Language For What I Already Knew
Summer classes are winding down, which is hard to believe given how quickly the season has moved. Between coursework, consulting, and everything else this summer has held, there hasn't been much time to sit still. But one of the more interesting realizations from my change leadership course is that many of the ideas I'm encountering aren't entirely new to me. What's new is having language for patterns I've been observing throughout my career.
Take the distinction between teams and teaming. For years, I worked in environments where success depended on cross-functional collaboration. A legal issue was never just a legal issue. It quickly became an academic affairs issue, a finance issue, a communications issue, a research issue, or a governance issue. The organizational chart suggested one way work was accomplished; reality suggested another.
I understood that instinctively as an executive. Amy Edmondson's work on teaming explains why. Teams are relatively stable. Teaming is the capacity to assemble expertise across organizational boundaries, solve a problem together, learn in real time, and then reorganize for the next challenge.
Higher education runs on teaming, whether institutions recognize it or not. Shifting demographics, financial pressure, regulatory change, political scrutiny, and evolving research requirements. Few of these challenges belong to a single office. Most require people who do not ordinarily work together to develop a shared understanding before they can develop a shared solution.
The improvement tools have held my attention, too. Fishbone diagrams. Driver diagrams. Early in my legal career, I learned that asking the wrong question often produced an elegant answer to the wrong problem. These frameworks build that lesson into the process. They force a distinction between symptoms and causes, and between assumptions and evidence, before anyone decides what to do. That discipline matters because individual personalities rarely explain organizational behavior. More often, it reflects systems, incentives, governance structures, and institutional culture interacting in ways that are easy to overlook until they produce consequences.
That's what has made this semester so valuable. It hasn't challenged my experience nearly as much as it has helped me interpret it. After nearly three decades in higher education leadership, I'm finding that the literature often names the dynamics that I have been navigating for years. That seems less like discovering something new and more like seeing something familiar with more clarity.
