Note: This interview in the Weekly Wisdom Series originally aired on July 8, 2024 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Dan Greenstein:
It continues to have a culture of it's data-driven, it's super focused on mission. It's outcomes, bias for action outcomes oriented. This is going to sound weird, Bridget, but we have – I feel blessed by the quality of the elected leaders in the elected representatives of Senate, House, governors, administration. We know this is the second one. They care about public higher education. They care in different ways. They have different views of how it should evolve. But the people in the relevant committees and leadership roles who are attached in some way to education, workforce development, some of the richest and most creative and frankly informed conversations that I am able to have are with folks who have that deep –
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together, a podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is a podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders that will help you improve student success. I'm your host, Bridget Burns. Each week I partner with a journalist to have a conversation with a sitting college president, chancellor, system leader, or someone in the broader ecosystem who's really an inspiring leader. The goal is to have a conversation to distill their perspective and their insights gathered from their leadership journey. Our hope is that this is inspiring and gives you something to look forward to each week.
Hi, welcome to another episode of the Innovating Together podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Burns, with the University Innovation Alliance. Today, I'm delighted to bring you a show where we're going to have a fantastic guest and a rich conversation that I think is exactly perfectly timed for where higher education needs to be focusing its efforts today. But, first, I want to talk about how this podcast and this show is sponsored by Mainstay and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Mainstay used to be known as Admin Hub way, way, way, long time ago. Not anymore. They are the student engagement and retention platform that has proven it works through peer-reviewed research and independent validation in a way that we hope other EdTech companies engage in that kind of research. They've already shown that they can reduce summer melt. They did it at Georgia State by reducing theirs by 21% and helping them retain 1,200 students that they otherwise would've lost. So, especially as people are feeling those significant enrollment pressures, you might take a look mainstay.com. The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a longtime benefactor and sponsor and support of the UIA. We are very grateful for their assistance.
Now, I get to bring my new guest on. Dan, thank you so much for being here. For those at home, Dan Greenstein, who when we first met, you were the head of secondary success at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But, you had already had a long career working for the UCs. You were a librarian. You've done all kinds of stuff in a variety of places. Now, for the past five years, you really took a wild turn, and you became the chancellor of the Pennsylvania System of Higher Education. I noticed online, and perhaps folks at home might've noticed, that you started a blog and you've been writing some really interesting stuff. So, I wanted to bring you on. Thanks for being our guest today.
Dan Greenstein:
Oh, well, thanks for having me. Really appreciate being here. Nice to see you.
Bridget Burns:
It's very unusual for someone who's actively in the trenches of transformation to force themselves to stop and actually observe what they're learning, synthesize it, and think about sharing it. I think we see a lot of books from people who are retired. That often can feel not as helpful because it's not in real time. Sometimes, it's storytelling about the actor rather than wisdom to help arm the field. I feel like what you're doing is the opposite. You're publishing blog posts. Will you tell folks about what prompted you to do this?
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah, it actually is so interesting. It goes back to my days at Gates. The work at Gates was really, and still is, not just in the post-secondary strategy, but in many of the areas that they're working. The idea is to find things that work in solving a particular problem, and then helping to support their widespread adoption. In the post-secondary success area, it was to find ways of improving outcomes for marginalized students, low-income students, students of color. It's not good enough to know, oh, here's some things that work. It is really important to get a lot of people to adopt those strategies because they're good for students. And, frankly, they're good for the universities that are helping their students succeed.
We had long and rich conversations about, well, how do you encourage adoption of things, of learning, that may be helpful? And I'm not sure. So, just steeped in that tradition. Here at the Pennsylvania State System, recognizing on the way in, the state system, as you know, when I got here 2018, 14 universities, really regional publics teaching mostly to the master's level, serving predominantly low- and middle-income students. They are the gritty part. They're part of that, the gritty part, the larger part of the higher education ecosystem in the country that serves most of our students, quite frankly, in the four-year space and the two-year space. They were in trouble, facing the demographic pressures, the financial pressures, the underfunding from the state, the enrollment decline, the demographic cliff. All that stuff that everybody talks about, it was just super acute here. So, okay, well ,what do you do?
