Leadership development for the people who run the campus
Professional learning people actually want to do.
Couch Scholar turns stories people already know and love into powerful professional learning for higher education. Leaders explore real questions about trust, teams, change, conflict, judgment, culture, and the future of work — then apply what they learn to the challenges they face every day.
Stories get their attention. Learning Everywhere turns that attention into learning. Potato helps carry it into practice.
How Couch Scholar works
Experience the story
Stories people already care about create an engaging starting point for exploring the challenges leaders actually face.
Learn through the framework
The Learning Everywhere Framework™ moves learners from experience toward deeper understanding, judgment, and application.
Grow through application
Potato™, the Couch Scholar AI Learning Coach, asks questions, challenges assumptions, introduces relevant concepts, and helps learners connect what they are learning to their own work.
Develop the capabilities higher education needs now
See Couch Scholar in action
A show isn't the course.
It's where the learning begins.
Believe: Trust, Psychological Safety & the Coaching Leader
Most people see a story about an unlikely soccer coach.
Couch Scholar sees a leadership laboratory.
Questions learners explore
- How do leaders create psychological safety?
- When does optimism build trust — and when can it become avoidance?
- How do you coach someone without solving the problem for them?
- What rituals actually shape team culture?
- How does a leader's own wellbeing affect the people they lead?
Every learner has a coach
Meet Potato™, the Couch Scholar AI Learning Coach.
Potato doesn't lecture. It engages. It asks the next question. Challenges an assumption. Introduces a leadership concept. Pushes for evidence. Helps learners connect what they're seeing to their own team, department, or institution.
Because Potato works through the Learning Everywhere Framework™, the conversation moves toward something professional development too often misses.
Application
Learning pathways
Institutions don't have to build professional development course by course. Couch Scholar pathways combine learning experiences around the capabilities your people need to develop.
Leadership Pathway
Professionals moving into leadership
New Supervisor Pathway
First-time managers of staff
Leading Through Change Pathway
Leaders managing institutional transformation
AI Leadership Pathway
Campus leaders navigating AI-driven change
Student-Centered Leadership Pathway
Professionals whose decisions shape the student experience
Strategic Judgment Pathway
Cabinets, committees, and decision bodies
Built for the way colleges develop people
Emerging leader cohorts
Develop future campus leaders across departments and functions.
New supervisor development
Give first-time managers practical tools for coaching, feedback, trust, accountability, and team leadership.
Department chair development
Support faculty leaders navigating supervision, conflict, collaboration, change, and distributed authority.
Cabinet & senior leadership
Explore judgment, change, AI, culture, and institutional decision-making.
Cross-functional teams
Build collaboration across academic and administrative boundaries.
Strategic priorities
Create pathways around priorities such as AI leadership, culture change, student-centered thinking, or organizational transformation.
Explore the learning library
Explore story-powered learning experiences across the capabilities higher education leaders and teams need most.
What I want to develop
Streaming service
Showing 30 of 30 learning experiences
Capability track
Leadership Foundations
Judgment, trust, credibility, and self-awareness — the practice underneath every other leadership capability.
Leadership Foundations
Believe: Servant Leadership & Coaching for Campus Leaders
Higher education runs on people who are underpaid, overcommitted, and mission-driven anyway. Ted Lasso is a study in leading exactly that kind of team: curiosity over judgment, belief as an operating principle, and coaching that raises performance without burning anyone out.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Optimism is easy in September. What does your team need from you in the third week of a budget freeze?
What you'll be able to do
- Practice a coaching conversation model you can use in one-on-ones
- Build trust deliberately rather than hoping it accumulates
- Motivate mission-driven staff when compensation is not a lever you control
- Use optimism as a leadership discipline, not a personality trait
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Curiosity Over Judgment
Anchor: The dart scene
- Assumptions leaders make about staff capability
- Question stacks that surface real constraints
- Listening as an information strategy
Module 2. The Coaching Conversation
Anchor: Roy Kent learns to coach
- GROW and the one-on-one that is not a status update
- Feedback that is specific, timely, and survivable
- Coaching peers and people who out-tenure you
Module 3. Motivating Mission-Driven Staff
Anchor: The locker-room reset
- Intrinsic motivation and self-determination theory
- Recognition systems that cost nothing
- Recognizing burnout before the resignation email
Module 4. Trust as Infrastructure
Anchor: Believe above the door
- Trust equations: credibility, reliability, intimacy, self-orientation
- Repairing trust after a bad decision
- Transparency limits when you cannot share everything
Module 5. The Leader's Own Wellbeing
Anchor: Ted's panic attacks
- Modeling boundaries in a culture of overwork
- Empathy without absorbing every crisis
- Building a sustainable leadership practice
Leadership Foundations
Currahee: Leading Through Adversity, Mission & Cohesion
Easy Company is a case study in what holds a unit together when conditions get worse and no one is coming to help. Translated to campus, it is a course about leading through budget cuts, program consolidation, and the long stretch where morale is the only resource you can still influence.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Winters leads differently than Sobel and gets more from the same men. What exactly is the difference — and can you name it in behaviors?
What you'll be able to do
- Articulate a mission that holds when resources and headcount shrink
- Sustain cohesion through sustained, not episodic, stress
- Make and communicate hard calls without losing the team's confidence
- Develop the courage to escalate, dissent, and protect your staff upward
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Competence Is a Trust Signal
Anchor: Sobel vs. Winters at Currahee
- Positional vs. earned authority
- Why staff forgive difficulty but not incompetence
- Auditing your own credibility gaps
Module 2. Mission Clarity Under Scarcity
Anchor: Day of Days
- Commander's intent translated to a campus unit
- Deciding what to stop doing, explicitly
- Communicating priorities that actually change behavior
Module 3. Cohesion Over Time
Anchor: Bastogne
- Cohesion research and small-unit dynamics
- Rituals in a long winter: check-ins that are not performative
- Spotting the person who is quietly done
Module 4. Moral Courage and Managing Up
Anchor: Speirs and the hard orders
- Dissenting to leadership without becoming the problem
- Absorbing pressure vs. passing it down
- When to protect staff from information and when not to
Module 5. After the Campaign
Anchor: Points and going home
- Recovery, debrief, and honest retrospectives
- Retaining people after the emergency ends
- Turning a survival story into institutional learning
Leadership Foundations
In the Room: Judgment, Values & Leadership Under Pressure
Mission-driven institutions ask leaders to decide before the evidence is complete, then defend the decision to people who will only ever see the outcome. This experience uses The West Wing to build the practice of values-anchored judgment: how advice and dissent should reach you, how to choose when every option costs something, and how to explain a decision people will not like.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Think of a recent decision you defended well and still doubt. Was your discomfort about the decision, or about the process that produced it?
What you'll be able to do
- State the values a decision must protect before weighing the options
- Make and own a decision with information you know is incomplete
- Build an advisory circle that surfaces dissent early rather than after the fact
- Communicate an unpopular decision so people understand it even when they disagree
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Values Before Decisions
Anchor: A decision reaches the senior office
- Naming the institutional values actually in tension
- Mission language vs. operational reality
- Writing the decision criteria before reviewing options
Module 2. Leading With Incomplete Information
Anchor: The staff briefing scene
- Deciding on a timeline you do not control
- Reversible vs. irreversible decisions
- What you owe people when you say 'I don't know yet'
Module 3. Advice, Dissent & the Leader's Inner Circle
Anchor: Advisers disagree in front of the principal
- Designing advice so bad news travels fast
- Whose voice is missing from your inner circle
- Disagree-and-commit inside shared governance
Module 4. Communicating Decisions People Won't Like
Anchor: The public explanation
- Rationale, tradeoff, and what you will not pretend
- Sequencing communication across campus constituencies
- Distinguishing transparency from oversharing
Module 5. Being Right vs. Leading Effectively
Anchor: The argument won and the relationship spent
- Correctness as a leadership liability
- Rebuilding credibility after a decision ages badly
- A personal standard for how you decide
Managing & Developing Teams
Don't Fix It for Them: Coaching, Listening & Developing People
This is a leadership coaching experience, not therapy training — and the distinction is the point. Shrinking is a story about the damage done when someone crosses the line between supporting a person and taking over their problems. Translated to campus supervision, it builds the habit of listening first, asking questions that develop judgment, and staying inside your role.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Name a staff member who brings you the same category of problem repeatedly. Whose capacity is that pattern actually protecting?
What you'll be able to do
- Run a coaching conversation that does not end with you owning the task
- Ask questions that build an employee's judgment rather than deliver your answer
- Choose deliberately between coaching, directing, and referring
- Hold professional boundaries and route personal or clinical needs to the right campus resource
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Listening Before Solving
Anchor: Advice offered before the problem is understood
- The rescue reflex in helping professions
- Listening for the problem behind the request
- Silence as a supervisory tool
Module 2. Questions That Develop Judgment
Anchor: A conversation that changes direction
- Open questions, question stacks, and the follow-up
- Asking for the employee's read before offering yours
- Coaching a staff member who out-tenures you
Module 3. Coaching vs. Directing
Anchor: When guidance turns into instruction
- Situational judgment: competence, stakes, and time
- Directive moments that are the right call
- Naming the mode out loud so people are not guessing
Module 4. Boundaries & Role Clarity
Anchor: The line that gets crossed
- Supervisor is not counselor: what the role does and does not include
- Referring to EAP, counseling, HR, and campus support
- Confidentiality and mandatory-reporting realities
Module 5. Building Capacity, Not Dependence
Anchor: The person who no longer needs the help
- Delegation as development
- Designing stretch work with a real safety net
- Measuring whether your team is getting more capable
Student-Centered Leadership
The Student You Think You Know
Institutions categorize students constantly — at-risk, non-traditional, undeclared, probation, first-gen. Students experience themselves as whole people. The Breakfast Club is built on exactly that gap, and this experience uses it to examine how labels shape service design, and what changes when staff listen for the story behind the behavior.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Look at a label your office applies to students. What does it help you do, and what does it stop you from seeing?
