Designing for Institutional Resilience in a Changing World

Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I am a content marketing and program manager with EDUCAUSE, and I'm one of the hosts for today's show.

Kathe Pelletier: Hello everybody. I'm Kathe Pelletier and you may have seen me as a guest on this show, but I have the exciting honor to be able to co-host with Sophie. I'm the senior director for community programs at EDUCAUSE.

Sophie White: Hey, this is a special day that we get to co-host together. So thanks Kathe. And we have two fantastic guests with us today to discuss institutional resilience. So I'll introduce you all to our guests today. We'll chat a bit about what institutional resilience is and then we'll dive into it. So our first guest today is Jackie Malcolm Bailey. Dr. Bailey is the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and CIO at Minnesota State. She brings over twenty years of distinctive higher ed experience and has been a leader both at the campus and system levels. She's committed to delivering complex information systems that support access to affordable and equitable education and increase the economic viability of students. Dr. Bailey is an active thought leader in the higher education technology space through her engagement with EDUCAUSE and other IT community organizations. She holds a bachelor's degree from Drexel University in Pennsylvania, a master's from the George Washington University in DC and a doctorate from Delaware State University. And she'll earn her executive Juris Doctorate from Purdue Global Law School in December of 2025. That's exciting. You're almost there. Thanks so much for being with us, Jackie.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Sophie White: And our second guest is John Dunning. John is the assistant Chancellor of Strategy and Planning slash Chief Data Officer for the University of Wisconsin Platteville, or to his friends, the assistant chancellor of data and stuff. I love that as an easy way to describe what you do data and stuff.

Sophie White: He has served in the higher education space for nearly thirty-five years, all at regional comprehensive institutions like UWP. John is a passionate advocate for collaborative work within the higher education community writ large and the higher ed IT community in particular. He served for a decade as chair of the Midwestern higher education compact technology community, which focused on using national procurement and best practice collaboration to enhance value for students throughout the nation. He served as a founding member of the Kane Group, a multi-state shared services organization comprised of thirteen institutions and he has also volunteered with EDUCAUSE in a number of capacities. So thank you Jackie and John for being with us and for all that you do for EDUCAUSE we really appreciate all of your time.

John Dunning: Thrilled to be here. Thanks. Yep,

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: It's a pleasure.

Sophie White: Great. And I love that both your bios had so much about supporting higher education in general and the success of students, so we can talk about how that fits into institutional resilience in a bit. So before we dive in, I just wanted to give a definition of what institutional resilience means because resilience can look a lot of different ways depending on the context that we're working in. But for this specific conversation, we're looking at institutional resilience as the ability to anticipate, respond to, and adapt to quickly changing circumstances in ways that maximize opportunities and minimize impacts of unforeseen events. So that's the EDUCAUSE definition of institutional resilience and I thought that was important to illustrate as we've been talking about some of this institutional resilience work, Jenay Robert, who's sometimes our co-host, typically our regular co-host, we're so excited to have Kathe today. She mentioned that this issue, we're really looking at it from a systemic standpoint and not from the standpoint of an individual has to be more resilient and do things a different way. We want to look at what the structures are in place that can build this type of resilience to support our institutions now and into the future. Does anyone want to add anything in terms of that definition or why you think that's important as we're looking at resilience right now?

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Yeah, I'll add one thing. One of the things I think is really important, we think about resiliency. It's always about our ability to bounce back. And I was doing some reading a couple weeks ago and it's actually more of how do you bounce forward, right? Reinvent yourself. How do you continually put yourself in a space in place where you're bouncing forward and looking at the future as opposed to being reactionary and saying, well, I bounced back. Didn't we do great? I think we all wanted to bounce back after COVID instead of really acknowledging the fact that we actually had to bounce forward in higher ed and do our business a bit different. And that's the beauty of resiliency if you want to look at it that way. There's a positive sort of forward thinking way in that.

