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
I have access to that data. I'm going to send it to you now. And so what's happening is this magical thing where people are experiencing real collaboration and a sense of community. They're feeling like they're on the same team. They're actually being reminded of the purpose that they work for students. They care about students. It's activating. It's very exciting.
They're getting inspired because they're feeling like they have permission to actually solve problems in real time. And it's just a palpable sense of enthusiasm. Like it feels like this is, oh my God, this is like the kind of experience we want to have.
And at the end of that day, they take a step back and they look at the post-it notes and the headline is they discovered that in the email line that in those three months, they were sending every student at Michigan State 450 emails in three months from the day you get admitted to the day you show up, which is overwhelming and obviously not what anyone knew and not what anyone would want to do.
And most universities have no idea that they do that. And most of them are sending more than 450. And it's got to stop because it will stop students from registering. It will stop them from being successful. It's overwhelming if you're a first-gen student. It's just like, ah, you know how it is. You unsubscribe from emails. Like, gross.
They also found that there were 50 types of holds a student could have on their account that they didn't know could exist. The university didn't know. So if we don't know, how are we expecting? The net result of this is... The institution is wiser. They're able to solve problems in real time about what the student's experiencing.
The community of people in that room feel like they actually own it. They get to decide what's happening. This is exciting. The president's not in the room, right? But since then, multiple Michigan State presidents have heard this story and it lives on. It's a legend.
It's also inspired the other UIA campuses to map all the other things they do, whether it's major change or graduation or any college to career, etc. So it's an example of... how you can make change feel good. Play music, choose a room that's well lit, invite people together to be a part of a process that feels good.
As opposed to a mandate that comes down from on high, where you individually are going to be negatively impacted and you get to have no input on the process. And frankly, the idea is rarely good. It's rarely actually the right idea. Because we know that collaboration brings better ideas. So that's an example. It's just human beings.
And if we could just have the most basic level of acknowledgement of that and care for people, we would create experiences that give them a chance to be their best selves and to give their best work and to this work should be fulfilling. And it can, I think change is incredibly fulfilling work when well done.
Yeah, invite your people into the problem that you need to solve. People love to solve problems. People love to be helpful. But what they don't want to be is a cog in a wheel told to do X or Y. And they also literally work in that area. They might have some ideas. Listen, I know that you can have employees that you're like, oh, they're just not going to want it.
Yeah, invite your people into the problem that you need to solve. People love to solve problems. People love to be helpful. But what they don't want to be is a cog in a wheel told to do X or Y. And they also literally work in that area. They might have some ideas. Listen, I know that you can have employees that you're like, they're just not going to want it.
All I'm saying is that the resistance is justified. And if you are so out of touch with your people that you can't understand that, then you've been at it too long. And you need to give yourself a micro dose of a empathy sprint to go out and remember why you started doing this work. Remember why you cared about the people. Remember why you chose to be a leader. Because...
I get dismissing people because I feel like people who work in any industry, my observation is there's a lot of people walking around with broken hearts because they've had a leader who's betrayed them. They've had a thing that they worked on for 10 years that got shelved at the last minute. And they remember that they showed up, that they missed dinner with their kids to build that thing.
And you're just going to turn it off. You're just getting rid of it. There's all these people who are carrying around these stories of bad experiences from change. And then there are leaders who are carrying around this mythology about people being lazy or people not wanting to do stuff. And I just, it doesn't serve us. And it is not, it's not reality.
And we are not our best selves when all we're doing is living out a story we're telling ourselves about change. Other people. And so you just got to you got to tap in. Curiosity is going to be your best friend.
And if you don't if you don't have it right now, you've got to give yourself you got to pull back out of the work and get back to caring about people and remembering they all have a reason to feel the way they do.
So I think the thing that is going to get in the way are things that are very human. The first thing I'm observing is that we have this natural tendency to compete with each other. There's like an arms race usually when something's new, and that's what's happening with AI.
So what you have is thousands of people across higher ed, different institutions, who are all trying to figure something out simultaneously. And what a waste that we are not finding a way to work together, that we are not teaming up on the shared objective that you just put forward.
Because this is a space that's hyper-competitive and we will batten the hatches and not share anything with anyone and students will be worse for it. Because you need the people who are in the classroom and people who are outside the classroom finding ways to collaborate with peers, not just at their institution, but do it in a way that...
advances the entire agenda forward for everyone, which is we have big questions around learning that we need to address. We need to figure out how to make it so that any person can learn. We need to figure out how to make it more sustainable for every person to have access to personalized learning at scale.
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