Literally, the reason to come here was: are there ways to work with these really important, vitally important institutions or engines of social mobility and economic development, and carve out a future for them that's viable and sustainable into the future? That was the goal. Of course, well, if you're going to try it, you might as well give lessons back to the field, good and bad, things that work, things that don't. The blog really derives from that real passion about paying it forward, giving back to the field, lessons learned, in the hope that others can build on or at least short circuit, not make quite as many mistakes or short circuit their path to success based on mistakes and learning that we have made.
The form I took, it was originally a book. And then, I gave a conference presentation about six months ago and I realized in the course of that back and forth, people don't want your stupid words in a book. They want the lessons, and shut up with your words. So, okay, it's a blog. And it's kind of one set of one lesson per blog. And then, I try to attach what I call assets to them. These are tools and templates and policies and approaches so that people can just have at it. Here's some things that we use, the tangible assets that then people can download, adapt, adopt, whatever. That's really the purpose. It's lessons learned, trying to get – recognizing the problems that we're facing are not anything unique and trying to synthesize what are the generalizable lessons, return them to the field with maybe some tools that could help others along the way.
Bridget Burns:
That gives me a couple of things I want to ask about. Because I think that a lot of folks might hold back and only share their insights, do a postmortem, years later. Because they get us at the record and nobody gets to dispute it. But you put yourself in a vulnerable position in a positive way that people could say, "No, that's not the lesson." In fact, in real time, these people are still here right now, and you're actively doing it, and they could possibly push back. I want to know what the response has been. But I also want to dig into this idea of there's something really magical about the architecture or the structure of the way you share. Because if you share in a way that is glamorizing and just telling the story, that's not useful for the reader. What's useful is what you're doing, which is like, here's what I wish I'd known before I started. You want to know what I regret? Hang on for a sec. That's the kind of stuff that actually gets people. It feels like you're being generous as opposed to just trying to document your success.
Dan Greenstein:
Actually, I have some great mentors and also some shout-outs to people you know. I mean, Jeff Selingo out there, he does this as a routine matter, and so effortlessly well. Michael Horn, you're very active in podcasting in other ways. Goldie Blumenstyk at the Chronicle. And I've spoken to all these people, get information from them about their craft. And I'm not anywhere at their level. But the tips and tricks that I've collected along the way have been super helpful. Including some of the publishers I talked to when originally it was a book, some other folks whose input I really honor. One of the things, though, that people say is think about the lessons that are generalizable. Think about how you make them generalizable. And then, to your point, don't just talk about the successes. I really try, at the end of every blog to say, "Well, how well does whatever it is really work?"
For me, in some ways, it's the most intellectually challenging part of the exercise, telling the story and here's the stuff that we did. It's good, and you have to be brief, and you try to be a little compelling. But it's that critical moment at the end, which I find to be – it takes the longest. It's the thing I ended up editing most because I rewrite, and I rewrite. But it's also – I think that's the part that I enjoy. And that really is – it's an insight that I was provided in conversations with these folks who do this stuff really well.
Bridget Burns:
I think that's good advice. But also, there is a fundamental difference between you, Goldie, Jeff, and Michael. I am friends with them, and they are not actively leading the work in the field. Michael might be, because he does consulting. But Jeff, I mean, he still is kind of an author. He's a commentator. He's an observer. He does some work with the Georgetown Center, with the [inaudible 00:09:38] Georgetown Academy. But part of I think what's been really helpful for him and for Goldie as a journalist, you stay apart as an observer. But, you don't have that. You are actually out – you're in the trenches with people. You're getting dirt on your face. So, I think it's smart that you gathered their insight. I think it's also, again, it's really refreshing to see someone actively putting themselves out there, doing and leading the change and while also not waiting to share the lessons someday later when they have the luxury of rewriting history. Because I feel like it's a very collaborative diffusion strategy. You're opening yourself up in a way that other people can probably add onto the lesson and say, "You think that was interesting, but also I got this from this, and I was a faculty member," or whatever.
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah. That's actually the purpose. It's interesting, too. Because, coming into it, you think you know what's going to be interesting. And then, going through the process, the things you thought were going to be important aren't always. And the things you never even thought about, all of a sudden the significance of them grows in front of your eyes. Although I know every journey will be very specific and contextual, local to a particular place, set of institutions, political context, culture, et cetera. I do think that there is a playbook that's beginning to – there are playbooks I should say, that are beginning to emerge. And we're in trouble in higher ed. I don't know if you noticed.