John Dunning: Yeah, I love that Jackie, and it's connecting for me with some of the comments Sophie made earlier about advocacy for the higher ed community writ large. And so I'm thinking of this as we're having this conversation in terms of societal resilience. And so the reality is that we are going through profound societal change right now and higher ed, at least in my ideal and hopefully conception of reality, higher ed has always had a role in societal fabric. And so I think this is a really interesting time to have this conversation because how do we as a vertical within society's fabric bounce forward to use your language and what impact then in a positive way does that have on society writ large? I think that's a fundamentally important question right now.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah, I love the bounce forward idea and I would also add that it's not by accident, right? It's because we are intentionally creating these structures and attributes in our organizations that enable us to either be forward thinking or be agile or anticipate potential challenges and be ready for them so that we can weather those storms and not just the bounciness of a system or a group of people to have that grit to just, but it's anticipating, right? So I think that's so empowering too that institutional resilience is something that we can create and develop in our organizations. And I know both of you were on the panels that we held at EDUCAUSE to develop the definition that Sophie shared and to identify various attributes of resilient organizations. I'd love to hear from you any of those that stuck out in particular for you, or any aspects of resilience that seem either the most critical or the most timely or just the ones that pop out for you.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: For you, John.

John Dunning: Yeah, I think for me, and this is informed by having had a number of opportunities in the last two or three years to practice institutional resilience. That's not something you really want to have on your resume, but it is a reality that we find ourselves in. And so for me, what's fascinating, having done some of that definitional work with EDUCAUSE prior to experiencing some of the things in the last two or three years and then having lived through that is number one, I think in terms of the language, I think we got it right. What really surfaces to me though is that there is a nuanced layer of understanding for me below that language, realizing that it's people that make all of those things happen, right? Yes, we build systems and our systems are important. Yes, we build structures and our structures are important, but when stuff's going down, it's the people in those systems and structures that we lean on and bounce forward with that make all the difference. And so I think we've absolutely got the concept right. I think what's really important for us to remember as we go through is the sort of nuanced, softer side below the implementation of those concepts that are also critical and it's important not to lose sight of that.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Yeah, John, I think that's spot on because I think frequently we talk about the structures, we talk about all the ways in which our institutions will be able to bounce forward and reinvent ourselves hopefully ahead of any crisis or something like that or any type of disruption. But I think we also have to remember that we are our people, that's who we are, that's who we serve and that's who we are. And that is, to your point, who's doing the work. So as we are doing this type of work, which a lot of times involves large scale change and rethinking the way in which we do our business in higher education, I think sometimes we forget just how tired some of our folks are from all the chain, from all the being innovative and strategic, and how do we help them be in a space, how do we take care of them, be their cheerleaders so we can encourage them to continue to want to do this work with us. So I think people, to your point John, really, really important when things actually sort of go bump in the night, who are we calling, right? Yes, we're reliant on our systems and other things like that, but we're largely reliant on the people to do the work. So how we care and feed for our staff and our employees and our students and our faculty and all. I think it's equally as important as those structures that we need to be putting into place to futureproof ourselves as well.

Sophie White: I think that's a great point. And I'm curious, John, as the assistant chancellor of data and stuff, we're talking a lot and I know that this resilience, institutional resilience research has to do with using data as a strategic asset too. Data is typically not always thought of as really people-centric. Thinking about the softer side, how are you considering how to use things like data or even AI in the world that we're in right now while considering the needs of the people that you're working with on this institutional resilience work?

John Dunning: Yeah, Sophie, I think that's a great question. At the risk of getting philosophical, which I want to do sometimes. Great. I think the power of data in an institutional context and in many contexts, societal context as well, is that what really data does for us, if you think about it, is that it captures in numbers, human stories. Because what we're doing is we're taking sort of these metrics snapshots of what's happening as humans interact with other humans. And that's especially true to Jackie's point. We are organizations of humans, ideally humans helping other humans, and we grow together. And so our data is really the sort of point in time views of what's happening there. So I think from my perspective, we can, this is overly simplistic, but we can use data in a couple of ways. We can value integrity and we can value truth, and we can value the human stories that those data represent, and we can do the work to surface those stories faithfully and tell us about our organizations, or alternatively, we can either intentionally or unintentionally weaponize data

