A (0:05)

Hello, I'm David Henson and I serve as Campus CIO for Bolden Networks for Higher Education. Welcome to Control Alt Lead. Let's talk a minute about institutional resilience. Not in a buzzwordy strategic plan we have a committee kind of way, but living and breathing operational institutional resilience. The kind that gets tested when your network's going down during finals, or when your LMS provider just got acquired. Or when a cyber attack hits on a holiday weekend. Or when your star engineer gives two weeks notice and leaves behind a decade of undocumented knowledge. That's the higher ed IT world you and I live in. Higher ed IT isn't just navigating complexity. We're navigating compounding complexity. The 2025 Educause Top 10 list highlights institutional resilience as a key strategic focus, and rightly so. But what does that mean for us? Sitting in the CIO chair? How do we move from strategy to practice? I want to explore that question by grounding IT within our lived experience, our teams, our talent, and our tactics. And then drill into how we force multiply operational and organizational muscle through managed services and smart leadership. Let's start with this. Resilience starts with your team, not with your technology stack. As CIOs, our job is to build an IT culture that can respond to ambiguous challenges and limited data with both clarity and confidence. We can't afford to wait around for all the data to be present or for a perfect alignment of the stars because disruption doesn't rsvp. So how then do we hire, develop and train for that kind of working environment? Well, we need to build our teams with the following three qualities. We need adaptive thinkers, people who can shift gears fast and still bring good judgment. We need collaborative doers, those folks who can see across silos and solve problems together. Finally, we need emotional ballast. We need leaders and staff who can stay calm in a crisis and communicate under pressure. It's tempting to chase unicorns with every cert and skill under the sun, but let's be honest, you have to go to war with the army you have. The question then becomes how do we shape that army to thrive in real world fog of war conditions? The answer is we must design, manage and plan for ambiguity. Sadly, ambiguity is a core feature of our operating reality. Budget timelines are always fuzzy, cyber risks are ever evolving, and AI is moving faster than our ability to create guiding guidance to manage its spread. We must make our teams be more ambiguity capable, if not entirely ambiguity comfortable. A few ways I've seen this work in practice. First, normalize saying I don't know. The goal isn't omniscience, it's movement. Model and reward people who ask the right questions and build clarity incrementally. Second, don't penalize effort. You can't motivate a team that's in fear of making a mistake or raising their hand. Demonstrate that there's growth to be had, even and especially in failed efforts. Finally, use reflection like muscle training after action. Reviews shouldn't just cover what went wrong, they should surface how the team adapted. This builds not just knowledge, but confidence and trust. Confidence fuels action, which in a crisis is everything. We have to be less brittle and much more malleable. Here's the truth. Most of our IT organizations weren't designed for continuous disruption. They were built for stability, predictability and process. Resilient IT organizations aren't necessarily bigger, they're simply more malleable. They shift shape depending upon the problem at hand. Creating this type of team culture means the first, you have to reduce over specialization, encourage role fluidity and job shadowing. Next, you have to cross train your staff, have backups for backups and document like your future self will thank you or that your very future depends upon it. Because it does, you have to delegate authority, push decision making down to team leaders with clear escalation pathways. Finally, you need to create leadership opportunities. Find or create vehicles for staff to develop nascent skills that they will one day need to progress in their professional journeys by teaching them how to raise their hands, self advocate and get skin in the game. You want staff who can pick up a new tool on Tuesday, brief a VP on Wednesday and triage an incident by Thursday. That's our new normal. Now let's talk about something that we often undervalue but have learned since the pandemic to appreciate much more. And that's leveraging. Managed services is an operational resilience force multiplier. Too often outsourcing is simply viewed as cost cutting. But smart CIOs know that managed services can be strategic levers for flexibility, focus and scale. Here's how to think about it. You need to offload routine high volume operations like patching, monitoring and tier one support. This gives your internal team much more breathing room to do the work that only they can do. Use managed service providers as elastic staff, especially during peak moments for major upgrades, staff transitions and crisis recovery. Finally, choose partners that understand higher education and our nuances, our semester cycles, our governance, complexity, privacy requirements. The goal isn't to replace your people, it's to preserve their capacity for high value, mission critical and mission aligned work. Okay, by now you're probably asking yourself, how do we move from strategy to practice and make institutional resilience real? Well, here's how you can move from concept to creation. We need to create institutionally aligned tiger teams, cross functional teams that can assemble fast to solve emergent problems. Next, we need to map and gap our personnel skills. Where and who are our single points of failure? Who has hidden or underused talents? Where might a managed service provider plug in next? And finally, we need to reward resilient behaviors. Spotlight those team members who have adapted, collaborated and innovated under stress. But above all, we need to talk about this stuff intentionally and openly. Don't treat resilience as a dark art. Make it visible, name it and model it. In uncertain times. Brittle systems break and so do brittle cultures. Our job is not simply to just deploy to the cloud or defend the perimeter. It's to enable and empower people who are calm in chaos, adaptive by design, and supported by tools and partners that flex when our institutions need them the most. That's the charge. That's the work. As cio, your greatest resilience asset isn't your budget, your erp, or even your incident response plan. It's your people. Only if you develop them right, equip them intentionally and support them smartly. Go build the army you need with the one that you already have. Thanks for listening and I'll see you soon. Sam.