What you'll be able to do
- Distinguish an institutional label from a student's lived experience
- Listen for the circumstances behind a behavior before responding to the behavior
- Identify where belonging is created or withheld in your own processes
- Reframe a recurring 'student problem' as an institutional design responsibility
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Labels vs. Lived Experience
Anchor: Five students, five categories
- How campus data categories become identities
- Where labels help and where they harden
- Auditing the labels your unit assigns
Module 2. Listening for the Story Behind Behavior
Anchor: The conversation that reframes everyone
- Missed appointments, silence, and late work as signals
- Asking without interrogating
- Documentation that respects dignity
Module 3. Belonging & Identity
Anchor: The room changes
- Belonging-uncertainty research and its campus implications
- Small signals of membership in routine interactions
- First-generation, transfer, and adult learner experience
Module 4. Designing Around the Student Journey
Anchor: The day from the student's side
- Journey mapping one real process end to end
- Friction that only staff can see and only students pay for
- Removing one requirement, deliberately
Module 5. From 'Student Problem' to Institutional Responsibility
Anchor: The essay at the end
- Reframing recurring issues as system outputs
- Bringing student voice into the decision
- One process change you can own this term
Capability track
Managing & Developing Teams
Supervision that builds accountability, psychological safety, and the capacity of the people you lead.
Managing & Developing Teams
Every Second Counts: Building High-Performing Campus Teams
A chaotic kitchen and an understaffed campus office have more in common than either would like to admit: too much work, not enough people, and a culture inherited from whoever ran it last. This course uses The Bear to build the operating habits of a high-performing team — clear standards, real accountability, and safety that survives a bad week.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Your team keeps hitting deadlines and keeps losing people. Which of those two facts is the real performance problem?
What you'll be able to do
- Diagnose whether a team's dysfunction is a systems problem or a behavior problem
- Establish standards and accountability without relying on fear or heroics
- Build psychological safety that holds under deadline pressure and public scrutiny
- Lead a unit through a culture change you inherited rather than chose
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Mise en Place for the Office
Anchor: The prep-list episode
- Turning recurring chaos into repeatable process
- Documenting the work only one person knows how to do
- Where campus bottlenecks actually live
Module 2. Standards Without Cruelty
Anchor: "Yes, chef" and its limits
- Inherited toxic norms and how to name them
- Setting a bar the team can defend publicly
- The difference between demanding and abusive
Module 3. Psychological Safety Under Load
Anchor: Service goes wrong
- Edmondson's model in a service unit
- Rituals that surface bad news early
- Leader behaviors that quietly kill candor
Module 4. Accountability That Sticks
Anchor: Sydney and Carmy at the pass
- Separating performance conversations from personality
- Documentation, progressive expectations, and HR realities
- Delegation as development, not dumping
Module 5. Culture Transformation You Inherited
Anchor: Renovating the restaurant
- Sequencing change when you cannot replace the team
- Coalition building with skeptics
- Sustaining the change after the crisis passes
Leadership Foundations
Believe: Servant Leadership & Coaching for Campus Leaders
Higher education runs on people who are underpaid, overcommitted, and mission-driven anyway. Ted Lasso is a study in leading exactly that kind of team: curiosity over judgment, belief as an operating principle, and coaching that raises performance without burning anyone out.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Optimism is easy in September. What does your team need from you in the third week of a budget freeze?
What you'll be able to do
- Practice a coaching conversation model you can use in one-on-ones
- Build trust deliberately rather than hoping it accumulates
- Motivate mission-driven staff when compensation is not a lever you control
- Use optimism as a leadership discipline, not a personality trait
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Curiosity Over Judgment
Anchor: The dart scene
- Assumptions leaders make about staff capability
- Question stacks that surface real constraints
- Listening as an information strategy
Module 2. The Coaching Conversation
Anchor: Roy Kent learns to coach
- GROW and the one-on-one that is not a status update
- Feedback that is specific, timely, and survivable
- Coaching peers and people who out-tenure you
Module 3. Motivating Mission-Driven Staff
Anchor: The locker-room reset
- Intrinsic motivation and self-determination theory
- Recognition systems that cost nothing
- Recognizing burnout before the resignation email
Module 4. Trust as Infrastructure
Anchor: Believe above the door
- Trust equations: credibility, reliability, intimacy, self-orientation
- Repairing trust after a bad decision
- Transparency limits when you cannot share everything
Module 5. The Leader's Own Wellbeing
Anchor: Ted's panic attacks
- Modeling boundaries in a culture of overwork
- Empathy without absorbing every crisis
- Building a sustainable leadership practice
Managing & Developing Teams
World's Best Boss? Feedback, Difficult Employees & Communication
Michael Scott is a case study in wanting to be liked more than wanting to be effective — a trap almost every new supervisor falls into, especially when they were promoted from within the team. This course turns Dunder Mifflin's failures into a practical supervision toolkit.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
You were promoted over your friends last month. What is the first thing you should have said to them, and did you say it?
What you'll be able to do
- Run the transition from peer to supervisor without pretending it did not happen
- Deliver corrective feedback that changes behavior and holds up in documentation
- Address a persistently difficult employee using a defensible process
- Use humor and informality without eroding your own authority
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. From Peer to Supervisor
Anchor: Michael's promotion problem
- Renegotiating relationships you already have
- Boundaries, favoritism, and perceived fairness
- The first conversation with your former teammates
Module 2. Feedback That Works
Anchor: The performance review episodes
- SBI and the two-minute correction
- Praise that is specific enough to be believed
- Preparing for a conversation you are dreading
Module 3. The Difficult Employee
Anchor: Managing the Stanleys and Dwights
- Distinguishing won't from can't
- Progressive discipline and HR partnership
- Documenting without becoming adversarial
Module 4. Communication Across the Unit
Anchor: Meetings in the conference room
- Meeting hygiene and the announcement that should be an email
- Communicating decisions you disagree with
- Rumors, transparency, and what you can share
Module 5. Humor, Humanity, and Authority
Anchor: Michael actually gets one right
- Humor as cohesion vs. humor as harm
- Belonging and the office culture you set
- Being liked vs. being trusted
Managing & Developing Teams
The Department That Cares: Public-Service Leadership & Optimism
Leslie Knope runs a small, unglamorous, permanently underfunded public office with more energy than the institution deserves — the exact profile of most higher-ed departments. This course studies public-service leadership: bureaucracy, stakeholders, and keeping a team optimistic inside a slow system.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Leslie's binders are legendary and her burnout is real. Where is the line between exceptional preparation and doing everyone else's job?
What you'll be able to do
- Build a small team where each person's strengths are used deliberately
- Move a project through institutional bureaucracy without losing momentum
- Manage public and stakeholder expectations in a service unit
- Sustain optimism as a team practice rather than a personal burden
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Public Service as a Vocation
Anchor: The pit becomes a park
- Mission ownership in an administrative unit
- Service orientation and the campus community
- Managing your own cynicism
Module 2. Building a Team From Who You Have
Anchor: Ron, April, Tom, Donna
- Strengths-based assignment and job crafting
- Working with a disengaged direct report
- Developing student employees into real staff
Module 3. Bureaucracy Without Despair
Anchor: Endless permits and forms
- Mapping the approval chain before you need it
- Building sponsor relationships across departments
- Small wins strategy for long projects
Module 4. Stakeholders and Public Meetings
Anchor: The town hall
- Facilitating a hostile room
- Communicating decisions with unpopular tradeoffs
- Documentation and transparency norms
Module 5. Organizational Optimism
Anchor: Treat yo self, then get back to work
- Rituals, recognition, and team identity
- Optimism vs. toxic positivity
- Preventing the Leslie Knope burnout curve
Managing & Developing Teams
Don't Fix It for Them: Coaching, Listening & Developing People
This is a leadership coaching experience, not therapy training — and the distinction is the point. Shrinking is a story about the damage done when someone crosses the line between supporting a person and taking over their problems. Translated to campus supervision, it builds the habit of listening first, asking questions that develop judgment, and staying inside your role.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Name a staff member who brings you the same category of problem repeatedly. Whose capacity is that pattern actually protecting?
What you'll be able to do
- Run a coaching conversation that does not end with you owning the task
- Ask questions that build an employee's judgment rather than deliver your answer
- Choose deliberately between coaching, directing, and referring
- Hold professional boundaries and route personal or clinical needs to the right campus resource
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Listening Before Solving
Anchor: Advice offered before the problem is understood
- The rescue reflex in helping professions
- Listening for the problem behind the request
- Silence as a supervisory tool
Module 2. Questions That Develop Judgment
Anchor: A conversation that changes direction
- Open questions, question stacks, and the follow-up
- Asking for the employee's read before offering yours
- Coaching a staff member who out-tenures you
Module 3. Coaching vs. Directing
Anchor: When guidance turns into instruction
- Situational judgment: competence, stakes, and time
- Directive moments that are the right call
- Naming the mode out loud so people are not guessing
Module 4. Boundaries & Role Clarity
Anchor: The line that gets crossed
- Supervisor is not counselor: what the role does and does not include
- Referring to EAP, counseling, HR, and campus support
- Confidentiality and mandatory-reporting realities
Module 5. Building Capacity, Not Dependence
Anchor: The person who no longer needs the help
- Delegation as development
- Designing stretch work with a real safety net
- Measuring whether your team is getting more capable
Capability track
Difficult Conversations & Conflict
Candor, performance conversations, organizational silence, and the disagreements campuses tend to route around.
Managing & Developing Teams
Every Second Counts: Building High-Performing Campus Teams
A chaotic kitchen and an understaffed campus office have more in common than either would like to admit: too much work, not enough people, and a culture inherited from whoever ran it last. This course uses The Bear to build the operating habits of a high-performing team — clear standards, real accountability, and safety that survives a bad week.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Your team keeps hitting deadlines and keeps losing people. Which of those two facts is the real performance problem?
What you'll be able to do
- Diagnose whether a team's dysfunction is a systems problem or a behavior problem
- Establish standards and accountability without relying on fear or heroics
- Build psychological safety that holds under deadline pressure and public scrutiny
- Lead a unit through a culture change you inherited rather than chose
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Mise en Place for the Office
Anchor: The prep-list episode
- Turning recurring chaos into repeatable process
- Documenting the work only one person knows how to do
- Where campus bottlenecks actually live
Module 2. Standards Without Cruelty
Anchor: "Yes, chef" and its limits
- Inherited toxic norms and how to name them
- Setting a bar the team can defend publicly
- The difference between demanding and abusive
Module 3. Psychological Safety Under Load
Anchor: Service goes wrong
- Edmondson's model in a service unit
- Rituals that surface bad news early
- Leader behaviors that quietly kill candor
Module 4. Accountability That Sticks
Anchor: Sydney and Carmy at the pass
- Separating performance conversations from personality
- Documentation, progressive expectations, and HR realities
- Delegation as development, not dumping
Module 5. Culture Transformation You Inherited
Anchor: Renovating the restaurant
- Sequencing change when you cannot replace the team
- Coalition building with skeptics
- Sustaining the change after the crisis passes
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
The Study Group: Group Dynamics, Conflict & Shared Governance
Seven incompatible people trapped at a table, arguing about things that do not matter and occasionally about things that do. Community is a surprisingly precise model of committee life, and this course uses it to teach group dynamics, conflict, and the strange machinery of shared governance.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Every group has a Britta, a Jeff, and a Pierce. If you can name yours in thirty seconds, what does the group say about you?