Bridget Burns:
What?
Dan Greenstein:
In a lot of different ways, at a lot of different levels. This radical collaboration, a phrase I just got the other day in visiting a university nearby. This kind of radical collaboration across the industry, the kind of stuff that you do at the University Innovation Alliance, the kind of stuff that Tony Bright talked about in Carnegie, building network improvement communities to accelerate the pace of change, that information sharing, the critical back and forth of ideas and tools, I think it gets more, not less important as the problems that we face become more challenging, more urgent, and frankly more vital that we solve them for the purposes, for the benefit of the country.
Bridget Burns:
That's great. I want to talk about the transformation itself. I want to understand for you. You've been sharing about building a culture. How did you actually shift Pennsylvania folks? How did you support the shift, I would say? Because, you definitely have not made it feel like you've been the hand of God forcing change, but rather you have invited people a part of a very long multi-year process to reimagine who you are, how you govern yourselves, how you hold yourselves accountable. One of that is data. You talked about becoming more really focused on data. I'm just wondering, of all these changes and all these shifts that you've shared about, what caught you off guard the most or what was the most surprising for you as you came in with your very curious informed perspective from Gates? But, really, I'm sure it was wildly different.
Ray Magliozzi:
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Dan Greenstein:
Yeah, I'll tell you that. And I've talked about this with members of my team and folks at the office of the Chancellor, but also our presidents who are very closely involved in the work, and a fantastic group of people. I have this group of blogs about building drains and toilets. And it goes back to my library days. The idea is that you can't launch off on doing really interesting innovative work until you've got some of the foundational tools in place. And you can't necessarily, when you're trying to reimagine your business models and your educational models to sustain an institution and to improve its productivity in terms of the number of credentials it's able to produce, you need some fundamental, some foundational stuff. You need good governance. You need accountability. You need to begin to build the data-driven culture. You need great data resources and people who know how to use them and routinely use them in decision-making.
You just can't assume that your organization is up to all that. So, you go in, you create this great strategy, it's going to be cool. There's all these bells and whistles, change agency, whee. And then, you realize, oh crap, the organization is actually not equipped to do any of this stuff. And, the time it took, and this is what I talk about it in terms of investing, in mending drains and toilets and investing in them. The time it took to put that stuff in place, that was a big surprise to me. The fact that you needed to do it to improve organizational capability didn't surprise me. The fact that that work in itself was so consuming and required so much discipline, consistency, staff time investment, et cetera, I think that was a surprise. A good lesson. It's one of the lessons in one of the blogs, I think.
Bridget Burns:
I think my team probably could attest to this, that I often think things will take less time than they do. I often think, "Oh, you know what I can do? I can just pull an all-nighter, turn that around, get that proposal out the door. We could just do that in a couple of months." It's like, oh man. People vastly underestimate how difficult and how slow change is. What I find interesting is that people often dismiss any of the actors who don't immediately jump and run to be part of it as un-innovative or as resistant. And they just lack the common decency of the empathy needed to be able to truly lead people, which is recognizing what change really is. It is you're going to impact my life. I might not have a job. You might eliminate the chance that I can feed my family or I get to live in this community that I've spent my life in. We just don't think about the emotional aspect of it. And then, create space for people to slowly turn their temperature, their resting heart rate up a bit, to the new idea. We just are like, "You're either in or you're out. I guess you're not innovative." It's very dismissive.
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah. Actually, there's a couple of great books, one by Chip and Fred Heath, the Heath brothers, called Switch, which really addresses the emotional aspects of change leadership. And then, there's another one called The Change Monster. I can't remember the name of the authors. They're two ex-business consulting group folks. It's a little dated, but they're fantastic. They talk about you have to be available, you have to connect with your people at an empathic level. Because, especially the more transformative the change, people are going to be – they're going to be afraid, they're going to be exhilarated, they're going to be angry, they're going to be frustrated. And, sometimes, all at the same time. You just have to let that happen, and you have to understand it's real and design around it, to be perfectly honest. It's a very human enterprise.
Bridget Burns:
That's a helpful insight. Let's move to my next question, which is if you could wave a magic wand and change a decision that you made leading this transformation or supporting this transformation, if you were coaching Dan from five years ago, what tips would you give him running into this? Is there a change that you think would make things a little easier?
