“Nothing Ever Changes”
A couple of years ago I ran a storytelling workshop for a team of admissions counselors here in Chicago. I walked them through how a story moves. Once upon a time. One day. Because of that. Until finally. It isn't a story until something disrupts what was. It doesn't end until something resolves.
Afterward the head of the team came up to me. "I just realized the biggest problem with the stories that I tell," she said, "is that nothing ever changes."
Her line is the best summary I have of the hour and a half Tracey Halvorsen and I spent on Escape Velocity.
Tracey asked why higher ed is still wrestling with the problems we had in 1996. I gave her the answers I believe. Shared governance (thanks, Staci G.!). Homepages copied from the last great launch. Budgets that appear when a new president arrives and evaporate the week after go-live. We treat websites as syncopated capital projects. Someone declares the site a dumpster fire, we rebuild it, we celebrate, and everyone goes back to what they were doing before. Five years later the cycle starts again.
That is a story where nothing ever changes.
The hardest version of it, for me, is what happens to the agency. More than once a client has told me some version of this. “We love working with you, but I can't bring back the team everyone associates with the problems we have now.” The problems arrived after launch, when governance quietly broke down. The blame arrived anyway. That one still sucks.
Tracey put the fix plainly. The work begins on launch day. And I’d add that governance is only as strong as the person willing to enforce it, and a policy outlives its champion only if someone fills the seat. When nobody does, the momentum stops and we teach the next person from the beginning.
AI raises the stakes on all of it. Students now arrive at the website much later in their search. They aren't there to discover you. They're there to validate the vibe. And when AI engines read a site that's cluttered and contradictory, they go looking elsewhere for the truth about an institution. Reddit. YouTube. Wikipedia. Every old problem we never solved now decides who gets to tell your story.
Which brings us back to story. Tracey said the institution is "the stage." I agree. In my workshops I show a still from “Back to the Future” and ask who the hero is. Marty, Doc, George, Lorraine. Very few people pick Lorraine. Some will say Marty or George. Most will pick Doc.
Then I arrive at the punchline: nobody ever picks the high school. Your institution is never the hero. The people it changes are.
That's the hopeful part, and the counselor taught it to me. A story turns the moment someone notices nothing has changed. She noticed.
When I recently came back to the web team after four years and heard the same list I'd left behind, it broke my heart a little. Then I got to spend thinking it through with someone who I admire so much and who sees it, too.
That's a beginning. And here’s to my new beginning. Web, I’ve missed you. Never leave me.
𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4jewtXIzeH29zLQLF0coVX?si=jV-4ePXtQoGe7DT4DpB1vA
𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘀: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-higher-ed-websites-still-look-the-same-with/id1792675902?i=1000783711765