What you'll be able to do
- Read group roles and dynamics in real time and intervene appropriately
- Move a committee from repeated debate to a documented decision
- Handle the persistent disruptive member without blowing up the group
- Navigate shared governance so that consultation is real and still finite
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Roles Around the Table
Anchor: The study group forms
- Formal roles vs. the roles people actually play
- Tuckman revisited for standing committees
- Identifying who holds informal power
Module 2. Productive and Unproductive Conflict
Anchor: The paintball escalation
- Task, process, and relationship conflict
- De-escalation moves a chair can make mid-meeting
- When conflict is a symptom of unclear scope
Module 3. The Difficult Member
Anchor: Pierce keeps derailing
- Behavioral agreements and how to enforce them
- Private conversations that change public behavior
- Removing someone from a group, carefully
Module 4. Shared Governance in Practice
Anchor: The dean, the board, and the group
- Consultation vs. consent vs. decision authority
- Writing charges that prevent scope creep
- Closing the loop so faculty see their input used
Module 5. Belonging in a Working Group
Anchor: The group stays together anyway
- Cohesion that survives disagreement
- Onboarding new members mid-cycle
- Ending a group well
Managing & Developing Teams
World's Best Boss? Feedback, Difficult Employees & Communication
Michael Scott is a case study in wanting to be liked more than wanting to be effective — a trap almost every new supervisor falls into, especially when they were promoted from within the team. This course turns Dunder Mifflin's failures into a practical supervision toolkit.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
You were promoted over your friends last month. What is the first thing you should have said to them, and did you say it?
What you'll be able to do
- Run the transition from peer to supervisor without pretending it did not happen
- Deliver corrective feedback that changes behavior and holds up in documentation
- Address a persistently difficult employee using a defensible process
- Use humor and informality without eroding your own authority
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. From Peer to Supervisor
Anchor: Michael's promotion problem
- Renegotiating relationships you already have
- Boundaries, favoritism, and perceived fairness
- The first conversation with your former teammates
Module 2. Feedback That Works
Anchor: The performance review episodes
- SBI and the two-minute correction
- Praise that is specific enough to be believed
- Preparing for a conversation you are dreading
Module 3. The Difficult Employee
Anchor: Managing the Stanleys and Dwights
- Distinguishing won't from can't
- Progressive discipline and HR partnership
- Documenting without becoming adversarial
Module 4. Communication Across the Unit
Anchor: Meetings in the conference room
- Meeting hygiene and the announcement that should be an email
- Communicating decisions you disagree with
- Rumors, transparency, and what you can share
Module 5. Humor, Humanity, and Authority
Anchor: Michael actually gets one right
- Humor as cohesion vs. humor as harm
- Belonging and the office culture you set
- Being liked vs. being trusted
Crisis & Resilient Leadership
One Shift: Resilience, Triage & Difficult Conversations
An emergency department across a single shift is a study in sustained decision making, triage, and conversations no one wants to have. Campus staff who handle conduct cases, behavioral intervention, and student emergencies do a version of the same work with less training and no shift change.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
You have four urgent student situations and capacity for two. Write down the criteria you will use — before the next one arrives.
What you'll be able to do
- Triage competing urgent cases using criteria you can defend afterward
- Deliver difficult news to students and families with structure and care
- Maintain judgment quality across a long, escalating day
- Build personal and team practices that prevent cumulative burnout
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Triage as a Leadership Skill
Anchor: The board fills up
- Explicit criteria vs. loudest-voice prioritization
- Reassessing as conditions change
- Communicating the wait to people who are frightened
Module 2. Decision Quality Over a Long Day
Anchor: Hour eight
- Cognitive load, fatigue, and decision drift
- Checklists and forced pauses
- Handoffs that do not lose information
Module 3. Difficult Conversations
Anchor: Telling the family
- SPIKES adapted for student and family conversations
- Silence, empathy, and not filling the space
- Documenting a hard conversation accurately
Module 4. Teaching While Doing
Anchor: Residents on the floor
- Supervising newer staff during a live crisis
- Correcting an error without humiliation
- Debriefing a student worker after a bad call
Module 5. Resilience That Is Not Just Grit
Anchor: After the shift
- Cumulative stress and secondary trauma
- Team rituals for closing a hard day
- When to route yourself to help
Difficult Conversations & Conflict
Rooms Where It Happens: Negotiation & Organizational Politics
Succession is an unflattering, extremely useful field guide to how decisions actually get made in institutions with boards, factions, and inherited power. This course teaches the legitimate version of those skills: reading the room, negotiating, and surviving reorganization with your integrity intact.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
The decision was made before your meeting started. When did it get made, and where were you?
What you'll be able to do
- Map the real decision network behind an institutional choice
- Prepare and run a negotiation with interests, BATNA, and tradeables defined
- Handle conflict with peers who control resources you need
- Practice political skill without becoming the person no one trusts
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Reading the Power Map
Anchor: The board circles
- Formal org chart vs. actual influence network
- Identifying sponsors, blockers, and brokers
- Where your unit sits in institutional priority
Module 2. Negotiation Fundamentals
Anchor: The deal talks
- Interests over positions; BATNA and reservation points
- Budget and resource negotiations with peer units
- Concessions that build future capital
Module 3. Conflict Between Peers
Anchor: Siblings at war
- Escalation dynamics and how to interrupt them
- Repairing a working relationship after a public clash
- When to involve your supervisor
Module 4. Restructuring and Uncertainty
Anchor: Reorganization looms
- Leading a team through a reorg you cannot explain
- Protecting staff while staying honest
- Positioning your unit without undermining others
Module 5. Integrity Under Pressure
Anchor: Everyone's compromises
- Naming your non-negotiables in advance
- Political skill vs. manipulation
- Deciding when to leave the room
Leading Change & Culture
Quiet Channels: Influence, Stakeholders & Change Management
Kate Wyler's job is to produce outcomes across organizations that do not report to her, under time pressure, with incomplete information and competing agendas. That is also the job of anyone leading change on a campus. This course is stakeholder management taught as diplomacy.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Your initiative has executive support and three departments quietly waiting for it to fail. What is your first conversation?
What you'll be able to do
- Build a stakeholder map with influence, interest, and required commitment level
- Use back-channel and coalition tactics ethically to move an initiative
- Sequence a change effort so early wins protect the harder later steps
- Manage up to senior leadership whose priorities shift under you
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Stakeholder Mapping
Anchor: Competing capitals
- Influence/interest grids and commitment analysis
- Identifying the veto players early
- What each stakeholder needs to say yes
Module 2. Influence Without Authority
Anchor: The unofficial conversation
- Reciprocity, framing, and the pre-meeting
- Back channels that build trust rather than resentment
- Coalitions and who to recruit first
Module 3. Change Management in Slow Institutions
Anchor: Policy meets reality
- Kotter and ADKAR applied to a campus initiative
- Pilot design and evidence gathering
- Resistance as information, not obstruction
Module 4. Crisis Diplomacy
Anchor: The incident escalates
- Coordinating a response across divisions in real time
- Message discipline across multiple spokespeople
- Preserving relationships while moving fast
Module 5. Managing Up and Sideways
Anchor: Serving two principals
- Briefing senior leaders concisely
- When priorities change midstream
- Getting credit distributed correctly
Difficult Conversations & Conflict
The Conversation You're Avoiding
Every campus has a fact everyone knows and no one says. This experience uses A Few Good Men to examine why organizations go silent, how authority distorts what gets reported upward, and how to prepare and hold the accountability conversation you have been routing around — with evidence rather than accumulated interpretation.
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Recommended audiences
Write the sentence you have been avoiding saying, exactly as you would say it. What makes it hard: the content, the relationship, or the consequence?
What you'll be able to do
- Diagnose why a known problem has gone unspoken in your unit
- Prepare a difficult conversation with evidence separated from interpretation
- Challenge a superior's position without making yourself the issue
- Plan the follow-through that determines whether candor changes anything
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Why People Don't Say What Everyone Knows
Anchor: The complaint no one files
- Organizational silence and perceived futility
- Hierarchy, loyalty, and the cost of being the one who said it
- Auditing what your unit cannot currently say
Module 2. Preparing for the Difficult Conversation
Anchor: Building the case
- Purpose, opening sentence, and desired outcome
- Anticipating the three responses you fear most
- Documentation, HR partnership, and process fairness
Module 3. Evidence, Assumption & Interpretation
Anchor: The record vs. the story
- Separating what was observed from what it meant to you
- Behavior-and-impact language
- Testing your interpretation before you assert it
Module 4. Challenging Authority Constructively
Anchor: Pressing the person in charge
- Managing up without insubordination
- Framing dissent as institutional risk, not personal objection
- Escalation paths and when to use them
Module 5. What Happens After the Truth Is Spoken
Anchor: The aftermath
- Repairing the working relationship
- Protecting people who spoke up
- Turning one conversation into a durable norm
Difficult Conversations & Conflict
The Cost of a Comfortable Answer
Institutional failures rarely begin with a bad decision; they begin with an accurate report that never reached the person who needed it. Chernobyl is the definitive study of what happens when a system rewards reassurance. This experience is about the campus version: enrollment numbers that get rounded up, incidents that get softened, and the leaders who never learn what their own institution knows.
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Recommended audiences
What is the most recent piece of bad news that reached you late? Trace the path it took and name each place it was softened.
What you'll be able to do
- Identify the incentives that cause bad news to be softened before it reaches you
- Escalate a serious concern in a way that survives the chain of review
- Design reporting norms that make early warning safe and routine
- Communicate an institutional problem publicly without minimizing or catastrophizing
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. The Comfortable Answer
Anchor: The first report
- Why reassurance travels faster than accuracy
- Information distortion across organizational layers
- Signals your unit is filtering upward
Module 2. Escalating a Serious Concern
Anchor: Raising the alarm
- Building an escalation that names risk, evidence, and ask
- Choosing the right forum and the right moment
- When to go around someone, and what it costs
Module 3. Designing for Early Warning
Anchor: The system that failed
- Near-miss reporting on a campus
- Separating accountability from blame
- Making the first report cheap and the cover-up expensive
Module 4. Communicating an Institutional Problem
Anchor: The public account
- Saying what is known, unknown, and being done
- Coordinating with communications, counsel, and leadership
- Avoiding both minimization and alarm
Module 5. Rebuilding Trust After the Fact
Anchor: The reckoning
- Honest after-action review
- What changes must be visible to be believed
- Institutional memory beyond the people who lived it
Capability track
Leading Change & Culture
Resistance, coalitions, institutional politics, and turning a successful pilot into an institutional practice.
