggregate it into something. And that’s one of the core things that we have accomplished and we always are looking is where do you have people that are just using their time in a way that they’re probably like extremely talented, hardworking people. And they’re just trying to accomplish whatever they’ve been told to do, but they’re not spending their time, if they’re at a university, they’re not spending their time serving students or working on something that’s extremely impactful. That’s not what they signed up for.

They didn’t sign up to sit and copy and paste stuff into spreadsheets. And so, that, that’s where we’re trying, when folks are like, “oh my goodness, not another technology project or another tool”. It’s like, no, no, you have to reframe that. You cannot be thinking of it in tool terms. You need to be thinking of it in, “how is my day currently spent and how can I claw back that time so that, not only saving it, but I’m repurposing it into a way more productive sort of situation”.

[00:11:01] Change Starts in Planning

Drumm McNaughton: Well, to me that starts with a shared vision of what you are really wanting to do. And with that you’ve got implementation. But then there’s the change management piece of all that.

Most folks say, “oh Yes, we can do the change management, et cetera, et cetera. We’ll get that to the end”. What they don’t realize is effective change management starts with the planning for a project and building a shared vision. Am I right?

Mike Toguchi: You are definitely right.

[00:11:33] Leadership Trust and WIIFM

Mike Toguchi: The way that plays out is often, leadership in whatever form that it is, sort of, like Zeus with a lightning bolt, “we’re going to do X”. And “X” is not a strategy. It’s not something that is an operationalized system. It’s just like, “Hey, we’re going to use this tool,” or something along those lines.

And that does not engender trust, that does not make people excited or confident about what’s coming. And therefore they already start off on a bad foot. And so the change management is where there’s: Are there going to be good feedback loops? Are people going to have an opportunity to innovate and figure out what works and what doesn’t?

Have you told a story about the “what’s in it for me”, or how do I fit into this picture? And that’s, that was what I was connecting earlier is to like, it’s not about saying like, well, “currently you spend your day in Google and Excel, but now congratulations, you’re going to spend it in, insert something different”. It’s about saying, “no, 25% of your time is spent doing this. We’re going to get you 25% more time in front of, helping a student or working on something that is more substantive”. It’s about creating a story for the folks that need to do this implementation so that they understand the picture, they understand how it’s going to be evaluated the leadership is being, good communication, accountable to the results of it, and moving forward in that way.

Drumm McNaughton: So it’s really defining what outcomes you want. What is the shared vision? And shared vision means back and forth between leadership, stakeholders, the people that are actually going to be using the processes, and then implementing according to that shared vision. Does that make sense?

Mike Toguchi: No, that, that makes a ton of sense. And when groups do that, they are far ahead of the curve.

[00:13:20] Champions and Adoption Layers

Mike Toguchi: The other thing we’re always looking for is making sure they have people that will champion this. adoption is really the key. It’s not about, “you can do great planning, you could do good implementation”, but as soon as you start you need people that are going to continue and carry through the work to make sure that, staff at every level understand their role in making the system work. That’s the only way you can get integrated departments or validated data and things like that. That’s where we see a lot of success, it’s not just strong leaders, but it’s strong folks at every layer of the process that are helping guide this and shepherd it through.

[00:13:56] Planning Elements That Work

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s go through the change management process. Starting with the planning.

Mike Toguchi: Mm-hmm.

Drumm McNaughton: How critical, well, obviously I’m, I was about to say something really stupid. Of course planning is critical, but what are the elements that you go through in planning out a project? Just say like, you walk into XYZ University. They’ve got 30,000 students, they’ve got 5,000 faculty, staff, et cetera. How do you approach a planning for a, well, you give me a project that might work with something like that.

Mike Toguchi: If we’re brought in, or I think anybody who’s trying to engage in something, you want to start again at the leadership level and make sure they understand like the, their, it there’s a sense as their responsibility. It’s not the technology’s responsibility to make the project a success.

It’s a leadership’s responsibility to make sure that a clear plan is created, that it is communicated along the way to the people that are responsible for it. And if they are resistant to it, that is not necessarily them being bad employees. It might be feedback for you about the way things have operated before. That’s one layer of it.