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah. I'll give you a three. One real quick. The first one is go slow to go fast. The mending your drains and toilets, just accommodate. It's going to take time. Just get on it. The other one is – it goes back to this governance. One of the challenges that we face was how do – we're a system of originally 14 universities that are pretty independent. They're managed by presidents. They're presidents or CEOs of their universities. And you want to engage them in this enterprise-wide effort, which is this fundamental redesign of the system's educational business models to produce different outcomes, initially to stop the financial decline which was pretty serious. So, the approach was to engage them in the work. I think of them as co-investors, thought partners, they're strategy partners, partners in strategy and execution and co-investors in it. Because we're a single system, it's a single bank account. If one university has trouble paying its bills, all the others have to basically use their money to bail the other ones out. They have a vested interest in collaborating in that way. So, creating the space for that collaboration is important.
Of course, we started on the budgetary stuff, and we created budget processes which we held each other accountable for using. That horizontal accountability was really important in getting people to manage their budgets differently in a very financially sustainable way. But the other thing we learned was that, as they began to do that, we began to realize what were the key drivers of financial decline. Because we could look across the entire system of 14 universities, who's successful, who's struggling. And, through that analytical process, that process of working together on figuring out how to do sustainable budgeting, we began to identify practices that seemed to work. And then we began to document those practices. And then we began to turn those practices into playbooks. One of the reasons I wanted to prepare this blog and get these playbooks out there. And then we began to hold each other accountable for implementing these playbooks.
So, it builds that network improvement community. We sort of learned that together over five years. And, I'm thinking, "Wow, if we had known that on day one, we would've had a bunch of..." So, now, we have playbooks in financially sustainable budgeting, financially sustainable academic program array management and course scheduling, financial aid optimization, enrollment management. We just keep moving on as we discover more of these key drivers. I'm thinking, "Man, if we had known this on day one, we'd be up to nine or ten." And the performance improvement would just have been accelerated. It's just one of those things like, "Oh wow, I wish we'd had that." Anyway. That's two. I'll spare you the third. But you just wake up and you think, "Oh, there's things I wish I had..."
I'll give you one other. We ended up – as a long-winded story which I won't bore you with – but we ended up integrating six universities into two and went through a very detailed planning process. It was inclusive, it was contentious. I don't recommend anyone doing this for fun. It was essential to ensure students, particularly at our smaller rural institutions, had access to full breadth of academic programming. And, really, hats off to the people who did the work and are continuing to do the work as these enterprises continue to integrate. It's a long journey. But, when you're building something new, like a fundamentally different construct for a university, one that operates over a wide area, and you have three universities blended into one, you're building a new culture building, you're blending all sorts of organizational, educational and business processes. It's not clear that the capabilities that you have, which are really good at running universities, are the capabilities you need to do that kind of merger, that integration type work. I'm not sure what we would've done differently having recognized that. Probably spend more time thinking about, okay, what are the organizational capabilities? Where do they need to be strengthened in order to accommodate this new kind of work? And maybe strengthen them upfront as opposed to afterwards and realize, "Oh my God, there's a problem. How do we fix it? We got to throw support at this." Maybe that was a third one.
Bridget Burns:
Well, I mean, I'm sure that it made you wildly popular to do that. I'm sure that –
Dan Greenstein:
Not super.
Bridget Burns:
– you were beloved by everyone. The idea of a merger, I can't think of an example where someone's been like, "Yeah, that was really – people love me for that." No, that's a very difficult change. One of the things I've observed is, and I picked this up from my first few years in the Alliance, is that the motivation for change, people do it for lots of reasons. But the fanfare for driving and for doing something hard is kind of the same as doing something small. The confetti size for low-hanging fruit at a university driving change is honestly the exact same amount of confetti you're going to get for doing PASSHE’s change. That is what's messed up, is that it creates a bias where I find that university leaders are easily drawn to doing little tiny stuff that's around the edges because it's not really worth it enough to do this really hard stuff. They're here for a limited amount of time. You and I are talking about the rapid turnover and transition.
