Building Institutional Resilience to Adapt and Thrive in Times of Uncertainty

Institutional resilience has emerged as a critical capability for higher education organizations navigating grand challenges in an increasingly complex and volatile environment. EDUCAUSE has defined the concept of institutional resilience as the ability to anticipate, respond to, and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances in ways that maximize opportunities while minimizing the impacts of unforeseen events. More-resilient institutions anticipate stakeholder needs to advance the mission and objectives of the institution, foster collaboration, and improve equity by involving all impacted communities and resource ecosystems.

Developing institutional resilience requires technology leaders and practitioners to embrace specific practices and mindsets that enable sustained organizational agility and effectiveness. EDUCAUSE has been working with the higher education technology community to develop a framework that provides a foundation for assessing organizational strengths and growth areas while translating insights into actionable strategies. We incorporated themes from the 2024 and 2025 editions of the EDUCAUSE Top 10, as well as complementary definitions from leading organizations such as ISO, Gartner, and McKinsey & Company, definitions that emphasize the importance of absorbing disruption, recovering from setbacks, and continually adapting to transform challenges into opportunities for growth and advancement.

Attributes of Institutional Resilience

As refined by expert panelists in June 2025, the framework consists of seven attributes that describe resilient institutions. As the higher education landscape continues to evolve, this framework itself will be updated, ensuring it remains relevant and responsive to emerging challenges and opportunities facing institutional leaders.

Adaptive

Institutional leaders support change-related competencies and structures that increase the ability to adapt to and learn from challenges. All institutional stakeholders are agile, flexibly adjusting to new realities at a speed sufficient to keep up with rapidly changing conditions.

Data Fluent

All institutional stakeholders understand how to use data as needed for decision-making and action, even when new data-driven technologies rapidly emerge and develop. Data is treated as a strategic institutional asset, and data governance—including ensuring that all stakeholders have appropriate access to data—is a priority.

Decisive

The institution is action oriented and has the foresight to detect and respond to both long- and short-term change in ways that advance strategic vision, mission, and goals. Governance structures support leaders to make rapid and sometimes difficult decisions, even in situations where institution-wide consensus is not possible.

Led with Courage

Leaders foster a culture of perseverance and institutional resilience and lead courageously under changing and challenging circumstances, including high turnover among leaders. They have a commitment to institutional mission and strategic goals, and they encourage and value initiative, curiosity, innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness.

Interconnected

People, processes, systems, and technologies are interconnected and not siloed, both within the institution and with external partners such as broader communities, other institutions, employers, and solution providers. Institutional stakeholders proactively listen to, plan for, and respond to partners’ needs.

Prepared

Institutional leaders evaluate risk and assess strengths and weaknesses, aligning goals and strategic objectives across the institution. Use of strategic foresight or other scenario-planning methodologies empowers stakeholders to take quick action in response to changing circumstances (e.g., society, technology, economy, environment, policy).

Trustworthy

Trust, collaboration, cooperation, empathy, and inclusion characterize the relationship between individuals and the institution. Leaders support a culture of trust by adhering to consistent principles and values. Individuals feel safety and belonging at their institution. Emotional trust and digital trust are both seen as critical values.

Getting Started

The challenges higher education is facing today might look different from those experienced in 2023, when the work to explore institutional resilience in higher education started, but such resilience is not limited to specific circumstances. Consider these potential starting points when building institutional resilience:

• Mobilize your entire institution. Unite business units around a shared mission and drive collaboration across departments to prioritize institutional performance over individual unit gains.
• Develop new institutional capacities by fostering adaptiveness, encouraging innovation, and embracing calculated risks.
• Commit leadership and resources to resilience—marginal efforts won’t create meaningful change.
• Assign specialized roles to key units including oversight, finance, cybersecurity and risk management, campus operations, HR, supply chain, data  and technology, and communications. Equip them with the expertise, principles, processes, and policies they need.
• Treat resilience as an ongoing transformation process, not a destination—similar to digital transformation efforts.
• Target specific dimensions of resilience—financial, operational, technological, organizational, reputational, or business model—and tackle one or a few at a time for focused impact.
• Invest in your workforce  by providing comprehensive support and deliberately cultivating diverse perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, and skills to strengthen institutional resilience.

Focusing on developing institutional resilience will help your campus adapt, recover, and even thrive in these times of uncertainty, volatility, complexity, and ambiguity.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Susan Grajek and Betsy Reinitz, former EDUCAUSE staff members who initiated the work on institutional resilience prior to their retirements. We also extend our thanks and appreciation to the panelists who participated in the development of this framework:

• Jennifer Burns, Associate Vice President IT & Chief Information Officer, The University of British Columbia
• Lanita Collette, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Chief Information Security Officer, The University of Arizona
• Courtney Davis Curtis, formerly Assistant Vice President for Risk Management and Resilience Planning, University of Chicago
• John Dunning, Assistant Vice Chancelor for Institutional Research, Strategy & Planning/Chief Data Officer, University of Wisconsin-Platteville
• Gerald Hector, Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance, University of Central Florida.
• Janelle Jefferson, Director, Network Services and Development (Advising Success Network), NASPA
• Jackie Malcolm, Vice Chancellor of IT, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
• Sue Menditto, Senior Director, Accounting Policy, NACUBO
• Stephanie Moore, Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico
• Kim Nimmo, Director of Risk Management, Lehigh University
• Jami Painter, Senior Associate Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, University of Illinois
• Rob Shomaker, Senior Vice President, CUPA-HR
• Sandeep Sidhu, Chief Information Officer, Emily Carr University
• Phil Ventimiglia, Chief Innovation Officer, Georgia State University
• Christine Whalley, Chief Information Security Officer, Amherst College

Jenay Robert is Senior Researcher at EDUCAUSE.

Kathe Pelletier is Senior Director of Community Programs at EDUCAUSE.