future and change capability

Sustaining Direction Dynamically: Designing governance tempo, portfolio and insight management for future and change capability in higher education

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This is the sixth article in a series on future and change capability in higher education, and the second of two posts on strategy, governance and risk. This post is a long one, because it’s where I get into how institutions can become more agile by making good decisions based on getting the right people with the right authority to move at the right speed with the right information.

The premise of the future and change capable series is that we are in an environment of sustained uncertainty – AI disruption, funding volatility, shifting student demand, policy instability and declining popularity – and universities need more than capable leaders and good intentions to navigate it all effectively. Along with external factors like enabling policy environments, the institutions themselves need future and change capability. This is the designed capability to decide deliberately in the face of change, act coherently and learn from what they do.

The previous post added a third element to the framework developed in this series: decision architecture, which is the structural layer through which strategic commitments are formed and risk is treated as a strategic judgement rather than a compliance activity. That argument built on two foundations developed earlier in this series. Identity is the anchor that tells an institution what matters; permeability is the deliberate design of channels through which insight enters and circulates.

If you need a recap, all of the posts are here in order:

post 1: why future and change capability in higher education?

post 2: identity before adaptability

post 3: university permeability and adaptive ecosystems

post 4: midway point reflection and why is Ruth exploring all this?

post 5: decision architecture

And post 6 is this one – governing decisions and commitments dynamically over time.

Before diving in, I want to flag that what I am developing in this post (and elsewhere in this series) is grounded in organisational learning, strategy and governance theory and research, and in my own experience as an institutional leader. But systematic empirical evidence of how these governance practices could and do function in universities specifically is limited, and universities have structures, policy contexts and aims that are very distinct from both the public and corporate sectors. This blog series is building towards empirical research that will refine the ideas I’m proposing and test them against others’ experiences and practices. At this stage I offer these ideas as reasoned propositions for testing, not established findings.

You’ll be happy to know that the core argument in this post isn’t that universities need more bureaucracy and governance machinery. I think most already have too much process applied in too generic a manner. The risk management and quality assurance intentions are good, but the execution isn’t always optimal. The problem is that the wrong kind of deliberation can be applied to decisions, and that sometimes important decisions are not always made consciously.

Poorly calibrated governance, in which decisions of very different kinds move at roughly the same pace through similar structures regardless of what is at stake, is itself a source of institutional inertia. What future and change capability requires is purposefully calibrated governance, with less undifferentiated or unconscious deliberation and more deliberation of the right kind, surfacing and dealing with each decision at hand in a way that balances consideration with speed. This post discusses three connected areas that shape whether this is achievable: how institutions differentiate the tempo of different decisions; how they manage and conclude strategic portfolios; and how insights generated through permeability, including evaluation insights, reach the fora with authority and capability to act on them.

Governing decision speed

Future and change capability requires governance calibrated to what each decision actually needs. Universities can move quickly when circumstances require it, but speed without adequate deliberation, the right information or the right people in the room does not always produce good outcomes. Often, when decisions are made rapidly or reactively, there isn’t time to assemble the ingredients good decisions require. These include the right people with the right authority, the right data and analysis, and clear pathways for enactment. Deliberate pre-design of governance pathways for different kinds of decisions will allow institutions to respond well, rather than having to improvise or default to an existing pathway that doesn’t fit. We can and have done this well previously. For instance, many universities set up differential decision speed governance systems during COVID, and these worked well. Once the crisis was over, we mostly returned to the single-speed governance status quo.

Universities commonly apply similar governance processes to decisions that differ considerably in what they require. A proposal needing swift operational action may sit in the same committee queue as a long-term strategic commitment requiring deep deliberation. The speed at which each moves is shaped as much by funding cycles, political momentum and institutional sponsorship as by the nature of the decision itself. Necessarily, governance processes tend to be structured around annual calendars, committee schedules and funding timelines. Unfortunately these rarely align neatly with each other (how many of us have committed to an operational plan without the associated annual budget approved?) let alone with what individual decisions actually require. The result is a system that is simultaneously too slow and deep for some decisions, and too fast and shallow for others.

The organisational ambidexterity literature has long recognised that institutions that simultaneously pursue the exploration of new initiatives and the consolidation of established activities need different conditions for each. One way to approach this is to create distinct organisational units for these different purposes. Another is to cycle through periods of exploration and periods of embedding and consolidation. Neither translates straightforwardly to the university context. Unlike commercial organisations that can more cleanly separate exploratory from consolidating activities, universities are deeply integrated: different types of decisions and activities draw on the same academic and professional staff, the same infrastructure, and the same resourcing, and are governed by the same bodies.

A major review of UK higher education governance, conducted by Advance HE in partnership with the Committee of University Chairs and the Association of Heads of University Administration (2025), noted the tension between the pace that effective transformation requires and proper oversight obligations. Drawing on wide-ranging engagement with governors, chairs, institutional leaders and board secretaries, the review called for more deliberate differentiation between what warrants extended deliberation at board level and what can be resolved more quickly with appropriate authority, recognising that when everything receives the same level of scrutiny regardless of its strategic significance, governing bodies spend less time on the decisions that most warrant their attention.

Temporal architecture can address this misalignment through the deliberate design of different decision pathways, with different routes, authority structures and tempos for decisions that differ in their stakes, reversibility and legitimacy requirements. Mission-level and long-horizon commitments, about research concentration, pedagogic direction or the institution’s relationship with particular communities, need deep deliberation, broad consultation and extended timeframes proportionate to what is being decided. Portfolio adjustments need evidence-based, time-bounded consultation with clear decision rights and authority to conclude. Bounded pilots and experiments need delegated authority and built-in review triggers, with explicit assumptions and predetermined signals for continuation or adaptation. Designing these different pathways reduces overall deliberative burden. Decisions that warrant speed can move more quickly, and those that warrant depth can receive it.