Two, it has to reflect the reality of, if we’re talking about a university, this isn’t, it’s not corporate America, like you must understand budget cycles, risk, security, the workload of the staff,and things like that.

So you have to make sure that your planning adapts to the environment or the landscape that you’re working in. I guess a third thing as, as much as we all love a good roadmap and a good discovery process, you cannot, you, you can’t over plan either. because you don’t want the committee, the pre-committee that talks about things that then establishes this outline.

And by the time you’ve done that, in this era, things are moving so quickly. By the time you get through one term or two,while you’re kind of doing this planning, you’ll have wasted a lot of time. And so the roadmap needs to build in some agility, you can’t necessarily move as slowly as you might like.I mentioned earlier, and something that to me is always crucial, is that stakeholder buy-in. And again, some of that just gets to communication and leadership, making sure the lieutenants that are in charge of executing on the plan, the ones that are going to be the tip of the spear. They need to understand what they’re doing, how to make it effective, how it fits into the grander vision for them and for the university.

I also think something that’s important that we emphasize is the idea that, the scalability that we chatted about at the beginning, that’s crucial. Like, if you have to be successful in a scaled environment, but in a smaller environment, you can have issues where you want a pilot program, you want a small attempt at a workflow, and if people fail at that, that’s okay. You want them to be able to give you feedback and say, ” here was part of the plan that we tried and it did not work”. The technology wasn’t good, or the data didn’t come out right, or our work with another department wasn’t successfully integrated the way we’d hoped. And you want them to be able to give transparent and honest feedback so that you can then adjust it. So we want to make sure from a planning standpoint, you’re building in some buffer to allow groups to figure out what works and what doesn’t. So that’s just sort of that way to pivot.

[00:17:19] Agility Buffers and Timelines

Drumm McNaughton: you’ve talked about all these great things that are really important, but when I think about those, along with how quickly technology and institutions are evolving, I would think that having a process built in to pivot, changes to the process is important.

Mike Toguchi: We a hundred percent agree with you. You have to have something that allows you to pivot. You have to build that into your timeline.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, timeline. Good idea.

Mike Toguchi: You have to set a realistic timeline up, whether it’s over the course of, and there should be little, three months, six month, or one semester, two semester timelines where you give your departments and give your groupsan opportunity to work through something to pilot it. To show their results, to share that feedback, and then for whether it’s a CIO or whoever is overseeing all of this, in order to aggregate that and figure out, what’s successful, are you on track, are you getting the information that you need? But Yes, that buffer is going to be something that is always a crucial piece. Otherwise, you’re never going to build trust. You’re essentially telling people, “Hey, I want you to implement something, and it’s got to be perfect, from day one”. Even though nothing is ever perfect from day one. And as you alluded to earlier, the technology is changing so fast, even if it’s perfect on day one, six months later, things have changed. So you essentially have to build in your own agile schedule in order to continue to integrate and adapt to new technologies, new changes and things that are occurring.

Drumm McNaughton: And that is a challenge because on day one, roll out everything assuming everything works correctly. It doesn’t always. I’ve seen so many technology projects go off the rails. You don’t even want to get me going on that one.

But when it rolls out and it rolls out, “right”, that’s great. But six months later, is it obsolete? Do you have the processes built in? Do you have the timeline built in the budget to continue to upgrade so that your process doesn’t go its separate ways, just like it did before?

Mike Toguchi: Right, and that’s where you run into, it’s the tough choice. Sometimes on day one things are a broken mess and people are just fire drill scrambling to try and make it work and then you feel like the initiative is a little bit of a failure. Or even when it is successful, people kind of pat themselves on the back and feel like the work is done. And at this point, unfortunately with technology, the work is never done. And that’s where that roadmap in planning and that vision and articulating it is so crucial so that people understand, 10 years ago about doing a six month, 12 month, this big project and then, kind of cutting the ribbon and being done with it for a few years. That’s not the era or environment we work in now.

