Marshalling Progress with an Agile Strategic Plan

In this episode of TRANSFORMED, Joe sits down with Dr. Andrea Talentino, President of Augustana College, to explore how she is leading a bold, community-driven approach to strategic planning. With deep roots in teaching, coaching, and student development, Dr. Talentino brings a unique blend of vision and practicality to her leadership.

Listeners will gain insight into how Augustana is embracing creativity, shared governance, and agility to shape a strategic plan grounded in mission and focused on student outcomes. From informal listening sessions and living-room salons to design teams and evolving metrics, Dr. Talentino shares an honest, inspiring view of what it takes to align an entire campus around meaningful transformation.

References: 

Andrea Talentino

Augustana College

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Transcript

Andrea Talentino: 0:00

So that's probably the most common mantra that I gave to people as we started having these planning sessions. I said, don't focus on what we have now and don't reject an idea because when you look around campus today, we wouldn't be able to pull it off. Think about what we can do. Think about what's consistent with our culture and our mission and our legacy. And then once we start to kind of crystallize those concepts, we can figure out what we need to do to get there, right? But I really push people to recognize that the things we wanted to achieve with a strategic plan are things that we could not do today. And so if we were only kind of basing our planning on what was possible now today, then we were doing the wrong thing. We had to be thinking of things that we weren't ready to do right now.

Joe Gottlieb: 0:47

That's Andrea Talentino, former camp counselor, tennis teaching pro, professor, dean, and provost, and now the president of Augustana College. describing the organizational mantra she used to encourage faculty, staff, students, and trustees to think outside the box when identifying opportunities to consider in the new strategic plan. We talked about their entire process for building this quite agile strategic plan, including the identification of focus areas, the use of design teams to create short, medium, and long-term initiatives supporting those focus areas, a set of measures to track success, and a specific method to structure and qualify net new ideas going forward. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Joe Gottlieb: 1:35

Welcome to TRANSFORMED, a Higher Digital podcast focused on the new whys, the new whats, and the new hows in higher ed. In each episode, you will experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence. Culture, strategy, and tactics, planning and execution, people, process, and technology, it's all on the menu because that's what's required to truly transform. Hello, welcome, and thanks for joining us for another episode of Transformed. My name is Joe Gottlieb, President and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I'm joined by Dr. Andrea Talentino, president of Augustana College. Andrea, welcome to TRANSFORMED.

Andrea Talentino: 2:25

Thanks, Joe. I'm happy to be here. What do you want to talk about?

Joe Gottlieb: 2:28

Well, I'm glad you asked, Andrea. I want to talk about your thoughts on marshalling progress with an agile strategic plan. But first, I'd love you to share a little bit about your background and how you got connected into the work of higher ed.

Andrea Talentino: 2:44

Great. It's a little bit of an odd story. I always tell my story of how I came to be a president by talking about kind of my past as a camp counselor, camp administrator, and high school coach. I love teaching, I guess, and you do that in a lot of different ways. methods and ways. And I love kind of developing young people. And so I knew that I was going to be a teacher of some form. My dad had been a professor in higher ed and I kind of followed that path. But I also, while I was in graduate school, I was working as an administrator at a summer camp and helping pay for the bills in graduate school also by being a tennis pro and a tennis coach in Los Angeles. And those things are really kind of foundational to my leadership development because that's where I learned kind of the twin task of making sure that, you know, 50% of your work as a leader is moving a collective forward, whether you're leading a team or a cabin and a camp or a higher ed institution. And then the other 50% is really how you make sure to support the individual so that they're inspired and excited about what they do and contributing to that whole. And so all through my kind of the start of my career. I started as a professor at Tulane and then moved to a couple different institutions and took on progressively higher administrative roles. But that was really at the foundation of it and really thinking about how you, where those strategic ideas intersect with kind of individual inspiration and how you make sure that you're getting both of those things to happen. I always say, in fact, I said this to one of my colleagues this morning, I want people to be excited to come to work every day. I want them to feel like their ideas and their motivations, they're going to be able to express those. And so that's kind of how it's worked out.

Joe Gottlieb: 4:38

It's a great background. And I know we'll get into, in the discussion, ways that it surfaces in both your leadership style and the way you've tackled the set of things we'll review today. So to set the stage, before we get into the approach that you took to develop a new strategic plan and how you've executed over the time you've been there, tell me a bit about Augustana College. What makes it unique and what did you learn as you even interviewed for the presidency there?