Two governance challenges are likely to arise in any attempt to differentiate decision tempos. The first concerns escalation. When a bounded experiment succeeds and warrants serious institutional investment, scaling typically requires a different kind of decision from the one that approved the original pilot: different authority, a different funding stream and often an institutional case that the pilot phase was never required to build. Without designed escalation pathways, successful pilots can stall at this transition. Temporal differentiation must therefore address how decisions move between modes, not just how each mode is structured.

The second concerns classification. Whether something is treated as a mission-level commitment or a bounded experiment is not a neutral determination in a university. It involves questions about where legitimate authority lies and who is responsible for making the classification when that is unclear. In practice, establishing this requires deliberate discussion at executive level about which governance pathway applies to which kinds of decisions, and who holds responsibility for making that determination, ideally before, rather than during, the decision process itself. And the more bounded experiments a well-designed fast lane generates, the more important it becomes to manage what happens to them over time.

The capability to stop

Without deliberate management, a portfolio of initiatives can develop inefficiencies and redundancies, become misaligned with current mission and priorities, and generate sub-optimal outcomes. Individual initiatives may have been examined at launch or reviewed in isolation, but systematic review of the portfolio as a whole is often absent. Future and change capability requires the ability to adjust as circumstances change, and that adjustment comes through deliberate portfolio management.

Portfolio discipline is the active, ongoing management of an institution’s portfolio of initiatives and activities. It involves the deliberate decisions about what to continue, what to adapt, what to scale and what to pause or stop, made against explicit criteria rather than by default or inertia. It is the counterpart to the capability to start things, and in many universities it is considerably less developed.

Temporal differentiation, if it functions well, generates more bounded experiments, proofs of concept, prototypes, and pilots. Without portfolio discipline to complement it, it also generates more unexamined legacy. Each pilot, initiative and project that moves through the fast lane creates a potential new commitment. Without designed mechanisms for rapid evaluation and conclusion, the portfolio can grow through addition rather than managed choice. Alternatively, it can leave a graveyard of promising initiatives that were never properly examined, or that showed real potential but never found the resourcing or decision authority to advance further.

Portfolio accretion is a pervasive feature of university life. Each initiative made sense when it was launched. Collectively, accumulated initiatives create administrative complexity and progressively narrow the capacity for adaptation. The resourcing challenge this creates is not usually a straightforward competition between legacy and new. In my experience, legacy initiatives are typically funded through operational budgets and are driven by operational staff and operational KPIs; new initiatives may be associated with strategic / project KPIs and different funding sources (but not always). Because the two streams may not come into direct competition, the tension between them tends to stay below the surface. Staff sustain ongoing commitments while also driving new priorities, and the organisational area may attempt to absorb both simultaneously rather than to evaluate what might slow, pause or stop. When something does eventually conclude, it can be the initiative with least visibility or advocacy, regardless of its actual mission alignment or return.

Empirical research illuminates how universities actually make decisions about program closure, and how these conditions can play out in practice. Eckel’s well-known empirical study of program discontinuation at four US research universities in 2002 found that the determining factors were generally not performance evidence or mission alignment. Programs that were closed tended to be those with fewer institutional supporters and limited capacity to mount a defence during the review process, regardless of the criteria formally developed to guide it. Alex Usher’s commentary in 2025 suggests that Eckel’s research is still relevant, noting that degree closure decisions continue to be shaped by a combination of implicit criteria such as prestige/reputation and sponsorship. My take on this is that implicit criteria may well have some validity, but we need to have the courage to make these implicit criteria explicit, to make mission and impact central, and to make unpopular decisions if needed. Institutions need to define exit criteria in advance and design the process for making stopping decisions. Without those conditions, stopping decisions are less likely to align with what is truly important to an institution, and may be deferred or at least take longer to make.

I’d argue that stopping is a design problem. It requires agreed and shared criteria established at the point of commitment that define what would warrant continuation, adaptation or conclusion; regular portfolio review against those criteria; and reallocation mechanisms that direct freed resource toward current priorities rather than baseline absorption. Dickeson’s program prioritisation model is the most widely used practitioner framework for this in higher education. Its limitation is that it centres on metric-driven ranking (enrolments, cost per student, financial contribution) rather than mission or strategy-anchored judgement, or less tangible criteria such as reputation or public good. A complete assessment also requires weighing the costs and benefits of continuing against alternatives, including what the same resources could do if differently directed.

The distinction Argyris and Schon draw between single-loop and double-loop learning is useful here. Stopping an initiative well means questioning whether its founding assumptions were correct, not just whether it met its targets. Without predefined criteria, institutions can only adjust at the operational level, modifying delivery, adjusting timelines, tweaking scope, without asking whether the initiative should exist in its current form. Criteria established at the outset make that question structurally available when review comes around, helping move it from the domain of assumption and political negotiation to the domain of considered judgement.

Time-limiting pilots and programs by default creates a structural trigger for deliberate review, ensuring that continuation is a considered decision rather than the default outcome of inertia. These review triggers need to be calibrated to what is being reviewed. Activities that require years to develop and show impact warrant longer cycles; bounded experiments warrant shorter ones. Responsibility for setting and conducting these reviews needs to be clearly assigned. In many institutions this sits most naturally at executive or Provost level, with academic governance consulted on quality dimensions but not holding sole authority over continuation.

