Resources

The learning curve was steep. Even after six years, I am still learning.  In 2019, I went from twenty-plus years as a faculty person who flourished in the graduate school classroom to directing the Wabash Center. Before my faculty membership, I was on the staff of a large church, I worked as a community organizer and professional gardener. Intermittently, I worked as a consultant. While on faculty, I enriched my scholarly portfolio by managing small, medium and large grant projects. Even with all my previous experience, this first attempt at being in the C-suite is a huge challenge. Executive leadership is a new role, a new language, a new responsibility. I can report—without hesitation—that executive leadership is not for the faint of heart. In this digital age, with the ripening of AI, with major advancements in all sectors of the global marketplace, executive leaders have got to ask significant questions that prompt new kinds of discussions with new discussion partners. The changed and changing world demands new approaches. New questions design new approaches. Recently, I hosted a group who attended SOCAP 25. The annual conference meets to discuss the critical relationship between capital, culture, and imagination in institutional transformation. There is an emphasis upon global problem solving and ways to develop new approaches for healing, restoration, more equity, and collective care. The conference was attended by venture capitalists, AI experts, philanthropic agencies, international education projects, medical technology leaders, and Wabash Center participants.   The conference began with the proclamation that leaders must be concerned about engaging in the problems that are worth our resources (e.g., capital, time, talents, spirit, etc.). I was reminded that so many college, university and seminary leaders report spending time primarily “putting out fires.” By their report, too often their time is spent “dealing with minutia.” Tasked to navigate meager resources for outdated obligations, outmoded work patterns inside recalcitrant structures.  The conversation at the conference reified what I already know to be true - we need the new! We must ask ourselves new questions, have new conversations with new conversation partners! Our future will depend upon our leaders’ abilities to imagine what has never been then construct that reality. What if a key to impactful educational leadership, finding new solutions, new imaginations, new ways of building is by asking new questions? And what if colleagues in other fields are also asking and answering those questions – what new partnerships might be forged? During the three-day conference I took note of and collected the questions the wide variety of speakers said were their north star. In obvious and not so obvious ways, all the presenters divulged the question that their companies and enterprises were pursuing a hopeful future. Sometimes other people’s questions can assist us with our own leadership obligations. Here are the main questions I harvested: What is executive leadership into the future? What are the unmapped and startling roles and responsibilities? What is the preparation and training? What is the prerequisite? What durable skills must leaders possess? Given that most leadership careers will have multiple iterations in the workplace, what experiences prepare people for the many iterations?What are the meta-skills needed for effective leadership?How does one hone the mindsets of: (a) agency, (b) creativity, (c) building (creating), (d) flexibility and adaptability, and (e) managing complexity? What does it mean to manage personal emotional intelligence and nurture emotional intelligence in your team?What AI technologies will need to be added to your repertoire? What AI coaching do you need? What AI do you need to be aware of without learning in-depth? What technologies develop creativity and foster wonder? What about the ancient technologies of story, song, kinships, and relationships?Given that most leaders possess multiple skills advantageous to employers, what does it take to imagine yourself in a variety of kinds of jobs and how will you communicate your skills, knowledge base, and assets to many kinds of employers?What does it mean that we do not know how adults learn? (There is much study of children and adolescents’ ways of learning with little scholarship on how adults learn.) How do you learn? How do you learn to learn better, faster, with more agility? What does it mean to have keen awareness of the ways one learns? Who teaches adults how to learn? What if leaders’ primary task is to ensure new learning by their team? What if success is not transactional, but deeply communal? To which community’s success is your future tied (locally, regionally, nationally, internationally, religiously, spiritually, politically?)As we lead into the future – what do we leave behind and what do we take with us?What will it take to push past our own discomfort, entitlement and fear? What “moon shot,” i.e. bold gesture, will your company take toward the future?In these questions I hear some reassurances. As an executive leader, I have been asking and engaging in some of these questions. Likewise, the list has new questions for me. There are questions on the list that I did not know to ask or pursue. I am glad to have these new questions, and I hope they spark new insights, needed possibilities, and previously unconsidered potentials for and beyond the Wabash Center.  For ReflectionReflect upon your habit and practice of asking questions in search of new approaches. Who is your conversation partner for the meta-questions? As you attempt a large-scale shift in the approach of education in your context, to what kind of reality are you trying to shift and shape?  What other industry is shaping the same or similar reality? From the above list – select the question that feels “foreign” or “uncomfortable” and take a deep dive into answering it for your context. For presidents, provosts, deans, department heads, and project managers – what would it mean for you to locate and participate in a conversation with experts in fields you are unacquainted with but interested in? How might that experience and exposure to the wider world provide you with new insights, perspectives, and possibilities?  