But I feel like there is an unfair, unequal incentive and reward for what you're doing. Because I know of institutions that have done very small things and they get a couple of articles, maybe they get to tell their story, maybe it gets in the news and otherwise. And I don't know that there is going to be a big enough – I know that you're driving for actually outcomes change for your students and for sustainability of your system that was otherwise probably going to die or would've limped along because we avoid change. But I'm just curious about that piece. If you've observed that, at times, maybe, “Wow, I get why people don't change. I get why they don't do this. It's just so obvious why...” It's wild that you're doing this and you're sticking around.
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah, I mean, it's hard. Look, it is interesting. Our universities, many, most I would say of our universities and colleges, are legacy centric. And, actually, there's good reason for that. I think their legacy centrism is almost a built-in mode of quality assurance. They're slow to chase fads. That's a good thing in my view. But at the same time, they are not built to undertake this massive transformation. And you can't do it as one person. So, in order to undertake something like this, you've got to enlist a lot of folks. It takes a village. And everybody in that village is doing really good work. It's really important to support each other. I mean, those playbooks are one way that we support each other. There are all sorts of others. But they're going to take a bunch of arrows.
So, it's really important to align around the mission, to provide – there's a blog, I think it's this week or last, about the accountability. Accountability regime, holding people accountable for good outcomes. But, upfront saying, "Look, this is a people-centered accountability. You've got to provide – this is hard work. You have to provide your leaders with support." When I talk about leaders, not like presidents and provosts and, yes, those people too, but in this kind of change work, everybody's a leader. In the integration, in the integrated schools, it was the faculty. We're talking frontline faculty, not necessarily chairs and people with seniority or positions, who are basically doing the work of rewriting and integrating the curriculum. And staff who are figuring out how to blend practice in IR shops and financial aid packaging units. How do we become one? Everybody, you're asking a lot of people to step up into leadership roles and you're asking them, not only to step up at the leadership roles, but to change their behaviors and practices and those of their colleagues around them.
So, you're really asking a lot of folks to do hard work. I think recognizing that, and it does build in resistance. It's not like – if I don't need to do that, maybe I don't – but we had a sense of urgency. I mean, it was existential, A and B. We were, like so many in public higher education, were mission-driven. Our historic mission is to be engines of social mobility and economic development to provide that bridge to opportunity for people who otherwise would not have one, whether they're in rural Pennsylvania or downtown Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. People who work in these places, they're not here to make tons of money or drive fancy cars or to feed their golfing habit or whatever. They're here because they are driven by that mission. When you begin to recognize that the only way that we can continue to be as we always have been, it is a profound conservatism. This kind of radical change is like we're changing everything. So basically, we can stay the same, so that we can continue to drive our historic mission. That kind of thing, you can begin to appeal to ideas and values that people have and inspire them to do the hard work. Because, in doing the hard work, they're doing what they signed up to do and what they chose to do for their careers, on steroids.
Bridget Burns:
It's great. I mean, again, I feel like – we were talking about this – that there's massive turnover in the sector right now. That the stakes are higher, these positions are more fraught, and it feels like it's a harder job. And then, you are an outlier in terms of doing long-term systemic change work in one of those harder jobs. Whereas I think the more difficult and tenuous these positions become, leading universities, leading systems, the more you're seeing people losing their jobs on a regular basis. And, turnover, the less likely I think people will be brave and bold and willing to take on systemic change. Because, systemic change, it's just so much harder and murkier than doing a quick win, grabbing the low-hanging fruit, and let's see if we can celebrate the W for this.
I love that you're doing it. I do think that we have to think about, as a sector, about the incentives and rewards for doing hard work. Because we can hope that people have altruistic intentions and that they're going to show up with the curiosity that you brought into this system. I think that was one of the things is that you came from a lens of deep curiosity. That was probably the most defining characteristic about you at Gates, is you were really interested in this stuff. It was fascinating to you. You came in and I think that curiosity coupled with – it was connected to humility, but I think it also helped convey humility, your questions. So, people didn't feel like you came in with, here's Dan's plan, we're going to do what I said because I thought it. So, you've been successful, but I feel like I worry about others. I worry about us, about the sector making the other hard choices that others need to make.