The reallocation mechanism is as important as the stopping decision. Even when institutions agree that something should conclude, freed resource does not always reach new priorities. It can be absorbed into operational costs or directed toward deficit reduction rather than strategic reinvestment. Again, this could be a helpful thing, but the decision needs to be conscious and a mechanism needs to be created for it.

Many pilots are conceived with eventual scaling in mind, but the infrastructure to make it possible is frequently less developed, with no designed pathway from trial to sustained investment. Anyone in higher education who has encountered either of the phrases ‘everything here is a project’ or ‘everything here is a pilot’ will know what I mean. Project staff are focused on producing deliverables within the funding period, not on building the case or the infrastructure for continuation beyond it. When project funding concludes, the resourcing to sustain or generalise what worked can be unavailable, and the governance mechanism to authorise and fund ongoing investment may be unclear or poorly aligned. The capability to scale requires not only criteria for what would justify moving from experiment to commitment, but decision authority capable of acting on that judgement, and planned resourcing pathways to do so.

For portfolio discipline to work, it should connect to identity throughout. Mission provides the principled basis for decisions about what to continue and what to relinquish, distinct from decisions driven by financial pressure or the advocacy of those arguing for particular initiatives at the time.

Insight pathways, feedback loops and institutional learning

Future and change capability depends on institutions learning from experience and adjusting over time, which requires insight from evaluation, data and practice to reach the people with authority to act on it. The third article in this series addressed how permeability enables insight to enter and circulate. This section addresses what happens to that insight once it exists. I think it’s fair to say that in practice, insight does not always flow naturally to the places where it can influence strategic direction.

Even where permeability has worked well and insight has been carefully gathered and analysed, the journey from insight to institutional decision can have more stumbling blocks than is often acknowledged or addressed. Evaluation may be designed primarily around compliance or outputs rather than outcomes and institutional learning. Evaluation design shapes what questions get asked and whose perspectives are sought. Insights may not reach the people with authority to act on them in a form or at a time that enables considered response. Or it may reach the right people through the wrong forum, such as a governance body with quality assurance responsibilities rather than one with authority over strategy and resourcing. None of this reflects a lack of good intent; it reflects the absence of up-front, deliberate design around how insight is created, routed, aggregated, translated, and acted upon across institutional boundaries.

Weick’s sensemaking framework is useful here. According to Weick, organisations actively construct meaning from information, shaped by existing commitments, identities and contexts. Degn’s application of the framework to higher education strategy shows how leaders simultaneously make sense of changing circumstances and actively shape how insight is interpreted across the institution. Insight pathways are therefore interpretive forums as much as information channels. Who has the standing to frame what reaches decision authority is a political question as much as a design one. Whether uncomfortable intelligence surfaces or gets managed away depends not only on how pathways are structured, but on the trust and psychological safety conditions the next post in this series (culture and capability) examines.

The sensemaking and organisational learning literature suggests that effective insight pathways tend to share four features. First, decision-makers need structured exposure to evidence through collective interpretation in light of institutional purpose, not just dashboard reporting. Second, the connection between evidence and decision is traceable, strengthening accountability and institutional memory. Third, decision outcomes feed back into what data is subsequently collected and what questions future evaluations ask, so that learning from one cycle shapes the design of the next. Finally, different forms of intelligence (quantitative data, qualitative feedback, experimental findings and professional judgement) are considered together rather than routed to separate forums.

A further challenge to designing effective insight pathways concerns synthesis and timing. Useful intelligence often exists across different parts of an institution (in faculties, research offices, survey and data units, student services and planning teams), but in dispersed and incompatible forms. Bringing it together in a way that informs strategic deliberation requires effort that is rarely assigned as an explicit institutional responsibility. In fast-moving environments the timing challenge compounds this. By the time insight has been gathered, synthesised and reached deliberation, it may already be outdated, which is a particular risk in areas like digital and AI disruption, international student market shifts or rapid policy change. Feedback cycles therefore need to be calibrated to the tempo of the decisions they serve and the intel they provide, which connects directly to the temporal architecture argument developed earlier in this post.

Most institutional feedback mechanisms are single-loop, reporting whether initiatives met their targets and prompting operational adjustment within existing assumptions. Double-loop feedback reaches strategic deliberation and asks whether the targets were appropriate, whether the founding assumptions held, whether the direction warrants revision. What we know from learning analytics research, and from examples like Arizona State University’s integration of student data with curriculum redesign and support, is that structured feedback between data and institutional practice can improve outcomes at the operational level. Whether universities have built equivalent feedback loops at the level of strategic governance is much less clear, and is part of what the empirical work this series is building toward will need to examine.

Sustaining direction

Temporal architecture, portfolio discipline and insight pathways with feedback loops are complementary and connected. The ‘fast’ track of decision-making depends on insight pathways to generate the evidence that informs continuation or adaptation; portfolio discipline depends on double-loop feedback to make principled recalibration possible. Temporal architecture shapes how quickly that feedback can reach deliberation. Each constrains and enables the others.

What this governance cycle makes possible, when it functions well, is what I described in the midpoint reflection in this series as institutional learning and recalibration. This is the institutional capability to connect experience, evidence and judgement over time, and it is, I’d argue, a large part of what future and change capability looks like in practice: a continuously renewed capacity to understand, adjust and act with purpose.

