Chief Change Officer
#126 From Rivals to Allies: Dr. Bridget Burns’ Mission to Transform Higher Ed — Part One
Sun, 29 Dec 2024
What if universities worked together instead of competing like contestants on a reality TV show? In this episode, we explore the “Higher Ed Hunger Games,” where rivalry rules the day. Dr. Bridget Burns, CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) and host of The Innovating Together Podcast, shares her journey from a small-town upbringing in rural America to becoming a trailblazer in educational reform. Her mission? To unite academic institutions, boost graduation rates, and create better employment opportunities for low-income students—all through collaboration and innovation. No drama, just teamwork. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Overcoming Adversity: Bridget's Journey from Isolation to Empowerment “I grew up in a cul de sac of racism, homophobia, misogyny—very rural America—and getting out was super important.” Problem in Universities: Unveiling the Diffusion of Innovation Problem “We don’t know if what we’re doing is any good, or how to scale it.” Higher Ed Hunger Games: Tackling the Cutthroat Competition "Higher education is highly competitive, hierarchical, set up to pit you against others, which leaves very little space to share about shared problems." Real Change or Just for Show? Scouting for True Innovators in Academia "We need to figure out who else is a worker bee, who's interested in doing the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the image." Who Actually Likes Change? Spoiler: No One “Everyone who says they like change is a liar. You only like change that is your idea and that you actively participate in creating.” Connect with Us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Bridget Burns ______________________ --Chief Change Officer-- Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself. Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs, Transformation Gurus & Bold Hearts. 6 Million+ All-Time Downloads. Reaching 80+ Countries Daily. Global Top 3% Podcast. Top 10 US Business. Top 1 US Careers. >>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.<<< --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What is the mission of the University Innovation Alliance?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chan, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I welcome Dr. Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance.
Bridget and I met at South by Southwest when we were on the same judging panel for startups in education technology. That was a time before COVID. Many changes have occurred ever since. Bridget has navigated these changes firsthand in higher education.
She's now leading a university innovation alliance focused on improving graduation outcomes for students from low-income families, a mission tied closely to her own background. In this episode, we'll explore how she convinced 11 schools to work together shifting the paradigm from competition to collaboration.
We'll discuss the resistance to change because of poorly designed processes and how improving these processes led to much greater acceptance. We'll talk about the importance of empathy, curiosity, and ownership in driving change. We'll also cover how AI is reshaping education and the challenges institutions face in integrating this technology.
Lastly, we'll explore the crucial transition from education to employment and how her organization is helping students achieve better life outcomes. Sit back and enjoy this unfiltered conversation packed with insights and practical advice. Bridget, welcome. It's been a long time since South by Southwest.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. And it's been a wild ride since then. South by Southwest EDU and now across the world.
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Chapter 2: How did Bridget Burns overcome her background challenges?
Yes, the world has changed so much and so quickly in the past couple of years. We'll deep dive into many of those changes in your space, higher education. But first, I always start with the guest. The focus is on your change journey over time. So let's begin with that.
My journey has been one where I started with humble beginnings in rural Montana and higher education really was transformative for me. I grew up in a very low income family. in an environment that felt like a cul-de-sac of racism, homophobia, misogyny, all that stuff, right? Very rural America. And getting out was super important. Getting to college, just making it there was a huge priority.
And then college itself, higher education was just fundamentally life altering. It created incredible opportunities for me and changed my perspective of myself and the world around me. And so that's where it really begins is I got hooked on higher ed because it was so important in shifting my own opportunities and my experience. And so that's where I fall in love with higher education.
When I was a student still at Oregon State University, I was a year and a half after arriving there, I was elected student body president. And a year and a half after that, I was appointed to the State Board of Higher Education in Oregon, which is a really rapid transition for a 22-year-old. And so I was involved in the hiring and firing of my first college president at that age.
And that was when I started, I learned, I went from being a user of higher education to being aware of the complexity and challenges around governing and leading and seeing universities as organizations, as in some cases a business, and that my complaints as a user were not because somebody had planned those problems on purpose. It was actually organizational dysfunction.