Andrea Talentino: 5:06

Yeah, that's a good question. So we are a... kind of small-ish liberal arts college in the Midwest. We're about 2,500 students. We have a pretty traditional liberal arts profile. We even still have a classics department, which I'm proud of. We also do have some, we have engineering and kinesiology. So it, you know, we're sort of following some of those emerging interests, but very committed to our liberal arts background. We were founded by Swedish Lutherans in 1860, and their commitment was to making sure there was a place where they could educate Swedish... folks who may not have access to other institutions to become the pastors and teachers for their cohort. And we have, I think one of the things that's really a strength of Augustana, which I really learned about as I went through the interview process was just the incredible connection to and commitment to mission. Every single person who works here, doesn't matter if they've been here five days or 50 years, comes to work with mission top of mind every day and thinking about how to serve students. We're also a place that I really have to knock on wood as I say this, but we've been kind of remain successful over the last decade. We've been able to buck a lot of the trends that have been impacting smaller liberal arts colleges. We've done well in admissions. We've been able to maintain a strong student profile. We've been able to expand so that we really do have a national draw, not just a regional one. We've, my predecessor was, did a really terrific job managing both the financial basis and the physical plant. And so those things are in really good shape. You know, which is not to say that, I mean, we still have challenges. You have to work at it every day. And I'd like to tell people that we're kind of like the, you know, gerbil on the wheel. You got to keep running in order to keep everything going. But we're in pretty good shape. And then, you know, the other thing I think is important is that we're really, and Augustana always has been focused on student outreach. Really focusing on how to produce impactful citizens who are career ready when they leave Augustana and have the skills to not only start a job, but really be able to make themselves strategically valuable to the organizations that they work with. In order to do that, obviously, students have changed, the job market has changed. And so we've had to evolve too. And that's where some of the different types of majors have come in. It's also where we've really Thank you so much. politics and government, and we're very strong in pre-med programs. So we've been able to be very successful there as well. We have great alumni base. In fact, we just last week had some students who were spending the week in Washington, D.C., and our alumni turned out in force, but they're very engaged. They love to connect with students. They love to provide internships or job shadowing programs. They like to come back and be involved here. And then overall, I mean, we've really tried to pay attention to some of those key outcomes that matter, graduation rate, retention rate. Like a lot of places, ours have dipped a little bit over the last couple years. And so part of what we're doing as we think ahead to our strategic planning is thinking about how we push that. What are the factors that we need to do to impact that in a positive direction? And in order to guide us, too, we've come up with a set of benchmarking kind of peer groups, and we've chosen one. Most schools choose the group of colleges that the students they try to attract tend to go to instead of themselves. We have that group. But for the purposes, as we think about strategic planning, we also have what we really think is the aspirant group. These are the colleges that we think we're close to becoming or have a chance of becoming. And so we've pulled their metrics to really see where they are and how we can push ourselves to that. We're proud that we're in the top 100 of national liberal arts schools. We're always in that ranking, but we're in the bottom half. And so we'd like to move up a little bit in that. But I part of what I think, you know, that our board of trustees focused on that a lot in my first year. But part of what I told them is we're not going to get there by focusing just on the ranking. We're going to get there by doing things that are meaningful to students that then make us more compelling and make us more well known. And so we do think about how to move up. But not by folks, you know, like I always used to tell my students, don't focus on the grade, learn the material, and then the grade comes. So that's what we're in the process of doing. We're learning the material so that we can push ourselves up and really demonstrate to prospective students why we're so valuable. The one thing I will add, though, is we have a lot of pretty incredible alumni. Among our ranks, we count an NFL MVP, two Nobel laureates, a silver medalist in the payroll. Olympics. We have top executives in Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies. We've got a lot of folks who went into geology and made huge impact with the Army Corps of Engineers. So we're really proud of that long legacy of our grads. And I think we use that to speak a lot to prospective students about why this is a place that really can prep them for their next step in their professional and personal arcs.

Joe Gottlieb: 11:05

Well, it does sound like a special place where special things can happen. And I think that will become more evident as we get through this discussion. So let's take it all the way back. So shortly after your inauguration in October of 2022, you initiated a new strategic planning process with a series of listening sessions. I'd like to hear how you structured those sessions and what did you learn?

Andrea Talentino: 11:28

Well, when I first started out, I mean, I literally just went out and listened in all kinds of ways. So there wasn't a ton of structure to it. And that's what really led me to think about... Based on what I heard there, I started to kind of define three priorities in my mind. Our neighborhood and place came up a lot. We're right on the banks of the Mississippi. We're in a neighborhood that's a little bit lower socioeconomic. And so those two things, you know, one was seen as a plus, one was seen as a little bit of a weakness. And so how do we think about that? Educational distinction was a big part of it. How we think about kind of our liberal arts background and how we evolve that to be more modern and kind of active in today's world. And then transformational engagement, which we have a long history of. I mean, our geology department, I think like 100 years ago, started taking students out to the Colorado Plateau to look at rocks. And that has spread to other areas on campus. So what I did is those very early sessions kind of helped me define these three broad themes. Then I pulled people together and we started having more structured listening sessions where we presented those things and asked folks from around campus to think and talk about them. And cabinet members did that with me. So there were usually two or three of us who were kind of facilitating any one of those discussions. And then that really allowed us to hone in a bit more on how we think about the how we think about what matters at Augustana. And I learned a couple of things. I mean, number one, that there was a lot of consistency and consensus on those three areas. Now they're very, very broad, right? So they could mean anything to anybody, but that's what people talked about. And then there's also a lot of creativity that was kind of clearly rippling through our faculty and staff as they talked about things that they did, ideas that they'd had, things that they wanted to do. But then the last piece kind of that I learned that was also important is people were worried, right? How big could they dream? What kind of ideas should come forward as we were thinking about kind of our future? Should they be just continuing what they do or should they be thinking bolder and bigger? And so we really started to encourage people to think bigger, recognizing that there are always constraints, right? We're not going to suddenly have a endowment or something like that, but that we also can't move forward if we're not pushing ourselves to think differently from where we are now. So that's probably the most common mantra that I gave to people as we started having these planning sessions. I said, don't focus on what we have now and don't reject an idea because when you look around campus today, we wouldn't be able to pull it off. Think about what we can do. Think about what's consistent with our culture and our mission and our legacy. And then once we start to kind of crystallize those concepts, we can kind of figure out what we need to do to get there. But I really pushed people to recognize that the things we wanted to achieve with a strategic plan are things that we could not do today. And so if we were only kind of basing our planning on what was possible now today, then we were doing the wrong thing. We had to be thinking of things that we weren't ready to do right now.

