Effective Faculty Engagement in the Digital Age

Gonick shares ASU’s proven approach to driving innovation through collaboration. Rather than top-down mandates, ASU empowers faculty champions and strategic partners to lead adoption and experimentation. He highlights how identifying “coalitions of the willing” helps overcome resistance and accelerate cultural change. He argue, this open, partnership-driven model has allowed Arizona State University to scale technology initiatives across thousands of faculty members while keeping innovation aligned with real academic needs.

I think there's a bias in the world of technology leadership, which is a form of,  “if it's not invented here, it's not worth doing”. That is a deep engineering bias. That is generations old.

At ASU, the approach that we've taken is that partnership, both across the institution and with partners across the industry, is actually a piece of secret sauce that we are actually not necessarily the smartest people in the room, and that our aspirations cannot be fulfilled with us alone sitting down and trying to figure out how to get there. And I work with partners, especially partners outside of the university, to help design that opportunity set, but also to demonstrate that there are alternative ways of organizing the technology, that there are constantly evolving ways of leveraging technology to meet organizational goals by having other CIOs from industry, having other product leaders from industry, having other strategy folks from other industries coming to talk to our team about the importance of staying agile, of having a bias to action, to having a growth mindset, and to be of service to the institution's goals and not the alternative, which is oftentimes to be self-fulfilling in the idea. It''ll always be the same because that's the way we've always done it and nothing else can work here, because we've tried it all before.

I think one of the approaches that we take is to identify the champions on campus for any opportunity. Again, it starts with what is a design goal. But as that design goal becomes clarified, our job is actually to identify from the thousands of faculty colleagues that we have, folks whose own careers and or own research activities might actually position them to become that champion.

And long ago, I gave up on the idea that, in fact, somehow the insight of the CIO could lead to any positive outcome without actually having the champions lead that work. And our role is essentially not to take credit, but to enable those who are seen as our academic leaders, our research leaders, our institutional leaders, to see them as the champions.

And we win when they win. That is [an] essential piece of insight. Along the way and at ASU, we have a remarkable faculty cohort that are here, but not all of them are particularly keen to be first in line to try new technologies out. And that's okay. What you can't do, though, is say, we can't get to the next step until the last faculty member has decided that it's okay.

99 to 1 is not a tie. We can find a coalition of the willing champions among our faculty who can help us, not only experiment and pilot, but give us feedback on what is working and what isn't working in an iterative fashion. And that makes our offerings all the more valuable. As we look to drive adoption and the dissemination of the new technology deep into the organization.

And that's been the case for every new technology innovation at ASU, whether it's the online instruction experience, whether it is the development of services tied to the learning environment, whether that is in the development of AI experiences, that has always been our formula, which is not to see ourselves as the champions of the technology, but actually helping those faculty leaders who see value in the technology associated and tied to their success.

That becomes our formula for success.