It was funding challenges. It was all these other things. First, I'm hooked on higher ed. Then I go from being a user to understanding how to oversee an institution. I ended up being on the board for, I think, seven institutions at the time. And later I started working at the university system and became the chief of staff.
And that really turned me on to the problem of competition in higher ed and universities not working together, not collaborating. And I just was really frustrated with that. This, I just could see that they all should be on the same page, that we're all working in the same direction. We need to work together for the, at the time I was in the state of Oregon, which is where I live now.
But here are the seven institutions, limited resources, potentially millions of students, millions of people to be served. And I just kept seeing elbows thrown and I kept seeing unnecessary. It was just really difficult to get universities to be on the same page. So this is when I really fall in love with just the tension between competition and collaboration in higher ed.
And then I go through a transition where I had heard all of these things about innovation. I was ready to transition. And I just wanted to know if innovation in higher ed was real or if it was fake and marketing and PR. And in the state that I live and the institutions I've been working with for the past prior decade, I didn't see real innovation.
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Chapter 3: What is the diffusion of innovation problem in higher education?
And so building the University Innovation Alliance was the ultimate kind of, it was like the ascension for me. It was merging this focus on user-centered design and thinking about the perspective of students and why the student experience is not what it needs to be. The complexity of overseeing institutions, especially in a climate that's rapidly changing,
rapid innovation, and figuring out how to get universities to work together and try and accelerate innovation by collaboration. So the University Innovation Alliance is what I launched by the end of my ACE fellowship. And I've been for 10 years now at the UIA. I'm the CEO. And to describe what we do is...
It was founded by a group of university presidents who decided to unite around a shared sense of urgency that we were doing a terrible job as a country when it comes to graduating students, especially from low-income, first-generation, and student of color backgrounds. And we have 4,000 to 7,000 universities, depending on what you measure.
And it sure seems like a lot of repeated experiments and tinkering in silos. And so this group decided to band together to see if we could move faster and that going it alone was a waste of time, energy and money. And so this is the culmination of this. all of my prior background into one experience.
And I have the privilege of helping the most innovative universities hold themselves accountable by working together and driving rapid innovation, prototyping, scaling to try and solve student problems. And we've been able to, over the course of 10 years, we've been able to produce over 150,000 more graduates than we were on track to at even stretch capacity when we formed.
and 89% more graduates of color, 41% more low-income graduates. So it's been wildly successful because of, I think, the willingness to hold the tension between competition, collaboration, innovation, and how you get universities to really be serious about the painful process of change and the painful process of redesigning what they do around the students they need to serve.
So you're now leading a university innovation alliance focused on improving graduation outcomes for students from low-income families. This mission ties back to your own background. You've worked within the system for a long time. You've seen the problems, experienced the frustrations, and reached a point where you decided this is it. You shifted the perspective from competition to collaboration.
How did you go about convincing these 11 schools, their presidents and administrations to work together? How did the lobbying process unfold? It must have been like an entrepreneur hitching for investment. How did you make it happen?
It originally wasn't my idea. It was Michael Crow's and he had already found the 11 total. So it was him and 10 other presidents. But I will say there was a baseline commitment to a willingness to figure that out together. And I think that, I think at the time, these presidents, they were willing to see and they signed up for the chance to figure out how they would do this together.
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Chapter 4: How did collaboration shift the paradigm in higher education?
And I think that They had a shared, they share interest in addressing the scale question and Ultimately, they realized that they were all wrestling with the same challenge of needing to improve outcomes for populations that we've historically failed. But when I got involved, it was not moving as quickly as it should.
And it was because these people had not really spent time building relationships together. And I was willing to actually fly to each of their campuses and spend time. If there's anything distinctive about me, it's that I'm an incredibly curious person. I find people fascinating and just from a human interest perspective, but also I find just all of this work is just endlessly interesting to me.
And I find watching leaders figure out like how they lead, how they drive teams, how they advance, how they, these jobs are just so fascinating and difficult. And so each of them was like its own case study that I could observe. And what my job was at the time was to get this moving. And the way I did it though, was because through my experience,
deep curiosity about them, I could see that they had the same problems and they didn't know it. And there was no way they were going to come to that conclusion because of the architecture of the sector. Higher education is highly competitive. It is hierarchical. We are all a bunch of people who are trying to prove ourselves to each other with our pedigree and our publishing and our rankings.