Managing & Developing Teams
Every Second Counts: Building High-Performing Campus Teams
A chaotic kitchen and an understaffed campus office have more in common than either would like to admit: too much work, not enough people, and a culture inherited from whoever ran it last. This course uses The Bear to build the operating habits of a high-performing team — clear standards, real accountability, and safety that survives a bad week.
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Recommended audiences
Your team keeps hitting deadlines and keeps losing people. Which of those two facts is the real performance problem?
What you'll be able to do
- Diagnose whether a team's dysfunction is a systems problem or a behavior problem
- Establish standards and accountability without relying on fear or heroics
- Build psychological safety that holds under deadline pressure and public scrutiny
- Lead a unit through a culture change you inherited rather than chose
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Mise en Place for the Office
Anchor: The prep-list episode
- Turning recurring chaos into repeatable process
- Documenting the work only one person knows how to do
- Where campus bottlenecks actually live
Module 2. Standards Without Cruelty
Anchor: "Yes, chef" and its limits
- Inherited toxic norms and how to name them
- Setting a bar the team can defend publicly
- The difference between demanding and abusive
Module 3. Psychological Safety Under Load
Anchor: Service goes wrong
- Edmondson's model in a service unit
- Rituals that surface bad news early
- Leader behaviors that quietly kill candor
Module 4. Accountability That Sticks
Anchor: Sydney and Carmy at the pass
- Separating performance conversations from personality
- Documentation, progressive expectations, and HR realities
- Delegation as development, not dumping
Module 5. Culture Transformation You Inherited
Anchor: Renovating the restaurant
- Sequencing change when you cannot replace the team
- Coalition building with skeptics
- Sustaining the change after the crisis passes
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
The Study Group: Group Dynamics, Conflict & Shared Governance
Seven incompatible people trapped at a table, arguing about things that do not matter and occasionally about things that do. Community is a surprisingly precise model of committee life, and this course uses it to teach group dynamics, conflict, and the strange machinery of shared governance.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Every group has a Britta, a Jeff, and a Pierce. If you can name yours in thirty seconds, what does the group say about you?
What you'll be able to do
- Read group roles and dynamics in real time and intervene appropriately
- Move a committee from repeated debate to a documented decision
- Handle the persistent disruptive member without blowing up the group
- Navigate shared governance so that consultation is real and still finite
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Roles Around the Table
Anchor: The study group forms
- Formal roles vs. the roles people actually play
- Tuckman revisited for standing committees
- Identifying who holds informal power
Module 2. Productive and Unproductive Conflict
Anchor: The paintball escalation
- Task, process, and relationship conflict
- De-escalation moves a chair can make mid-meeting
- When conflict is a symptom of unclear scope
Module 3. The Difficult Member
Anchor: Pierce keeps derailing
- Behavioral agreements and how to enforce them
- Private conversations that change public behavior
- Removing someone from a group, carefully
Module 4. Shared Governance in Practice
Anchor: The dean, the board, and the group
- Consultation vs. consent vs. decision authority
- Writing charges that prevent scope creep
- Closing the loop so faculty see their input used
Module 5. Belonging in a Working Group
Anchor: The group stays together anyway
- Cohesion that survives disagreement
- Onboarding new members mid-cycle
- Ending a group well
Decision-Making & Strategic Judgment
Undervalued Assets: Data-Informed Enrollment Decisions
A small-market team with no money finds wins where everyone else is not looking, and every experienced scout in the room hates it. Substitute enrollment for baseball and the story is identical: better data, obvious resistance, and the political work of changing how decisions get made.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Your yield model says to stop recruiting a market your president loves. What is your next move?
What you'll be able to do
- Choose enrollment metrics that predict outcomes instead of describing history
- Identify undervalued student markets your competitors overlook
- Present analysis to skeptical senior leadership persuasively
- Lead the organizational change that data-informed practice actually requires
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. The Wrong Question
Anchor: The scouts' room
- Vanity metrics vs. decision metrics in enrollment
- Defining the actual objective: net revenue, mission, or headcount
- Where institutional intuition is right
Module 2. Finding Undervalued Markets
Anchor: On-base percentage
- Segmentation, yield modeling, and market saturation
- Transfer, adult, and stop-out populations as strategy
- Financial aid leveraging and its ethics
Module 3. Selling the Analysis
Anchor: Beane vs. the front office
- Translating models for people who distrust models
- Visualizing uncertainty honestly
- Pilots that create evidence and cover
Module 4. Organizational Resistance
Anchor: The clubhouse pushes back
- Why experienced staff resist, and when they are right
- Changing incentives, not just dashboards
- Coalition building across admissions, aid, and academics
Module 5. Living With Variance
Anchor: Losing streaks and long seasons
- Distinguishing noise from trend in cycle data
- Governance for continuous course correction
- Protecting the strategy through one bad year
Difficult Conversations & Conflict
Rooms Where It Happens: Negotiation & Organizational Politics
Succession is an unflattering, extremely useful field guide to how decisions actually get made in institutions with boards, factions, and inherited power. This course teaches the legitimate version of those skills: reading the room, negotiating, and surviving reorganization with your integrity intact.
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Recommended audiences
The decision was made before your meeting started. When did it get made, and where were you?
What you'll be able to do
- Map the real decision network behind an institutional choice
- Prepare and run a negotiation with interests, BATNA, and tradeables defined
- Handle conflict with peers who control resources you need
- Practice political skill without becoming the person no one trusts
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Reading the Power Map
Anchor: The board circles
- Formal org chart vs. actual influence network
- Identifying sponsors, blockers, and brokers
- Where your unit sits in institutional priority
Module 2. Negotiation Fundamentals
Anchor: The deal talks
- Interests over positions; BATNA and reservation points
- Budget and resource negotiations with peer units
- Concessions that build future capital
Module 3. Conflict Between Peers
Anchor: Siblings at war
- Escalation dynamics and how to interrupt them
- Repairing a working relationship after a public clash
- When to involve your supervisor
Module 4. Restructuring and Uncertainty
Anchor: Reorganization looms
- Leading a team through a reorg you cannot explain
- Protecting staff while staying honest
- Positioning your unit without undermining others
Module 5. Integrity Under Pressure
Anchor: Everyone's compromises
- Naming your non-negotiables in advance
- Political skill vs. manipulation
- Deciding when to leave the room
Leading Change & Culture
Quiet Channels: Influence, Stakeholders & Change Management
Kate Wyler's job is to produce outcomes across organizations that do not report to her, under time pressure, with incomplete information and competing agendas. That is also the job of anyone leading change on a campus. This course is stakeholder management taught as diplomacy.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Your initiative has executive support and three departments quietly waiting for it to fail. What is your first conversation?
What you'll be able to do
- Build a stakeholder map with influence, interest, and required commitment level
- Use back-channel and coalition tactics ethically to move an initiative
- Sequence a change effort so early wins protect the harder later steps
- Manage up to senior leadership whose priorities shift under you
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Stakeholder Mapping
Anchor: Competing capitals
- Influence/interest grids and commitment analysis
- Identifying the veto players early
- What each stakeholder needs to say yes
Module 2. Influence Without Authority
Anchor: The unofficial conversation
- Reciprocity, framing, and the pre-meeting
- Back channels that build trust rather than resentment
- Coalitions and who to recruit first
Module 3. Change Management in Slow Institutions
Anchor: Policy meets reality
- Kotter and ADKAR applied to a campus initiative
- Pilot design and evidence gathering
- Resistance as information, not obstruction
Module 4. Crisis Diplomacy
Anchor: The incident escalates
- Coordinating a response across divisions in real time
- Message discipline across multiple spokespeople
- Preserving relationships while moving fast
Module 5. Managing Up and Sideways
Anchor: Serving two principals
- Briefing senior leaders concisely
- When priorities change midstream
- Getting credit distributed correctly
Leading Change & Culture
Getting the Numbers Right: Innovation, Change & Inclusion
NASA needed answers no existing process could produce, and got them from people the institution had structurally sidelined. Hidden Figures is a course about innovation under deadline and about the talent your organization is currently wasting.
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Recommended audiences
Someone on your campus is doing work well above their title. What has stopped their promotion — and is any of it a policy you could change?
What you'll be able to do
- Identify capable people your structures currently overlook
- Remove access barriers that quietly limit contribution and advancement
- Lead adoption of a new method when the current one still mostly works
- Sponsor talent actively rather than waiting for people to apply
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Talent the System Wastes
Anchor: The West Computing group
- Hidden expertise audits in your unit
- Credentialing barriers vs. actual capability
- Who gets asked to lead, and why
Module 2. Access as Infrastructure
Anchor: The long walk to the bathroom
- Small structural barriers with large cumulative cost
- Mapping the friction in your own workplace
- Fixing what is within your authority this month
Module 3. Innovation Under Deadline
Anchor: Recomputing the trajectory
- Verification culture and permission to challenge
- Prototyping a new process alongside the old
- Deciding when the old method must be retired
Module 4. Adopting the New Technology
Anchor: The IBM arrives
- Reskilling your team before the change lands
- Change communication that reduces threat
- Redesigning roles rather than eliminating people
Module 5. Sponsorship and Advancement
Anchor: Mary Jackson's petition
- Mentorship vs. sponsorship in practice
- Building pathways: acting roles, stretch projects, tuition benefits
- Measuring equity in your own promotions
Leading Change & Culture
Left Side, Strong Side: Culture, Trust & Forced Change
Two teams are merged by a decision nobody in the room made, under a leader half of them did not want, on a deadline. Program consolidations and departmental mergers land exactly this way, and this course is about the trust-building work that determines whether the merger survives year one.
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Recommended audiences
Your two merged teams are polite in meetings and separate at lunch. What are you going to do about lunch?