Andrea Talentino: 14:32

We'll be right back.

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Joe Gottlieb: 15:48

And now, back to our program. You next formed a strategic planning commission, to work with a consultant and identify the areas of strategic focus that would comprise the plan. How did you select this team and how did you guide their effort?

Andrea Talentino: 16:08

Well, the number one thing is we wanted to be, I wanted to be collaborative. I wanted to make sure shared governance was part of this and the different constituencies on campus felt that they were part of it. So we made sure to include faculty, students, staff, as well as two trustees . I reached out to our faculty council and said, hey, recommend some folks. We also had some kind of brainstorming sessions with cabinet as different people put forward names that they knew of as people being creative and really thoughtful on campus. We did want to make sure we were reaching beyond the kind of usual subjects, right? There's always like a group of a dozen people on any campus who get called in for everything. And we wanted to make sure that, you know, some of those people might be right, but we also wanted to pull beyond that. And so it took a long time to craft the membership in the right way. We also sent out a call to say, hey, anybody who's interested, throw your name in the ring. And then the cabinet worked with the leadership of faculty council to really hone in on the faculty end. We worked with some staff leaders to hone in on the staff end. And then pulled in the students and the trustees. Then we also had, I hired some consultants, not to do the planning, but to sort of be neutral facilitators so that they could help people brainstorm. They could help move things forward. They could make sure that things weren't getting bogged down and kind of, you know... specific agendas to campus or concern people might have about one group getting resources that they might not get. And so they really worked. We had three co-chairs. We had a staff co-chair, a faculty co-chair, and then a trustee co-chair of the committee. And the consultants worked really closely with them to, you know, do everything from planning the agendas of meetings to leading the meeting to meeting afterwards to talk about sort of what points to bring forward, what points maybe to set aside for later. And so we really, we also, I should add, we set a pretty aggressive schedule. We started in January, 2023, and I said, We're going to be done by January 2024. The board is going to approve this in their meeting when they meet in January. And so we really had those 12 months to make it all happen. Having the three themes and having a lot of prior input from across the campus was really helpful. That gave some clear direction from the beginning, and it also helped the members know that there was good consensus around these three areas. And then the other thing that I really talked about with the Strategic Planning Commission was the fact that we wanted... We want to take strengths. We didn't necessarily want to come up with something brand new that we'd never done right, that we had no background in, because that probably wasn't something we were going to be able to lift up in a five to six year period. Instead, we wanted to find places of strength that we could really think of expanding and scaffolding up. One of the things I always told folks is the things we do, we want to make sure that they're unavoidable for students. We want to make sure that they're impactful for students. And we want to make sure that they're connected so that one initiative will connect to other to create sort of a holistic process through the strategic plan that's beneficial for student outcomes. We went through a lot of iterations. As you can imagine, the Strategic Planning Commission would come up with ideas. The co-chairs and the consultants would then kind of craft that a little bit. cabinet would meet to talk about it with the co-chairs. We had all kinds of sort of different combinations working in, but overall it was, I think, a really really positive process. And the Strategic Planning Commission was the heart of it. I mean, they were the ones who really articulated how to define those three very broad areas into something more directional for us, and then began to kind of envision what that might look like, right? Because it's hard when you're talking about broad, broader themes, people say, well, what does that mean? And so it was important for the Strategic Planning Commission to come up with examples for each of the areas that could then really generate more conversation. The other thing I think that was important about it is we did not include in that process coming up with metrics for measurement. We did that separately. Really, the cabinet led that in consultation with the co-chairs. And then we would give the metrics to the Strategic Planning Commission so they could look at them and comment on them. We also did some outreach to campus so that people could hear what we were thinking about and comment and discuss. But we made sure to, we felt it was important to separate the metrics because I didn't think that we were going to get good creativity in the planning process if everybody was worried about how we would measure it, right? We needed to have ideas and kind of motivational paths forward. And then we could figure out what was most important for us to measure. And we also want to make sure that the other key thing, right? Again, things that we knew we could measure. We didn't want to come up with very complicated things that were hard to figure out, that you'd have to have a whole new staff, right, just to kind of give the surveys. We wanted to do things that we either already were collecting and just not using as well as we should, or that we knew we could capture relatively easily. So, you know, that all kind of came together and throughout it. You know, the other thing is I like to tell people that a strategic plan should be a guide. It's not going to be kind of a lockstep thing that you have to follow every single step. It's sort of like I always likened it to we've said, OK, we're going to drive out to the West Coast and then we kind of map our route. recognizing that there are going to be things that pop up along the way that we say, hey, we want to go see that or we want to stay here a little bit longer. And so there's always going to be a fluidity to it as we develop the overall goals and the way that we achieve them.

