Higher education's track record with technology change is uneven for a reason, and the reason is rarely the technology. It is whether leadership treats change management as a discipline that runs from planning through sustainment, or as a rollout activity bolted on at the end.

In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Mike Toguchi, Chief Strategy Officer at Tectonic, about why technology projects in higher education succeed or fail on the strength of leadership behavior rather than tooling.

Drawing on 23 years working with universities, nonprofits, and foundations, including Stanford and UC Davis, Toguchi explains how the institutions producing durable digital transformation engineer trust, governance, and adoption into the project from day one. He shares why faculty resistance is empirically calibrated rather than culturally driven, why pilots should be sized for honest failure rather than confirmation of decisions already made, and why boards need to fund and govern transformation as an operating model rather than a discrete project. Throughout the conversation, McNaughton draws on his own consulting experience to surface common failure patterns, including the double-process trap that destroys trust by leaving legacy systems running alongside new ones.

This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, board members, CIOs, and senior leaders responsible for digital initiatives that span multiple departments and require sustained adoption across faculty, staff, and student-facing operations.

Topics Covered:

• Why change management belongs in the planning phase, not at rollout

• The "trust as infrastructure" framework and how to design for it

• Scalability versus departmental fiefdoms in institutional technology systems

• Pilot design that allows departments to surface real problems and report honestly

• The double-process trap and the discipline of hard end-of-life dates for legacy systems

• How board governance choices shape every downstream failure pattern

• Reframing technology ROI as reclaimed staff capacity in a non-expansionary funding environment

Real-World Examples Discussed:

• UC Davis disability center work that clarified workflow, saved staff time, increased compliance confidence, and produced documentation that gave leadership actionable data

• A multi-campus STEM admissions program that preserved each campus's unique workflow while keeping the underlying data consistent for funders and program leadership

• Two connected Stanford departments with shared faculty and joint ventures that consolidated systems and reduced the tool burden faculty were carrying

• Faculty teaching across multiple sections who routinely navigate 10 to 15 different tools as a baseline workload

Three Key Takeaways for Leadership:

1. Move change management to the front of the project lifecycle. The decisions that determine adoption are made during planning, not during launch communications.

2. Treat digital transformation as an operating model, not a project. Fund phase two before phase one ships and build governance reviews into the board's normal cadence.

3. Make trust the explicit design input. Faculty resistance is calibrated to past experience, and the way to change it is to give faculty a structural role in shaping the project, deliver visible reductions in their daily burden, and retire the legacy systems on a date everyone knows.

This episode offers a practical framework for institutional leaders who want their next digital initiative to deliver durable adoption rather than another fragmented rollout that quietly settles into legacy mode.

Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/higher-ed-change-management-tech-projects-digital-transformation/

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