It needs to be more about small, digestible bits of change that people can take that build up trust, build up understanding, build up expertise, so that they feel like they’re constantly in forward motion, constantly seeing positive results that tie back to the broader outcomes that you’re looking for, and not feeling like their technology project is some, we got to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat, and once we get there we all kind of collapse and exhaustion.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s a great metaphor.

[00:20:48] Faculty Governance and Trust

Drumm McNaughton: You talked about trust and what comes to mind for me is faculty governance. Faculty governance can be your best partner or your worst enemy when it comes to these kind of things, especially when it has to do with technology.

Mike Toguchi: That, that’s certainly true. and we work with faculty at all levels. It can be a challenge and a lot of times that challenge is that they have very reasonably built up questions of trust about, is this an unfunded mandate, is this a change that doesn’t really have any explanation? how am I supposed to add more responsibilities and bandwidth to, to deal with the requirements that you’re putting on top of me?

How is this sprawling technology, and you know, and there’s, as we mentioned before, many departments and places use all sorts of different tools, so they could be, if they’re teaching in a couple of different sections or places, they could be using 10, 15 tools themselves.

And then those outcomes that we talked about, if there isn’t a solid plan, if it hasn’t been, communicated, they don’t even understand, they don’t even get to see the final data, they don’t really know what the outcomes are. And so all of this is being done in a way that is not transparent and not helpful, and so therefore, they’re probably approaching it reasonably with some intense suspicion.

One of the things that we try and help is, when we’re talking to staff about executing it, and then there’s talking to faculty about how this is going to affect them, providing them with the context, what is the point of this project or initiative, how is it going to be helpful to the overall community and also themselves?

How is it going to help provide better stability, provide better student services? How can we respect their expertise and involve them in that process so that they feel like whatever their feedback is, their voices are heard when this is being executed.

The outcome isn’t always fewer tools, but that is often a goal is explaining, “hey, this is how we are going to make this easier for you”. Whether it’s, less interaction with the IT department, whether it’s less tools that you have to log into. Something along those lines, like show some carrots with the idea of going through this project. And, just being transparent with the data is always important to me. I think that’s a lot of researchers at heart, people that want to, if they can see the positive results, that can be very helpful. that helps show them the balance of like, look, this environment is “innovation is critical” and so we have to be maybe more speedy or agile or, less risk averse than we would’ve been, but we’re going to do it in a measured, thoughtful way. We’re going to try and be consistent with it, and blend that with our innovation. and so hopefully that will show them how some of these workflows or process automations or other things that they’re being looped into can actually be helpful to them.

Drumm McNaughton: And it’s so important to tie it back to the WIIFM, the “what’s in it for me”. And the other thing that I see, one of the big mistakes that technology implementation projects do, they may do the WIIFM, but it adds work rather than takes work away. Any kind of change process, people are going to go, “okay, how’s this going to make my life better?”

Great. You could do all these kinds of things, but if it doesn’t take tasks away or make tasks easier, if it’s just adding to the workload, that’s where you get into the loss of trust. You’d made a comment to me a few days back. “Faculty are not tech adverse. They’re trust adverse”. That’s the unfunded mandates, et cetera.

Mike Toguchi: Yes, I totally agree. I think their resistance is often a response to empirical evidence, that they have seen, over and over again. These kinds of initiatives or projects or new technology visions, things that have, had sort of, grandiose desires, but did not deliver on them.

And so I think that’s where a lot of that is related, that they’ve seen process failure, and that they haven’t seen the benefits of the innovation. It just ends up, as you said, being more work. And we want people to be open and transparent. Like there’s work in implementing something and there’s always work when something is new in order to try and figure out what does and doesn’t work.

And so we don’t ever want people to think, well there’s a magic, utopian wand that will make everything good on day one. That’s why, again, we’re trying to emphasize smaller, digestible bits where, we want your feedback. We want you to be a stakeholder. We want to understand how this is affecting you. So if something that has been implemented isn’t successful or is taking more time, is that part of just transition from one way to a new way? Or is it something that is actually inefficient and needs to be updated or changed? And so I think involving and including that kind of feedback loop for faculty is just crucial.