The task is impossible, yet ours to accomplish. Our students need us to shape our classrooms for a future we cannot foresee or anticipate. In the courses we design, our students need us to hone their voices, imaginations, and problem-solving abilities for a future that is unmappable yet will require their navigational skills for survival of our families, neighborhoods, and nation. The world powers are shifting before our very eyes, and we must teach to prepare our students for this change.  A call for agency is not a call to act out or act up. Agency has more to do with activating the responsibilities and powers which came with faculty hire when we joined an institution with a commitment to mission. We are bound to the promise of educating – come what may.Typically, the mission of the school has to do with educating for the moment at hand, and with an eye toward the coming future. Faculty, as stewards of knowledge production, have a professional obligation to adapt, pivot, adjust so that education remains future minded – especially in a moment when the future will not look like the past. We are teaching in a moment when we do not have the luxury of thinking that adhering to established traditions will save schools or educate our people into the next fifty years. While we need those with agency to guide us into the new possibilities, the new approaches, the new sensibilities of education, too many school contexts have punished, jettisoned, or abandoned those with agency.Agency, or lack thereof, is one of the perennial themes discussed in gatherings of early career colleagues at Wabash Center. Colleagues invariably bring to the discussion their fears, misinformation, unarticulated needs, desires, and hopes. They disclose their disappointment and misgivings about institutional citizenship and the lack of ownership they feel for their own professional duties. When asked by the workshop leaders why they feel so disregarded, they say:“I assumed that my needs are just like everyone else’s. They (the administration) should know what I need without me asking.”“I don’t ask questions in meetings because I do not want to appear stupid.”“I don’t like to ask too many questions because I am new.”“I really think someone else knows the curriculum better than I do, so I leave it up to the senior scholars.”“I have decided to wait until I am – [tenured, promoted, finished with my book] – THEN I will start speaking up about the workings of the school.”“I do not want to ask for a faculty handbook because they might think I am causing trouble.”“When colleagues ask me to lunch, I say no. I don’t want the department head to think I am colluding with them.”“I say “yes” to every extra assignment. I don’t want colleagues to think I am unavailable or lazy.”“I don’t make use of the teaching center. I don’t want my colleagues to think I do not know how to teach.”“My only mentor is my dissertation advisor who retired three years ago. I do not want colleagues to think I need advice.”“I am going to pitch my idea for a new class after Dr. XXXX retires in two years.”“I do not vote in faculty meetings because I do not want colleagues to think I take sides.”“I wanted to say something, but I did not know how the colleagues would react.”These are the kinds of responses given by the fearful and the distracted. The lack of agency signals that there is a denial of authority, an abdication of responsibility, a giving away of power, a squandering of opportunity. As some of the most educated people on the planet we are asking permission to do the jobs for which we are depended upon. My fear is that now, in this crisis, we are incapable of shaping our classrooms for the unknown future — we might be, as my father would say, “a day late and a dollar short.” As educators, we are in a reckoning moment when we must take agency if our craft of teaching is to be relevant and worthwhile.  Moving forward, we know that higher education will need to imagine, invigorate, and conjure up new schools as well as establish new approaches for entire systems of education. Professional timidity will sabotage these efforts. Faculty colleagues who have no agency, no forthrightness, no vision for the new, and who refuse or are unable to take authority for the job will only serve to further compromise the system and foreclose the freedom and creativity needed now and in the future. Leadership that is flexible, resilient, imaginative, and willing to convene open dialogue and struggle with challenging questions is what is needed as we press onward through the fog! Reflection QuestionsWhat are the obstacles to your own agency?How has your agency grown with the seasons of your career?What is at stake should your leadership go unvoiced?Who are your conversation partners for discussing this moment of crisis and the ways it is affecting teaching?Where are the open dialogues that address the new possibilities for the coming future?