Dan Greenstein:
Well, it's such a good point. We were blessed. I mean, I have a fantastic board chair, Cindy Shapira. I mean, she's been a board chair I think now for eight years. She's fantastic. She has created a culture on the board. Obviously, there's turnover on the board as you'd expect. But, it continues to have a culture of it's data driven, it's super focused on mission, it's outcomes, bias for action, outcomes oriented. This is going to sound weird, Bridget, but I feel blessed by the quality of the elected leaders, the elected representatives of Senate, House, governors, administration. We know this is the second one. They care about public higher education. They care in different ways. They have different views of how it should evolve. But the people in the relevant committees and leadership roles who are attached in some way to education, workforce development, some of the richest and most creative and frankly informed conversations that I am able to have are with folks who have that deep caring. It's not always fun and we don't always agree on stuff. But you feel this tremendous support from, in effect, board, which is obviously the governing body, and the legislature which really holds the purse strings. And, frankly, owns the universities by statute. I think that's been – I haven't written about that yet and maybe that's a new blog I'll have to add. But I think one of the success drivers is – those stars have aligned here in ways that I'm not sure is entirely common.
It's important, I think, at the policy level in particular to recognize that legislators and boards of governors in the public institutions, they really have a role to play. And, they don't have to – agreeing on stuff is a high bar. But, locking arms and trying to get something fixed or something improved is really important. And we've benefited from that. I think that it shows up in our funding, it shows up in some of the successes we've had. And it's worked. You got to bring a whole lot of people along, and you have to be brought along by them. But it's definitely a success driver.
Bridget Burns:
I love that. It makes me think about – because I think about other states. I think about how Pennsylvania is a great case study of a state that really needed change. It was obvious from the outside, from the data, that the system that was originally developed is no longer really in alignment with what the future was going to need, major demographics and industry change. I hope other states will go through the same reflection, this reflective process, to make sure that what they are working with in higher education that was built in the past, is it really what's going to position them for the future. And are willing to do the hard stuff. Because, I remember in the Oregon system, I was responsible for shepherding the legislation that initially creates the higher education coordinating commission. And then, when I was gone on my ACE fellowship, they passed the legislation to disband the university system. So, probably could have seen that coming since I was the chief of staff of the university system. But I was gone.
But I think that I remember how many times in the prior decade when I was on the state board of higher ed, the talk about closing and consolidating campuses that come up. We never did anything because of fear of upsetting legislators, of fear of how hard it was going to be. And I think what you're putting forward is, if you can really get clear about what a state is going to need to connect talent and opportunity in the future of work and put forward a compelling vision, you can unite stakeholders and constituents that you might think would be difficult and opposed to it.
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah, I mean, what's really interesting, and Pennsylvania's known as a swing state, it's a very closely divided state, divided government from party perspective. The thing that has really – in order to do anything, you've got to build a coalition at the middle, which you could argue is the hardest thing to do in American politics today. But the thing that has enabled us to do that is workforce, is economic development, is our role in that arena. You just keep making that case and plugging. It's an obvious case to make and you just keep plugging away. And people really get it. Where are we going to get our nurses from is a big deal. Our teachers, our IT professionals, our manufacturers.
Bridget Burns:
Home health aids.
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah. Look, Kim Hunter Reed down in Louisiana, she's doing similar work. She's able to work to build coalition. Harrison Keller in Texas, he’s probably a front runner in all this. He's just –
Bridget Burns:
I know. But now, he's going to a campus. It's going to be wild without him.
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see. Well, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how sticky it is. You hope that there's so much energy that it gets institutionalized. There are these points of light. And it's relevant here. We didn't make any of this. When we did integration, I reached out to Shelly Nichol, who was the vice chancellor for strategy at the Georgia system who really was at point in driving the Georgia integrations. She came in an advisory role to the chancellor, and she was critical. We learned lessons. Andrew Kelly did some really good work on accountability and how you work with universities to align their strategies with board priorities in terms of goal settings. We just adopted their model wholesale. We made some tweaks and stuff and all these things, but you don't have to make – it is part of the rationale for blog series, lessons learned, assets, pay it forward. Because I can name the people who we ripped off and borrowed from and graciously spent their time on the phone.
When I started down this path, Maine was doing integration, Connecticut. We talked to these people a lot, at the early stage in particular, to get lessons learned. So, there's that sharing. And, in those conversations, we can realize, "Okay, there are some strategies. Yeah, we're going to have to make some stuff up on our own, but there are some strategies that we can adopt. We don't have to make everything up wholesale." That has been a huge benefit in a way. Again, I think it behooves all of us to really think – and it's the work that you do. It's how do you return the lessons learned in a way that people can adopt and adapt and move them forward and build on them. It's important.