John Dunning: And it becomes a really powerful tool in either direction. And so I think it's really incumbent on us to understand that data is a lens with which we view truth and a lens with which we can to some degree predict the future if we're faithful to understanding how those data are interpreted. So I think it's absolutely a strategic asset, but the reality, and this goes back to sort of the earlier point, the reality is that if the rest of the organization doesn't trust the integrity of the people sharing the data, then data has no strategic value. And so yes, it's about our systems. Yes, it's about our technologies. Yes, it's about building the infrastructure to help people faithfully surface those stories quickly and easily so that we can sort of scenario plan and do those kinds of things. But if we don't have the relationships both with the underlying truth in the data and with the people we're sharing it with, then it doesn't matter.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: And John, the other thing I think about too, thinking about data as an asset, how do we look at data as we do software as a service? So thinking about data as a product and not a byproduct, we're always trying to use it after the fact and how can we use it to inform in a proactive way? And it goes back to resiliency. I do believe that part of resiliency is making sure that you create literacy around your data, the ability to understand it and comprehend it and use it for our common good as opposed to weaponizing it. Because that's actually the easy thing to do, is to weaponize it and have it tell the story you want it to tell as opposed to really taking those meaningful insights. And so the way I look at it is my organization is currently building its data strategy, and we've pulled our groups together to really think about how do we think about using our data as a product and unapply product, not as a lagger, but using them forward thinking.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: And I think about things like AI and machine learning. Those aren't new concepts. They are in higher ed in the way in which they're being used, but they've been here for some time. And it goes back to, I think it took us by storm. Many of us in higher education and others are like, we've been using these things and higher ed is sort of that way. Sometimes we kind of are sort of last to the gate. And I'd love to be able to see us take a more proactive stance in how we look at the use of AI machine learning in our ways in which we can be resilient and bring our faculty along. I think our students are way along with us, many of them. And I think about an institution that I used to work for prior to COVID and asking faculty, "Hey, would love," I used to oversee instructional design, and I said, "we'd love to have more of you teach online."

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Like, "oh, I don't want any part of that." And then right behind that, here comes COVID. And then it's like I couldn't get them to come to campus, right? "No, I just love to teach online." And so that's the way you transform yourself. It's a way to start thinking about it in that again, forward thinking way as opposed to looking at things as a barrier, but looking at them as how can we continue to service students in the spaces that they're in? And I love John's point about the core mission of higher education, whether your public or private or whatever your landscape is, is to increase the economic viability of our communities. We have to be resilient because higher education has that wonderful mission of being able to be there to support a student wherever they are, whether they're seventeen, whether they're seventy-nine, whether they're seventy-three, like my dad who's getting another doctorate, I don't know why. And so he can and live in that space in a way in which he can get after it when he wants to because there he'll remain relevant.

Kathe Pelletier: Both of you have touched on a tension that I think is important for institutional resilience, which is the tension between innovation and governance and trust is in there somewhere too. And those relationships, can you both speak to that and how you've navigated that tension on your campuses?

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Oh goodness. That's a great question.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah, I was going to say we can narrow it to data and AI or other use cases, but that was in my mind of the data and AI innovation and governance.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: No, I think that's great. In its broadness, the way you presented it, Kathe, I think about doing large ERP implementations that you think about how we're trying to be utterly and completely big and innovative and how we are trying to navigate who we are, who we happen, who we want to be in those places and spaces. And so it's been difficult. I would say it's been really difficult to be innovative in a space typically, especially around the ERP space, we have a homegrown system and there's a culture, there's a culture within our organization, but this has largely worked for us, that has served its purpose. And there are those who are saying, why are we doing this? And there are those that are saying, yes, let's go. We want the change and can see the future because there's AI, machine learning and all of that as well.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: And so I think it is challenging and difficult to try and be innovative and be resilient. Again, the level of change that's happening, moving into a SaaS-based product, software as a service and trying to get people to move along with you, but then you being the visionary and leading these teams and saying, this is going to be for the good and this is going to be wonderful and great, and helping them try to see it in the midst of all the change and in the midst of all the challenges. And I always say to my team with our implementation, I said, it's big, it's burly, but it's beautiful and we're making history. Look at it in that way and not to create such a burden around it, but also knowing what you're doing on behalf of students, that's where I feel like we can show up and do our best work.