There is an elephant in the room that needs naming. The mechanisms described across this post (differentiated decision pathways, portfolio review cycles, evaluation frameworks, insight aggregation functions) do of course add their own governance overhead. Applied generically or without sufficient care, they risk generating exactly the administrivia they are designed to replace. My suggestion is that the same principle of calibration that applies to institutional decisions should apply to the governance mechanisms themselves. In the spirit of double-loop learning, this is a meta-level application of the framework’s own logic. The mechanisms must be proportionate to what is being reviewed, differentiated by stakes, and periodically evaluated for whether they are adding value or merely adding burden, and adjusted accordingly. Getting that balance right is not at all straightforward, and is part of what the empirical work this series is building toward will need to examine.

All of this depends on culture and capability, the organisational conditions that enable or undermine these structures in practice. None of these (whether dissent reaches insight pathways, whether stopping decisions can be made without prohibitive political cost, whether feedback revises strategic direction rather than confirming prior commitments) are questions that structural design can settle by itself. How institutions develop the culture and capability to use these structures well is where the series turns next.

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Commitment Under Uncertainty: Decision Architecture for Future and Change Capability in Higher Education

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This is the fifth article in a series on future and change capability in higher education. The ‘what this series is about’ paragraphs just below are the same as in my Linkedin article and you can skip them if you’ve read that, but from ‘Decision architecture’ I’ve added a lot more depth than in Linkedin.

What this series is about

I think I’m in safe territory argument-wise as I suggest that universities have moved beyond periodic disruption to an ongoing intensification of uncertainty. I don’t need to rehearse the influence of AI and labour markets in flux, funding volatility, shifting public trust, changing student learning and support needs, policy instability, pandemics, global conflict, fuel crises… all this isn’t going to resolve into a new equilibrium. I think we also all know that universities can’t rest on the same laurels that they have for the last few hundred years.

Reactive institutional change tends not to be pleasant for anyone. Experienced by staff and students in phenomena like ‘a sudden strategic lurch’, or even a ‘needed restructure’, it depletes the institutional capacity needed to respond to the next pressure and doesn’t do much for broader strategic outcomes, including the learning and wellbeing of our students. On the other hand, incremental sustaining change can stall when leadership, 5-year plan, or other conditions shift. We need a better way of planning and accommodating for change and managing risk, while staying true to what is actually important.

Future and change capability is the ability to make coherent, deliberate choices about what to change and what to hold steady, and then to follow through, making universities more robust to disruptors and adaptable to opportunities. This a designed institutional condition. It’s important practically as well as strategically – for students develop future and change capability that will sustain them in their lives and careers, educators need to be future and change capable as well. So do the curriculum and pedagogy, and the institution more broadly. They enable one another. For the last fifteen years or so, I’ve been exploring literature that might help inform these ideas, and learning how universities are distinctive and what might work for them to become more future and change capable.

Here are my previous posts in this series:

post 1: why future and change capability in higher education?

post 2: identity before adaptability

post 3: university permeability and adaptive ecosystems

post 4: midway point reflection and why is Ruth exploring all this?

This post is post 5: Decision architecture

The earlier articles argued that future and change capability rests on two foundations: clarity of institutional identity and deliberate permeability. By identity I mean a settled sense of institutional purpose that functions as a decision framework, shaping what gets started, what gets stopped, and how constrained resources are allocated. By permeability I mean the intentional design of relationships and channels through which ideas, evidence and practice move across institutional boundaries, both within the institution and between the institution and the wider world. My midpoint reflection a couple of weeks ago drew those arguments together and sketched what remained to be addressed.

The next question relates to commitment. Universities can develop clarity of identity and invest seriously in permeability without producing sustained strategic direction. Identity tells an institution what matters. Permeability helps it notice and interpret change. But neither of those, alone or together, guarantees that insight becomes action or that priorities become anything more durable than a 5-year plan, or that they might need to change. Future and change capability requires designed mechanisms for converting what is seen and learned into decisions. That is what this blog post is about.

This post introduces decision architecture as the structural layer through which strategic choices are formed and institutional commitment is sustained over time. A companion article (I’ll write that one next) addresses how those commitments are governed once made: how institutions calibrate the tempo of different decisions, manage strategic portfolios, and develop the capability to stop as well as start.

Motion without commitment

Most universities already have strategic plans, portfolio reviews, risk committees, and consultation processes. Put another way, we have plenty of strategic machinery. But we tend to have much less architecture that differentiates meaningfully among kinds of commitments and ties them to identity and consequence.

The pattern is recognisable across very different institutions. Strategic documents articulate ambition while resource allocation shifts only at the margins. Pilot initiatives multiply without clear criteria for what would justify scaling or stopping. Consultation processes expand while decision rights remain opaque, making it unclear who has the authority to conclude a deliberation and act on its findings. Legacy programs persist not because they are performing well but because withdrawal carries reputational and political cost. Risk management focuses on cataloguing compliance exposure rather than examining strategic vulnerability.

These dynamics are rarely products of bad intent or insufficient intelligence. They arise from architectures that treat fundamentally different kinds of decisions as procedurally equivalent. A decision about long-term research concentration moves through the same committee structures at roughly the same pace as a decision about a short-cycle curriculum trial. A decision that would reallocate significant resources requires the same level of consultation as one with minimal institutional consequence. When everything is treated as requiring equivalent deliberation, the system produces neither the depth of reflection major commitments deserve nor the speed smaller decisions require.

The result is motion without commitment. This is sustained institutional ‘busyness’ that does not move in a meaningful direction. For staff and students, this can register as repetition, delay, and the quiet erosion of confidence that worthwhile change will ever stick.

Decision architecture as a designed layer

Decision architecture is the structured system through which an institution determines who decides what, on what evidentiary basis, at what pace, and with what consequences. It is the layer at which identity, insight and authority intersect. Strategy establishes direction and priority. Decision architecture determines how commitments in that direction are authorised, tested, sustained and, where necessary, concluded.