Bridget Burns:
You're making me realize there's a background piece here where you came into this work with, again, I think that was – as someone who was a Gates grantee during your time, in every conversation with you, you were always fascinated by – you wanted to talk about this stuff. It wasn't like perfunctory report on your thing, whatever. It was always like you are a deeply curious person. I think the fact that you had that curiosity and the chance to observe and watch change across multiple states, systems, different levels, prior, you came in with I think a better understanding of how change might happen. I think you had some theories, but you were willing to test them.
Harrison, he works as a staffer in the legislature way, way, way prior. So, he knows how to actually get stuff passed in the belly of the beast, which is I think so critical for why they were able to achieve what they did. Because he's not just a phenomenal scholar and a brilliant mind around policy, but it's because he knows how to get stuff done in a state that you better know, because you're not getting any bills passed. And then, also, Kim was – I think she was the deputy chief of staff for the governor a long time ago too. So, she also knows that belly of the beast. I think in general, each of these is a good case study of, when you have a leader who comes in really having an understanding that you don't get to make stuff happen. It's like a humility and a willingness to surf the wave and curiosity that is essential. Otherwise, you're going to have – I've seen a lot of folks try and lead change that, bless their hearts –
Dan Greenstein:
I mean, there are many aspects. And, you learn, I suppose it may be a lesson. There are a bunch of fundamental things you need. One of them is that political – you need to be that – there has to be that political capability. You either have to be it, hire it, or source it somewhere. Because there's a number of things you need. And without project management at a sophisticated level, without that, there's none of this. I mean, it sounds mundane and technical, but without data, you're going to fly blind. Without a really informed advocacy and, frankly, internal and external communications effort, you're done. So, there are a handful of capabilities. I would argue they're not – how they will be manifest may be different place to place, but if you don't have them all in place somehow and they're not functioning really well together, game over.
It's interesting. There's a playbook. Here's the seventh thing you really need to advance in this kind of way. Here are their attributes. And then, after – there is a couple of blogs. One of them is about culture, and one of them is about political context. The argument is that culture will establish the contours of what's possible for an organization to do, and so will its political context. It's not about culture eats strategy for breakfast, not necessarily believing that. It is that culture can be a powerful leverage point for change, but you have to understand it. The political context in which you operate can be a powerful – you think of it as an impediment. No, it's a powerful lever for change. But you have to know how to pull on the lever, where. So, immersion in those kinds of environments is absolutely critical, not just in designing the strategy, but because you're designing the strategy to implement in a culture within a political context, in thinking about its implementation path. Those are, again, critical components of any change effort.
Bridget Burns:
I know that we're going along a bit, but I actually – I love that and I want to ask you another, a question about learning continuous improvement, learning innovation. So, how to foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation amongst faculty and staff. Because just asking that question, I think a lay person might look at higher education and be like, "Well, why would you need to foster that? Allegedly, your university's education, you should be interested in learning." But there's a beautiful image that I've shown once that is from the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations about how organizations either have an efficiency outcome as their core operating tendency, or learning. They are very different. Like Apple, very different than I think if you were just a manufacturing – any company that manufactures a thing. And, college and universities, we have a big part of our work that is actually about efficiency. It is not about curiosity. It is actually not about trying to learn. That people are needing to just make it cheaper, make it easier, make sure we're offering it consistently. And that is counter to our desire to have people curious and testing new models and learning.
So, I want to know, while you're trying to push this culture of data, which is about efficiency and accountability and transparency, do you have any lessons learned from or just want to react to the idea of the difficulty of those two tensions?
Dan Greenstein:
Yeah. I would say the data is certainly about efficiency, but it's about driving to outcomes and those outcomes can be learning. You set up down a path to improve outcomes for x and students in particular areas or whatever to improve employment outcomes. And you're using your data to test your innovations or your approaches so you can constantly refine and improve them. So, yeah, I think this is the hardest thing to do, frankly, and it's the hardest thing to do in financially constrained institutions. In our universities, our faculty teach a 404. That's a lot. Their sections are fully loaded because we have to operate – we don't have a lot of spare cash. So, they're fully booked. Our staff, similarly, we don't have the luxury of throwing lots and lots of people at stuff. And we need to innovate. And we're pretty hierarchical in the industry generally as well as in PASSHE.
So, the question is, how do you empower your employees to learn to figure stuff out? The people who are best suited to figuring out how more impactfully to do, I don't know, financial aid advising are financial aid advisors. Administrators like me and professionals, we're very much attuned to the national dialogue and all the rest of it. The people who are on the ground, they're the ones who are going to – In larger organizations which are successful, whether it's a Google or an Apple, they're trying to push innovation as close as you can to the source of the problem. That is something, how do we empower our folks in organizations which are cash strapped and everybody's working flat out? I think that's one of our biggest problems. And it is a challenge for leadership because, in organizations which are cash strapped and basically in recession management, leaders do not want to let go. Because, letting go, there's a fear of over expenditure or whatever.
That's exactly what we need to do if we're going to foster innovation. We're going to have to find time for people to explore and to learn and to engage in a dialogue about how they should improve their practice. I read this book called All-in on AI. It's about the organizations which are successful with AI. It was written a few years ago, so it's a little dated. But I'm sure it's true today. They are the organizations which are deliberately going out of their way to give people time, to empower employees, support them with training and resources so they can gather the skills they need to just go and play with AI in their professional areas, to begin to explore and then to feed back into the process of what should we do here, to be part of the solutioning environment and team.
That is just not something we do. Actually, we were at a SU and GSP together, and it was all about AI, as you know. I'm listening to people talk about all the cool shit they're doing. And I'm like, "Oh my God, we're dead in the water." Because all the folks who are really doing cool shit are doing that. I'm like, "Oh my God." This is not a technical problem. This is not – I mean, technology problem. It's a cultural thing. Very few of our organizations, I mean, we empower our faculty to do what they do in the classroom. Thank God. And, in our research institutions, in the research organization. But we don't empower them to contribute to the continuous learning as an organization so that we get better. And we got to figure that out. Because, whether it's AI or something else, it's not going to take root, and you can't do this stuff from the top down. It's just not going to happen.
Bridget Burns:
This is the slide I was talking about from the Innovation in Large Organizations, about how basically if you're an efficiency-oriented organization, you're going to focus on repeating success, process control, specialization, low autonomy. And yet, you want people in discovery as well, testing and learning new markets. They're very different. To expect one or the other without recognizing that's going to require culture, and it has totally different dimensions. But the thing that holds back innovation is really the issue around lowering the cost of failure. That is the big challenge, is if you can lower the cost of failure for either entity, no matter who they are so that it's less risky to try something new, then you can drive innovation. But, otherwise, you're going to run into those impediments.
Dan Greenstein:
You'll love this. I was on a panel once with Jeffrey Moore, who writes about innovation and industry and stuff. His theory and his books are all about how, basically, you give an entirely separate P&L to your innovative arm. That is the cost of it. And it's a pretty big chunk of the overall revenues of the company. It's not necessarily intended to be return value in terms of revenue. So, we're sitting on this panel and there's two higher people on the panel. They turn to us, "You do that, right, with your innovation?" I'm like, "Ah, no. No." I mean, yeah, I guess we could. But, we'd have to start closing all these other programs in order to liberate, to reallocate the resources that we need. But, to me, we've got to figure that out if we're going to become that learning organization, which is going to be so important in finding paths, not just for our institution’s sustainability, more importantly for our student success.
Bridget Burns:
Yeah. Well, that's a great way for us to end this. I appreciate, again, for hopping on here, Dan, and giving us the insights you've had. For those of you at home, you got to go to digreenstein@greenstein.com is the blog – slash PASSHE – and you'll be able to follow along on his journey as he's trying to document and dispense wisdom that he's learning in real time while the scars are still healing. I think it's brave, it's smart, and I hope more of us will consider not waiting until there's a – later when you've forgotten the hard stuff, to share. Because I think we'll glamorize things up, and you polish it up, and you make it seem like it's a lot easier than it is. That's a great lesson, and I so have appreciated you sharing your wisdom. And you're always welcome to stop by anytime.
Dan Greenstein:
Bridget, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. See ya.