[00:25:52] Avoiding Double Process Traps

Drumm McNaughton: The one that I’ve seen that drives me right up the wall is you’ll be for, you’ll use the new process, but then you have to use the old process, so you’re double dipping rather than doing it under a pilot to make sure that things are done properly.

Mike Toguchi: That is an oldie, but goodie. And for sure. And that’s the, I think the whole point. AND, what we’ve done over the years has been about streamlining workflows, about creating functionality that automates processes and all of those things. And that just naturally has led to where AI is, which is trying to cut down on those pieces. Any roadmap or plan or vision that is created that involves maintaining a legacy project, a legacy process, while also implementing a new one for some duplicative purpose, unless there is a really obvious DOA, the end of end deadline for ending that old process, you’re never going to get people excited or bought into it.

Even if it’s the most cleanly documented, smoothest running thing in the world, you are truly just adding another thing onto people’s plates. So the whole point is to get rid of extra steps, to get rid of extra systems. Not to just tack onto your old way of doing things. “Oh, we have to keep using this system for this way, but the new way is good for a couple others”.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. It’s great.

[00:27:16] Board Governance Pitfalls

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s talk about board governance in this. You’ve seen some challenges when it comes to board governance and implementing technology projects.

Mike Toguchi: For sure. there’s a lot of ideas that aren’t a strategy, there’s a lot of, desire to execute without really understanding the funding. I think you mentioned before, like after day one, what is phase two? After phase two, what happens then? And that’s where a lot of this, a lot of these things kind of fail is there’s a grant or the legislature gives you money for X thing and you end up with just enough to do the first part. And you know that everyone kind of rushes to get to, to fulfill the requirements there. But then that legacy piece just keeps hanging on.

Yes, boards tend to treat, for as sharp as those folks are, they often can treat digital transformation as more like a project as opposed to like, this should be our systemic operating model. This is a way that we are going to infuse change and use a change as a force multiplier throughout our systems.

There’s also some ways that the changes, they aren’t thoughtful in terms of how they’re going to affect the fatigue that staff and faculty have with these kinds of change and projects. And they just expect the tool itself to, kind of, be the, the elixir for that.

Drumm McNaughton: The end all be all, this will fix all our problems.

Mike Toguchi: Mm-hmm.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, yes.

[00:28:46] Success Stories

Drumm McNaughton: We’ve talked a lot about the potholes that folks can hit. Give us some success stories that you’ve experienced.

Mike Toguchi: Yes, like I said, we’ve been very lucky to work with a lot of different, great groups that are mission driven, that serve different audiences. As you mentioned, we work with Davis, we work with their disability center, and we now work with a couple of other disability centers that are related to them.

They have been able to use what we’ve done to clarify their workflow, to save their staff time using more efficient tools and systems in place that’s increased their confidence in their compliance. It’s given them better documentation. Given their leadership better data, actual data that can show. A lot of times, when we’re talking about connecting this to boards, a lot of times, boards or leaderships or regents or deans will say, well, “oh, well, you’re asking me for X budget for this”.

It’s really not about the budget. You need to think, what’s the ROI? What’s the ROI If you have 12 staff members that are now 33% more productive. No one’s getting more money to hire new people anymore. That’s not a thing in higher ed right now. What you need is more efficient staff that’s not burned out. And so that’s one of the things we really try and help folks with is how do you make greater impact with what you have?

There’s a cost for everyone to that, but they shouldn’t be thinking in terms of the absolute dollars. Be thinking in terms of like savings and impact of what you’re capable of doing. Some other things, whether higher ed or not.

We’ve worked with some admissions program for some STEM projects where they are crossed multiple campuses and able to allow the campuses, the, kind of incubator where they can have their own workflow, but the data itself remains in a consistent state so that the larger program or the state or whoever is funding their grants are able to see things. So providing that balance of giving each campus their own, unique identity and ability to tailor things while not creating the little fiefdoms that I mentioned, and hitting those broader outcomes, that’s a great success for us and yes, there’s many others.

We work with a couple of groups at Stanford that were able to do something similar. They had two departments that were connected and had a number of joint ventures, a number of faculty that shared, back and forth, but they all had different systems and we were able to help them combine, align, reduce the number of tools, reduce the headaches that faculty had. Those are all things that we’re really proud and able to do.

