You Can’t Run a Slide

Right now, somewhere, a president is back from a week away and already thinking about the slides.

You know the gathering I mean. It is the fall kickoff, or the leadership breakfast, or the all-college convocation where the year gets named and the cabinet stands up to tell everyone what this year is about. It comes with a theme, maybe a hashtag, and it always comes with a deck.

Over the next few weeks, you and your leadership team are going to pour real hours into it. You will mull over the run of show and the order of speakers, you will settle on three priorities, and you will spend a surprising amount of time on the one slide that captures the whole year in a phrase people can repeat in the parking lot.

I want to tell you, with respect, that you are focused on the wrong thing.

It is not because the gathering does not matter. It is because the part you are spending your time on, the announcing, is the part that does the least. And the part that would actually make this year different is the part almost nobody prepares for.

The good news is that you still have time. So before you lock that deck, give me ten minutes.

Let me name the most misunderstood moment in any transformation, because it is the exact moment you are preparing for right now.

The most misunderstood moment is the announcement.

Leaders believe that once they have announced the value of a change, the hard part is behind them. The vision is set, the memo is sent, the breakfast is booked, and all that seems to be left is execution.

It is the opposite. The announcement is the easy part, and on its own it does almost nothing.

Let me tell you a story about what that looks like.

The Slide

I sat in a room while a president unveiled a transformation.

The lights dimmed and the slide came up, three words stacked in a clean sans-serif font.

Student-Centered. Sustainable. Future-Ready.

There was applause, and it was sincere. People believed in this president, they wanted the institution to succeed, and the three words sounded like exactly the right things.

Then a department chair raised her hand. She was not hostile, she was sincere, and she asked one question.

"What does this mean for my students in the fall?"

And the answer was, "That's what the working groups are for."

You could feel the room change. It was not anger. It was something quieter and worse, the squint people get when they have just been handed a promise they cannot do anything with. They nodded, they filed out, and they went back to their offices and did exactly what they had been doing the day before.

A year later, I watched the same president put up a version of the same slide. The transformation had not moved. It had been announced, and it had never been built.

In that same year, one dean in that same institution did it completely differently. She did not announce a value. She picked one program, redesigned how advising actually worked inside it, showed her staff the exact new workflow, and ran it for a semester. When it worked, she did not send a memo. She walked the people in the next program over through what had happened, and she let her own staff tell the story, because they were the ones who had built it.

That change spread. The slide never did.

People Do Not Act on the Announcement

The institution acted on the dean's work and ignored the president's slide, and the reason is simple.

People do not act on the value you announce. They act on the mechanism you show them and the proof that it works.

Sometimes you can get away with announcing. If the change is small and familiar, people can fill in the rest themselves. Tell faculty you are moving the registrar's office to a new building and nobody needs a working group, because they already know what that means.

But a real transformation is not familiar. It is new by definition. When you stand in front of people and say the words "more sustainable," they cannot translate that into the only question they actually have, which is what happens to me and what happens to my students.

You cannot outsource that translation to them. It is the single most important job a leader has in a transformation, and it is the one most leaders skip. They say the value and assume the room will do the math. The room cannot do the math, and that is why they squint.

Three Words Nobody Can Act On

Here is something you can test for yourself. Go pull the transformation announcement from any three institutions in the country right now.

They all say essentially the same things, that they will be student-centered, financially sustainable, future-ready, mission-aligned, and nimble.

I am not mocking those words, because they are true things to want. The problem is that they are the things everyone wants, which means they tell your people nothing about what you are specifically going to do, and they commit you to nothing you can be held to.

A claim that applies to every institution differentiates none of them. And a claim your faculty and staff cannot act on is not a strategy. It is a slide.

The work is to come down off the abstraction until you reach the level where a real person can act on what you said. You do not stop at "sustainable." You say instead that here is the program you are going to teach out, here is the program you are going to grow, here is who keeps their job and how, and here is what changes in advising on Monday. That is the altitude where transformation actually happens, and everything above it is decoration.

Value, Mechanism, Proof

So if announcing the value is not enough, what is?

Three things, and they have to travel together.

First is the value, which is the answer to what this change is actually for. Keep it, but do not stop there.

Second is the mechanism, which is how, specifically, the change produces that value. This is the part leaders are most tempted to wave away, and it is the part that earns belief. The dean in my story did not say advising would get better. She showed the exact new workflow, named who did what, and walked her staff through it. The mechanism is what makes the value real, and without it the value is just a wish with a deadline.

Third is the proof. You have to show that this can actually work, because your people have watched transformations get announced and die for their entire careers, and they are right to be skeptical. The strongest proof is a number from your own pilot. When you do not have that yet, and at the start of a transformation you usually do not, you borrow it. You point to a program inside your own institution that already did it, or to a peer institution that looks an awful lot like yours and made the same move. You tell them you cannot promise the exact result yet, but you can show them something that looks like them, and you can walk them through how it worked.

Value tells people why, the mechanism tells them how, and proof tells them it is real. Take away any one of the three and the whole thing collapses back into a slide.

In Higher Education, Proof Is Bigger Than a Number

This is where higher education is different from a company, and it is the part leaders import wrong.

In a business, proof is a number. The change worked, the metric moved, and the case is closed.

In a university, a transformation can hit its number and still be rejected. You can cut the programs, balance the budget, move the metric, and still fail, because proof in higher education is made of three things, not one.

The first is evidence: the pilot, the data, the peer case, the part someone would recognize.

The second is legitimacy. Was this change made through the real governance of the institution, with the consent of the people who will have to run it for the next ten years, or was it imposed and called consultation after the fact? A change that is imposed can work and still die, because the faculty and staff who never agreed to it are the same faculty and staff you are asking to carry it. Legitimacy is the proof that your change will outlive you.

The third is continuity. Did any student get stranded in the transition? A transformation that breaks faith with current students is dismissed no matter how clean the end state looks, and it should be.

So in higher education the bundle is value, mechanism, and proof, where proof means evidence and legitimacy and continuity together. Skip the legitimacy and your best people quietly wait you out. Skip the continuity and you have won an argument by harming the exact students you exist to serve.

The Real Cost

The cost of announcing without showing is not one failed initiative.

The cost is that you have to announce it again, and then again the year after. Every year you put up a slightly newer slide, and every year your faculty and staff learn a little more thoroughly that an announcement is something to be endured rather than acted on. Eventually they stop believing any announcement at all, including the ones that are real. You spend your credibility a slide at a time.

And while you are doing that, the conditions that forced the change in the first place do not wait. The demographics keep tightening and the funding keeps narrowing. Programs are being cut and consolidated across the country right now, in public systems and wealthy privates alike. The pressure is not theoretical, and it is not slowing down.

The institutions that come through this will not be the ones with the best transformation announcement. They will be the ones that showed their people the mechanism, proved it with something real, made it legitimately, and protected their students while they did it.

So Ask Yourself

Think about the last transformation you announced.

Did you show your people how it would actually work, program by program and Monday by Monday? Did you prove it with something they could believe? Did you build it through them instead of at them? Did you protect the students caught in the middle?

Or did you hand them three words on a slide and ask them to run it?

Because you cannot run a slide. You never could.

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