It is useful to be clear about what decision architecture is not. It is not culture, though it does shape culture over time. It is not leadership personality, though leaders operate within it. It is not a compliance framework, though it may incorporate compliance obligations. Decision architecture is a set of designed pathways and mechanisms that govern how choices are made and sustained. As structural arrangements, they operate independently of who happens to occupy leadership roles at any given moment.

These distinctions are important because many attempts to improve university decision-making address symptoms rather than causes. Calls for bolder leadership, fewer committees, or a more entrepreneurial culture are common, but actual change in these directions is rarer, because universities often leave the underlying architecture unchanged. An institution with diffuse decision architecture will produce hesitant, incremental choices regardless of the qualities of its leaders, because the architecture itself creates incentives for caution and diffusion. Well-designed architecture makes good decision-making more likely, because it embeds the conditions for coherent choice rather than depending on exceptional individuals to compensate for structural weakness.

Two elements of this architecture are particularly of consequence for institutions trying to build future and change capability: the capacity to make explicit strategic bets under uncertainty, and the capacity to exercise genuine risk judgement rather than risk compliance.

Strategic bets and assumption testing

Every strategy contains bets, whether an institution acknowledges them or not. Decisions to invest in particular disciplines, grow specific student cohorts, develop new delivery modes, or build partnership platforms all rest on assumptions about how the external environment will evolve and how the institution will perform within it. The question is whether institutions are making bets explicitly and well – that is, with the assumptions made visible and testable.

I’d suggest that in many institutions, those assumptions remain implicit. Plans describe aspiration and financial models project growth, but the underlying hypotheses about policy stability, demand trajectories, workforce capability and partner behaviour are rarely named and even less monitored as the conditions for continued investment. When circumstances change, institutions can discover retrospectively that their strategy depended on assumptions that no longer hold, requiring inelegant manoeuvring, reframing or the abandonment of stated objectives and initiatives.

A future- and change-capable institution treats strategy as a portfolio of explicit bets. A strategic bet has three elements: a defined commitment of attention and resources; a set of underlying assumptions about the conditions required for success; and predetermined signals that would warrant continuation or adaptation. The point is to design against stubborn adherence to prior commitments regardless of what the evidence shows. It is a form of designed commitment that remains reviewable against explicit assumptions and thresholds. Approached this way, strategy becomes a discipline of intellectual honesty about what an institution is actually wagering and why, rather than a performance of ambition that obscures the choices being made.

Explicit bets produce several forms of discipline that implicit commitments do not. They make strategic exposure visible. Institutions may spread investment thinly to avoid visible failure, but thinly spread investment rarely produces distinctive capability, and naming bets encourages deliberate choice about where concentration is warranted. They surface assumptions that can be monitored. Growth in international enrolment depends on geopolitical stability, visa settings and price competitiveness; expansion into professional short credentials depends on employer recognition and internal delivery capability. Assumption mapping brings these conditions into view before they become problems, rather than only after they have done so. And explicit bets create pathways for recalibration, because when indicators shift, the institution has already identified the thresholds at which adjustment is warranted, reducing the likelihood of both premature abandonment and damaging delay.

The Open University offers a useful illustration here. What makes it useful is something much quieter than dramatic strategic reinvention. The five-year plan is the current expression of a strategy that has been in place for decades. The OU was founded around a distinctive answer to basic questions about who higher education is for and what barriers matter, and that answer — open to people, places, methods and ideas, with educational opportunity and social justice at the centre — has shaped successive strategic periods rather than been replaced by them. Widening access, supported distance learning, part-time provision and flexible entry are not initiatives the OU has adopted because they are fashionable. They are coherent with a long-settled institutional identity. That is what gives them their staying power, and what allows the institution, when the external environment shifts, to distinguish between pressures that warrant genuine adaptation and those that should be absorbed without altering course. Not every disruption requires a strategic response. Knowing which ones do depends on having a settled sense of what you are there to do.

That is what strategic commitment anchored in identity looks like in practice. It is not rigidity, but a durable orienting logic that makes adaptation purposeful rather than reactive.

The implication is that strategic bets require identity as their anchor. Without it, bets fragment, each initiative justified on its own terms rather than as part of a coherent institutional direction. Without permeability, bets are made blind, without the external intelligence needed to test whether their assumptions are holding. And without decision architecture that authorises, reviews and when necessary concludes them, even well-conceived bets drift back into the same pattern of accumulation and inertia that strategic machinery on its own cannot prevent.

Risk as judgement, not compliance

Risk management in universities has been criticised as largely a compliance activity. Risk registers catalogue operational and reputational hazards, committees review them, and assurance processes confirm that mitigations are in place. These functions serve a real purpose. What they tend not to address is a different and often more significant category of exposure – the strategic risk of inaction.

Consider a familiar institutional trajectory. An early and successful push into international student recruitment generates strong revenue. That revenue is then absorbed into recurrent expenditure. The dependency deepens over several years, each increment too small to trigger formal review, until the institution is carrying a structural exposure that would have looked alarming if it had been assumed all at once. No single decision created it. There was no moment at which a risk committee weighed the options and chose badly. The risk accumulated in the space between decisions, in the absence of any mechanism for asking whether the institution’s overall strategic posture remained sound. That is the kind of risk that conventional frameworks are poorly designed to surface, because they are oriented toward what might go wrong with things already being done rather than toward the cumulative consequences of what is not being examined.