John Dunning: Yeah, I love that reframing, Jackie, and several points in this conversation make me think of we as humans tend to approach any problem with whatever the conceptual frame that we have is when we run into it the first time. So your point, Jackie too, sort of faculty and even students' acceptance of online learning pre-COVID, the frame was that is foreign and it is a barrier for me, and it is not an asset to me post-COVID like, oh wait, completely different frame through which I'm going to view that. So I think about our typical frame, or at least I'll speak for myself, my typical frame when we think of governance alongside the word agility, never the twain shall meet in our typical framework. So let's think higher ed governance. Well, the first thing we do is let's form a committee. And then that committee probably needs three other committees that are going to work. And there's subcommittees and there's task forces, and there's all of this kind of stuff. So I think to Jackie's point, one of the things that we can think about is how do we reframe the work that we're doing? So sort of the running joke that we have at UW-Platteville because we had a couple of non-Agile approaches to data governance prior to my arrival is the running joke we have at Platteville is we're not doing anything around data governance. We don't do data governance, we just work on data literacy, data security, data privacy, and data accuracy. That's all. But we don't do data governance. But what that leads to is a much more, at least for us, is a much more iterative approach in this particular thing like data literacy. What is our biggest challenge today? Data privacy. What is the challenge that we're dealing with right now? And I think it feeds into this institutional resiliency thing because I think the environment in which I think many of us find ourselves is that we're not done the last challenge to resiliency before the next challenge to resiliency starts. And so how do you navigate a world where it can feel like if you're not sort of helping yourself with reframing, it can feel like you're always in crisis, but the reality is we're simply always in change.

And so how do you navigate that? Well, one approach to that is to do it iteratively and not try to eat the elephant all at once, but keep in mind that the goal is no elephants were harmed in making this. Now keep in mind that the goal is to eat the elephant, but we are going to do it one bite at a time. And the view of which bite is next is going to change from day to day.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. Kathe, I know in our discussion about the Teaching and Learning Horizon Report, we talked about the poly crisis being a conglomerate of crises that we're looking at in the world today, and it can feel like things are escalating and changing so quickly that how do you keep up? How do you manage change for your teams? But I like the look at, it's not necessarily a crisis, but a change. And maybe change is accelerating faster now with the state of the world as it is, but there's always a way to reframe it and support teams to do that work.

Kathe Pelletier: And my very first exposure to something like institutional resilience was actually instructional resilience. And that hearkens back to architectural resilience. And the very compelling example was building homes near the coast where they're on stilts, and so that accounts for the water rising. They're somehow built to withstand or even a skyscraper that's actually built to move with the wind so that the way you're designing it is actually what contributes to the ultimate resilience. So it's even less about doing resilience or being resilient, but it's designing for resilience. And so I love the examples that both of you offered because it really speaks to that balance of having a vision and being decisive, and this is where we're headed. This is the elephant guys. This is the elephant we're going to eat. But then that agility of we're going to start here with this leg and maybe we need to move to the tail, but oh wait, let's actually go to the other leg instead next.

Kathe Pelletier: And so it's kind of buffeting the swirl around you in this highly complex and chaotic world of poly crises that you're just there on your stilts, it's all come through. That's really powerful to me. Again, that's where I feel so excited about the agency that offers because we get to build the stilts and to use that architectural and keeping in mind that the people are the ones who are going to be either building or holding the house up or whatever other metaphor I'm going to try to kill. Yeah. So I have another question.

Kathe Pelletier: Go for it. Are you saying no, no more questions. We're all about it. One of the things that has come up as we've been exploring this idea of institutional resilience is that in some ways it's an institutional, I mean, it's in the name, right? It's an institutional concept that requires the very top leadership to be on board, to be a champion, to be a part of this architectural endeavor. But as we sit in our IT organizations, we might have a special role in institutional resilience. So I'd love to just have some time to talk about that. Thinking about your place in IT, is it something that, do you look inward at your IT organization and think how can we as people with our systems that we're creating and our structures support institutional resilience that helps to benefit the organization or do we influence the organization or as a both and? But anyway, that's kind of a big question.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Just from where I sit as a CIO, I report directly to my chancellor, but obviously have direct oversight of the IT organization. So I get the direct benefit of doing both, which I think is a wonderful place and space to be in. And I have a highly seasoned team, and sometimes I'm able to bring a different perspective to the way in which they're thinking. Some of my team, this is sort of the only job or organization they've worked in, others are coming in with different perspectives. And so how do I make those connections within my own team to look at things differently? We're coming off of being a very highly waterfall type organization. When we moved into our ERP implementation, my team was like, well, hold on a second. We want to do this and then we can tackle this. And now it's like, no, we're completely agile.

We've got 5,000 things happening all at one time. And so I'm able to help us understand how do we change culturally to be able to combine too looking at things in the future. I think when we think of things like poly crisis and it being in that mode, and we think about what's right in front of us. I just need to solve what's right in front of me. And that is one of those things I think is not highly supportive of resiliency because you're only right here in front of you. But I also think too, in thinking about reporting up to the chancellor, but also having an opportunity to work with my vice chancellor colleagues as well as the presidents from our campuses is helping them see something different and the why in it and why would we want to do this? And how does this benefit your campus and how does this benefit your students?