Joe Gottlieb: 22:10

On that point about metrics, I want to just clarify something if I can. And that is, makes a ton of sense. It's good practice to identify metrics that you know you are already measuring or know you can measure. So that's because if it's a big work effort and super manual, it's hard to sustain. And so you knew that going in. I imagine you also drove the metrics in a dimension of we want it to be outcomes-based, right? The outcomes that matter to us, like student outcomes, for example. So those are sort of two dimensions of the way that you define the metrics. Did you also resist the temptation? Kind of putting you on the spot here, to name a target, a quantitative target, before you knew kind of like the ideated plans, which we're going to get into, like sort of how to get there? Or did you have targets in mind that you really at least wanted to set stretch goals and let the how-to plans that came later identify what portion of those goals could be accomplished in, you know, in what time frame?

Andrea Talentino: 23:21

Yeah, that's a great question. And we would, I will say we didn't, fully resist the temptation. I mean, there were some things that we knew early on were going to be key points for us. And we sort of knew what our goals were there or around where the goals should be. And I'll kind of phrase the whole context here by also saying that the things we wanted to measure, as you mentioned, were student outcomes. We did not want this to be a plan about measuring Augustana or measuring kind of the amount of work we were doing. We wanted to measure how the plan related to student outcomes. So things like retention, graduation rates, those emerged early on for us as numbers. And we know what our numbers are. So we knew we wanted them to be higher than that, right? But then what we did is we... came up with some methods to set some aspirational goals for ourselves. And so we ended up coming up with goals across the full 10 set of metrics. Our plan is intended to go through 2030. And for every single one we have– and we kind of have a living– chart for ourselves, where we are now, where we want to go, and what that means in terms of what we, you know, what we have to do in between. So there was a little bit, there were some things that we left to really codify until after the plan was done, but there were quite a few of the metrics, particularly some of those kind of more traditional hard metrics that we knew early on were going to be key. And we knew roughly, you know, if our retention is 82, we knew roughly, well, you know, we want that We want to get that to 86, 87.

Joe Gottlieb: 25:02

Gotcha. Now, it sounds like a reasonable midpoint in terms of understanding the limits of just setting big goals and having some aspirations that will drive some stretch, which is also healthy. Okay. So once the board ratified the new strategic plan in 2024... You kicked off the effort to implement the plan via a series of informal brainstorming and networking discussions to stimulate ideas. I think you call these discussions salons. I love that term. Because of the care you took to make participants feel welcome and comfortable. Could you elaborate on this phase of the effort?

Andrea Talentino: 25:43

Yeah, this was fun. And it kind of came out of, you know, our campus community was like, okay, that's exciting that the plan has been approved. Now tell us what to do. And I said, well, like, I can't tell you what to do. The whole point here is that we're going to harness the creativity of our campus community to determine what's right for different areas and different offices and also come together, you know, to think about some of those bigger initiatives that are going to be truly institutional level. And I think it's important to say there's sort of two levels to this. Every office, every department can come up with things related to the strategic plan that are relevant to them and are doing that. But then there will also be some big institutional initiatives that we launch and are launching. But I also wanted those to come out of the creativity of our community, not, you know, just I'm not going to make up great ideas on my own. So the salons were kind of the first step in that. And we held four of them. And We pulled out kind of... key points from the strategic plan that we knew there'd been a lot of conversation or a lot of questions about. And so we gave each salon a theme. And then we had, we would, I found a couple of my chief strategy officer, Kent Barnes is really terrific. And he helped kind of vision this. And so we found folks on campus who were doing something related to that theme. So we could open up the salon by saying, hey, here's what we do that fits within this. And then we We posed a couple questions for each salon to kind of get conversation going. And we opened it up so that there was basically I should say open up. It was my living room. Everyone came up to the house. It was we you know, we put the dates out and people could sign up. They knew the topics for everyone. So some people came to four. Some people came to one. We ended up having about close to 100 people from across campus come to them. We had food, beer and wine, you know, all that kind of stuff, give you the best possible setting for everybody to be creative. And then as part of each one, we had whiteboards set up around and there would be questions at each of them and the group would, you know, small groups kind of go around. And what we found and what people said about them afterwards was that it was really fun to be in a setting where Yeah. But then the other thing that came out of it, we realized when we took all the whiteboards and started looking through them that there were several ideas that had gone through each salon, even though the salons were on different topics, these, uh, specific ideas kind of popped up in each of them. Uh, one of them was about flexibility of credit. Um, one of them was about how we kind of, uh, recognize career readiness or a kind of took them to the next step. So the salons were fun when they happened, inspirational, I think, when they happened, but then they also provided the foundation for thinking about how we go to the next step. The one thing I will say is that we kind of encountered two drawbacks. You know, the... we're Midwestern here, Midwesterners here, Midwestern Lutherans. And, and that kind of concept, like, tell me what to do came out. So we had to push a little bit past that in the salons. And once we got people talking, then they really got excited, but they would sort of wait to think that I was going to tell them, okay, you're here. Now I'm going to kind of give you your instructions and move on. But, um, you know, I, I always say that nothing destroys creativity more than good instructions. So I, I resisted that. Um, and then the other thing that all always came out in every salon that we had to talk a lot about was just worry about support and resources. Well, but if I come out with a, come up with a good idea, you know, who's going to fund it, how much will you give me? And what I had to kind of teach people is we didn't start out with sort of a pot of money saying, okay, here's what we're going to use to, you know, fund all these initiatives. But I said, we're going to have mechanisms for this. So Get the ideas. Let's start moving them forward. And then we'll develop ways to support them. So it was a way, I think, that it got people excited about that co-visioning. And I think it started to allay some of those fears. But also, you know, that's something we know even now, you know, a year later, it's a muscle that we need to keep building that sort of like, I don't need instructions. I can come up with my own ideas. Here we go.