What you'll be able to do
- Lead a merged unit through the first year without picking a winning side
- Design contact and shared-goal structures that build cross-group trust
- Establish legitimacy as a leader half the team did not choose
- Convert forced change into a shared identity people will defend
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Inheriting a Merger
Anchor: Coach Boone arrives
- Legitimacy when you were imposed on the team
- First-week choices that set the tone
- What to keep from both prior cultures
Module 2. Contact and Shared Goals
Anchor: Camp at Gettysburg
- Contact theory conditions that actually reduce division
- Structured cross-group work assignments
- Rituals that make the new unit real
Module 3. Trust Between Factions
Anchor: Gerry and Julius
- Interpersonal trust as the unit of culture change
- Surfacing grievances without a public trial
- Peer leaders who carry the change for you
Module 4. Co-Leading With Your Predecessor
Anchor: Boone and Yoast
- Sharing authority without confusing the team
- Public alignment, private disagreement
- Handling staff loyalty to the previous leader
Module 5. Making the Change Permanent
Anchor: The season and after
- Codifying new norms into policy and hiring
- Guarding against relapse under stress
- Telling the unit's new story credibly
Leading Change & Culture
Changing the System From Inside
Ford v Ferrari is a story about talented people trying to build something excellent inside an organization designed to prevent exactly that. The central campus question this experience keeps returning to is the one every institution eventually asks: we piloted it successfully, so why didn't the institution change?
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Recommended audiences
Name a pilot on your campus that worked and then quietly ended. Which person, process, or budget line actually stopped it?
What you'll be able to do
- Explain why good ideas die inside institutions in structural rather than personal terms
- Map the people who can stop your initiative and what each of them needs
- Protect an experiment from process load long enough to produce evidence
- Design the transition from successful pilot to funded institutional practice
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Why Good Ideas Die Inside Organizations
Anchor: The idea meets the corporation
- Structural resistance vs. individual obstruction
- Risk asymmetry: who is punished if it fails
- Diagnosing your institution's failure pattern
Module 2. Mapping the People Who Can Stop Change
Anchor: The approvals begin
- Influence/interest mapping and veto players
- What each stakeholder must be able to say to their own boss
- Recruiting the first three allies
Module 3. Protecting Experimentation From Bureaucracy
Anchor: The team gets space to build
- Scoping a pilot small enough to survive
- Negotiating exceptions with a defined end date
- Evidence you will need before you need it
Module 4. Managing Executive Sponsors
Anchor: The sponsor's own pressures
- Briefing up in one page
- What sponsors need to defend you internally
- When the sponsor's priority shifts
Module 5. From Successful Pilot to Institutional Practice
Anchor: The win that must be repeated
- Budget lines, staffing, and policy as the real proof of change
- Handing the work to people who did not invent it
- Sustaining the practice after the champion leaves
Distributed & Hybrid Teams
Where Work Happens: Trust, Boundaries & the Hybrid Workplace
Severance takes the separation of work and self to its literal extreme, and in doing so asks the question hybrid policy usually avoids: what does an institution owe employees when work is technologically mediated? This is not a remote-work tips course. It is about trust, monitoring, autonomy, and the culture your policy is quietly teaching.
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Recommended audiences
If your hybrid policy were published alongside its actual reasons, which sentence would you want to rewrite?
What you'll be able to do
- Articulate the trust assumptions embedded in your unit's hybrid practice
- Evaluate monitoring and productivity tools against their effect on trust
- Set boundaries and availability expectations that protect people and the work
- Design accountability based on outcomes rather than observed presence
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. What Hybrid Policy Actually Says
Anchor: Two versions of the same person
- Stated rationale vs. the message staff receive
- Equity across roles that cannot work remotely
- Reading your own policy as an employee would
Module 2. Trust, Autonomy & Control
Anchor: The workplace that watches
- Monitoring tools and the trust they consume
- Autonomy as a driver of motivation and retention
- Deciding what you genuinely need to know
Module 3. Boundaries in a Mediated Workplace
Anchor: Work that follows people home
- After-hours expectations and response norms
- Protecting focused work in an always-available culture
- Modeling boundaries as a supervisor
Module 4. Accountability Without Presence
Anchor: Measuring the wrong thing
- Outcome-based expectations staff can see
- Fair evaluation across in-person and remote staff
- Addressing genuine performance problems directly
Module 5. The Culture You Are Building
Anchor: What the institution owes people
- Belonging, identity, and the workplace as community
- Consulting staff on policy that governs their lives
- Committing to one change in your own practice
Capability track
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
Getting work done across distributed authority, shared governance, and teams you do not control.
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
Making It Work: Faculty Collaboration With Limited Resources
Abbott Elementary is the most accurate workplace comedy about mission-driven institutions on television: chronically underfunded, staffed by people who care more than the budget deserves, and led by someone whose authority is mostly persuasion. This course is chair leadership without line authority.
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Recommended audiences
You cannot give your faculty money, course releases, or new hires. List what you can actually give them — then check how many you have used this term.
What you'll be able to do
- Lead faculty colleagues through influence rather than positional authority
- Design collaboration structures that respect faculty autonomy
- Advocate for resources upward with evidence rather than complaint
- Sustain motivation and mission in a chronically under-resourced unit
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Leading Without Authority
Anchor: Janine organizes the staff
- The chair role: colleague, advocate, and administrator at once
- Influence tactics that work with faculty
- Choosing which hills are worth it
Module 2. Collaboration Faculty Will Actually Join
Anchor: The teacher lounge summits
- Meeting design that produces decisions
- Distributed leadership and rotating service load
- Making committee work visible and countable
Module 3. Scarcity as a Standing Condition
Anchor: Fundraising for supplies
- Triage frameworks for budget and staffing shortfalls
- Building the case for resources in administrative language
- Avoiding the martyr culture trap
Module 4. Motivating Career Faculty
Anchor: Barbara mentors Janine
- Mid-career stagnation and renewal
- Mentoring across generations of faculty
- Recognition in a system with few extrinsic rewards
Module 5. Protecting the Mission
Anchor: The charter-school pressure
- Institutional pressures and mission drift
- Defending academic priorities in strategic planning
- Documenting impact when metrics miss the point
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
The Study Group: Group Dynamics, Conflict & Shared Governance
Seven incompatible people trapped at a table, arguing about things that do not matter and occasionally about things that do. Community is a surprisingly precise model of committee life, and this course uses it to teach group dynamics, conflict, and the strange machinery of shared governance.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Every group has a Britta, a Jeff, and a Pierce. If you can name yours in thirty seconds, what does the group say about you?
What you'll be able to do
- Read group roles and dynamics in real time and intervene appropriately
- Move a committee from repeated debate to a documented decision
- Handle the persistent disruptive member without blowing up the group
- Navigate shared governance so that consultation is real and still finite
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Roles Around the Table
Anchor: The study group forms
- Formal roles vs. the roles people actually play
- Tuckman revisited for standing committees
- Identifying who holds informal power
Module 2. Productive and Unproductive Conflict
Anchor: The paintball escalation
- Task, process, and relationship conflict
- De-escalation moves a chair can make mid-meeting
- When conflict is a symptom of unclear scope
Module 3. The Difficult Member
Anchor: Pierce keeps derailing
- Behavioral agreements and how to enforce them
- Private conversations that change public behavior
- Removing someone from a group, carefully
Module 4. Shared Governance in Practice
Anchor: The dean, the board, and the group
- Consultation vs. consent vs. decision authority
- Writing charges that prevent scope creep
- Closing the loop so faculty see their input used
Module 5. Belonging in a Working Group
Anchor: The group stays together anyway
- Cohesion that survives disagreement
- Onboarding new members mid-cycle
- Ending a group well
Leading Change & Culture
Quiet Channels: Influence, Stakeholders & Change Management
Kate Wyler's job is to produce outcomes across organizations that do not report to her, under time pressure, with incomplete information and competing agendas. That is also the job of anyone leading change on a campus. This course is stakeholder management taught as diplomacy.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Your initiative has executive support and three departments quietly waiting for it to fail. What is your first conversation?
What you'll be able to do
- Build a stakeholder map with influence, interest, and required commitment level
- Use back-channel and coalition tactics ethically to move an initiative
- Sequence a change effort so early wins protect the harder later steps
- Manage up to senior leadership whose priorities shift under you
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Stakeholder Mapping
Anchor: Competing capitals
- Influence/interest grids and commitment analysis
- Identifying the veto players early
- What each stakeholder needs to say yes
Module 2. Influence Without Authority
Anchor: The unofficial conversation
- Reciprocity, framing, and the pre-meeting
- Back channels that build trust rather than resentment
- Coalitions and who to recruit first
Module 3. Change Management in Slow Institutions
Anchor: Policy meets reality
- Kotter and ADKAR applied to a campus initiative
- Pilot design and evidence gathering
- Resistance as information, not obstruction
Module 4. Crisis Diplomacy
Anchor: The incident escalates
- Coordinating a response across divisions in real time
- Message discipline across multiple spokespeople
- Preserving relationships while moving fast
Module 5. Managing Up and Sideways
Anchor: Serving two principals
- Briefing senior leaders concisely
- When priorities change midstream
- Getting credit distributed correctly
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
The Team You Don't Control
Higher education distributes authority so widely that most consequential work is done by people who do not report to the person leading it. Ocean's Eleven is a clean study in assembling a team around a problem instead of an org chart, matching roles to expertise, and coordinating experts who each know something you do not.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
In your current cross-campus project, who actually holds the decision? If three people would answer differently, that is the finding.
What you'll be able to do
- Assemble a working group around the problem rather than the reporting lines
- Match roles to genuine expertise instead of availability or seniority
- Establish explicit decision rights before the first disagreement
- Sustain a coalition by distributing credit deliberately
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Assemble Around the Problem, Not the Org Chart
Anchor: Recruiting the crew
- Defining the problem precisely enough to staff it
- Who is missing from the room and why
- Enrollment + Academic Affairs + Financial Aid + Marketing as one problem
Module 2. Match Roles to Expertise
Anchor: Each specialist's contribution
- Mapping capability, not job title
- Naming the single accountable owner per workstream
- Handling the expert who is not a team player
Module 3. Establish Decision Rights
Anchor: The plan requires agreement
- RACI and consultative vs. consensus decisions
- Escalation paths defined in advance
- Shared governance without paralysis
Module 4. Coordinate Without Hierarchy
Anchor: The operation in motion
- Cadence, shared artifacts, and the one status source
- Influence when you cannot direct
- Student Affairs + Academics + Counseling + Athletics in one response
Module 5. Share Credit & Sustain the Coalition
Anchor: After the job
- Public credit as a coalition-maintenance strategy
- Reporting outcomes to each unit's own leadership
- Keeping the group available for the next initiative
Capability track
Decision-Making & Strategic Judgment
Evidence, bias, productive dissent, and decision processes that people across the institution actually trust.
