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This town ain't my home Sit us only for a while.

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I'm David Hinson, and I serve as campus CIO for Bolden Networks for Higher Education. Welcome to Control Alt Lead. When I think about the future of higher education, technology, leadership, the part of the job that keeps me up at night and the part that feeds me in the morning, I always come back to the same simple but stubborn truth. We can no longer be institutions that simply react. Not with the pace of disruption we see on our campuses today. Not with students, faculty and staff expecting insight before intervention, and not with the opportunities and risks of data, human dynamics, economics and technology shifting simultaneously beneath us. That's why the 2026 Educause Top 10 issue From Reactive to Proactive, number eight on the list, resonates so deeply with me and with the work we do every day. It's a call to stop living in the rearview mirror and start living in the realm of possibility, grounded in rigorous data but looking outward and forward in every decision we make. And it's why this is the time of year I intentionally sit with chief business officers across all the schools I represent to map the future, to lay out the IT operational costs of the coming budget year and beyond, and collaboratively address what the school must do to be technologically and organizationally secure, resilient, accountable and future ready. Too many of our schools and we've all been there, feel like they're always on their heels. Enrollment drops, budget shifts, student support issues, threats to campus safety or continuity. They're not surprises, they're inevitabilities. But they become crises because we wait to see them and not because we couldn't have anticipated them. That's what it means to be reactive respond only after something has happened. It's firefighting, it's triage, it's exhausting, and it's expensive. In dollars, in human energy, in lost opportunities and in frayed trust. By contrast, being proactive isn't just about predicting everything. It's about asking different questions. It's about taking the wealth of data at our fingertips enrollment trends, student behavior patterns, financial forecasts, even qualitative indicators like climate surveys and using them not just to describe what has been, but to model what might be. It's about looking at the horizon with curiosity instead of fear, then using that view to inform planning, strategy and action. It's sitting down with partner schools like the University of North Dakota or Simpson College to candidly assess where weakness may lie in our networking infrastructure nearing end of life, or frankly assessing the consequences of past decision making now coming home to Rooster. Within Educos framing, this shift is about scenario modeling, forecasting, prediction to strengthen institutional agility. And that's exactly the language of leadership, not just of technology. It's saying, let's prepare rather than patch. Let's anticipate rather than adjust after the fact. Let's shape outcomes rather than be shaped by them. Nobody here is suggesting we can divine the future with perfect precision, because the future is complex, ambiguous, and often shaped by forces well outside our control. But sophistication in data and analytics gives us something we never had before, the ability to stretch our thinking beyond what was to what could be. And once you've tasted that capability, once you see how a blend of quantitative forecasting and qualitative insight gives you clarity, you can't unsee it. I think about our student lifecycle work first. When we lean on data to describe enrollment patterns, we get descriptive dashboards that tell us where we were last semester. That's useful, but it's after the fact. But when we triangulate multiple data sources our lms, engagement data, advising touch points, financial aid status, course performance metrics we begin to see patterns that precede attrition. We begin to ask, who's at risk? Why now? What interventions might change the arc? That's proactive. And this doesn't just apply to students. Think about workforce dynamics. Higher education operates in an era of tightening labor markets and shifting expectations around staff and faculty roles. If we treat workforce planning reactively, scrambling to fill roles, reacting to resignations, responding to workload pressure, we will always be behind. But if we use scenario modeling to anticipate retirement's turnover, cross functional needs, and capacity constraints, we can plan professional development, adjust structures, and allocate resources with intention instead of urgency. That's proactive leadership in action. The same holds for financial planning. We live in an environment of constrained resources, where federal support is tightening and calls for accountability are rising. Reactive budgeting, cutting only after a deficit appears is politically and operationally painful. But predictive forecasting allows us to model multiple budget scenarios months ahead, to stress test assumptions, and to have honest conversations with stakeholders before there's a headline or a crisis. Isn't that the kind of leadership we want to bring to our campuses? Importantly, being proactive isn't just about more data. It's about better engagement with the human dimensions of that data. Educause cautions that predictive models that don't incorporate the full human context emotional, social, experiential risks being incomplete or misleading. And they're right. Students aren't data points. They're people. Predictive enrollment models without context can lead us to wrong interventions. That means we need humans in the loop experts, advisors, faculty, staff interpreting data with both nuance and empathy. This blending of data with human insight is where higher education's unique value proposition shines. We're not Netflix. We're not an e commerce platform. Our institutions are communities of learning and growth. So let's use data to inform decisions, not replace human judgment. One of the most exciting parts of this shift is how it ties into institutional agility. Too often, we talk about agility as if it's a buzzword. We need to be agile without recognizing what enables such agility, foresight planning, and decentralized empowerment. Reactive systems can be fast in the moment, but that's because they operate without strategy. They just respond. Proactive systems are slower to build, but once in place, they make institutions more adaptable, resilient, and confident. You can see this in both marketing and recruitment work at London Business School and the other campuses highlighted in the Educause discussion. Predictive and targeted approaches enable smarter use of limited marketing dollars and clearer insights into prospective student behavior. Those aren't reactive ad buys. They're strategic engagements informed by pattern recognition and forecasting. This shift requires leaders who are willing to think differently. It requires conversations that start not with what happened, but with what could happen. It requires shifting cultural expectations and building literacy and data interpretation across institutional stakeholders. That means training deans, department heads, administrative partners, and governing boards in what proactive planning looks like and what it doesn't. It isn't crystal balls or magic. It's disciplined analysis and thoughtful engagement. And that brings us, finally, to the essence of proactive leadership Clarity without paralysis, courage without arrogance, and humility without hesitation. When we practice that, we aren't just forecasting numbers, we're cultivating trust. We're telling our campus communities. We see patterns. We listen to people, and we're preparing not just to react, but to lead. That's the kind of mindset our institutions deserve in 2026 and beyond. Thanks for listening. I'll see you soon.