Joe Gottlieb: 30:52

I'm so glad you mentioned those two, you call them, I think, drawbacks or obstacles that you encountered, because while you set out and were quite proactive about creating an atmosphere, i.e. the salon that was comfortable and invited participation in an easy form, right, a safe space, you still encountered some of these tendencies, which are hard, you know, as you pointed out, they were culturally... resident and or geographically, you know, in terms of the sources. And those run deep, right? And so good that your takeaway was that, well, we have to keep investing in this because there's almost an invisible force there that we want to tend to. Really interesting. So the salon discussions led to four focus areas to be tackled by, I love the term that you use, design teams. How did you set up and guide these teams and what did they produce?

Andrea Talentino: 31:49

So we took the four ideas that had come out of the salons, and then I kind of wrote up, again, here's where me and our chief strategy officer sort of sat down and thought about how to write up a kind of charge related to that idea. And the most important thing, again, was sort of to move things fast. And so the charge was to come up with one initiative that that could achieve the goal or the topic kind of articulated in the salon. And then the timeline was to do it between September and December. So we sent out a the list of the four charges, the kind of description of each of the four design teams, and literally just said, hey, we'd love to know who wants to be part of this. And this is one of those moments where basically, I felt like I was saying I was having a party and finding out if anyone would want to come. And you know, you hear all the time, you know, faculty and staff are saying, oh, we're so busy, we're overworked, right? And people are, they are busy and overworked. And so it could have been a total dud. What amazed me and amazed all of us is that people raised their hands and said we did not have to solicit a single individual because great people raised their hands and said, yes, I want to do this one or I could work on either one of these two and you put me where you want. And so we ended up with a great group. And we also wanted the salons to be or the design teams to be small because we wanted them to be able to be fast moving and not get bogged down into, you know, too many different competing interests.

Unknown: 33:33

Right.

Andrea Talentino: 33:33

So we made them between six and eight people. It was a mix of faculty and staff in both cases. We tried to make sure that there was some balance, right, pulling people from across different places. There was one person that we had to say, well, you really said you wanted to do this design team, but would you mind being on this one instead? Everybody said yes. And then we had a kickoff meeting where all four of the design teams were there. I talked a little bit about what they were going to do and why. And then we set them loose. Each of them had designated co-chairs, a staff and a faculty member as chairs. And we sent them off to do their work. And then the plan was at the end, kind of in, I guess, December, they had a meeting with a third party facilitator to kind of make sure to get them to the finish line. And then they submitted their work. their proposals in February. I will say here too, one of the initial questions in that first meeting was, you know, what's the money? How are there going to be resources? And so what I told them and what I've really consistently told our community is, is again, we don't have a pot just sitting there, but we do have three places where we'll get money for these things. One is our operational funds. And we already have examples that I can talk about later where we've used money from there to fund initiatives that we're doing. One is from stopping or shifting activities. There's things that we may decide we no longer need to do because we're going to take on another initiative or we can decide to sunset something maybe because it's, you know, kind of run its course. And then the third thing is gifts and grants. And there too, we've also been successful. We just got a very large grant in early June to help us work on some of our curricular pieces. So When I was able to tell the folks in the design teams and across campus that these are going to be the three places where we get money, they started to feel a little bit better. They never totally trust it, but at least they realized that we were thinking about something and, you know, kind of had plans. So the design teams then went and did their work, came back with four great initiatives in January. But what we realized and what they realized is that all the initiatives, like the there was a lot of complementarity. And what they all said is, I think if we could connect these initiatives, then we have something that could potentially be really incredible. So actually what we've now transitioned to is one, a single super design team, which took the initial four ideas that each design team came up with. And here too, we took volunteers for people who wanted to continue the work. And they are now transitioning trying to come up with a single integrated initiative that will really be transformative in terms of how we think about providing credit for interdisciplinary and integrative kind of educational opportunities for students. And it's been pretty exciting. The three chairs of that were thrilled to be able to move it forward. Their work is hard because now they're really getting into deeper topics related to curricular and co-curricular programming. But they're super excited about it. And they're task is to have a proposal by beginning of September. So they're going to continue the work over the summer and then they'll have something in early fall. And the one other thing I should say about the design team is we tried to reward people a little bit. So we gave a little bit of swag to the people who volunteered. So I think like when it kicked off, we gave them a nice brand of water bottle. And then when the the first round finished up their work in January. We gave everybody a cozy flannel blanket and it was amazing. Like you think you'd given people a million dollar raise. They loved their blankets and people were posting pictures of them and all kinds of stuff.