Decision-Making & Strategic Judgment
Undervalued Assets: Data-Informed Enrollment Decisions
A small-market team with no money finds wins where everyone else is not looking, and every experienced scout in the room hates it. Substitute enrollment for baseball and the story is identical: better data, obvious resistance, and the political work of changing how decisions get made.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Your yield model says to stop recruiting a market your president loves. What is your next move?
What you'll be able to do
- Choose enrollment metrics that predict outcomes instead of describing history
- Identify undervalued student markets your competitors overlook
- Present analysis to skeptical senior leadership persuasively
- Lead the organizational change that data-informed practice actually requires
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. The Wrong Question
Anchor: The scouts' room
- Vanity metrics vs. decision metrics in enrollment
- Defining the actual objective: net revenue, mission, or headcount
- Where institutional intuition is right
Module 2. Finding Undervalued Markets
Anchor: On-base percentage
- Segmentation, yield modeling, and market saturation
- Transfer, adult, and stop-out populations as strategy
- Financial aid leveraging and its ethics
Module 3. Selling the Analysis
Anchor: Beane vs. the front office
- Translating models for people who distrust models
- Visualizing uncertainty honestly
- Pilots that create evidence and cover
Module 4. Organizational Resistance
Anchor: The clubhouse pushes back
- Why experienced staff resist, and when they are right
- Changing incentives, not just dashboards
- Coalition building across admissions, aid, and academics
Module 5. Living With Variance
Anchor: Losing streaks and long seasons
- Distinguishing noise from trend in cycle data
- Governance for continuous course correction
- Protecting the strategy through one bad year
Decision-Making & Strategic Judgment
Growth and Its Costs: Strategy, Competition & Positioning
Facebook's rise is a compressed lesson in exclusivity as strategy, growth mechanics, competitive speed, and the relationships that get destroyed along the way. Enrollment leaders will recognize all four — and the last one is the reason this course spends real time on ethics.
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Recommended audiences
Growth targets went up and your conversion tactics got sharper. Which of those tactics would you be comfortable explaining to the student?
What you'll be able to do
- Define a differentiated position instead of competing on price and rankings
- Analyze growth mechanics: funnel, referral, and network effects, applied to enrollment
- Move quickly in a competitive market without abandoning institutional values
- Evaluate partnerships and vendor relationships with clear eyes
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Positioning and Exclusivity
Anchor: Harvard-only launch
- Differentiation vs. imitation in institutional marketing
- Selectivity, access, and the mission tradeoff
- Defining the student you are actually for
Module 2. Growth Mechanics
Anchor: School-by-school expansion
- Funnel math from inquiry to melt
- Referral, alumni, and network effects
- Sequencing expansion into new markets
Module 3. Competing on Speed
Anchor: The Winklevoss dispute
- Decision velocity in slow institutions
- Fast-follow vs. first-mover in program launch
- What a competitor's move should and should not trigger
Module 4. Partnerships and Their Terms
Anchor: Sean Parker arrives
- OPM and vendor contracts: incentives and lock-in
- Due diligence questions leadership forgets to ask
- Protecting institutional data and brand
Module 5. The Cost of the Win
Anchor: The deposition scenes
- Recruitment ethics and student consent
- Metrics that quietly reward bad behavior
- Building growth you can defend publicly
Leadership Foundations
In the Room: Judgment, Values & Leadership Under Pressure
Mission-driven institutions ask leaders to decide before the evidence is complete, then defend the decision to people who will only ever see the outcome. This experience uses The West Wing to build the practice of values-anchored judgment: how advice and dissent should reach you, how to choose when every option costs something, and how to explain a decision people will not like.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Think of a recent decision you defended well and still doubt. Was your discomfort about the decision, or about the process that produced it?
What you'll be able to do
- State the values a decision must protect before weighing the options
- Make and own a decision with information you know is incomplete
- Build an advisory circle that surfaces dissent early rather than after the fact
- Communicate an unpopular decision so people understand it even when they disagree
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Values Before Decisions
Anchor: A decision reaches the senior office
- Naming the institutional values actually in tension
- Mission language vs. operational reality
- Writing the decision criteria before reviewing options
Module 2. Leading With Incomplete Information
Anchor: The staff briefing scene
- Deciding on a timeline you do not control
- Reversible vs. irreversible decisions
- What you owe people when you say 'I don't know yet'
Module 3. Advice, Dissent & the Leader's Inner Circle
Anchor: Advisers disagree in front of the principal
- Designing advice so bad news travels fast
- Whose voice is missing from your inner circle
- Disagree-and-commit inside shared governance
Module 4. Communicating Decisions People Won't Like
Anchor: The public explanation
- Rationale, tradeoff, and what you will not pretend
- Sequencing communication across campus constituencies
- Distinguishing transparency from oversharing
Module 5. Being Right vs. Leading Effectively
Anchor: The argument won and the relationship spent
- Correctness as a leadership liability
- Rebuilding credibility after a decision ages badly
- A personal standard for how you decide
Decision-Making & Strategic Judgment
Before We Decide
12 Angry Men is the most efficient case study ever made of a group about to decide too quickly. This experience puts campus decision bodies inside it: search committees, resource allocation, program review, and cabinet calls where consensus arrives well before the evidence has been examined.
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Recommended audiences
Recall a committee decision that was unanimous within ten minutes. Was that alignment, or was it the absence of a process?
What you'll be able to do
- Separate evidence from interpretation in a live committee discussion
- Name the biases most likely to distort your group's judgment
- Make dissent a designed part of the process instead of an act of courage
- Build a decision process people across the institution will trust
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Separate Evidence From Interpretation
Anchor: The first vote
- What the record shows vs. what the room believes
- Evidence quality in search and program decisions
- Writing findings before conclusions
Module 2. Recognize Assumptions & Cognitive Bias
Anchor: The argument shifts
- Anchoring, confirmation, availability, and similar-to-me bias
- Bias in candidate review and resource allocation
- Structured criteria as a bias control
Module 3. Make Dissent Productive
Anchor: One holdout
- Assigned dissent and pre-mortems
- Protecting the minority view without stalling the group
- Chairing so quiet expertise is heard
Module 4. Avoid Premature Consensus
Anchor: The vote that nearly ended it
- Groupthink conditions on campus committees
- Sequencing opinion so seniority does not anchor the room
- Deciding how you will decide, first
Module 5. Build a Decision Process People Trust
Anchor: The final deliberation
- Documenting rationale for people who were not in the room
- Communicating decisions across shared governance
- Reviewing decision quality separately from outcomes
AI Leadership & the Future of Work
What Should We Delegate to the Machine?
The central question is short: just because AI can do something, should it? This experience uses The Matrix as a provocation about agency and delegation, then works through the concrete campus version — which parts of advising, admissions review, communications, and operations should be automated, which should be assisted, and which must stay human and accountable.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Pick one task your unit could automate tomorrow. Who would a student appeal to when it gets their case wrong?
What you'll be able to do
- Classify a workflow into automate, assist, and human-only with defensible reasoning
- Preserve a named accountable human for consequential decisions
- Design verification proportional to the harm a wrong output could cause
- Redesign a process around AI without quietly transferring risk to students
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Capability Is Not Permission
Anchor: A system that decides for people
- Separating technical feasibility from institutional appropriateness
- Consequence mapping before adoption
- The questions to ask a vendor demo
Module 2. Automate, Assist, or Keep Human
Anchor: Delegating the judgment call
- A triage model for campus workflows
- Admissions review, advising nudges, and financial aid communication
- Documenting the boundary so staff are not guessing
Module 3. Verification & Decision Rights
Anchor: Nobody checks the machine
- Sampling, audit, and exception review
- Naming the accountable human in policy, not in principle
- Appeal paths students can actually use
Module 4. Agency, Convenience & Drift
Anchor: Comfort as a design choice
- How reliance grows quietly
- Deskilling risk in professional staff
- Reviewing automation decisions on a schedule
Module 5. Redesigning the Work
Anchor: The process after the tool
- Workflow redesign rather than tool bolt-on
- Reinvesting recovered time in student-facing work
- Measuring whether the change served the mission
Capability track
AI Leadership & the Future of Work
Not prompt tips — how to lead an institution whose work is being reshaped by artificial intelligence.
Leading Change & Culture
Getting the Numbers Right: Innovation, Change & Inclusion
NASA needed answers no existing process could produce, and got them from people the institution had structurally sidelined. Hidden Figures is a course about innovation under deadline and about the talent your organization is currently wasting.
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Recommended audiences
Someone on your campus is doing work well above their title. What has stopped their promotion — and is any of it a policy you could change?
What you'll be able to do
- Identify capable people your structures currently overlook
- Remove access barriers that quietly limit contribution and advancement
- Lead adoption of a new method when the current one still mostly works
- Sponsor talent actively rather than waiting for people to apply
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Talent the System Wastes
Anchor: The West Computing group
- Hidden expertise audits in your unit
- Credentialing barriers vs. actual capability
- Who gets asked to lead, and why
Module 2. Access as Infrastructure
Anchor: The long walk to the bathroom
- Small structural barriers with large cumulative cost
- Mapping the friction in your own workplace
- Fixing what is within your authority this month
Module 3. Innovation Under Deadline
Anchor: Recomputing the trajectory
- Verification culture and permission to challenge
- Prototyping a new process alongside the old
- Deciding when the old method must be retired
Module 4. Adopting the New Technology
Anchor: The IBM arrives
- Reskilling your team before the change lands
- Change communication that reduces threat
- Redesigning roles rather than eliminating people
Module 5. Sponsorship and Advancement
Anchor: Mary Jackson's petition
- Mentorship vs. sponsorship in practice
- Building pathways: acting roles, stretch projects, tuition benefits
- Measuring equity in your own promotions
AI Leadership & the Future of Work
Leading With AI: Judgment, Trust & Responsibility
This is not a course about writing better prompts. It asks the leadership question underneath the technology: how do you lead an institution in which AI is changing the work, the roles, and what employees believe about their own future? Black Mirror supplies the stress test; the learning is about judgment, verification, and the culture you are actually building.
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Recommended audiences
Where on your campus is AI already being used in a decision that affects a student — and who is verifying the output?
