How Campus Facilities Leaders Adapt to Change

May 1, 2026
6 min read
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Key Highlights

  • Higher education facilities leaders report unprecedented levels of change, driven by shifting institutional demands, external pressures, and rapidly evolving technology.
  • Despite change being a constant, many organizations remain reactive rather than consistently preparing their teams to manage it proactively.
  • Flexibility, resilience, and strong teamwork are essential traits that position facilities teams to lead campuses through continuous change.
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Collegiate environments are renowned, even disparaged, for their reluctance to change. The slow pace of faculty shifts, the permanence of the physical environment, the drag of alumni expectations and even the challenge to overcome reputational standing are all marks of stasis.  
 
But in fact, change has always been very evident in education. Students come and go every four to six years. That’s about the average tenure of presidents and chancellors as well, coming in at 5.9 years in 2023. Until very recently campuses have seen rampant growth, as for much of the past 70 years schools have been steadily increasing in size and population. Budgets are routinely going through a cycle of austerity and then surplus, with sources of funding constantly shifting, though most inside the communities are likely to remember austerity as the dominant condition. The pandemic showed everyone that academic communities could pivot dramatically in a matter of weeks, and the way in which students think about place, community and the classroom has been evolving ever since. That change was largely empowered by the technology that has been transforming education for decades now, and will continue to do so with the astonishing rate of artificial intelligence driven change. All of those changes have continued to be prominent areas of conversation on campuses over the past year.
 
If change is not an anomaly but the norm, then it begs the question whether campus leaders are aware of the change that is happening to them and if they are actively addressing the impact it has on their communities. So in January and February of this year Gordian surveyed people with facilities stewardship responsibilities about those questions, and more. We found both expected and provocative responses.
 
The least surprising finding is 77% of responses indicating that over the past one to five years they have experienced more than typical or a significant amount of change. Another 21% said that they were experiencing typical change. Change has clearly been part of the reality of higher education facilities leaders. 
 
A great challenge with change is that the impetus for it can come from a wide variety of sources outside and inside of our worlds, and those sources can be acting simultaneously. That is also the case for our respondents.
 
Given the opportunity to respond to more than one driver, the replies emphasize a mix of institutional, departmental and external pressures. Other drivers fall away quickly, though technology is noted surprisingly frequently as it can serve as much as a solution to change pressures as it can be a driver of change in and of itself.
 
While the kinds of changes we often think about as transformative are sudden and dramatic, Bill Waterson’s character Calvin notes that change is happening all the time and as life moves forward, we are changing whether we are trying to or not. “Know what’s weird?” Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes says. “Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon…everything’s different.” Change is therefore a reality which people and organizations should be managing as part of the course of regular business. The question, then, is not if but how leaders respond to it.
 
If the idea of allostasis, the notion that change is happening all the time, is in fact the right way to think about change, then it means we are always in a state of change and must not just respond to change when we notice it, but in fact be thinking about change preparedness all the time.
 
Our survey indicates a mixed bag in this regard for facilities leaders. When asked whether leaders were actively addressing the pressure that change places on their organizations through training or targeted programs, 29% indicated that they were doing it routinely. And 19% were actively doing more than normal right now. But 45% indicated only responding to change as needed, and a further 7% were not doing any work in this regard. While change is clearly all around us, the ability to drive toward active management is less widespread than it could be. 

Stanley Middleman, author and Forbes contributor working in the financial industry, suggested in his August 14, 2024 article for Forbes that there are several critical lessons he has learned for successfully navigating change:

  • Count on the plan changing: Change is an inevitability, a guarantee. 
  • Hone your foresight: Leaders must be observant about trends within their business and in the market.
  • Check your ego: It’s your job to prepare for risks, known and unknown.
  • Opportunities in disguise: Unexpected changes are the catalyst for new opportunities. 

These ideas aren’t forced into an easy mnemonic. But they do resonate with anyone who has successfully confronted any challenge which would ultimately drive a change in the way business had been done, or life had been lived, before.

The best facilities leaders learn to expect that things won’t go according to plan and that there will be a need for what Jim Jackson at the University of Nebraska has called “flexibility and resilience.”

Addressing challenges is hard when they are fixed and finite. Ask any superintendent on a complex project! But the very nature of changes is that they continue to evolve. And so do the people experiencing them. It’s a highly dynamic situation. Nearly half of our survey respondents felt their change response efforts worked as expected, with another 17% saying it worked better than expected, indicating that leaders are finding success amidst the efforts to respond to change that they are making.

We conclude with an observation that in a review of the comments made following various questions in the survey, the word cited most often was “team.” It’s fitting for facilities leaders who will continue to face changes. They understand that no work accomplished is done alone, that no changes are confronted in isolation, that no solutions are crafted unilaterally and no success is possible without the team of which they are a part.

There are likely no people better positioned on a campus to understand and address change than the facilities team. Between external pressures, internal business dynamics and the ever-present reality of a physical environment that requires continuous attention, change isn’t a periodic event, change is the day-to-day reality.

This article is an excerpt from Gordian’s State of Facilities in Higher Education, 13th Edition. This annual report, based on data from one of the largest verified higher education facilities databases in the country, identifies key factors shaping campus facilities across the United States. 

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