Joe Gottlieb: 37:46

It's amazing what those things can do in the context of that kind of esprit de corps, right? Like you're engaged, you're part of a team. It means so much more than just, what the funder contemplates as an inexpensive gift. It's like, oh, well, are we dissing these people by giving them something very inexpensive? Well, no, in fact, it's like, I always liken this to receiving your number on a team. You may have a favorite number that you would have rather have received, but at least for me, anytime I got a number that was issued by the team, it had a significance that was beyond my control, but as part of being on a team. Anyway, I have a small question to ask, but just to get the timing down. So the complementary design team, the super design team, is working on a very fundamental integration. It sounds like you highlighted this earlier, the way that credit is handled for these interdisciplinary studies. That's something that was coming up in a variety of forms throughout the process, I think I heard you allude to. And so it represents this really interesting interconnected bit of progress you can make, which you believe will actually help move multiple metrics forward. So sort of qualitatively, I have that right, I think, right? But then that team is targeting September of this year for a recommendation and plan for how to go about it, right? Correct. And then rolling back from there then, was it January... of 25 and rolled back four or five months, was the timeframe for the design, the four design teamwork. Is that right?

Andrea Talentino: 39:34

Yeah, they started in September and they had to submit their initiative in mid-January, January 15th.

Joe Gottlieb: 39:42

Got it. So if I go back, if I zoom out on the timeline, I'm just doing this so our listeners can sort of keep track of these stages, but you ratified the new strategic plan in January of 24. Your next big thing that you tackled were these design teams that you turned on. In between, you had the salons to solicit ideas. You found out you got ideas and stuff. And then you built four design teams that got rolling in September of 24. Correct. And they produced a... set of recommendations for January of 25. And now those recommendations are going to be incorporated in a super design effort that's looking to produce a central theme, a central interconnected capability in September of 25.

Andrea Talentino: 40:41

Yeah, and that's kind of what the super design team is working on is something that is more complex and higher level. I mean, at the same time of the year between January 24 and where we are now, so a year and a half, we've had a number of other smaller initiatives that have started that could be done sort of more simply or be kind of championed out of a single office. So there's a lot of kind of that first phase of things that took place for the strategic plan over the course of the year and a half. And then this design team is going to be kind of one of the things that's more complex that we think of as a longer term implementation.

Joe Gottlieb: 41:25

Great. Glad you clarified that because so the original design teams did spawn. short-term projects, and your next stage of design is continuing along with the super team, but those short-term projects have already been part of your natural ongoing effort. And I think we're going to get into some of that.

Andrea Talentino: 41:46

And I'll add, there were processes outside the design teams too. So that wasn't the only way that initiatives were coming forward, but that was one of the ways we were trying to really hone in on high-level institutional initiatives.

Joe Gottlieb: 41:59

Got it. Meanwhile, in parallel, we already mentioned that you had a team looking at metrics and you've now identified a series of measures that are using to track success. Can you talk about how that's going and what it's surfacing and how you're iterating? I love the fact that you're very emphasized on iteration because that is what allows you to recalibrate on new information and reorient and align.

Andrea Talentino: 42:28

Yeah. So to hone in on the metrics, we really looked at sort of what we call the four R's. What are the things we want to achieve out of this plan? And basically, when you think about sort of what's the point of a strategic plan is to improve your competitive position. And so we honed in on recruitment, retention, revenue and results as the areas. And results meaning what are the real results for students? Are they leaving with the skills and capabilities that they need to make them successful at the next level? So our metrics are all focused around those kind of things, looking at retention and graduation rates, which are very, you know... kind of forthright, right? Those are easy and easy to track. Looking at our recruitment year over year, looking at also philanthropy and our donor engagement involvement, particularly because one of the parts of our plan is very much focused on student access. And we have a philanthropic challenge to raise money for that to ensure that we can fill 100% of need for deserving students, high achieving, high need students. So that's an area that we're tracking really carefully from kind of the engaged learning. And we're really thinking about what's the participation rate in some of those easy to measure things, community-based initiatives, student research, global travel or internships or, you know, a variety of initiatives there. We're looking at our career center and what the use is there. And then the last part that was sort of hard, the hardest one to hone in on was really thinking about sort of what's the you know, people always focus on ROI. Okay, what's the return on investment of higher ed? Families want to know that when they send their student to an institution. And so trying to hone in on how do students express the value they perceive of Augustana when they leave the institution. And so we've developed a kind of very simple, but we hope pretty pithy five question survey to give to students at the conclusion of their time Augustana to sort of assess how prepared they think they are, how they see the value of what they paid versus what they got, to really kind of hone in on that student value question.

Joe Gottlieb: 45:01

Nice. Just out of curiosity, did you intentionally avoid a net promoter structure for that?