And it's just very much set up that the rewards and trappings pit you against others. And as a result, there's very little space to share about shared problems and to really understand that maybe it's not you that's the problem. Maybe it's actually that these systems are problematic in their design. They were not designed around students. It turns out leading a complex bureaucracy with a
And that it's also hard to be a human doing that. These people are humans. Right. And so I had to do a lot of the weaving of the relationship because they don't have time to get to know each other. They would come to a meeting every three months and it was they were interested, but I don't think that they would have kept going had I not been able to weave together.
a sense of perspective between them and for them to know that, hey, Michael Crow struggles with that thing too. Or Chancellor Wilcox, they're having that same issue at UC Riverside. And in fact, here's some anecdotes from that experience. That makes them realize that maybe there's other value in working together beyond just teaming up to see if this works.
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Chapter 5: What strategies did Bridget use to build relationships among university leaders?
It's actually, wow, it would be nice to have some allies, some buddies. And that was a really big part, I think, that I played.
The prospectus, which was the basically the strategy and what we were going to do and getting 11 college presidents and chancellors in 11 states running institutions over 25,000 students to sign off on a document that was so significant, including a data sharing agreement and.
agreeing to match all the money that is raised was really, it required a lot of trust building because there's no way that any one person can read every single line. But for me, I had to, and I had to come up with this consensus-based document and how this organization was going to operate. And when I first got to, you talked about like the kind of entrepreneurial aspect of it.
When I first got to ASU and met Michael Crow, he told me I was a bureaucrat and that I was going to need to become an entrepreneur. if I was going to do this, and we were going to have to break out that bureaucrat. And boy, did we.
I don't think I... I wasn't already... I had some entrepreneurial tendencies prior to this, but it just required a willingness to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and figure it out and ask for a lot of help and advice from people. But just sitting with the stories that I had to surface of the campuses and the weaving between of what they had in common...
And then also what the sector really needed to see from leaders that would be fundamentally different than everything they'd seen before. Because at the time, higher ed was obsessed with college access, which is just to get more people in. That was the strategy.
And the other theme was undermatching from President Obama, which was basically that low-income kids could get into better schools, but they just don't know it.
And both of those things are right and fine for that time, but they are missing the biggest problem, which is that there are literally millions of students who are never going to go to college if the higher ed doesn't change how well it does, how well we serve those students, and that there are millions of people walking around who went to college and the only credential they have is a student loan because they failed out, because the institution was never designed for them to be successful.
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Chapter 6: How has the University Innovation Alliance improved graduation rates?
And just like the scale of that and the threat that creates for the future economic competitiveness of this country. And it's just it was like it's a big problem, but nobody sits with it. It's no one's responsibility to fix that. We all need it to be solved.
But when you have college presidents who are hired to run just one institution and their board holds them accountable to move up and down in the rankings against each other, imagine what that does. It doesn't make them want to work on the same team and fight for a bigger cause than themselves. It makes them want to play defense and hunker down and focus only on their institutions.
It was a huge challenge to build that. And then also I needed to raise all the money for it to work. exist. And thankfully, the idea was right. The people were right. And they were responsive and excited. And honestly, it's only the momentum has just accelerated from then. Now we have 17 institutions. And I say that, but I stopped counting
the number of institutions who were asking to join the alliance at 120. And I stopped counting within six months of announcing the alliance. So it's not a question of we could be massive and have all kinds of institutions, but it was about figuring out who first we needed to actually do the thing to actually accomplish our goals.
of figuring out how to innovate together and scale up what works, hold each other accountable, and produce dramatically more graduates, especially from low-income backgrounds. But the big challenge I ran into after that was, how do you figure out who to let in when you've already built something that's successful?
Because then you run into the problem of people want to be a part of something that's successful. They like the image of it, perhaps. They like the PR and the marketing, and it looks really great. But we needed to figure out who else out there is a worker bee.
Who else is interested in doing like the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the fact that we will have been very effective at telling our story and amplifying the importance of this work. So that's to this day still one of the biggest problems I face is that vetting issue of who else to let in because this could continue to grow.
