28 April 2026 
Emma Walton-Pond, Communications Officer
In recent years, UK universities are asking people to absorb repeated rounds of change – including disruptive restructuring, role redesign, and cost reduction – against a backdrop of thinning capacity, growing change fatigue, and waning trust. In this context, a static, check-the-boxes approach to change management isn’t just ineffective, it’s actively damaging.
Change programmes don’t usually stall because leaders ask the wrong questions. Typically, they know to set a vision, define a case for change, identify key leaders, and engage an initial set of relevant stakeholders. Yet initiatives often take a wrong turn when leaders assume that the answers they agreed to at a high, strategic level will still hold as efforts descend to the lower levels of more practical design and tactical delivery. As a result, even well-defined initiatives lose momentum, trust, and clarity as ideas expand from a roundtable discussion amongst executives to an organisation-wide change. Ultimately, the issue isn’t lack of know-how or frameworks; it’s lack of intentional, proactive iteration.
Core Questions
When universities solicit Huron’s support with large change programmes, our Results Enablement approach underpins every aspect of technical planning and execution. This approach is built around 10 core questions:
Each individual question feels deceptively simple. However, collectively, these questions offer a reliable framework for routinely iterating on your change management and communications strategy that ultimately makes or breaks a large-scale initiative.
If the questions don’t change, what does? With each step of a change programme, your altitude shifts – and with it, the audience, the level of required detail and tactical planning, and stakeholders’ sense of immediacy and urgency. The most effective leaders don’t just revisit the same questions; they do so with the recognition that answers will necessarily change, taking on greater focus and clarity.
35,000 feet: Cruising altitude for imagining change
At the highest altitude, a relatively small group of senior leaders flies at 35,000 feet. Peeking out the windows of the aircraft, you can see the whole landscape, from mountain ranges to valleys to flatlands – or, in practical terms, institutional strategy, funding pressures, regulatory constraints, sustainability risks, and other considerations – and the overarching direction in which you are headed.
From this vantage point, answers to the core questions are intentionally broad, focusing on vision statements, a case for change, roadmaps, governance models, and high-level groupings of stakeholders and their needs. Equipped with the 35,000-foot view, leaders can assess if their vision is pointing the aircraft in the right direction, if their case for change is sufficiently compelling to justify impending turbulence, and if their approach for navigating the change is best suited to the ups and downs of the terrain below.
At this point, answers may feel crisp and final, but assuming so jeopardises initiative success from the outset. As the aircraft begins its final descent, ravines previously obscured from view come into focus and what seemed like a hilltop from above shapeshifts into mountain.
10,000 feet: Descending altitude for designing change specifics
As the aircraft descends, the same set of questions take on more texture and require further detail. You can now see the ridges and faces of the hilltop-turned-mountain and need to decide which route to take. This is the stage at which change efforts often stall – not because the vision and strategy are misguided, but because the realities of execution are not appropriately confronted and integrated into earlier assumptions.
For example, ‘Who is leading?’ transcends from an organisational chart exercise to a true test of decision ownership and leadership ability: Who has the authority to decide? Whose input is critical? Whose influence resonates most with core stakeholders?
‘Who will we bring along?’ shifts from an overarching stakeholder map to an in-depth review of the faculties, professional services teams and staff, and other individuals most excited, concerned, and/or impacted by impending change. Questions on stakeholders’ readiness for change, fuel to be added, and friction to be removed shift from an overview of broad priorities and concerns to an accounting for daily pain points and moments of joy: Will my workload double? Will our team’s monthly outing to lunch be taken away?
And finally, ‘Are we there yet?’ moves away from sweeping statements on intended outcomes to concrete interim goals to be achieved well before the final stages of the initiative.
0 feet: On-the-ground implementation
As the aircraft touches down, you can clearly see the faces of all the people gathered around the runway, anxious about what lies ahead. The 10 questions shift from broad and strategic to operational, personal, and urgent. Stakeholders want to know the specifics: Where are we headed in the next few weeks and months? How realistic is the timeline? Will I keep my job?
At this juncture, reiteration of the high-level vision, unidirectional communication, and insufficient involvement of stakeholders in the change misses the mark by undermining people’s emotional responses to change grounded in day-to-day realities. The ability of leaders – across all levels and components of the organisation – to build and reinforce trust becomes the number one predictor of success, trumping the eloquence and rationale of executives’ vision.
Leading at Every Altitude
Huron’s point of view is deliberately uncomfortable: successful change is less about having the right answers early and more about the discipline to keep revisiting the same questions – with precision and granularity evolving as altitude changes. Otherwise, stakeholders will hear yesterday’s vision applied to today’s reality and conclude that leaders are out of touch and unwilling to adapt. Ultimately, credibility erodes, scepticism calcifies into resistance, and once promising change programmes leave the university reeling, with minimal improvement to show for the investment.
For HR leaders, these 10 questions are not an abstract exercise in armchair philosophy but a practical guide to leading through change. They are a call to move beyond technically focused delivery support to an active role in architecting alignment during change programmes. Doing so entails putting formal mechanisms in place to revisit decisions and assumptions as conditions evolve – guided by real‑time stakeholder intelligence and reinforced through transparent, recurring communication that acknowledges people’s lived experience.
In a sector under pressure, the most successful universities will be those whose leaders recognise the criticality of change management, involve HR in operationalising it, and continue revisiting the same hard questions – at every altitude – until change takes hold.
Helen Sdvizhkov