What you'll be able to do
- Explain in plain language what AI systems do well, badly, and unpredictably
- Establish where human judgment must remain in an institutional workflow
- Set expectations for bias, privacy, and responsible use in your unit
- Lead staff through AI-driven anxiety about their roles honestly
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. What Campus Leaders Need to Understand About AI
Anchor: A technology arrives ahead of its rules
- Capability and failure modes without the jargon
- Hallucination, confident error, and why fluency misleads
- Where AI is already embedded in campus systems
Module 2. Human Judgment & Machine Output
Anchor: The output nobody checked
- Verification standards proportional to consequence
- Automation bias in professional practice
- Deciding which decisions require a named human
Module 3. Bias, Privacy & Responsible Use
Anchor: The system's hidden assumptions
- Training data, disparate impact, and student-facing risk
- FERPA-conscious practice and vendor data handling
- Writing a usable unit-level AI expectation
Module 4. Leading People Through AI Anxiety
Anchor: The employee who fears replacement
- Honest conversations about changing roles
- Reskilling as a leadership obligation
- What not to promise
Module 5. Building a Responsible AI Culture
Anchor: Practice that outlasts the tool
- Disclosure norms and shared examples
- Piloting with evaluation built in
- Governance that does not stop learning
AI Leadership & the Future of Work
What Should We Delegate to the Machine?
The central question is short: just because AI can do something, should it? This experience uses The Matrix as a provocation about agency and delegation, then works through the concrete campus version — which parts of advising, admissions review, communications, and operations should be automated, which should be assisted, and which must stay human and accountable.
Learn more
Recommended audiences
Pick one task your unit could automate tomorrow. Who would a student appeal to when it gets their case wrong?
What you'll be able to do
- Classify a workflow into automate, assist, and human-only with defensible reasoning
- Preserve a named accountable human for consequential decisions
- Design verification proportional to the harm a wrong output could cause
- Redesign a process around AI without quietly transferring risk to students
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Capability Is Not Permission
Anchor: A system that decides for people
- Separating technical feasibility from institutional appropriateness
- Consequence mapping before adoption
- The questions to ask a vendor demo
Module 2. Automate, Assist, or Keep Human
Anchor: Delegating the judgment call
- A triage model for campus workflows
- Admissions review, advising nudges, and financial aid communication
- Documenting the boundary so staff are not guessing
Module 3. Verification & Decision Rights
Anchor: Nobody checks the machine
- Sampling, audit, and exception review
- Naming the accountable human in policy, not in principle
- Appeal paths students can actually use
Module 4. Agency, Convenience & Drift
Anchor: Comfort as a design choice
- How reliance grows quietly
- Deskilling risk in professional staff
- Reviewing automation decisions on a schedule
Module 5. Redesigning the Work
Anchor: The process after the tool
- Workflow redesign rather than tool bolt-on
- Reinvesting recovered time in student-facing work
- Measuring whether the change served the mission
Capability track
Student-Centered Leadership
Seeing institutional decisions through the lived experience of students rather than the categories we assign them.
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
Making It Work: Faculty Collaboration With Limited Resources
Abbott Elementary is the most accurate workplace comedy about mission-driven institutions on television: chronically underfunded, staffed by people who care more than the budget deserves, and led by someone whose authority is mostly persuasion. This course is chair leadership without line authority.
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Recommended audiences
You cannot give your faculty money, course releases, or new hires. List what you can actually give them — then check how many you have used this term.
What you'll be able to do
- Lead faculty colleagues through influence rather than positional authority
- Design collaboration structures that respect faculty autonomy
- Advocate for resources upward with evidence rather than complaint
- Sustain motivation and mission in a chronically under-resourced unit
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Leading Without Authority
Anchor: Janine organizes the staff
- The chair role: colleague, advocate, and administrator at once
- Influence tactics that work with faculty
- Choosing which hills are worth it
Module 2. Collaboration Faculty Will Actually Join
Anchor: The teacher lounge summits
- Meeting design that produces decisions
- Distributed leadership and rotating service load
- Making committee work visible and countable
Module 3. Scarcity as a Standing Condition
Anchor: Fundraising for supplies
- Triage frameworks for budget and staffing shortfalls
- Building the case for resources in administrative language
- Avoiding the martyr culture trap
Module 4. Motivating Career Faculty
Anchor: Barbara mentors Janine
- Mid-career stagnation and renewal
- Mentoring across generations of faculty
- Recognition in a system with few extrinsic rewards
Module 5. Protecting the Mission
Anchor: The charter-school pressure
- Institutional pressures and mission drift
- Defending academic priorities in strategic planning
- Documenting impact when metrics miss the point
Student-Centered Leadership
Meeting Learners Where They Are: Classroom Culture & Relationship
Kotter returns to teach the students everyone else wrote off, and the show's whole premise is that relationship precedes rigor. This course pairs that premise with current research on belonging, motivation, and classroom climate for faculty teaching underprepared and nontraditional students.
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Recommended audiences
The Sweathogs were labeled unteachable before Kotter arrived. Which of your course policies assumes something about students you have never verified?
What you'll be able to do
- Design a first-week classroom climate that raises persistence
- Apply belonging and motivation research to course policy decisions
- Build instructor–student relationships at scale without losing boundaries
- Adapt rigor and support simultaneously rather than trading one for the other
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Who Gets Written Off
Anchor: The Sweathogs' reputation
- Deficit framing and its measurable effects
- Prior-experience inventories that change your teaching
- Equity gaps hiding inside course averages
Module 2. Relationship Before Rigor
Anchor: Kotter learns their names
- Belonging interventions with real effect sizes
- Names, office hours, and low-cost connection at scale
- Warm demander pedagogy
Module 3. Classroom Culture by Design
Anchor: Running the classroom
- Norms, syllabus tone, and the hidden curriculum
- Managing disruption without escalation
- Humor and authority in the same room
Module 4. Motivation and Self-Concept
Anchor: Students who expect to fail
- Expectancy-value theory in practice
- Feedback that builds rather than confirms self-image
- Grading policies that keep the door open
Module 5. Sustaining the Teacher
Anchor: Kotter's own limits
- Emotional labor of high-support teaching
- Referral, not rescue: knowing the campus network
- Sharing practice with colleagues who disagree
Student-Centered Leadership
Clear Eyes: Mentorship, Student Development & Belonging
Coach Taylor's real job is not football. It is eighteen-year-olds with unstable housing, absent parents, injuries that end plans, and futures that hinge on one adult paying attention. This course maps that work onto student development theory and the daily practice of student affairs.
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Recommended audiences
Coach Taylor and Tami give the same student different things. What does your role let you give, and who else does the student need?
What you'll be able to do
- Apply student development theory to real advising and mentoring cases
- Build belonging for students who arrive without a network
- Hold high expectations and high support at the same time
- Recognize the limits of your role and refer without abandoning the student
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. The Mentor Relationship
Anchor: Coach and Smash
- Mentoring vs. advising vs. coaching
- Trust-building with students who expect to be let down
- Boundaries and dual relationships
Module 2. Student Development in Practice
Anchor: Matt Saracen's senior year
- Chickering, Schlossberg, and validation theory
- Developmental conversations at transition points
- Students carrying adult responsibilities
Module 3. Belonging and Community
Anchor: Friday night in Dillon
- Belonging research and first-year persistence
- Building community for commuter and transfer students
- Rituals, traditions, and who they exclude
Module 4. Equity Behind the Story
Anchor: Two students, two outcomes
- Structural barriers hiding behind individual choices
- Basic needs insecurity and campus response
- Advocating inside the institution for one student
Module 5. Tami Taylor's Job
Anchor: The counselor's office
- Crisis response and referral pathways
- Vicarious trauma and staff sustainability
- Documenting and following up without surveillance
Student-Centered Leadership
Student-Centered by Design: Equity & Family Engagement
Abbott's staff make daily choices between what the district requires and what the child in front of them needs. This course uses that tension to teach student-centered practice, equity analysis, and family engagement — including engagement with the families higher education usually ignores.
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Recommended audiences
A policy is fair to every student and works for almost none of them. Whose problem is that on your campus?
What you'll be able to do
- Audit a policy or process for its actual effect on the students it burdens most
- Design student-centered services rather than office-centered ones
- Engage families as partners, especially first-generation families
- Advocate for a student inside a system without breaking the system
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Student-Centered vs. Office-Centered
Anchor: The supply-closet economy
- Journey mapping a student's actual experience
- Hidden compliance costs of routine processes
- Redesigning one process this term
Module 2. Equity in Everyday Decisions
Anchor: Two classrooms, unequal resources
- Disaggregating your own program data
- Equality vs. equity in service design
- Naming a disparity without blaming colleagues
Module 3. Family Engagement
Anchor: Parents at the school door
- First-generation families and institutional literacy
- FERPA, boundaries, and honest family communication
- Events families can actually attend
Module 4. Advocacy Inside the System
Anchor: Fighting the district
- Escalation paths and case advocacy
- Building administrative allies
- When to comply, when to push, when to document
Module 5. Sustaining the Work
Anchor: Barbara's steadiness
- Compassion fatigue in student-facing roles
- Peer supervision and case consultation
- Measuring impact for people who fund you
Student-Centered Leadership
The Student You Think You Know
Institutions categorize students constantly — at-risk, non-traditional, undeclared, probation, first-gen. Students experience themselves as whole people. The Breakfast Club is built on exactly that gap, and this experience uses it to examine how labels shape service design, and what changes when staff listen for the story behind the behavior.
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Recommended audiences
Look at a label your office applies to students. What does it help you do, and what does it stop you from seeing?
What you'll be able to do
- Distinguish an institutional label from a student's lived experience
- Listen for the circumstances behind a behavior before responding to the behavior
- Identify where belonging is created or withheld in your own processes
- Reframe a recurring 'student problem' as an institutional design responsibility
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Labels vs. Lived Experience
Anchor: Five students, five categories
- How campus data categories become identities
- Where labels help and where they harden
- Auditing the labels your unit assigns
Module 2. Listening for the Story Behind Behavior
Anchor: The conversation that reframes everyone
- Missed appointments, silence, and late work as signals
- Asking without interrogating
- Documentation that respects dignity
Module 3. Belonging & Identity
Anchor: The room changes
- Belonging-uncertainty research and its campus implications
- Small signals of membership in routine interactions
- First-generation, transfer, and adult learner experience
Module 4. Designing Around the Student Journey
Anchor: The day from the student's side
- Journey mapping one real process end to end
- Friction that only staff can see and only students pay for
- Removing one requirement, deliberately
Module 5. From 'Student Problem' to Institutional Responsibility
Anchor: The essay at the end
- Reframing recurring issues as system outputs
- Bringing student voice into the decision
- One process change you can own this term
Capability track
Distributed & Hybrid Teams
Trust without proximity, asynchronous work, autonomy, and belonging when the team is not in one place.