A future- and change-capable institution treats risk appetite as a strategic instrument. Risk appetite clarifies what kinds and levels of risk the institution is prepared to absorb in pursuit of its mission, and it makes that judgement differently across different domains. An institution whose mission centres on regional community engagement should carry a different risk posture regarding partnerships that might compromise community trust than one oriented toward global research intensity. These reflect different assessments of which institutional capacities are most distinctive, most fragile, and most difficult to rebuild once damaged, rather than simply different thresholds on a common scale.

Differentiation by domain is important. Curriculum experimentation may warrant a high tolerance for failure and a fast cycle of trial and learning. Partnership development may warrant more caution where relational capital takes years to build and can be damaged quickly. Infrastructure decisions may require conservative risk management precisely because the consequences of failure are long-lasting and costly to reverse. Treating all these as instances of a single institutional risk appetite produces neither appropriate caution where it is needed nor appropriate boldness where it is warranted.

Risk posture should also be grounded in genuine risk intelligence, which in most universities is narrower than it ought to be. The people with the richest insights about what is actually risky (academics working at the frontiers of their fields, professional staff managing relationships with employers and communities, students navigating programs that may or may not be serving them well) are largely outside the formal risk architecture. An academic who raises a concern about a program’s labour market relevance at a faculty meeting, only to watch it pass without institutional consequence, is experiencing a design failure. The institution has not built pathways through which that kind of intelligence reaches the people and forums with the authority to act on it.

Commitment as capability

Identity defines what an institution is for. Permeability expands what it can see. Decision architecture determines what it can actually commit to and sustain. Without that third element, an institution may have genuine clarity of purpose and rich situational awareness, and still find itself unable to convert either into strategic direction that holds across time, leadership transitions and shifting external conditions.

Designing that architecture is not a matter of adding more process to institutions that some might say already have too much of it. It is a matter of differentiation among the kinds of decisions that warrant deep deliberation and those that warrant speed; among the domains where risk-taking serves the mission and those where it threatens what is most distinctive; among commitments that deserve sustained resourcing and those that have run their course. That differentiation is what turns strategic intention into sustained strategic capability.

The next article turns to how those commitments are governed once made, including how institutions calibrate the tempo of different decisions, manage their portfolios, and build the capacity to stop as well as start.

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Future and change capability in higher education: A midpoint reflection

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From individual capability to institutional adaptability

This post marks the halfway point in my series on future and change capability in higher education. Rather than introducing a new component of the framework, I offer a brief sensemaking reflection on where this work has come from and why it matters now.

The beginning of this post is for any readers who might have known me and my work for a while and could be thinking, ‘Ruth Bridgstock’s work is about graduate employability, WIL and careers. Why is she writing about institutional change all of a sudden?’

There is logic to it, I promise, and a trajectory of thoughts and practice over a couple of decades.

My interest in future and change capability did begin with individuals, and graduate employability in a certain sense, and since then it has been helpful to align much of my work with employability policy and discourse, although my interests are deeper and broader.

My doctoral research examined how creative practitioners and graduates develop the capacity to navigate uncertain career paths across the lifespan. I was interested in how people manage learning, identity and professional direction in conditions of ambiguity and change. Over time, that inquiry expanded into questions about how individuals learn to lead and navigate innovation and transformation, as individuals and collaboratively.

My interests shifted into curriculum and pedagogy. I moved out of a research intensive career track and became a teaching-and-research academic, to explore whether I could teach the capabilities I was researching. I wanted to know: How might we design educational experiences that cultivate future and change capability in students? What do educators need in order to support, enable, and facilitate? Eventually, as I moved into institutional leadership roles, these questions led to deeper and more challenging ones.

What became apparent was that educational innovation was often being undermined by institutional structures not designed for learning or adaptation. I started to ask: if we truly want students and educators to be adaptable and capable, what must our educational institutions be and do? Significant change was clearly needed.

That progression – from individual capability to educator practice to institutional systems and architecture – has unfolded for me across research, academic leadership and large-scale educational transformation over the last 20 years. After two decades of exploration and experimentation, I have come to the conclusion that without an adaptable HE system with adaptable institutions within it, we cannot effectively enable educators and students to be future and change capable – and future and change capability is vital to our futures.

I no longer believe that future and change capability can be meaningfully developed at the level of the individual student without being actively constrained or enabled by educator practices and capability, and the institutional context.

My timing isn’t incidental. As I argued in post 1, artificial intelligence, funding volatility, workforce transformation, social change and policy reform have intensified the demand for adaptive capability in students and graduates, and at every level of higher education. What began as a question framed in terms of graduate employability has become a broader question about higher education’s sustainability, public value and long-term contribution.

The framework I present in this series integrates several strands: identity and differentiation; permeability and institutional learning; strategy, governance and risk; culture and capability; and engagement with external forces. Together, they outline a model of the future and change capable university.

The model below synthesises the elements developed across this series into an integrated framework for institutional adaptability.

The future and change capable university.

Identity and purpose sit at the core of the institution, anchoring distinctive contribution and long-horizon commitment (post 2). Around that core, strategy, governance, risk and enactment shape how choices are made, sustained and adjusted. Institutional permeability describes how boundaries are intentionally designed: how relationships, information and practice move across academic, organisational and sectoral domains (post 3). Permeability expands what the institution can see; decision architecture determines how insight is translated into action. Learning and recalibration connect experience, evidence and judgement over time. Culture and capability permeate the whole, enabling disciplined interpretation and collective decision-making.

The university operates within a broader ecosystem of policy, professions, technology, industry and community. These conditions cannot be controlled, but they can be engaged with deliberately. Future and change capability develops cumulatively through the alignment of identity, permeability and strategic judgement.