And, while they had technology as an element of it, they still focused on all of the tenets that we’ve been talking through.

Emphasis on leadership, emphasis on communicating a vision.

Creating an overall plan. Extracting good, consistent data, and using the technology as that force multiplier and not something that’s a drag and with more manual labor.

[00:31:42] Three Takeaways for Higher Education Presidents and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: Well, Mike, thank you. This has been fabulous. Of course, I’m a change management geek. I love this kind of stuff. I certainly hope that the audience has gotten a lot out of it, gotten as much as I have from you. You guys are doing great work.

Three takeaways for boards and presidents. What do you need to know about change management and technology products in projects in today’s day and age?

Mike Toguchi: I would say number one, that, I think as a theme for our conversation, that when you think of technology, you think of infrastructure. And when you think of change management, think of trust as your infrastructure—that you are not able really to innovate or be effective in your projects without that kind of trust that you need to be transparent.

You need to have the guardrails of governance in place. Predictability and steadiness matters more than just doing it fast— and when you have trust it helps show people the “what’s in it for them”, and it gives them incentives for how they can better their work and better themselves. And so if you’re not designing with trust in mind, and if trust isn’t part of the system, the adoption will either stall or fail. that would be one.

A second one, I think, starting small, digestible, but make sure that is part of a broader systemic vision or idea. So start small but think systematically. When you do smaller, little innovations or trials and pilots, those are things that help you understand what can work and then you can figure out how to scale that success. For those that are old enough to remember Ed Harris saying, “failure is not an option” is like at scale, failure is not an option, but in micro size, failure should be an option. Allow people the opportunity to experiment and fail in “small” so that then you know what can work at scale.

So, we ask people, we try to get people to start in small pilots. It helps with buy-in, it helps with adoption. It makes it feel not so overwhelming. It helps figure out how you can get rid of those legacy systems you mentioned. And it helps avoid some of the like one-off things that, we always see getting implemented. and then those are the things that just kind of pile up and suddenly there’s so many different systems that you get, just very fragmented. So, I think that would be number two for us.

And then, kind of going back to the beginning, just the idea of like, if you’re doing digital transformation or digital strategy or any sort of broad based thing, make sure you’re planning in the, the institutional reality that you have to deal with. Make sure that your plan, is pragmatic. higher education is its own beast. Sometimes it moves slow, but make that slowness a thoughtful approach. Make it a careful approach. Just make sure that you’re not moving too slowly. Make sure you’ve got governance in place, compliance, security, all of those things, the mission of the university.

Those things are crucial. They apply differently in that environment than they do in a corporate environment. So make sure your transformation strategy and your road mapping bakes those things into every element of it. Because if you want to have sustainable change, it’s got to be done within the culture and within the framework of where you’re implementing it.

So you know that creating that lasting transformation, that’s going to happen when it feels like it’s a responsible thing, not, not a reckless kind of crazy change.

Drumm McNaughton: Great, thank you. Three great takeaways. What’s next for you?

Mike Toguchi: Yes. Our company, recently rebranded to Tectonic, where you can find us at teamtectonic.com. We’re very excited about that. We’ve been working really hard on that. We’ve got a lot of AI projects in the hopper. We’ve got a lot of groups that are anxious to try and find ways to automate and make themselves more efficient.

Our online application system “Orchestrate”, has been a big hit in universities and so we’ve got a lot of projects there. And so we have a lot of irons in the fire and a lot of people that are needing our help, but we’re always excited to chat with folks to see if there’s, whether it’s us or anyone else, we want people to find ways to do impactful work. That’s really the way we approach things. And so helping point people in the right direction, whether it’s with us or not, is, that’s our goal. And so if anyone wants to track me down, I’m happy to help chat through that.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, Mike. Thanks for being on the show. Really enjoyed our conversation. Look forward to the next time our paths cross.

Mike Toguchi: Thank you so much.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Mike Toguchi. Mike, thanks a lot, I really enjoyed having you on the program and as I said on the show, I’m a change management geek at heart, so this was a great conversation for me. Thank you.

For my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.