The Weathering Effect: How Four Disruptions Impact the CIO Imagination
When every past storm leaves scars, it gets harder to believe the skies will stay clear.
My generation of IT leaders is experiencing our fourth major disruption.
We started our careers during the dot-com boom and bust, stepped into leadership just before the Great Recession, weathered the pandemic as executives, and now face a wave of uncertainty as the federal relationship with higher ed dramatically shifts. Each disruption brought tighter budgets, shifting priorities, and a lot more caution.
Over time, that breeds a mindset. You think about the next storm. Vision narrows. Imagination fades. And yet, my generation of leaders has shepherded the Internet revolution, mobile disruption, and now the widespread use of artificial intelligence.
That’s the tension: managing risk without surrendering vision.
I’ve seen all sides, leading ERP transformations, building overseas campuses, investing in faculty innovation, while still holding the line on stewardship. In today’s Dispatch, I want to explore how to balance this tension: how repeated disruption shapes leadership, and how CIOs can resist the slow drift from innovation to inertia.
The big picture
In technology leadership, there’s a quiet drift toward two false extremes. On one side is sufficing IT: reliable, cost-aware services built to meet core needs and little else. Like, flying coach instead of first class. On the other is aspirational IT: big strategies and high-dollar projects that promise transformation but drift untethered from core needs. One approach risks starving the future by underinvesting; the other buries it under innovation theater that crowds out other practical business needs.
Both poles are traps.
Most CIOs know how to avoid the excesses of expensive IT. The harder challenge, and the more common failure, is what happens when the discipline of frugality hardens into a worldview. You stop seeing what’s possible. You build a team that survives, even thrives, but struggles to imagine. And eventually, you forget how to dream big at all.
That’s the deeper threat. Not overspending or shiny objects. But the erosion of vision.
The institutions that thrive won’t be the ones that spent the least or the most. They’ll be the ones led by CIOs who can do both: stretch every dollar and the imagination.
Why the “frugal” becomes the norm
Most public sector CIOs, especially those shaped by higher education’s many disruptions, are forged in environments of chronic underinvestment. You learn to:
Extend hardware lifecycles well past their prime.
Customize when you can’t afford to replace.
Patch and integrate when you can’t afford to upgrade.
Juggle staff roles instead of filling vacancies.
That discipline builds resilience, but at a cost.
Over time, you become a master of working within constraints. But that muscle memory starts shaping what you believe is worth wanting. You begin to view ambition with suspicion. You begin to treat innovation like stagecraft, something performed at conferences but quietly abandoned back home, where budget reality always wins.
So you self-censor.
You tell your team to think creatively while quietly training them not to. You ask for innovation while rewarding compliance. And you convince yourself that dreaming is an unaffordable luxury when dark clouds are always visible just over the horizon.
But most of the time, those clouds aren’t real.
The price of forgetting how to dream
When resilience and stability are the benchmark, progress often means preserving the familiar, not pursuing the new. This is how technical debt becomes cultural debt.
You stop proposing transformational upgrades because the president won’t fund them. You avoid platform shifts because the transition costs seem insurmountable. You keep using that ancient data warehouse because it’s “good enough.”
Eventually, your staff stops bringing you ideas. Not because they don’t have any, but because they’ve seen too many good ones die on the altar of strong stewardship.
That’s the cost of learning to operate in perpetual disruption: a team that learns to see through a narrow lens, always assuming the forecast is more of the same dark clouds.
The myth of “expensive IT”
Let’s be clear. There are expensive mistakes in IT: bloated RFPs, poorly scoped implementations, and flashy tech that yields nothing but conference presentations.
But the real risk isn’t spending too much. It’s spending too much on the wrong things because you didn’t feel it was safe enough to explore the right ones.
When leaders conflate “spending” with “waste,” they kill the ability to invest strategically. And when CIOs internalize that message, they stop pushing for new, future-facing solutions, especially if they carry upfront costs they can’t bear.
But real innovation isn’t free. It requires time, capacity, and political capital. And those won’t be available unless CIOs reframe how institutional leaders see IT: not as an expense to minimize, but as a strategic lever to wield.
How to lead in both worlds
CIOs have to live in two time zones: the now and the next. You still need to keep systems running, fight off ransomware, and deliver on shrinking budgets. But you also need to build a culture and a leadership mindset that remembers how to dream.
That means:
Maintaining a “shadow roadmap.” A separate list of big, unfunded ideas you believe are worth pursuing. Keep it updated. Reference it in cabinet meetings. Let it shape conversations about strategic direction.
Giving your team a dream space. Once a quarter, carve out time for your staff to pitch ideas with no budget limits. Ask: “What would we build if we weren’t stuck?” Then ask: “What part of that could we do now?”
Reframing conversations with presidents and provosts. Don’t just report uptime and project status. Show how your team could unlock research, student success, or administrative resilience if given the right investment.
Benchmarking against vision, not just peers. Don’t aim to match what other schools are doing. Aim to match what your institution needs, even if no one else has done it yet.
Protecting the imaginative core. Create psychological safety for risk-taking inside your org. Reward insight, not just compliance. And let people know that thinking big isn’t naive, it’s necessary.
The final word
CIOs who thrive in the coming decade will be those who never stop sweating the details, but also never stop sketching the future. It’s easy to fall into the polemic of “frugal IT,” but the job of a technology leader isn’t just to preserve. It’s to propel.
You have to build budgets, manage vendors, and harden systems. But you also carry the flame of possibility when everyone is too tired to light it. That’s the real craft. Making things work without losing the ability to imagine what should come next.
Don’t let scarcity become your story. Let it be your forge.