Here I am synthesising and building upon various streams of theoretical work — key contributions that come to mind are Senge’s learning organisations, the double-loop learning of Argyris & Schon, complex adaptive systems, learning ecosystems, innovation systems and triple helix models, and strategic management theory such as Mintzberg & Teece. I’m integrating and extending these for higher education by placing identity, public accountability, and decision architecture at the centre. This is a deliberate departure from capability framings that privilege responsiveness alone; in higher education, adaptability without identity quickly becomes incoherence. Adaptability becomes the cumulative outcome of aligned purpose, selective permeability, disciplined experimentation and governance under constraint.

Three posts in this series remain. They will examine decision architecture and processes in greater depth, explore how culture and capability enable decision-making under uncertainty, and consider how institutions can engage with shifting external conditions without losing coherence.

This model offers an emergent framework for thinking about purposeful institutional adaptability in contemporary higher education.

I invite critique, refinement and collaboration from colleagues who are exploring similar challenges. If the model is useful, I will translate its elements into practical tools to support institutional analysis, disciplined choice and sustained change.

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In these disruptive times, universities don’t need to be less resistant to change.

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They do need a more advanced kind of capability for change.

As we embark on another working year, I’ve been reflecting on the challenges and opportunities facing universities in 2026. And yes, me being me it’s turned into a 1,700 word theory of change piece… there is also a conceptual model, and I have some practical ideas about implementation, which I’ll save to share later if they’re useful. But here’s the introductory piece.

Universities: facing disruptive change and increasing pressure to change
The higher education sector is now thoroughly familiar with the ‘universities are facing disruptive change’ narrative. Today, that narrative is most often associated with the sudden ubiquity of generative AI; before that, it was the pandemic. The underlying concern, however, remains the same: the business sustainability of universities. Other pressures in Australian higher education include policy-led financial constraints and shifting funding models, and intensifying institutional competition from within the sector and elsewhere. Taken together, these pressures don’t just strain university finances. They shape institutional decision-making, risk tolerance, and the kinds of educational trade-offs universities feel compelled to make.

This disruption narrative is often conflated with a related but distinct one: that higher education itself needs to change. This second narrative points to growing mismatches between what universities do and offer and what their stakeholders expect. In 2025, the decline in social license and erosion of public confidence and trust were key issues for the sector, driven by perceptions that universities have become overly corporatised and out of touch with community concerns. Some of the criticisms relate to universities’ difficulties keeping up with an increasingly diverse student population, meeting evolving learning needs, and catering to rapidly changing workforce skill requirements.

How can our students be more adaptable if we aren’t?
Across roles and initiatives that I’ve pursued in my career, there is a recurrent theme: leading and enabling change within institutions, with the overall aim of supporting learners to become more future- and change-capable. For instance, at my current institution I’ve worked with educators to embed work-integrated learning at every level of every undergraduate course; I’ve infused career development learning into the curriculum with positive impact on student engagement, retention, success and graduate outcomes; and most recently, I’ve been using data to personalise learning and student support within and beyond the curriculum.

Much of this work has involved connecting parts of the institution that do not naturally collaborate, partnering with industry, community, educators, and learners themselves, and working across entrenched silos and legacy processes in pursuit of transformation. Across these initiatives, the common challenge has been less about persuading individuals to change (although stakeholder engagement has been centrally important), and more about enabling universities to act coherently and responsively. Within universities we’ve all had innumerable ‘process wagging the dog’, ‘computer says no’, ‘ivory tower syndrome’ and ‘fiefdom mentality’ experiences that militate against change.

At a higher level, what I have noticed through my experiences is that to develop future-and-change capable learners and graduates who will be successful in their lives and careers, you need future-and-change capable educators, and in turn future-and-change capable institutions (and a policy context that enables all of the above). Put another way, it is very difficult to teach students to be proactive and adaptable when their educational experiences, programs, processes, structures and environments they encounter are reactive and rigid.

Change resistance: Not the enemy, necessarily
Universities are often described as change-resistant, and this is usually framed as a criticism. Actually, and this may seem to run counter to what I’ve just said – bear with me – I think that some change resistance in higher education can be a good thing.
Commitments to educational quality, consistency, and accountability are essential. Quality assurance requirements play a legitimate and necessary role in maintaining trust in higher education. Too much change leads to exhaustion and confusion.

Here’s where the nuance comes in. I’d argue that universities need to build our capability to know when (and how) to flex, and when (and how) not to. In many ways, we’ve erred on the side of non-change for a long time. Over time, layers of bureaucracy and administrivia have accumulated – often in response to past risks or policy pressures – without being revisited or tested against their ongoing value. I suggest that some of these structures are no longer proportionate to the quality aims they were designed to serve, yet they continue to shape what is possible, how quickly institutions can move, and where effort is expended. A good example here is course development and accreditation processes, which can sometimes be so glacially slow that once finally approved, a new course immediately needs to be redesigned to be relevant.

There is an important difference here between principled resistance, grounded in educational quality, equity, and accountability, and inertial resistance that persists simply because systems are difficult to change. In this sense, selective resistance is not a liability but a contributor to public trust and social licence, signalling that universities do not abandon core values in the face of every new pressure.

The deeper problem isn’t resistance to change, but that universities are not sufficiently future-and-change capable. Future-and-change capability is a distinct institutional capability, infused into all of our core activities at every level of the institution, that shapes how universities navigate uncertainty over time.