And so the way in which, and it's funny, I have a background in marketing communications, which some say that's strange. You have a background in marketing communications, but you work in IT. And I said, they actually work very, very well together from a change management organization, from change management perspective because I am able to help message and help figure out the why to folks when they're thinking about, I know what this technology thing is here to do. Well, I don't have to use the technical terms. I can pull in some layman's term technology to help 'em understand how this is going to work on behalf of your students, on behalf of you, create efficiencies, have you look at you doing your particular business better and different. And so I think that is a really big question. But I think as I think about the resources that EDUCAUSE offers us as IT leaders as well, I think about the integrated CIO.

And I know sometimes when I talk to folks, I sound like a bit of a broken record, but that's how I see my role is I am truly woven into the fabric. IT is woven into the fabric of our business every day and how important that is and the level of influence you have around that to do good and support where your organization needs to go well off into the future is really important and how we should be using our roles to do that, right, to work within my team. I said to my team the other day, and I was like, I want us to do a bit more with AI. I want to think about how we're using our current tools and applications to do that where they're plugging and chugging along and they're turning these things on. And I'm like, but we've got to have a little bit more strategy around what that looks like, but then I can take that and help the chancellor understand how we're using AI within our system. And so again, I just enjoy the fact that I get to do both and help to support and influence my team, but also help to support and influence and help leadership understand the why.

John Dunning: I think that's great, Jackie. And I'm really blessed to be sort of in a similar position. I report to the chancellor, IT reports up through me. We have a CIO, but we just sort of an unusual reporting structure, but it works for us. But as you were talking and as Kathe was posing the question, one of the things I got to thinking about was really that role of IT and value creation for the business. It's not about the technology. It's about how do we extract every bit of high value human potential that we have in the organization? And to put it in rudimentary terms, let's stop doing stupid work so that we can have the time that we need to spend with our students and to spend with our colleagues doing the things that the technology doesn't do well yet. And so one of the things that I've found when you do get into an institutional crisis, it's almost like a sci-fi movie where time slows everything gets super focused on exactly the things that are most important in that moment. So we had an institutional event here about six or eight weeks ago, and all of a sudden everything else goes away.

The strategic plan goes out the door for a moment, and I'm in charge of the strategic plan. So it can't go out the door forever, but for the moment you put it outside the door, what becomes important is the safety and wellbeing of students, the safety and wellbeing of staff, logistical things like how do we move people from here to here and do that in a way that's safe? So everything gets hyperfocused, which means that if you haven't done the work of value creation, you are going to have business processes that fail while you're focusing on the thing that has to take focus right now.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: That's right.

 

John Dunning: But if you've done the work of value creation, the machine keeps humming.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: That's right.

John Dunning: The machine keeps humming, the bills still being paid. Students, students are still taking their classes, doing their whatever. And the beautiful part about that, I think, and this also speaks to Jackie's point, is that then when you come out of crisis, that's where bounce forward comes from.

Kathe Pelletier: Yes.

