One observation from the first Career Design Blueprint™ Workshop Series surprised me.
Participants came from very different institutions. Different sizes. Different governance structures. Different reporting lines. Yet as they reviewed their Career Ecosystem Readiness Assessments, many found themselves circling the same domain:
Coordination & Operating Model.
However, every institution represented in the room had committed professionals doing meaningful work. Faculty were creating opportunities for students. Career services had developed strong employer relationships. Advising, experiential learning, alumni relations, and student affairs all had important pieces of the ecosystem.
The question became something much harder.
How does all of this actually work together?
As people compared experiences, familiar patterns emerged. Initiatives depended on a handful of relationships rather than institutional processes. Committees were formed, but they lacked the decision-making authority and treaded water. Cross-campus partnerships existed, yet they often relied on individual champions whose calendars were already overflowing. Everyone was contributing. Few people could describe how the work moved from idea to implementation.
One participant captured it well during our discussion: "Career is in our strategic plan, so we scored well on Authority & Governance...but nothing is moving."
That observation stayed with me.
Strategy creates direction, but operating models create progress.
Coordination is an institutional capability
One reason this became its own Blueprint domain is that coordination often feels invisible.
Campuses usually notice the symptoms first.
Projects advance more slowly than expected.
The same conversations happen in different committees.
Senior leaders receive different updates depending on who they ask.
Faculty aren't always sure where to send students.
Career staff spend enormous amounts of time coordinating work that no system has been designed to support.
These coordination difficulties reflect the way the institution has organized itself to accomplish cross-functional work.
Career ecosystems require people from many different parts of campus to make decisions together over time. That requires more than goodwill. It requires intentional operating structures, defined roles, shared decision-making, and routines that keep work moving even when people become busy or leadership changes.
The institutions making the most progress have rarely eliminated complexity. They've simply designed better ways to navigate it.
One of the most valuable conversations happened after the assessment
Toward the end of the workshop series, participants shifted from discussing their scores to asking a different question.
"How do I have this conversation with my leadership?"
That became the focus of our discussion.
Assessment results don't create change on their own. Their value comes from giving leaders language to describe patterns they have been experiencing for years but haven't been able to articulate.
→ Instead of saying, "We need more staff," leaders can point to where coordination is slowing execution.
→ Instead of describing isolated frustrations, they can connect them to broader organizational design.
→ Instead of proposing another initiative, they can begin discussing how the institution itself supports—or unintentionally constrains—the work it has already committed to.
Those conversations are now continuing in our individual strategy sessions with each participating institution, where we're translating assessment findings into practical next steps for their campuses.
That's where the real work begins.
Four questions to discuss with your leadership team
This week, consider asking:
Where does important career work slow down as it moves across divisions?
Which decisions require the same people to revisit the same conversations repeatedly?
What coordination depends primarily on individual relationships rather than institutional processes?
If one key leader left tomorrow, which partnerships or initiatives would lose momentum?
Those questions often reveal more than another committee meeting ever could.
Final Thoughts
One thing I appreciated about this first Blueprint cohort was watching participants recognize that many of their challenges weren't unique to their institutions.
Different campuses.
Different structures.
Remarkably similar patterns.
That's encouraging because organizational challenges can be redesigned. Once leaders have language to describe how work actually moves through their institution, they can begin improving the systems that support it.
The conversations happening in our upcoming debrief sessions will focus on exactly that: identifying where momentum is getting lost and helping institutions design operating models that allow good ideas to become institutional practice.
It’s hard to believe it is August!
Wishing you the best as you prepare for fall,
P.S. We’ve received a lot of interest in the Career Ecosystem Readiness Assessment. Stay tuned, we’ll post more Career Design BlueprintTM Workshop Series soon!
