The technologies are great. The personnel must be seen as greater.
Pete Mackey, Ph.D.
President & Executive Strategist
Everywhere we look, there’s another tool promising to help us do our work better, whether it’s AI, a better CMS, a better CRM, a better app. None of that is inherently bad. Much of it is genuinely useful. All the while, though, a ceaseless pressure as powerful as thinning oxygen keeps building, a professional FOMO that keeps whispering, “Use this, or lose.”
The Challenge: Not All Work Matters the Same
I have yet to meet an advancement, marketing, communications, or admissions team—in fact, an administration—that doesn’t feel overwhelmed by existing expectations (faculty of course have their own form of this predicament).
Mix in tools and technologies changing as fast as the chips driving them, and the tasks right in front of us, let alone the big strategic questions, only get more overwhelming. The space for judgment, creativity, and sound decision-making shrinks, and the latest innovations can sound like a horde battering against the door.
I teach a strategic prioritization method designed to help answer the question: What work will really make a difference and how do we align our entire team around THAT? It is built around the idea that not all work is equally important to strategic impact. In fact, if all work is being treated as equally important, then by definition we’re not being strategic.
Ironically, technologies meant to help us improve this or that tactical priority can further interfere with the real fact: People, not tools, make education succeed as one of the most human-driven enterprises ever created. The same goes for the very human actions of communications, recruitment, and fundraising that change minds and choices.
The instinct to use the latest tool is understandable. But constant improvement also requires attention to the current realities—the time pressures, the countless expectations, the team dynamics—of the people who will have to learn and deploy another technology and keep adapting to updates. Even the best tool will fail, even backfire, and become a financial waste if the team doesn’t have the time to use it for what they are most trying to accomplish.
The Questions: Making Sound Choices
So here are a few principles I like to keep in mind when considering a new shiny object:
What will it mean for capacity, not just performance?
Capacity depends on such decisions as how work is paced, what gets prioritized, which work must be A+ (or not), what gets stopped while we learn this, and what is allowed to accumulate. Asking What will this tool require of our people to really make it matter?—not just What does it do? And, Can we use it?—helps create the conditions for good judgment, trust, and stamina over time.
Will it boost impact or innovation?
Many teams feeling overwhelmed operate in a constant service mode—responding to every ask, treating every demand as equally urgent, iterating endlessly. The latest tools can feed that rat race. Strategic clarity can stop it. When we are explicit about what we want to impact—from reputation to giving, campus visits to downpayments, alumni pride to giving—the actual value of the tool to this team, or the tool’s relative irrelevance, grows more vivid.
How does it stand up against attention as a finite resource?
Attention is limited, both inside organizations and among their audiences. Fragmented focus pollutes decision-making, throws teams on treadmills, and confuses constituents. The latest technological option will divert attention until we use it effortlessly. In the meantime, can we live with the consequences? Teams operating on the premise that attention is finite choose tools and plan engagement deliberately. Purpose matters more than possibility.
The Reality: The People Doing the Work Matter Most
The push to improve isn’t going away. We’re living amid technologies that once starred in sci-fi movies. And the pace of advance is only increasing. But speed isn’t everything, technology should be a help not a burden, and our data is only as good as the uses we can make of it to achieve institutional goals.
And that requires knowing our goals, appreciating what the team already has on them, appreciating how our new and present tools will mesh, owning what it will take to master the tool, and knowing how we’ll know if the tool really proved itself. Until the robots really take over, it’s on us to serve people first, starting with the people who do the work.