John Dunning: Because all this stuff, you've had this opportunity to zoom way in and go, oh, okay, this item needs attention all hands on deck. We are all here for this right now. And then two weeks later, you zoom way back out and it's like, oh, this other stuff is running like a top. This is our capacity to bounce forward. Now we tick that. Now we grab the strategic plan again, pull our eyes up to the horizon. What did we learn two weeks ago that changes the trajectory of this institution? And if we've done our job well at IT, we've actually created institutional capacity throughout the organization for folks to refocus with that sort of new perspective that having gone through crisis brings. And to me, that's where the bounce forward concept, which I love, it's really what happens on the backside of a crisis that can inform as much as preparation can inform institutional agility. And that's where I think we as technologists, who, to Jackie's point, absolutely, we have to be fully integrated into the fabric of the institution, and that is our job as higher ed and IT leaders, we bridge that gap. But if we've done that well, it enables the whole institution to bounce forward and really a very fun way to watch.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: And John, one of the things I love you had said and mentioned, and it kind of hearkens back that old kind of conversation around never let a good crisis go unused. You can bounce forward, you can see certain things, you're like, wow, I never knew this is what these business processes were doing to students. And here at Minnesota State, through our technical work, we're always looking at how are we, and we totally stole this from the University of Arkansas. So Steve Fulkerson has all the credit here, but as common as possible, as different as necessary. Because John, to your point, when that crisis is happening and we have 33 different institutions, I don't need 33 different flavors of ice cream that I now have to go through and figure out. But if I can create some commonality out of what we're doing, that crisis comes up.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: I really know across my system how I need to work and how I need to function, and what can we do to get us back up and running and doing the business of teaching and learning. So I think looking at things in that way too, again, is what's the value in that business process and what's the value that we're creating not just for today, but in those times when that is not the time when we're trying to figure out what might be the value in that or how do we get through that? So I do think as you're thinking about when you're a CIO or a technologist or anyone in the organization for that matter in your business, how can you be thinking in those kinds of ways that what structures we're putting into place don't cause barriers? The other piece I frequently always think about is equity.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: And I know that's a sensitive topic politically, but if I think about just the humanistic piece of equity, not what it means to any political party or anything like that, but what it means to a student coming in and having the expectation that we do what we said we were going to do on their behalf. Our job is to make sure that they're going through their classes and that they graduate and they get a really great job. But any disruption to that really can be disruptive. As a first generation student myself, sometimes it's just that one barrier that means, you know what? I'm not coming back. It's too hard. I really don't have the capacity. So if we're able to make sure we understand the value in the work that we're doing and the expectation that our, and I'm going to use our students and use the word consumers, which I know is a bad word in higher ed, but this is the largest purchase that they'll make outside of their home for many of them. And so we need to be there for them. We need to meet them where they are. We need to be resilient enough because our mission is core critical to many of our communities remaining and growing and thriving. And so I always say no pressure around that. That feels pretty heavy. But having a responsibility to them and having a responsibility leading them where they are and really making sure we have equity structures in place where we can think about all of them. And again, coming from a system, all of our communities are different.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: And so what our community needs in rural Minnesota versus what they need in the Twin Cities might be different, but there are some commonalities that we can thread through all of those needles. And how we can get after our work in those common ways is also important and also creates resiliency. So as we think about our 33 flavors, I said, okay, maybe we don't need 33, but can we get maybe one or two or maybe we could be Neapolitan and maybe there's, and so I'm okay with that if it addresses our student needs, but we certainly shouldn't have 33 because we feel like that's what suits us best because there isn't resiliency in understanding what suits us best as faculty, as staff, as leadership. It's about what suits the students best. And if we can be in that space, then I think that we can consistently understand what it is they need and meet them where they are.

John Dunning: Yeah, I love that, Jackie. And as you're sharing that, I'm thinking through, and I think this has actually been a thread that sort of underlies the entire conversation, but we haven't really articulated it. So I had like to do that. We're really talking about how do we live our values as institutions and humans. And I think when you have moments of intense change or intense challenge, knowing ahead of time what your values are is kind of helpful.

John Dunning: And Jackie mentioned culture earlier. I think that informs the institutional culture and the community culture that we bring to facing those challenges. Because when stuff gets real, right, all of a sudden the temptation is to become very, very tactical and say, oh, crisis, fire, water hose, go, don't care. Just get stuff done. And in my experience, at least rarely is it that black and white, there are multiple paths. Even in crisis, the paths get really constrained in a crisis. We know we're at A, and we want to go to B, we want to go to the far side of this crisis, and the paths get constrained because the resources become constrained, and the options time as a resource becomes constrained. Human capacity may be constrained, budget may be constrained. So you have fewer choices in how you're going to navigate from A to B, but that's exactly when your values are most important, because it's values that really say, I'm going to get from A to B in a way, to Jackie's point that equitably supports all of our students or that treats our faculty and staff with dignity and respect and honors their journey.

