The Kodak Moments Higher Ed Can’t Afford to Miss
We have a tradition here at EduCred Services: when someone new joins the team, we hand them the keys to the blog and ask them to introduce themselves by writing about something they know well and care about. This week, we're thrilled to introduce you to Chris Mayer, the newest member of our team.
Chris joins us after nearly three decades of military service, much of it spent at the United States Military Academy West Point, where his focus was developing leaders at every level, the kind of experience that translates remarkably well to higher education, where strong leadership is often the difference between an institution that reacts to change and one that's ready for it. At EduCred Services, he now helps institutional leaders build the structures and practices that allow them to enhance their operations for the students they serve.
Fittingly, his first post is about the kind of leadership based on a willingness to look up from the daily grind, see what's coming, and act while there are still choices available. With obvious excitement to have him a part of our team, we'll let him take it from here.
A Kodak Case Study
In 1975, an engineer at Kodak built something nobody had asked for: the first digital camera. Kodak patented it. The company understood that digital photography had potential and that it might even be the future of the industry. But Kodak didn’t pursue that future. Its film business was profitable, and digital threatened the very thing the company did best. So, the company that invented the future of photography put their patent in a drawer. Roughly 37 years later, Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, after patenting the very thing that disrupted it.
Kodak is not the only example of a company failing to embrace the future. In 2000, Blockbuster had the chance to buy a struggling young company called Netflix for $50 million. Blockbuster passed. (Netflix is now worth over $300 billion, a number Blockbuster executives presumably try not to think about.) It held on to the late fees and the storefronts that had made it successful, and by the time it took streaming seriously, Netflix had already redefined the market and secured its lead. The same pattern appears with Nokia and BlackBerry, which dominated the phone market and then watched the iPhone redefine what a phone was for by producing an offering that met the needs of consumers. In each case, the problem was not a lack of intelligence or information. These were capable, successful companies run by smart people. They saw the possibility of a future where consumers desired features that their products were not offering. Instead of exploring this future and investing to meet those needs, however, they protected what was already working: the core of the company.
Higher Education Has the Same Choice to Make
Higher education finds itself in the same situation that Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and BlackBerry faced. The sector has been warned for years about the challenges bearing down on it. The enrollment cliff has been forecast for over a decade, making it perhaps the most punctual crisis in higher education history. The rising cost of a degree and growing doubt about whether that degree pays off have led some students to skip college altogether. Many question whether college is worth it. None of this is a surprise. The warnings have been clear, and they have been arriving for a long time (winter is coming). We have, in effect, been watching the iceberg approach in slow motion since 2013 (while the orchestra plays on).
Here is what makes the parallel to Kodak so striking: many institutions already have a new approach that addresses higher education’s challenges. It might be the faculty member teaching in a novel way. It might be the new program that a department has been trying to launch. It might be the partnership between employers and academic programs. It might be the idea that someone on campus has been advocating for years, but has not gained any traction. Other institutions might have already developed new models that are allowing them to thrive despite the challenges, and their example is available to anyone willing to look. The solutions exist. And yet, too many institutions stick with a model that enabled them to be successful in the past under different conditions.
Adopting a new model is not as simple as telling institutions to be bolder. It is hard to move away, even slightly, from the foundation of your institution’s success, from what you rightly value, and from what you are good at. Sticking with film was not irrational. Film was the thing Kodak did better than its competitors and the thing that earned the company decades of success and loyalty. Nobody walks away from that easily. Institutions face the same dilemma. The model that brought them success is often the model they know best and value most, and that makes it the hardest one to question. That pull is one reason change is hard. There is another, and it is less obvious. Imagination is often schooled out of us as we continue pursuing higher education. We learn to defer to precedent, avoid mistakes, and color within the lines. These are useful habits…right up until the moment they aren’t. But they don’t prepare people to take bold risks. None of this means every situation calls for calculated pivots. Most don’t. The challenge is recognizing the moments that do and being prepared to act when they arrive.
Two Moments Designed for This
When was the last time your leadership team spent an afternoon thinking about the year 2036? If the answer is "never," you're in good company, but that's not a great thing. Most of the year, the daily work of running an institution fills every available hour. And then crises consume even more time. There is rarely a moment to stop, look up, and ask where the institution is heading. But there are two occasions built into the life of every institution that exist precisely for that purpose: strategic planning and accreditation. Both require an institution to step back and ask important questions about its mission and its direction. Both are opportunities to consider what is changing, the different ways the future might unfold, and what the institution must do to thrive in these futures. And both are routinely wasted. Strategic planning too often produces a plan that looks like every other institution’s plan (swap the logo on the cover and nobody would notice), designed to produce very little real change. Worse, the plan is filed away and forgotten. It joins the previous strategic plan, which was also filed away and forgotten. Accreditation often fares no better. Many institutions treat it as a compliance exercise or even a threat to survive rather than a structured opportunity to examine whether they are still serving their mission in a world that has changed.