Andrea Talentino: 45:11

Well, that's sort of what we're looking at for that. We think of that as kind of the net promoter structure. So the questions were kind of developed with that in mind, for sure.

Joe Gottlieb: 45:22

Okay. Yeah, just the way you described it was very... organically conceived around the things that you felt would be useful. And sometimes I wonder if, you know, if NPS is a good or a bad thing. The good thing is it can be compared and people recognize it. The bad thing might be that it has, you know, some associations with it that feel very business-like, but, and sometimes that rubs the wrong way in higher ed, but anyway, just curious. Okay. So then for each of your three strategic goals, you have a list of signature initiatives classified as short, medium, and long-term. And this is the part where I think the agile strategic plan really comes to life. Does this list remaining somewhat fluid as new context emerges over time and some things take longer than expected? How are you using this short, medium, and long-term approach and your iterations to make this agile, make this dynamic?

Andrea Talentino: 46:19

Yeah. So having the short, medium, long-term approach, I think, has really helped us be able to categorize. But I would say that, you know, even a year and a half later, some of the ideas that we put up here for each of these categories have already changed. I think in every single one, all three of our goals, we have things that are very much going in across all kind of timeframes. Yeah. Just as an example, sort of when we take our goal to prioritize engaged learning, one of the things we built kind of right away that we could do pretty simply was student success teams to help them connect with All kinds of academic supports as well as other supports. I mean, it's really kind of sits between goal one and goal two of our plan. And that wasn't something we necessarily identified as what we would do when we were first making the plan. But we realized that that was something that we really it was an easy win that we could put up quickly. Long term, one of our stipulated goals. goals there was to revise general education, which obviously takes quite a bit. But, you know, kind of we're already on the path to that. We got a very large grant in June to help us do that from the Tegel Foundation. And so we have something that's kind of happening across every one of the temporal phases for all these areas. We've come up with some pretty exciting ideas. I We're going to be later, well, I guess not quite this month, but next month we'll be having a mini retreat, two mini retreats on two great ideas that have come out that'll be a little bit longer term for different areas. One is a welcome center and city lab that's about sort of how we connect with the area that we're in. One is a small business entrepreneurship center that's very much kind of connected to our engaged learning concept. So we have a lot of pieces that have developed, but we really have to be mindful to make sure to keep them in that sort of, is this short term? Is it something we can stand up in a year? And there are things that we have an Augustana mentor program that will be, it'll be live this fall. We've already hired the students for it. entirely a new strategic initiative under this plan. And really they got it going in about three to four months, which shows what you can do when you're inspired and excited, right? And then there's other things like the CityLab Welcome Center, which will certainly take longer. And that's also something for which we'll need, you know, gift support in terms of funding. So we try to, I think we categorize across that areas. That's also helpful to tell people when they bring in an idea to say, This is going to be bigger and more long term. Let's start working on it and figure out kind of what the steps are and how we can lay them out on a timeline versus this is terrific. Let's go get this going for next fall and let's see how it works. The other thing I'll say about it, though, is this is super fluid. We want to try things, try them quick, fail fast if we need to. We're going to keep monitoring and measuring throughout. There will be things that are terrific and we say we want that to continue for five or 10 years. There are going to be things that we say, you know what, maybe this only worked for a couple of years and now we've got to transition it or move it out. So we want people to think of these things as impactful and meaningful, but not necessarily what the school is going to do for the next 50 years. Things that help us now or that we learn don't help. And so then we shift them out early and try something else.

Joe Gottlieb: 49:55

I'm so glad you mentioned that because to me, this is a best practice in learning in strategic progress or how to make strategic progress, the fact that you also reinforced that you're not measuring sweat equity on a list of projects that everyone's agreed to and therefore abandoning them requires some due process and or signals some failure. No, on the contrary, you've empowered teams to move the needle on the metrics you care about. And if the first thought or the second or thought or the third thought on what what it would take to do that proves to be not satisfying you reserve the right to make the adjustment right and i think that's just such a powerful thing to create an atmosphere for because it what is what really unlocks the ability to make to make progress right not being stuck on a bunch of project lists but instead enabling the teams to keep pursuing projects that move the needle and a commitment to measure, openly evaluate, fail fast and acknowledge that if that's what's going on, embrace and for longer term durability, if it's something that is representing a pattern that you can sustain and continue to get more value out of. Great, great distinction there. All right. One more question before we start to wrap this up. On your website, I noticed that you have multiple examples of your open door policy in action. And In addition to a basic suggestion box, you've developed a form for submitting new strategic initiatives and published a five-step process to guide those submissions. From my perspective, this is also best practice territory because it invites participation and also specifies what it takes. It really signals you're serious about listening. And yet you've also learned a thing or two about how you could make those ideas more useful by gathering more information via the approach that you're suggesting, but also setting expectations about what it will take to get resources in your process that is distinct, right, and focused on that. So I imagine it's quite intentional, and I'm just wondering, you know, how much engagement you've seen through this channel.

