Before Governance Can Lead Renewal, It Must Diagnose Friction

Presidents and trustees are now being asked to do something much harder: help institutions strategically navigate the possibility that the model itself must evolve.

That is where a new governance playbook begins to separate itself from traditional oversight. 

For decades, governance in higher education has centered on stewardship of the visible institution, including enrollment, finance, compliance, capital, policy, and reputation. These responsibilities remain crucial. No institution can succeed without disciplined oversight and strong executive leadership. However, in an era characterized by demographic pressures, structural deficits, evolving learner expectations, new credential pathways, and AI-enabled capabilities, oversight alone is no longer sufficient.

The challenge now is not simply whether institutions are being governed responsibly. It is whether presidents and boards are leading with enough clarity to recognize where renewal may be blocked. This represents the friction between the status quo and the necessary change for prosperity.

That is the space the Alliance for Board eXcellence (ABX) was created to address.

ABX is built on a simple but increasingly urgent premise: governance must shift from mere oversight to a strategic partnership between presidents and trustees in institutional renewal. Boards can no longer afford to wait until signs of decline are visible before asking deeper questions. Presidents can no longer shoulder the burden of transformation alone without a governing body capable of recognizing what is changing beneath the surface. By the time the decline becomes obvious, the institution is often reacting instead of proactively renewing. The accountability for decline lies with the governing board.

The harder work is to identify friction early, before drag becomes stagnation, and before stagnation becomes decline.

And in many institutions, friction does not announce itself dramatically. It hides in plain sight.

Consider something deceptively and critically important: Academic Delivery Margins

The data is clear and evident in all financial audits – academic delivery cost (instruction and student support). There is clear evidence that poor academic delivery margins have a direct impact on structural deficits. Yet most boards are not aware of this critical ratio.

A structural deficit leads to cutting costs, not lowering costs.

The institution may interpret that outcome as a general cost problem.

But too often, it is an academic margin issue creating structural deficits and the accountability for this decline rest with the board governance.

It becomes a friction problem.

That distinction matters because institutions frequently respond to visible symptoms (cutting costs) while leaving the real source of resistance (poor academic delivery margins) untouched. Presidents and boards alike can fall into the trap of solving for performance without accurately diagnosing drag. They launch new initiatives without removing old constraints. They invest in technology without rethinking the process. They redesign the strategy without addressing the workflows that make execution harder than necessary.

In other words, they act before they diagnose.

This is one of the most important ways ABX is different.

Many governance models appropriately focus on board roles, fiduciary responsibilities, committee structures, agenda design, and strategic oversight. These are all crucial parts of effective governance. However, ABX introduces an additional layer that is often overlooked in current governance practices: a disciplined ability for presidents and trustees to identify where institutional friction truly exists before deciding what needs to change. And how and where the board can support the president and administration to address.

Sometimes the barrier is policy. Rules, requirements, or inherited assumptions that may have served the institution well can become obstacles when they no longer fit the learner’s journey, the market environment, or the institution’s strategic direction.

Sometimes the problem is procedure. Processes that feel ordinary internally may create delay, confusion, and abandonment externally. They may add complexity where there should be clarity or create drag at the very point where momentum matters most.

Sometimes the issue is people. Not because the institution lacks good people, but because individuals may be placed in roles, given incentives, assigned reporting lines, or operating under conditions that make success unnecessarily difficult. What appears to be underperformance may be misalignment.

Sometimes the barrier is the systems. Disconnected platforms, fragmented workflows, outdated tools, and poorly integrated information flows can quietly shape institutional behavior in ways leadership does not fully see. Institutions often describe these issues as cultural or operational when they are, in fact, systemic.

And sometimes the problem is the structure itself. The institution may be organized in ways that made sense for an earlier era but now impede coordination, responsiveness, and renewal. In these cases, the challenge is not merely to improve execution inside the model, but to rethink the model’s underlying design.

This diagnostic lens is one of ABX’s clearest delineators.

Too often, institutions assume they have a strategy problem when they actually have a friction problem. They interpret stalled progress as resistance when the deeper issue is drag embedded in policy, procedure, people, systems, or structure (P3S2). That misunderstanding is costly. It leads presidents, cabinets, and boards to solve the wrong problem, invest in the wrong intervention, or grow frustrated with outcomes that never improve because the real constraint was never touched.

Modern governance must become more perceptive than that.

The role of leadership now is no longer just to ask whether the institution is performing. Presidents and trustees must also identify where the institution is unintentionally hindering progress. Where is momentum being lost? What is mistaken for cultural resistance when it is actually a procedural obstacle? What is seen as a strategy issue when it is truly a structural problem? What appears to be an execution failure when it is actually a system design issue?

These are not operational questions in the narrow sense. They are governance questions because they shape whether the institution can adapt, respond, and renew in time.

This is especially important now because the institutions that will endure in the next era are not simply the ones that govern the current model more efficiently. They will be the ones whose presidents and trustees can recognize where the current model is constraining the future and act early enough to remove the friction before decline becomes obvious.

The future will not belong to institutions where trustees govern at a distance and presidents shoulder transformation alone. It will belong to institutions where presidents and boards share a deeper discipline: the ability to recognize what is changing beneath the surface, diagnose where policy, procedure, people, systems, and structure are creating drag, and act early enough to renew the model before it fails.

That is the work ABX was created to advance.

That is where modern governance stops reacting to change and begins helping shape what comes next.