Collaboration & Shared Leadership
The Team You Don't Control
Higher education distributes authority so widely that most consequential work is done by people who do not report to the person leading it. Ocean's Eleven is a clean study in assembling a team around a problem instead of an org chart, matching roles to expertise, and coordinating experts who each know something you do not.
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Recommended audiences
In your current cross-campus project, who actually holds the decision? If three people would answer differently, that is the finding.
What you'll be able to do
- Assemble a working group around the problem rather than the reporting lines
- Match roles to genuine expertise instead of availability or seniority
- Establish explicit decision rights before the first disagreement
- Sustain a coalition by distributing credit deliberately
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Assemble Around the Problem, Not the Org Chart
Anchor: Recruiting the crew
- Defining the problem precisely enough to staff it
- Who is missing from the room and why
- Enrollment + Academic Affairs + Financial Aid + Marketing as one problem
Module 2. Match Roles to Expertise
Anchor: Each specialist's contribution
- Mapping capability, not job title
- Naming the single accountable owner per workstream
- Handling the expert who is not a team player
Module 3. Establish Decision Rights
Anchor: The plan requires agreement
- RACI and consultative vs. consensus decisions
- Escalation paths defined in advance
- Shared governance without paralysis
Module 4. Coordinate Without Hierarchy
Anchor: The operation in motion
- Cadence, shared artifacts, and the one status source
- Influence when you cannot direct
- Student Affairs + Academics + Counseling + Athletics in one response
Module 5. Share Credit & Sustain the Coalition
Anchor: After the job
- Public credit as a coalition-maintenance strategy
- Reporting outcomes to each unit's own leadership
- Keeping the group available for the next initiative
Distributed & Hybrid Teams
Leading Across Distance
The Martian is a study in coordination across enormous distance and communication delay, where the person closest to the problem must be trusted to act. Higher education's version is quieter but structurally identical: branch campuses, remote staff, hybrid departments, and consortium projects where presence is not available as a management tool.
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Recommended audiences
How much of your confidence in a colleague comes from their work, and how much from seeing them in the building?
What you'll be able to do
- Build trust with people you rarely see using evidence rather than proximity
- Communicate context and intent, not just tasks and deadlines
- Push decision rights to the person closest to the problem, with clear limits
- Sustain belonging on a team that does not share a location
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Trust Without Proximity
Anchor: Working alone at distance
- Presence bias in evaluation and promotion
- Reliability signals that replace visibility
- Naming what 'available' means on your team
Module 2. Communicating Context, Not Just Tasks
Anchor: The transmission that explains why
- Commander's intent for distributed staff
- Writing so the message survives without you
- Shared documents as the source of truth
Module 3. Decision Rights at the Edge
Anchor: The call that cannot wait for approval
- Defining the authority boundary in advance
- Escalation thresholds people can apply alone
- Reviewing edge decisions without second-guessing
Module 4. Asynchronous Collaboration
Anchor: The delay between messages
- Meeting-worthy vs. document-worthy work
- Time zones, branch campuses, and fair scheduling
- Response-time norms as a written agreement
Module 5. Maintaining Belonging Across Distance
Anchor: Keeping the team whole
- Inclusion in hybrid meetings
- Recognition that reaches people who are not in the room
- Onboarding someone you will rarely see
Distributed & Hybrid Teams
Where Work Happens: Trust, Boundaries & the Hybrid Workplace
Severance takes the separation of work and self to its literal extreme, and in doing so asks the question hybrid policy usually avoids: what does an institution owe employees when work is technologically mediated? This is not a remote-work tips course. It is about trust, monitoring, autonomy, and the culture your policy is quietly teaching.
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Recommended audiences
If your hybrid policy were published alongside its actual reasons, which sentence would you want to rewrite?
What you'll be able to do
- Articulate the trust assumptions embedded in your unit's hybrid practice
- Evaluate monitoring and productivity tools against their effect on trust
- Set boundaries and availability expectations that protect people and the work
- Design accountability based on outcomes rather than observed presence
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. What Hybrid Policy Actually Says
Anchor: Two versions of the same person
- Stated rationale vs. the message staff receive
- Equity across roles that cannot work remotely
- Reading your own policy as an employee would
Module 2. Trust, Autonomy & Control
Anchor: The workplace that watches
- Monitoring tools and the trust they consume
- Autonomy as a driver of motivation and retention
- Deciding what you genuinely need to know
Module 3. Boundaries in a Mediated Workplace
Anchor: Work that follows people home
- After-hours expectations and response norms
- Protecting focused work in an always-available culture
- Modeling boundaries as a supervisor
Module 4. Accountability Without Presence
Anchor: Measuring the wrong thing
- Outcome-based expectations staff can see
- Fair evaluation across in-person and remote staff
- Addressing genuine performance problems directly
Module 5. The Culture You Are Building
Anchor: What the institution owes people
- Belonging, identity, and the workplace as community
- Consulting staff on policy that governs their lives
- Committing to one change in your own practice
Capability track
Crisis & Resilient Leadership
Decision rights, communication, and sustained judgment when the timeline collapses and everyone is watching.
Crisis & Resilient Leadership
Work the Problem: Decision Making & Teamwork in Crisis
Apollo 13 is the cleanest available model of structured crisis response: a defined incident commander, ruthless prioritization, constrained improvisation, and communication discipline. This course converts it into a campus crisis playbook you can actually run.
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Recommended audiences
In your last campus crisis, who was allowed to make the final call — and did everyone in the room know that before it started?
What you'll be able to do
- Run a structured crisis response with clear command and decision rights
- Prioritize under severe constraint using explicit triage criteria
- Communicate accurately to leadership, staff, students, and families at once
- Lead constrained improvisation without abandoning safety and policy
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. The First Thirty Minutes
Anchor: "We have a problem"
- Recognizing a crisis vs. a bad day
- Standing up an incident structure quickly
- Information triage and stopping speculation
Module 2. Decision Rights Under Pressure
Anchor: Kranz takes the room
- Naming the decision maker before you need one
- Options analysis with incomplete information
- Avoiding decision paralysis and false urgency
Module 3. Constrained Innovation
Anchor: The CO2 filter
- Inventory-based problem solving
- Assigning parallel workstreams
- Testing before you commit the whole institution
Module 4. Communication Discipline
Anchor: Ground-to-capsule protocol
- One voice, many audiences: students, families, media, staff
- Saying what you do not yet know
- Cadence: when the next update comes
Module 5. Recovery and Debrief
Anchor: Splashdown
- Hot wash and after-action review
- Fixing the system, not the person
- Supporting staff after the adrenaline drops
Crisis & Resilient Leadership
One Shift: Resilience, Triage & Difficult Conversations
An emergency department across a single shift is a study in sustained decision making, triage, and conversations no one wants to have. Campus staff who handle conduct cases, behavioral intervention, and student emergencies do a version of the same work with less training and no shift change.
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Recommended audiences
You have four urgent student situations and capacity for two. Write down the criteria you will use — before the next one arrives.
What you'll be able to do
- Triage competing urgent cases using criteria you can defend afterward
- Deliver difficult news to students and families with structure and care
- Maintain judgment quality across a long, escalating day
- Build personal and team practices that prevent cumulative burnout
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. Triage as a Leadership Skill
Anchor: The board fills up
- Explicit criteria vs. loudest-voice prioritization
- Reassessing as conditions change
- Communicating the wait to people who are frightened
Module 2. Decision Quality Over a Long Day
Anchor: Hour eight
- Cognitive load, fatigue, and decision drift
- Checklists and forced pauses
- Handoffs that do not lose information
Module 3. Difficult Conversations
Anchor: Telling the family
- SPIKES adapted for student and family conversations
- Silence, empathy, and not filling the space
- Documenting a hard conversation accurately
Module 4. Teaching While Doing
Anchor: Residents on the floor
- Supervising newer staff during a live crisis
- Correcting an error without humiliation
- Debriefing a student worker after a bad call
Module 5. Resilience That Is Not Just Grit
Anchor: After the shift
- Cumulative stress and secondary trauma
- Team rituals for closing a hard day
- When to route yourself to help
Difficult Conversations & Conflict
The Cost of a Comfortable Answer
Institutional failures rarely begin with a bad decision; they begin with an accurate report that never reached the person who needed it. Chernobyl is the definitive study of what happens when a system rewards reassurance. This experience is about the campus version: enrollment numbers that get rounded up, incidents that get softened, and the leaders who never learn what their own institution knows.
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Recommended audiences
What is the most recent piece of bad news that reached you late? Trace the path it took and name each place it was softened.
What you'll be able to do
- Identify the incentives that cause bad news to be softened before it reaches you
- Escalate a serious concern in a way that survives the chain of review
- Design reporting norms that make early warning safe and routine
- Communicate an institutional problem publicly without minimizing or catastrophizing
Five-module learning experience
Module 1. The Comfortable Answer
Anchor: The first report
- Why reassurance travels faster than accuracy
- Information distortion across organizational layers
- Signals your unit is filtering upward
Module 2. Escalating a Serious Concern
Anchor: Raising the alarm
- Building an escalation that names risk, evidence, and ask
- Choosing the right forum and the right moment
- When to go around someone, and what it costs
Module 3. Designing for Early Warning
Anchor: The system that failed
- Near-miss reporting on a campus
- Separating accountability from blame
- Making the first report cheap and the cover-up expensive
Module 4. Communicating an Institutional Problem
Anchor: The public account
- Saying what is known, unknown, and being done
- Coordinating with communications, counsel, and leadership
- Avoiding both minimization and alarm
Module 5. Rebuilding Trust After the Fact
Anchor: The reckoning
- Honest after-action review
- What changes must be visible to be believed
- Institutional memory beyond the people who lived it
Built for serious learning
Learning Everywhere Framework™
How experience becomes learning.
Knowledge Packs
The professional concepts, research, evidence, and disciplinary knowledge grounding each experience.
Potato™
AI-guided questioning, coaching, challenge, and reflection.
Learning Everywhere Rubric
A structured approach to examining the quality and depth of learner thinking.
Professional transfer
Helping learners carry insight into action and professional practice.
Learning should be visible. Private reflection should remain private.
Institutional learning does not require employers to read private learner conversations or reflections. Institutional reporting focuses on activation, participation, completion, and aggregated indicators of learning and application — not individual coaching conversations.
Bring Couch Scholar to your campus
Build stronger leaders, managers, and teams through professional learning people actually want to experience.