In this period of turbulence, colleges and universities will need to transform to survive and thrive in the emerging learning and work ecosystem. These times call not only for able and authentic leaders, but they also require people with the skills to staff and coordinate these efforts—people we call “transformation architects.”
Transformation architects fulfil critical roles: 1) champions of change; 2) futurists; 3) facilitators and coordinators of strategy and planning processes; and 4) orchestrators of the execution of transformation strategies. They fulfill these roles by ensuring the concurrent execution of integrated strategies, the building of organizational capacity, the understanding and transformation of culture, and by providing advanced analytics to measure the impact of the new strategies.
Today’s planners can become Transformation Architects by making jump shifts in their vision, mindsets, behaviors, skills, actions, and desired outcomes. Colleges and universities will need to transform their organizational structures, roles, and job descriptions to support this new role.
Tim Gilmour, Linda Baer, and I will discuss these transformations in our session “Making Planners Indispensable for Transformation” at SCUP 2022 on Monday, July 25 at 2.50 pm PDT, both physically in Long Beach and virtually. These transformations will also be discussed in two SCUP TaP talk sessions, available on the SCUP Website after the SCUP conference.
