Setting aside the usual command-and-control model where the president’s office issues directives that ripple down through the org chart, Lowery is turning over R&D to staff teams.
“This design process – I’ve never done this before. But it makes sense to empower our employees,” Lowery said to a gathering of college presidents at the October 2024 Aspen Institute’s Opportunity Youth Forum.
Across the country, OYF Collaboratives engage tens of thousands of young adults in the work of systems change. The youth-led Collaboratives are using innovative approaches to embed Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose in systemic change in higher education, juvenile justice, job training, and more. College presidents hold touch points across all of these systems and play a critical role in the OYF work.
At Austin Community College, Lowery said members of the design teams are committed to radical transparency, radical simplicity, impact, scale, holistic wellness, and fiscal responsibility.
When Lowery arrived at the college a year ago, the staff and student data were clear. He found “a broken culture and poor student outcomes,” and he used his first 100 days to build trusting relationships with colleagues. He invited the students to identify and name the college’s values.
“In that process of connecting and listening, it became clear that the employees on the front line felt cut out of decision making, that it was a top-down organization. If we were going to change the climate, I had to change that dynamic. I got clear very early that we were not going to be able to fix any of those outcomes without changing that dynamic. That was the beginning of the design process,” Lowery said.
At the same time, Lowery recognized that the problems extended beyond Austin’s borders. “The fundamentals of higher education are broken,” Lowery said. “The histories that designed our bureaucracies no longer reflect our communities, our students, or our economies.”
This reality – that our higher education institutions are the product of outdated systems – is why college presidents are central to Aspen’s OYF ongoing work to transform systems so that every young adult can flourish. In Austin, this means giving staff permission to dream. Lowery set up the design process so that team members are not responsible for implementation. He knows that leaping to solutions would suppress imagination. “We don’t want to be constrained for now. The longer we can wait, the more the design teams can dream.”