Is There a Better Way? How Higher Ed Can Finally Adapt

For too long, higher education has wrestled with inefficiency, silos, and structures that resist change. Now, in 2025, the cracks are impossible to ignore. Yet amid the dysfunction lies a chance to do things differently. Dynamic Work Design offers institutions a pathway to cut through complexity, connect people and processes, and build the resilience needed to thrive in a fast-changing world.

Higher education has been under scrutiny for years—never more so than in 2025. My work, like many others in and serving higher ed, has focused on how institutions can survive and thrive in this moment. The Tambellini Group’s themes for 2025 centered on agility and resiliency. Our Future Campus Summit carried the theme “Navigating the Ambiguity.” The situation is clear: it’s tough for everyone across higher education today.

We are all searching for ways for institutions not just to survive, but to become adaptable and healthy organizations—capable of withstanding today’s pressures and prepared for those still to come.

We support many institutions that are considering, preparing for, and executing major technology modernization efforts. But as I’ve reflected on my clients and my own 39-year career in higher ed, I find that many institutions could benefit from a serious focus on people and processes (long before launching major modernization projects!). Too often, “best practice” designs stumble under their own complexity and change barriers, delaying true adoption and benefits for years. But if institutions can learn to measure, adapt, and iterate to improve themselves first, they can take full advantage of technology change when it arrives.

Only about a third of higher ed institutions have selected modern cloud administrative systems, and the clock is ticking on legacy support. Most remaining institutions are planning and preparing. Technical preparation – data strategies, identity governance, integration tools – is common. What’s rare is deep people and process preparation.

After recently reading my brother Don Kieffer’s latest book with Dr. Nelson Repenning from the MIT Sloan School of Management (There’s Got to Be a Better Way), I was reminded how directly their work addresses challenges that have dogged higher education for decades and may be insightful for those institutions in planning mode.

• Entrenched inefficiency
• Misaligned processes to purpose
• Slow-changing structures in a fast-changing world
• Siloed organizations, cultures, data, and processes
• Leaders disconnected from daily work

The book outlines five key principles of dynamic work design—a practical way to make organizations more adaptable:

1. Solve the right problem: Focus on the real obstacles between intent and impact.
2. Structure for discovery: Let issues surface naturally and address them through small experiments.
3. Connect the human chain: Link people with clear triggers and handoffs so work moves smoothly.
4. Regulate the flow: Manage pace to balance throughput with problem-solving.
5. Visualize the work: Make invisible tasks visible to create shared understanding.

Don and Nelson have collaborated for decades in developing, teaching, and employing these techniques to help organizations of all types improve. These principles move work away from firefighting and inefficiencies toward disciplined, empowered, repeatable improvement.

Picture a purchasing department bound by layers of compliance, legacy systems, and cost-cutting mandates that result in complex, manual processes that impede top-of-mind goals of efficiency, service, and cost containment. With dynamic work design, leaders can zero in on a specific goal and its true constraints, test small process changes, connect approvals more clearly, regulate workload, and make bottlenecks visible. Suddenly, an impossible tangle becomes a path forward.

Faculty face similar pressures: new credentials, teaching models, and content demands – all while trying to teach effectively. A process approach might be useful to find improvements across teaching and learning processes. Applied here, these principles could help reduce tension between academics and administrators, replacing conflict with constructive redesign.

This approach requires leaders willing to admit they don’t know everything and to tap into the expertise of their own teams. I’ve known leaders unwilling to do that – but I’ve also seen those eager to break down barriers in action.

What better time than now to experiment safely, learn together, and build new organizational muscles?

This isn’t about industrializing higher ed. It’s about clarifying intent, testing ideas quickly, and making work visible so institutions can continuously improve. Agility is one of the promises of the SaaS applications that institutions will eventually need to move to – they incrementally improve as conditions dictate and technology allows, as the institution should. But the projects that try to implement these practices often fail to elicit this agility on their own.

Family ties aside, the lessons in this book are exactly what higher ed needs right now. The five principles of dynamic work design may be the tools leaders have been waiting for. Start with one process, one department, one experiment. Build the habits now that will let your institution thrive in whatever our industry faces next.

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Originally posted by Dave Kieffer on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow him there to catch all his great industry insights.