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I'm David Henson and I serve as Campus CIO with Bolden Networks for Higher Education. Welcome to Control Alt Lead. A constant challenge we face as higher education technology leaders is managing change. Change in leadership change in staffing, change in budgets, change in platforms, change in technologies, change in vendors, change in processes, change in requirements. In fact, change itself is about the only constant we have in our leadership practice. So why is it that we rarely, if ever, explicitly design for change? Oh sure, we do build in fudge factors. We sneak in escalation estimates, we over build over design under promise. All in the service of avoiding mastering change because it's easier to avoid understanding it and using that understanding to make informed, sustainable and data driven decisions. We also caved to the finite at the expense of the infinite. As I had mentioned in an earlier episode on Courageous Leadership. Usually this comes in the form of implementing customization of a standard platform that now must be carried forward in perpetuity, complicating every future system upgrade, or avoiding making a decision on a needed change because you're anticipating leaving your position and just leaving that problem for the next person. Or you're relying on a heaping helping of unfunded copium for an immediately needed future system upgrade that you're putting off for that someday. How often do we explicitly articulate our unknowns and uncertainty so that planning for change can be understood and managed to, instead of avoiding the subject altogether, simply hoping for the best? It seems hardly ever. And that's entirely to our detriment and to the detriment of the institutions that we serve. It's quite common in my practice as a fractional CIO that I do encounter systems that can't be upgraded because of substantial customizations that make it nearly impossible to move forward with the platform change or dealing with hardware purchased without an installation plan, much less a technology roadmap that's been purchased piecemeal simply because it was on sale, but now can't be updated for a needed critical security exploit or to see the deleterious effects of relying upon heroes as an unsustainable management methodology rather than do the more demanding work of responsibly succession planning, training and professionally developing your staff. Patrick Van Horne and Jason Riley in their book Left of Bang refer to such initiative taking risk management and thinking as thinking left of Bang, that is Taking a proactive approach to potential threats by planning based on observation and intuition to prevent the bad from happening. In short, being Left of Bang is a practice of increased situational awareness, early threat detection, and developing plans for acting on those threats. Planning for Risk Designing for change long before change inevitably occurs. Now, in my personal experience, most schools that wind up in a succession crisis or marooned on a platform without a clear technology roadmap forward, or are left in the lurch when the indispensable person on that team finally walks, find themselves there not because of a lack of imagination, but rather a lack of imagination that the unthinkable would ever happen to them. I'd like to suggest, therefore, for your consideration, a handful of sustainable best practices to inculcate change and design mastery into your daily leadership DNA. First, let's recognize that change is inevitable, so you should plan for it and you should design for it. Don't assume that everything will continue to operate as it does in perpetuity. Trees don't grow to the sky, technology advances, people grow, develop and they leave. Therefore, plan, design and manage with that front of mind. Next, plan to minimize the impacts of change. Look for ways to minimize the lift or the effort needed by you, your school or your staff needed to enact change. Reduce the number of customizations that must be maintained and the number of one off integrations that have to be managed. Find ways that trusted managed service providers can perform change management on your behalf rather than depending upon those at your institution to do the work so that you and your staff can focus on institutional priorities instead of break fix activities that rob you of time and the capacity to innovate. Budget for change whenever possible. Incorporate OPEX thinking rather than CAPEX thinking into your budgetary planning practices. Opex those operating expenses and ongoing costs a school incurs to run its day to day operations afford greater flexibility in managing your budget because costs are more predictable with the added ability to scale operations quickly based upon needs, making it particularly advantageous for schools with limited budgets and unpredictable enrollment futures. Capex or one time funds a school uses to purchase, improve and maintain long term assets are less predictable and more unreliable, making it inherently more difficult to plan and design for change with that particular worldview. Finally, you should embed change design intrinsically into your leadership vocabulary. Change management should be a natural part of your daily leadership walk. It should permeate your risk management, your systems of accountability, your communications, the entirety of your management style, from your president to the cabinet to each staffer on your team. Everyone should understand how we account for uncertainty, how we manage risk and how we design for change and how that process informs our decision making. We should always seek to be left of bang proactively looking for ways to minimize the inevitable impacts of changes on our staffing, on our strategic technology design efforts, and on our budget planning. Because change is inevitable. Failing to plan for change, however, is not. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you soon.