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Chapter 7: What role does empathy play in driving change in higher education?
But we have to actually deliver on the outcomes while we're doing it.
Speaking of delivering outcome, I recall from one of your recent speeches that you mentioned people are not actually resistant to change. They resist poorly designed processes. Do you have any specific examples where resistance was due to a poorly designed process? And then once the process was improved, you started seeing more and more acceptance?
So I think that a lot of the time we just have no intentional strategy about change. We expect change to happen. And then we don't think about the very human experience of, okay, I come into my office every day. I've worked an entire career with the hopes of being able to see a window. I've worked in a cubicle most of my life.
It's a huge deal to finally have an office that I, maybe I don't have a corner office. Maybe I just have a window I can see. And now you got to come in here and you're telling me that we're going to be moving our department because we need to do a better job.
We need to combine departments because of a need to do data sharing and also to make sure that we're aligning our systems and process with this other department. What I know. is that you just told me that I'm going to have to give up this office that I've worked for. You're completely ignoring the things that matter to me, the experiences that have been valuable to me.
You haven't, for a second, given me an opportunity to even offer ideas based on the, let's say, 20-year career I have. Let's say I have some expertise to contribute. Instead, you just come in with this pipe dream of an idea. You know what the solution is, and you give people no opportunity to to add to it, to make it feel like it's an idea that they could be excited about.
They don't even get a chance to consider it because all they do is hear, I'm going to change your life. I'm going to change your daily experience. And I respect you so little. I haven't even given you a chance to be part of the process or to offer input.
And then we also, what I find is, because that's a regular experience, it's often like physical moving offices is like the worst cases and every leader will tell you about the worst. But I could talk to you about consolidating data or getting, switching advising from being decentralized to centralized.
Now you're telling me that I'm going to have a different boss, that what I'm responsible for completely is changing, that the students I serve are changing. You're not going to even ask me for input or like I get no buy-in on this process. I get no even, I don't even get a chance to touch it. And my daily experience every day from nine to five or whatever is going to change.
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Chapter 8: What are the biggest challenges facing low-income students in higher education?
We just jump over these very basic things and that change is discomfort. It is shifting things around and... We glamorize innovation as though it's literally lasers and rainbows. And the truth is innovation is messy. I've never seen an example where innovation, we're starting something new, that you don't, the time, it doesn't take longer. It's more difficult. You run into unexpected hurdles.
So it's bumpy. It's not smooth. It's not predictable. You can't plan your day. You can't plan. You don't know when you're gonna pick your kids up. You don't know when you're gonna do all these human things. It's the human stuff that gets in the way because these are human beings.
And I just think that too often leaders, we don't have that genuine empathy to think about that for a second, to know that at the end of the day, like if you're trying to do something where humans are involved, The very basic understanding about human beings is that they are adverse to pain. They don't like pain. They don't. And they like pleasure. They like things that feel good.
And what constitutes pain for me is probably different than you. But generally, all you got to do is be a little curious to try and figure out the things I value, the things I don't. The things that constitute pleasure for me are maybe I'm extroverted and I like to talk to people. Maybe I'm introverted and that sounds terrible if you're offering to give me a speech opportunity.
There are ways, though, if leaders will just care about the people that they are trying to lead and And, again, empathy is the first step of design. If you'll just learn about these people, you can structure an experience that feels good, that actually meets their needs.
And so all that to say, I hope those have been slightly tangible in terms of relatability, but I can give you a real example of what...
the best case scenario like a good example is and that's you all the time we do we use something called process mapping we didn't invent it but how the alliance works is i bring campuses together and we do the professional development and build them as a network and a community so they trust each other and talk about the things that are getting in the way and then they help each other out by here's something that worked for me here's something you can do in the
In one of those experiences early on, Georgia State University shared about process mapping, which is one of the things they do before they do any new system. Because you have to understand the system that you're bringing a new idea into so that you don't just bring a new idea into a toxic system.
And two people who were at that event are a professor and a person who's been working at the university for, I don't know, a couple of months, early stage, early career person. And they got stuck in the airport and they decided that the idea of process mapping was pretty profound and they were going to figure out how to take it back home to Michigan State. That's where they worked.
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