These two occasions could be the most valuable moments on an institution’s calendar. Used well, strategic planning and accreditation are not boxes to check. They are the institution’s best chances to look up and look out, to ask honestly whether it is serving its mission and its students as fully as it could, and to decide how it will continue to do so as conditions change. They are also where a new approach often surfaces. A serious planning or accreditation process is exactly where those ideas can finally be heard.
What Looking Up and Looking Out Requires
Reframing strategic planning and accreditation as opportunities rather than burdens is the first step. The harder work is using them well. Here are four ideas that can help.
The Safe Choice Might Be the Dangerous One
The companies that failed did not fail from recklessness. They failed from caution. Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and BlackBerry all saw a possible future where they no longer met consumer needs and chose to protect what they had. Looking back, the leaders of those companies would almost certainly make a different choice. The lesson isn’t that boldness is always right. Most decisions call for steady management of what already works. The lesson is that there are moments when the safe choice could actually be the most dangerous one, and avoiding risk altogether is its own kind of risk. Strategic planning and accreditation provide an institution with the opportunity to identify the difference. Done thoughtfully and collaboratively, both processes (we've written about these before) surface the choices that matter and that provide opportunities to examine which risks are worth taking in alignment with the mission. That is the moment to decide if a measured risk is worth taking, rather than defaulting to the option that feels safe because it is ”what we’ve always done.”
Look Past the Current Budget Cycle
Annual requirements consume an institution’s attention. The budget cycle, enrollment for the coming term, and the immediate crisis on the president’s desk all matter. But they are operational, and operational thinking tends to focus on the short term, not the long term. An institution’s mission should be thought about on a longer time horizon. So should the question of whether an institution and its offerings will still be needed, and still be chosen, five to ten years from now. That horizon is where the demographic, preference, political, financial, and technological shifts already underway will reshape what students want and what institutions must offer. An institution that only looks one year out will keep meeting this year’s expectations while the ground shifts beneath it. Strategic planning and accreditation are among the few moments an institution must lift its gaze to assess the future. Using these moments for short-term thinking, or on a plan that simply extends the present a few years further, misuses the rare chance to ask where the institution needs to be in ten years to fulfill its mission and continue to exist.
Look Into the Future
Foresight is essential for long-term thinking. Strategic foresight does not predict the future. It is not the same as a traditional five-year plan that assumes conditions will hold steady. It offers a rigorous approach to exploring plausible futures to anticipate and prepare for change. In practice, this means:
Scanning for early signals of change across a wide range of areas;
Identifying the forces that are both highly uncertain and highly consequential; and
Building a small set of plausible scenarios around them.
An institution can then ask whether its current strategy and offerings are viable in each of these futures and where new opportunities lie. Kodak did not lack data. It lacked the willingness to take a hard look at where its own signals pointed and to act on what it saw. Foresight is what turns strategic planning and accreditation from exercises that describe the present into processes that prepare institutions for an uncertain and complex future.
Build Leaders Who Can See Around Corners
None of the first three ideas happen on their own. Embracing measured risk, thinking long-term, and using foresight all depend on leaders prepared to take action. Yet the ability to navigate uncertainty rarely appears on lists of qualities we associate with good leadership. We value decisiveness, operational competence, and command of the present. Those all matter. But leaders also need the capacity to anticipate change, to act without waiting for 100% certainty, and to help their teams explore what the future might require. This capacity can be developed. It grows through practice, through exposure to foresight tools, and through a culture that treats curiosity about the future as part of the work rather than a distraction from it. Leaders who build this capacity in themselves and across their institutions are the ones who will use strategic planning and accreditation for what they can be, rather than filling those moments only with the concerns of the present.
Kodak held the future of its industry in its own hands and could not bring itself to act on it. The warning in that story is not really about cameras. It is about what happens when an organization can see what is coming and chooses the comfort of what it already knows. Higher education doesn’t have to repeat it. The people who work in higher education are among the most committed and hardworking anywhere, and the challenges they face are real and relentless. The problem isn’t effort or dedication. It is that the daily work leaves little time to step back, look up, and look out. The better model is often already inside the institution: in a program someone is trying to launch or an idea someone has been advocating for years. Strategic planning and accreditation are the institution’s two best chances to bring those ideas into the open, look honestly five to ten years out, and decide what achieving its mission will require in the years ahead. Used as boxes to check, strategic planning and accreditation become wasted opportunities. Used well, they allow an institution to decide what it must become to keep serving its students. Some institutions are already doing this work, and their students will be the ones who benefit. The future of every institution depends on the willingness to look up, look out, and act while there is still time to choose.