This isn’t another call for university agility, innovation, or cultural change alone. It is an argument about the fundamentals of institutional design – about embedding adaptive capacity into governance, systems, and everyday decision-making. It is a set of institutional capabilities embedded in structures, processes, and ways of working. A future-and-change capable university can make good, informed decisions with the future and the present in mind at every level of the institution, to change and adapt where needed or stay put when this is the best course of action.


Reactive, sustaining and transformative change
Universities can and do change. However, much change in universities remains reactive and mostly unexamined, triggered by external shocks and requiring extraordinary actions and measures. From the inside, reactive change can feel like a sudden sideways lurch: priorities shift, funding is reallocated, roles and structures are reshaped. The aim of reactive change is not transformation. It is usually about returning to a viable version of the status quo. Over time, this reactive pattern erodes staff trust, depletes morale, and weakens institutional memory, making subsequent change harder rather than easier.

Universities also pursue what might be described as sustaining change: proactive, incremental improvements intended to enhance existing practices, programs, or systems. While these initiatives are frequently well-designed and evidence-informed, they are less often structurally protected. Unlike routine continuous improvement, sustaining change often challenges existing power arrangements, resource allocations, or performance metrics, which can make it more vulnerable. When priorities shift, leaders move on, or funding and policy settings change, sustaining change initiatives can stall or disappear, sometimes irrespective of their impact or value. Often, what is missing is structural protection: stable funding, formal governance ownership, embedded roles, and alignment with core institutional processes.

It seems many of our institutions struggle to do any form of change particularly well. Reactive change is exhausting, disruptive and sometimes frightening for those affected. Sustaining change can be fragile and difficult to maintain over time. Change often seems to be something universities endure, rather than something they are structurally equipped to navigate, learn from, and build upon.


The deeper problem is not that universities resist change, but that they lack the capability to decide – deliberately, proportionately, and in time – when and how to change and when not to, and then to carry those actions through.

There are, of course, institutions that have pursued more substantial transformations successfully, including new models and modes of delivery, large-scale pedagogic change, deeply data-informed approaches to curriculum and student support, short-form credentials, and co-ordinated tertiary offerings across vocational and higher education. What makes these examples compelling is that these are instances where, despite universities’ change resistant and risk averse reputations, they have taken larger risks proactively in pursuit of meaningful change.

Also, we find in many of these innovations evidence that institutions have sought to meet sector policy priorities and business sustainability imperatives concurrently, while keeping core ideas around HE values, identity and purpose at the forefront (which might also, incidentally, help rebuild our social license). Success here takes courage and outstanding leadership, along with the right enabling conditions.

What is future-and-change capability? (AKA I finally get to the point)
But my thinking keeps returning to how higher education institutions (and the sector as a whole) can start to become more future-and-change capable in an ongoing way. Innovation cannot be a one-off project or even a periodic endeavour for universities, as disruptors, change pressures and opportunities continually emerge. Yet for many institutions, there remains a significant gap between acknowledging this need and having the institutional capability required to act on it consistently.

Proactive, conscious, deliberate and ongoing approaches to navigating change must become normalised in higher education. This begins with ensuring that we are continually looking around and ahead, experimenting, and connecting meaningfully with our communities, then interpreting what we are seeing. We need to sense-make actively from these experiences and make informed decisions about how to act that are also grounded in who we are and why we exist.

Universities also need to ensure that we have the capability to act – that we are equipped and ready to transform, adapt, or deliberately hold steady, and that we learn from our actions. This means building feedback loops that allow us to assess outcomes, adjust course, and sustain effective change over time, rather than repeatedly resetting in response to each new pressure.

I know that what I am calling for is a huge challenge for institutions and the sector, given the complexity of our internal and external contexts, and the constraints that we face. I also think it’s central to our survival and our ongoing place in society.

It means supporting students and staff to develop their own adaptive capabilities, while also building enabling adaptive institutional structures and processes. We must also recognise that no institution can do this work in isolation. Connecting and collaborating across boundaries – with other institutions, communities, and policy makers – is essential to building and sustaining an adaptive educational ecosystem. For senior leaders, this means shifting some of their attention from each initiative or transformational program to the harder work of building enduring institutional capabilities that allow universities to adapt with integrity and purpose over time.

If higher education is serious about preparing learners for uncertain futures, then the sector itself must become more future- and change-capable. This will never occur through episodic reform, but by building aligned, adaptive capability and action across learners, educators, institutions, and the systems that shape them.

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This piece could be the first in a short series exploring what future-and-change capability could mean for higher education institutions and the sector. As I mentioned up front I have further thoughts about what future-and-change capability involves, what it could look like in practice institutionally and sectorally, and how to surmount the challenges involved in becoming more future-and-change capable.

I’m keen to hear from colleagues about your experiences of institutional change, particularly when it has been effective (or has had effective elements), or where ongoing adaptation has been a feature. Are there examples that you know of from higher education or other highly regulated sectors containing large organisations where continual adaptation is done well? Please get in touch if you’d like.

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NB. I wrote this post as a scholar of higher education, without critique of any particular institution or initiative in mind.

AI use and post development disclosure: I wrote a first draft of this post and asked ChatGPT to edit it critically. I reviewed its changes and additions and threw them all out because (i) it failed to grasp important nuances in the argument and (ii) its contributions were all in its own (very characteristic) writing style, despite my requests that it follow mine.

I wrote a second draft and then asked ChatGPT to critique the 2nd draft paragraph by paragraph, looking for errors in argumentation and editorial issues. I made some minor editorial changes based on its recommendations. I shared this 3rd draft with some close friends and colleagues for their thoughts and made some more changes before publishing. This post is organically me, including any errors or annoying em dashes you see.

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