Creating a Spacious Capacity to Support Institutional Change

Capacity within higher education institutions is held in its people. Institutional change is a complex and messy business that cannot happen unless people change attitudes and behaviors (Armenakis, Harris, & Mossholder, 1993; Abrell-Vogel & Rowold, 2014). A human-centered change approach is reflected in recent reimaginings of faculty development as institutional change (Schroeder, 2012; Kelley, Cruz, & Fire, 2017) and calls for leadership in sustainable development (Verhulst & Lambrechts, 2015), among others.

To be successful and sustainable, capacity building needs to support the development of people within the contexts that matter to them (Merriam, 2011). Such approaches must be dynamic, contextualized, and individualized. For those charged with leading capacity building and other change efforts, the questions become, how do you create a process such that people want to continue to engage in this work? How do you design a change process that foucses on connecting people to each other? In this talk we will share guiding principles and key design elements for creating engaging and human-centered capacity building to support your institutional change efforts.

These learnings come from our experience as part of an NSF-funded IUSE Capacity Building grant. As part of our dissemination efforts, we offer navigational capital for designing, implementing, and adjusting capacity building activities, resources, and initiatives. Strategies include, for example, assembling the change team and getting to know your system. The lessons are designed around four principles: 1) Hold a position of humility; 2) Center the project around the people in it; 3) Design for good process and trust that the products will emerge; and 4) Trust your team to do the work that needs to be done.