I love a good challenge. The more impossible the better. So here we are. I’ve been at my current institution for roughly seven months. I’m looking at this university and, with each and every glance, I fall in love with it a bit more. The campus. The possibilities. The people. The support. The empowerment. The beautiful slate. And, for the record, my lenses are not of the rosy variety. They are crystal clear. There is tension. There is change. There is fear. There is wonder. There is passion. But mostly, there is opportunity. And there are distractions. I love a good challenge. The more impossible the better.

We know where we are. We have twenty weeks (-ish) until the close of this fiscal year and the opening of the next. As an institution we have goals. As an IT team we have goals that must align to and with the institutional goals.

Focus for Week 1 – ACCEPTANCE

Starting bright and early Monday morning, in our IT leadership meeting, we will discuss our goals. We are all (I believe) at a point where we know where we stand. We need to accept and embrace our current environment as our starting point. We know where we need to be and we know how to get there. Accepting our limitations is integral up front. At a meeting last week, I shared a current struggle: organization and planning of our department events, projects, meetings, trainings, and more. I followed up in a positive way sharing then, “I likely need for us to go slower because we don’t want to drop balls, lose campus confidence, appear disorganized. So I will work on going slower.”

First off, for anyone that knows me, going slower is not my strong suit.

Secondly, and ironically, directly after my deep, sharing moment, I became aware that not only is slowing down not an option, but much of our work in IT is foundational to institutional improvement. So we need to, in all actuality, go faster. And we need to stay smarter. And we need to do all of this without additional administrative, organizational support. Focus for week 1 – ACCEPTANCE.

It simply is what it is. We are human. No one believes otherwise. We can do what we can do. If we must move quickly and our resources remain the same, people will survive the messy. We will try. We will complete. We will deliver. We will communicate. We will also occasionally miss meetings, run late, show up minimally unprepared. This is acceptance. The technology pieces are easy. It’s the people pieces that we need to make sure we continuously develop and engage.

Week 1. Starting soon. As we are, where we are, why we are.

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A friend of mine shared this. Thank you Kath for sharing. I love you. Time permitting, I might have this tattooed on my forearm later this week. As always, I support all, love all, serve all. The ‘God’s’ portion might not pertain to all who read. Replace the word with ‘our’. It delivers the same message: