Our vision is to help colleges and universities courageously reinvent higher education to meet its promise, today and tomorrow.

 

Why Transformative Change is So Rare

Even when it appears fairly obvious that traditional solutions will be inadequate for what, in many situations, are existential challenges, very few organizations have committed to transformative solutions. Why is that?

First of all, very few executive leaders or even leadership teams have the bandwidth or ability to run the daily operation, manage through disruption, and build for the future all at the same time, let alone build for a transformed future. It just demands more than most leaders have ever done or experienced.

Moreover, in many cases, particularly in higher education, institutions misunderstand what their challenges actually are. Because they are structurally built and have been refined over centuries to preserve the status quo, rather than to engage in transformative change, they perceive their challenges—and solutions—to be within the framework of what’s always been.

Some Additional Reasons that Reinvention Is So Uncommon

  • It requires people to go against their natural tendencies.

  • It requires a level of transparency, honesty, and compromise foreign to most organizations.

  • It requires a level of leadership commitment that most leaders have not experienced.

  • It takes a longer-term commitment than most of organizations are used to.

  • It’s high risk (although no higher than continuing to operate under the status quo!)

How to Enact Transformation Despite the Challenges

The Transformation Collaborative’s practice is based on driving transformation/reinvention with a holistic, “embedded,” and long-term partnership. We think transformationally rather than transactionally, approaching foundational change with a comprehensive, integrated view of the institution, supporting sustainable transformation with compelling strategy, aligned culture, capacity building, value proposition & market differentiation, a robust business model, and best practice operations.

For institutions that are willing, we will directly support an active change process, backfilling for institutional deficits in experience and expertise.