Bridget Burns
speaker
389 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Bridget Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And that there are millions of people walking around who went to college and the only credential they have is a student loan because they failed out because the institution was never designed for them to be successful. And just like the scale of that and the threat that creates for the future economic competitiveness of this country. And it's a big problem, but nobody sits with it.
It's no one's responsibility to fix that. We all need it to be solved. But when you have college presidents who are hired to run just one institution... And their board holds them accountable to move up and down in the rankings against each other. Imagine what that does. It doesn't make them want to work on the same team and fight for a bigger cause than themselves.
It makes them want to play defense and hunker down and focus only on their institutions. It was a huge challenge to build that. And then also I needed to raise all the money for it to work. And thankfully, the idea was right. The people were right. And they were responsive and excited. And honestly, it's only the momentum has just accelerated from then. Now we have 17 institutions.
And I say that, but I stopped counting back. the number of institutions who were asking to join the alliance at 120. And I stopped counting within six months of announcing the alliance. So it's not a question of we could be massive and have all kinds of institutions, but it was about figuring out who first we needed to actually do the thing to actually accomplish our goals.
of figuring out how to innovate together and scale up what works, hold each other accountable and produce dramatically more graduates, especially from low income backgrounds. But the big challenge I ran into after that was how do you figure out who to let in when you've already built something that's successful? Because then you run into the problem of
People want to be a part of something that's successful. They like the image of it, perhaps. They like the PR and the marketing, and it looks really great. But we need to figure out who else out there is a worker bee? Who else is interested in doing the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the fact that we have been very effective at telling our story and amplifying the importance of this work?
That's to this day still one of the biggest problems I face is that vetting issue of who else to let in because this could continue to grow, but we have to actually deliver on the outcomes while we're doing it.
So I think that a lot of the time we just have no intentional strategy about change. We expect change to happen. And then we don't think about the very human experience of, okay, I come into my office every day. I've worked an entire career with the hopes of being able to see a window. I've worked in a cubicle most of my life.
It's a huge deal to finally have an office that I, maybe I don't have a corner office. Maybe I just have a window I can see. And now you're going to come in here and you're telling me that we're going to be moving our department because we need to do a better job.
We need to combine departments because of a need to do data sharing and also to make sure that we're aligning our systems and process with this other department. What I know.
is that you just told me that i'm gonna have to give up this office that i've worked for you're completely ignoring the things that matter to me the experiences that have been valuable to me you haven't for a second given me an opportunity to even offer ideas based on the let's say 20-year career i have let's say i have some expertise to contribute instead you just come in with this pipe dream of an idea you know what the solution is and you give people no opportunity to
to add to it, to make it feel like it's an idea that they could be excited about. They don't even get a chance to consider it because all they do is hear, I'm going to change your life. I'm going to change your daily experience. And I respect you so little. I haven't even given you a chance to be part of the process or to offer input.
And then we also, what I find is, because that's a regular experience, it's often like physical moving offices is like the most, like the worst case, every leader will tell you that's the worst. But I could talk to you about consolidating data or getting, switching advising from being decentralized to centralized.
Now you're telling me that I'm gonna have a different boss, that what I'm responsible for completely is changing, the students I serve are changing. You're not going to even ask me for input or like I get no buy-in on this process. I get no even, I don't even get a chance to touch it. And my daily experience every day from nine to five or whatever is going to change.
And you're surprised that I am disappointed or that I might be a little bit grumpy. We just never consider the possibility that people do not, anyone who says they like change is a liar. You only like the change that was your idea and that you actually agree with. And that is usually a change that's your idea, right?
But if you told me, if like I came into my office today and you had moved my furniture in my office around, listen, it might be a better blow and layout. But the fact that change happened, that I wasn't like, you didn't give me a second to turn the water temperature up slowly so that I could acclimate to it or that I couldn't offer input.
We just jump over these very basic things and that change is discomfort. It is shifting things around and We glamorize innovation as though it's literally lasers and rainbows. And the truth is innovation is messy. I've never seen an example where innovation, we're starting something new. that you don't, the time, it doesn't take longer. It's more difficult. You run into unexpected hurdles.
So it's bumpy. It's not smooth. It's not predictable. You can't plan your day. You can't plan. You don't know when you're gonna pick your kids up. You don't know when you're gonna do all these human things. It's the human stuff that gets in the way because these are human beings.
And I just think that too often leaders, we don't have that genuine empathy to think about that for a second, to know that at the end of the day, like if you're trying to do something where humans are involved, The very basic understanding about human beings is that they are adverse to pain. They don't like pain. They don't. And they like pleasure. They like things that feel good.
And what constitutes pain for me is probably different than you. But generally, all you got to do is be a little curious to try and figure out the things I value, the things I don't. The things that constitute pleasure for me are maybe I'm extroverted and I like to talk to people. Maybe I'm introverted and that sounds terrible if you're offering to give me a speech opportunity.
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