Behind the Conversation: Your Mission Won’t Save You, and No One Is Coming …
Thirty years of consulting teaches you a particular kind of heartbreak. You spend months inside an institution. You sit with the provost, the admissions team, and the students who agreed to a focus group for free pizza. You build the roadmap. You present it in a conference room with bad coffee and good intentions.
A year later you pull up their website. Same site.
In our conversation with Myla Edmond for Higher Ed Icons, I verbalized something I've believed for a long time. Being temporary lets you say what the people inside can't. You walk in, name the thing everyone has been saying for years, and suddenly it's brilliant. Mallory laughed when I called it the halo. It's true, though.
So I asked Myla the question underneath it. Does distance make honesty easier and change shallower?
She answered it straight. The shallow version, she said, is the leader who asks for a roadmap, gets it, and decides "this is taking me further than I want to go." Then walks through the process anyway, so they can talk about how hard it was not to do the thing you recommended.
I've been in that room. I've been handed that thank-you.
Earlier she'd said something that stopped Mallory and me both. She used to get too attached to outcomes, and for her own well-being she had to let that go. Her job, as she put it, is "to make you aware."
My first reaction was resistance. Detachment sounded like surrender, and I've spent a career believing that caring about the outcome is the whole point.
But that wasn't what she meant. Myla still prefers to change the institution over changing the copy. She said so without hesitating. What she released was the idea that the decision was hers. "Marketers are the mirrors," she said. A mirror doesn't choose what you do with the reflection. It just refuses to lie to you.
I think about the roadmaps I've handed over. Some changed everything. Some are in a drawer. I used to count the drawer ones as failures. Myla made me wonder whether the mirror was the work all along, and the drawer was never mine to open.
At the end of the interview, Mallory told her she leaves every place better than she found it.
"That is my intention," Myla said.
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/higher-ed-icons/id1889996806?i=1000791055550
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Pn7efgMp84ksjGw1pABkt?si=c8a40aac2e8c4d56
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hDEPvegHWYw?si=S8hCgpAR_qHb3fzV