Glen Weppler is Executive Director of Organizational Strategy and Systems at the University of Waterloo, where he spent nearly 13 years leading one of Canada's largest campus housing operations. He advises universities across Canada on building systems that help good people do their best work.

CRI:
In areas like recruitment or pricing, institutions often act on what they think the problem is. How do you pressure-test that before committing to a solution?

Glen:
Well, that’s a major risk that we don’t talk about enough: moving too quickly from what we think the problem is into trying to solve it.

I’ve run into this with my work in housing. The environment we were operating in had changed, the issues were evolving, and we needed a better way to really understand what we were dealing with before jumping to solutions.

We needed a more structured approach, and that eventually led me to Continuous Improvement, which is a practical framework for understanding and managing change, built around four core principles: purpose, customer value, visualization, and flow.

The one that matters most when it comes to pressure-testing a problem is visualization because that's where a lot of problem-solving either starts or stalls.

When people are trying to understand a complex problem, we tend to talk about it. Verbalize it. And that's fine at first, but too often it stays there. The most important move is to get what you're thinking out of your head and into something others can actually see and work with – a diagram, a document, a sketch. It doesn't have to be sophisticated, just visible.

Once you've done that, treat it as a draft. I'm very deliberate about that word, because it changes the tone entirely. A draft invites a response. It says: this is how I'm seeing it right now – what do you think? Rather than: here's my position, defend yours.

From there it becomes iterative. There's a technique in Continuous Improvement called Catchball. You put your thinking out, someone responds, it comes back to you. You keep going back and forth as though you’re tossing a ball. What that process does is build genuine mutual understanding – people stop holding positions and start working on something together. That shared ownership is what gets you to real alignment and buy-in on the problem, not just the solution.

That's the pressure test. If you can't make the problem visible and get others to engage with it, you might be solving the wrong thing or missing out on potential productivity.

CRI:
If someone knows something needs to change, but the institution isn’t aligned yet, what’s a smart first move that actually gets traction?

Glen:
The instinct in that situation is usually to talk about the problem or to complain about it. And that’s understandable. We’re wired to notice problems.

But the challenge in higher ed is volume. There are a lot of smart, responsible people who care deeply, and there's no shortage of problems and opportunities. Everything feels urgent. So if you just raise a concern verbally, it tends to disappear into that noise.

If you want something to get traction, you have to demonstrate that you're taking it seriously – and that means, again, making your thinking visible.

One approach I use is something called "BLUF": Bottom Line Up Front. Start with one clear sentence: what's the issue, or what decision are you looking for? Then add a few bullets of context. That's it. You can put that together in a few minutes.

What that does is shift the dynamic. Instead of asking someone to react to a concern, you're giving them something concrete to engage with. If they push back or say it's not a priority right now, that’s fine – you haven't lost much. But if they engage, you've started something. And either way, you've signaled that this is more than a passing frustration.

That's what creates traction. Not the strength of your argument, but the fact that you did the work to put something in front of someone that they can actually respond to.

"The tendency is to solve problems within that same inherited context, which means you get local solutions to problems that might actually require a different kind of thinking altogether."

CRI:
So let’s say our readers are trying to improve something like retention or tuition strategy. They've identified an issue, they’ve got some level of buy-in, a plan in place. Now, where do things typically break down during execution?

Glen:
There are lots of places things can break down, but the common thread is a lack of clarity – and the place it shows up most is meetings.

People will often go into meetings with an agenda, but it’s framed around what they’re going to talk about, not what needs to be decided or achieved. So there ends up being good discussions, people feel generally aligned, but nothing is clearly captured.

At the moment it feels productive, but give it a week, and people start to remember things differently, or not at all. That's where execution starts to break down.

So for me it comes back to being explicit going in: What are we trying to get out of this? What decisions need to be made? Who is doing what, and by when? It sounds simple, but it's hard to do consistently and it's even harder when leadership doesn't demand it. W. Edwards Deming said a bad system will beat a good person every time. Clarity is what keeps the system from undermining the people in it.

CRI:
About long-term solutions in a university context: how do you decide between a quick fix and something more structural when there’s pressure to act quickly?

Glen:
It starts with defining what actually counts as urgent, which many organizations never do.

Without that, urgency becomes whatever any given person decides it is in the moment. And when everyone has their own threshold, everything starts to feel like it needs immediate attention.

We saw this managing work requests across our large campus. There were too many rush orders, but when we looked closer, we discovered that the issue wasn’t just about volume – it was that nobody had ever clearly defined what a rush order actually was.

Once you establish that kind of shared definition, you can measure actual performance against the desired target which sets the stage for continuous improvement.

From there, you can build feedback loops: looking at where those definitions hold up, where they don’t, and what that tells you about the underlying problem.

That’s what allows you to separate what needs a quick response from what actually requires a more structural solution. Without that foundation, the risk is you get pulled toward the immediate at the expense of the important.

"That's what creates traction. Not the strength of your argument, but the fact that you did the work to put something in front of someone that they can actually respond to."

CRI:
When you’re solving a complex problem, how do you decide what not to focus on? Especially in environments where everything feels important?

Glen:
In higher ed, most of the problems on the table are legitimate. That's what makes this genuinely hard: you're choosing between competing priorities that all have real consequences.

That's why it ultimately comes down to leadership. Creating the conditions for the right questions to get asked. Making it safe for people to surface problems, to disagree, to challenge assumptions. Without that, it’s difficult to get the ability to accurately prioritize.

At some point, someone has to decide, and that decision should always come back to purpose: what are we actually here to do, and what matters most in service of that right now? Everything else follows from that.

CRI:
When a problem or opportunity crops up, is it your sense that people in higher ed tend to immediately go to work trying to develop a solution without reference to paradigms that have already been developed and that could help? How do people find those paradigms?

Glen:

Higher ed has been around a long time, and there are deeply established ways of doing things. People follow those norms – often without questioning them – because they're familiar, and because the pace of everything else leaves little room to step back and ask whether there's a better way.

So when new problems come up, the tendency is to solve them within that same inherited context, which means you get local solutions to problems that might actually require a different kind of thinking altogether.

That’s where I’ve found approaches like Scrum to be really helpful.

There are six different events that have to happen in a Scrum cycle, and one of those is the retrospective, a dedicated moment to step back and reflect on how the team is working, not just what they’re doing.

That’s important, because most of the time we focus on output and don’t always take the time to ask, “Is this actually working?” The retrospective creates that space.

And because it’s built into a regular cadence, people know the retrospective is coming. They don’t have to push issues in the moment or find the right time to raise something – they know there’s a place for it.

Over time, that changes how teams operate. It creates a more deliberate way of working, where you’re not just reacting to problems, but continuously improving how you approach them.

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