Andrea Talentino: 52:04

You know, thanks for asking that. This has been great, and it was something we had to work on, though. At first, people did not do it. And they'd, you know, come up to somebody and say, well, I've got an idea. And we'd say, well, submit it to the, you know, fill out the proposal and submit it to the Strategic Plan Implementation Council. Now, I think it's really taken off for a couple reasons. Number one, the first couple things came through and people realized they got funded and selected to move forward. And so we're starting to see some of the fruit of that early effort. Number two, we did some outreach. So our Strategic Plan Implementation Council started holding sort of quote unquote open office hours by our coffee shop and things like that and inviting people just to come by. I was doing some open office hours this spring. I actually started it for a different reason, sort of recognizing that people were feeling anxious about our current political context. But what I found is that more people came with strategic initiative ideas than with any anxiety. So it was actually fun for me to hear. And then The other thing that I think we've really sort of required, and you were just kind of hitting on this at the end, the first couple times people submitted something, they would just kind of put an idea and maybe a sentence or two to describe it. We had to send stuff back and say, look, no, the whole point here is that you do some careful thinking so that we can understand what the kind of frame of this is, what the context of it is, what the scope is. And so people do have to you know, think about some financial impacts and think about some personnel needs and things like that. And I think initially they found that super scary because they didn't think that, you know, they thought if they said, well, I'll need $5,000 to do this, it would be automatically rejected. And now what they're seeing is that we really want an honest assessment because then that helps me and members of cabinet think about where we find money and what we need to do and how, you know, the kind of steps by which we might implement something. So you know, it's kind of that old story, right? Success breeds success. Once they see things that start to happen, then other people are more willing to do it. But I think it is becoming much more common now. And then the other thing that I think we did that really helped with it was in February, we actually held a showcase and celebration of one year of the strategic plan. And we had champagne and, you know, kind of some fun treats and stuff. We ended up the only... time day that worked was actually on Valentine's Day, but we tried to make sure it was early so people would come and they got an early champagne. But we highlighted four or five of the initiatives that took place this year. And then we also had a kind of incubator place where, hey, if you have an idea, come and members of the Strategic Plan Implementation Council will be there to talk you through it and ask you questions and help you think. And it was phenomenal. People were so excited to see what was going on. They were amazed. People tend to get their heads down and just work in their area and they don't necessarily realize what's going on. around them. We had community members come. We had alumni come. And it just... bred so much excitement and enthusiasm. And I think that was a real kind of turning point, too, when people started to say, oh, I have an idea. I should fill out the forum and get this moving forward. And so we've seen a lot of really good ideas come there. I'm always a little bit cautious, right? If we get too many, then I'm going to have to start saying no. So far, we've got a lot of great ones, and we've mostly been able to say yes, or it might take us a little while, but we do want to get there. But that, I think, was really helpful, and particularly for folks faculty sometimes who feel maybe a little bit separated. One of our faculty said it was really fun to be one of the cool kids who got highlighted there as a creative person. So that's been super helpful to us. And I think people are, it's starting to become more habit now when you have an idea, this is what you do with it.

Joe Gottlieb: 56:06

Wow, this has been a lovely conversation. We've been on a great journey together, but it's time to bring it home. So in summary, what three takeaways can we offer our listeners on the topic of marshalling progress with an agile strategic plan?

Andrea Talentino: 56:20

Well, you know, I think number one, creativity is exciting and inspirational. This has been bottom up. None of our major initiatives are things that I've said, hey, we must do X. There are things that have come from our community and are consistent with kind of our experience. So that's been super exciting. A second thing is certainly clearly that people need lots of reassurance that their ideas are meaningful, number one, but also that there's a chance for them to see the light of day, right? Nobody wants to sit there kind of thinking, yeah, I'll throw out this good idea because they feel like it'll kind of get lost in the maw. And, you know, I think there has been some of that in the past, not exclusive to Augustana. But so that's been really exciting. And then the last thing for us is, you We're using metrics to measure the outcomes. We are not measuring sweat equity. We are not measuring, okay, did we make it through a list of 10 steps that we had to do? Or, you know, we were going to achieve these 15 things within campus. It's all about how are these impacting the outcomes that are meaningful to our students? And we're going to keep measuring that. We're going to adjust as necessary. And we're going to make sure that we're rigorous about holding initiatives to the concept that we want them to be. to impact these outcomes. And then we're going to shift initiatives if they don't do that. So that's probably, you know, as we think across those three things, they really connect the ideas that we need to have, the support that we need to have to bring them forward, and then the value that they bring to the institution.

Joe Gottlieb: 58:05

Great summary. Andrea, thank you so much for joining me today.

Andrea Talentino: 58:08

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much, Joe.

Joe Gottlieb: 58:10

And thanks to our listeners for joining us as well. I hope you have a great day, and we'll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of Transformed. Hey, listeners of TRANSFORMED. I hope you enjoyed that episode. And whether you did or not, I hope that it made you stop and think about the role that you were playing in your organization's ability to change in the digital era. And if it made you stop and think, perhaps you would be willing to share your thoughts, suggestions, alternative perspectives, or even criticisms related to this or any other episode. I would love to hear from you. So send me an email at info at higher.digital or joe at higher.digital. And if you have friends or colleagues that you think might enjoy it, please share our podcast with them. As you and they can easily find, TRANSFORMED is available wherever you get your podcasts.