Great question, and one that gets to the heart of why change management has become essential infrastructure for institutions of higher education.
When I think about "the pace of change will never be this slow again," three interconnected realities come to mind that fundamentally shape our work as change practitioners in higher ed:
We've shifted from "build it and they will come" to market-responsiveness, and many institutions are still learning what that means.
For decades, higher education operated in a seller's market. Institutions could design programs based on faculty expertise and institutional tradition, confident that students would come. That era is over for most institutions, but the muscle memory remains strong. Today's change managers aren't just implementing decisions made at the top. We're helping institutions develop the capacity to sense market signals and respond with agility. This means building change fluency across the organization, creating feedback loops that translate student needs into action, and helping our institutions learn to test and iterate rather than spending 18 months in committee designing something that may already be outdated. The institutions that understand this shift are evolving. Those that don't are falling behind.
The competitive landscape has fundamentally changed, creating both urgency and paralysis.
We now have more institutions competing for fewer traditional-age students. The math is simple and sobering. Differentiation isn't optional anymore, and some institutions won't survive. For change managers, this environment is particularly challenging because, while it creates urgency, it often produces paralysis instead of action. As change managers, our role should be to help leadership move from exhaustive planning to strategic experimentation, because the old approach of analyzing everything before acting is simply too slow. We're also managing change in an environment where fear is high, which means resistance will be intense. People need help understanding that staying the same is actually the riskier choice. This requires better prioritization. Institutions can't chase every trend, so we need to focus energy where it will truly make a difference.
Perhaps most critically, institutions recognize change is needed, but many still don't execute it well.
This gap is where change managers prove our value. Leadership doesn't need more people telling them change is necessary. They need practitioners who can actually make change happen. The common failures we see include treating change as a one-time project rather than an ongoing process, underestimating the human dimensions, inadequate stakeholder engagement, unclear accountability, and poor communication. Change managers bring discipline and methodology to what is often approached haphazardly. And in higher ed specifically, we're navigating shared governance, academic freedom concerns, and deeply rooted cultures. This requires specialized understanding, not just corporate change management frameworks applied without adaptation - which is one of the reasons I'm so happy for this new forum!
Here's what concerns me: many institutions (mine included) don't have dedicated change management capacity. They're trying to navigate this accelerating pace without the expertise, frameworks, or organizational muscle to do it effectively. The result? Exhausted leadership, initiative fatigue, wasted resources, and cynical stakeholders who've seen too many change efforts fail.
The accelerating pace of change isn't just a challenge to manage. It's the reason why change management expertise has become essential for institutional survival and success. Those who have embedded this capacity are better positioned to navigate uncertainty. Those who haven't are learning painful lessons about the cost of poorly managed change.
I'm curious what others are seeing: How are your institutions building (or not building) the organizational capacity to manage continuous change? And for those of us doing this work without formal change management roles or titles, what's working to build credibility and capability?
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KJ Fagan, PhD
Pomona College
Claremont, CA
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Original Message:
Sent: 2025-10-17 10:41
From: Mary Sylvester
Subject: Question for Members - Pace of Change
As we are building new membership in this community channel, I have a question that I would love a few people to respond too. What does the following statement mean to you: "The pace of change will never be this slow again?" More specifically, what does that mean to Academia or practitioners leading change in Institutions of higher education?
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Mary Sylvester
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