John Dunning: It's when you get to be who do you still need to have standing the people that you were at A with, and they need to be ready to sort of face the next thing that comes along. And it's our values that allow us to do that and look back and go, okay, I'm comfortable with how we did that. That was hard, but I'm comfortable with how we did it.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Yeah, I think that's really important, John, and I appreciate always really keeping that at the forefront of who we are as institutions and leaning into our mission and our vision and our values. And Sophie, you gave a really great definition of institutional resiliency. And part of that is using all of that to make sure you don't lose sight of the reason why you're here, that mission and that vision and those values, and how do you revisit those? And that's something that we've used as a strategy here at Minnesota State, is when times are difficult and hard, how do we go back and say "who are we?" and how do we pull that in and lean into that during times of crisis? And how do we use that to move the work forward and to continue to care and feed for our students? And so I do think it becomes transactional, as John mentioned, right? When you're in crisis mode, it's like just trying to get the fire put out. What are the things I need to do to get the fire put out? But if we really think about the mission of who we are, yes, you do want the fire to be put out, but how do we do that in a way that honors who we are? And so that way it doesn't then become just transactional, but it becomes meaningful and thought provoking and growth provoking as well.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. Yeah. Getting those values into muscle memory of all the individuals in the institution.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's good work. I think that at times we look at this as pretty heavy, and it can be, right? I'm not certainly saying that it's not at times, but I think if you're able to take the time and again, look forward, fast forward, reinvent yourself, use your crisis to the good, I think that's in those moments when you understand just how meaningful your work is every day, and I enjoy what I do. I enjoy my job. I enjoy the people I work with. I enjoy going to our campuses and seeing our students. And right now we're implementing a technology for specifically for our students, and we're bringing our students into the project to help with meaningful experiences. Instead of saying, well, this is what we think you all need. If we're just going to design and configure this thing, we are the people who are doing the work, and there's a novel thought.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Maybe we can actually get the people who are going to be the recipients of this thing included and involved. And so we're including our students, not just as sort of focus group people and people that we can listen to, but really, if I'm a marketing student, can I get you involved in change management? How can I get the voices into the work of the folks that we directly influence every day? Because there just might be some really good ideas that exist outside of our own. And I think those are other important ways in which you can understand how you lean into that mission. What do you want? What are you expecting of us? What's on the horizon for you? What program would you like to see? What do we not offer you? What could make your experience that much better? I think if you can involve your students and your other stakeholders now and in real time and all the time, I think you'll get past some of those pieces of doing things that perhaps you thought were what they wanted but maybe weren't really what they needed.

Kathe Pelletier: It's that interconnectedness aspect that really, it helps us knit together as a community too, and genders trust and just builds a self-perpetuating wheel of goodness to have that kind of engagement.

John Dunning: Yeah, I love that example, Jackie, because the thing that I find amazing is, and this is where sometimes I think, and just speaking from an editorial perspective for myself, sometimes we overuse financial data in our decision making. We forget why we're doing the thing that we're doing, and I get the importance of financial data, right? There is no mission without margin. I get all of that. But what you're describing to me is exemplifying a value of we are doing this for students. We are doing this to change a student experience. We are not installing a piece of software that students will use. We are actually trying to do something to positively change the student experience. And so when you reframe that job with the value in mind, not only do you still get to be, you actually get further. You actually accomplish something that wasn't necessarily in the brief of the thing that you set out to do because you did it the right way. We were going through an experience a couple of years ago, and it involved a lot of iterative choices. We would've leadership folks sitting in the room, and I probably can't capture this gesture on camera, but Chancellor would repeatedly sort of take her hands and bring them back to her chest.

John Dunning: And that was symbolic, and we all knew what it meant. Are we keeping our students close? Is this decision keeping our students close? And so when you said muscle memory, Kathe, literally it was muscle memory. And I think it's incumbent on us as institutional leaders like IT hat, academic affairs hat, like finance hat, regardless of what hat we wear, marketing and comms hat, it's incumbent on us as institutional leaders to literally model that behavior.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Oh yes, absolutely.

John Dunning: Otherwise, why is anybody going to follow? And that is especially important in moments of crisis and especially important, I guess it's not special if it's special on both sides, but right in between moments of crisis, we have to model that at both times or we lose it. And then at that point, at a certain level, what's the point? Why do we exist if we're not going to live what we say that we are as organizations and people?

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: Yeah.

Sophie White: I think that's a mic drop. I think we did it.

Jackie Malcolm Bailey: I'm like, I'm done.

Sophie White: No, I think this was so refreshing with as all the talk of managing risks and the chaos that we're seeing outside, how can we ground ourselves to the mission of higher education? I'm so glad both of you brought back why we're here, why we're supporting students, how important higher education is to the social fabric of the world that we live in. So I'm really thrilled that that's the takeaway and inspired by this conversation about institutional resilience. So thank you all for being here. Thank you.