Deep Dive: Storm Scars and Bright Skies

Mark Putnam

There’s this image that’s stuck with me for decades—a dusty old conference room at a previous University, early 2000s. Dot-com crash in full swing. We’re all younger, and I remember the CIO standing at the chalkboard, just laying out the facts: budgets shrinking, projects paused, staff frozen. It wasn’t dramatic. It was steady. That was my first education in what disruption actually looks like, Liv. No magic fix, just transparency and calm when the future turns gray.

Olivia Carter

Yeah, that’s something you don’t forget. You know, whenever I’m reporting on higher ed—especially during COVID—I keep seeing echoes of that same playbook. Like, I remember covering these tech layoffs at a major state university right at the start of the pandemic. Teams just… shrank, almost overnight. Everyone pulled into crisis mode. No one was planning new projects or talking about the next big wave. It’s like institutional muscle memory: heads down, brace for the next hit.

Mark Putnam

Absolutely. If you look at the last 25 years, we’ve cycled through four disruptions—dot-com bust, Great Recession, pandemic, and now all the policy shocks and federal resets. Each time, leaders survive by getting leaner, quicker to pivot, more conservative. You sort of build this reflex—not optimism, but vigilance. I’d say it’s made the CIO role almost allergic to big bets. Always, the question in the back of your mind is: “What’s about to break next?” And that mindset sticks, for better or worse.

Olivia Carter

Right. And it seeps into culture, too. It’s not just about surviving the current storm, it’s—like—the scars those storms leave. I mean, you start noticing how people flinch whenever there’s talk of new funding cuts or “right-sizing.” They remember all the other times things got pulled out from under them. The resilience is real, but it comes at a cost—the cost is maybe forgetting how to aim for something brighter than just survival.

Mark Putnam

And here’s the irony—survival mode does get results. You stretch every dollar, push hardware longer, squeeze the most out of what you’ve got. But there’s a tradeoff. It’s like you’re always fixing what broke yesterday, not building for tomorrow. Have you seen this in your reporting, Liv? That sense that the next win has to be fast, cheap, and absolutely safe?

Olivia Carter

Oh, totally. Everything gets framed as “operational excellence”—but no one wants to champion the moonshot stuff. I mean, I remember talking with IT folks at a midwestern campus about modernizing ERPs. They had this whole vision for re-platforming, but the project that actually got funded was the incremental, ‘keep the old thing alive’ sort of fix. Everyone says, “Let’s innovate,” but then it’s, “Well... only if it won’t cost much and disrupt nothing.” And that culture trickles down, right? Teams know which battles are worth picking, so the risky, strategic ideas just don’t make it out of the brainstorming phase.

Mark Putnam

That's right. I’ve lived through a dozen ERP upgrades where the strategy is survival—keep patching, keep customizing, never stick your neck out with something fundamentally new. Maybe that’s “wise” if you judge by not failing, but it’s a dangerous kind of wisdom. We have to ask: Are we shaping a generation of leaders who, almost unconsciously, train themselves to underinvest in the future because all they’ve known is turbulence? I worry we’re institutionalizing short-term thinking—building teams that are fantastic at risk management but rusty when it comes time to imagine.

Olivia Carter

That’s such a good point. And it’s not always about individuals, right? Like, the system tunes itself around survival. So you get this group that’s amazing at jumping through hoops, but maybe a little afraid to, I don’t know, dream out loud about the next real leap. Everyone’s so good at playing defense, it’s easy to forget offense—which, I guess, brings us to how that mindset creeps into the very culture of what the IT team believes is possible.

Mark Putnam

That's right, Olivia.

Olivia Carter

So, you can feel it in the room. There’s this shift—from cautious optimism to outright risk aversion. Like, I covered a university recently that kept putting off a cloud migration for years because the leadership just couldn’t stomach the upfront costs or the perceived risk. Then one semester, with everything running on aging on-prem servers, they got hit with a critical outage. It knocked out research systems right before grant deadlines—total disaster. Trust cratered, both from faculty and upstairs. So in trying to “be prudent” and delay, the hidden cost was much bigger—systems, careers, reputation, all at risk.

Mark Putnam

That’s the trap, exactly. When you’re so conditioned for frugality you equate every new investment with recklessness, you miss the point where “playing it safe” is actually blindly risking more. It’s what I call the shift from technical debt to cultural debt. First, you postpone upgrades. Then, you stop proposing them altogether. You reach a point where the staff brings fewer and fewer bold ideas—because in their experience, bold ideas just don’t make it. That is when vision erodes. You used to get budget proposals that pushed the envelope. Now, people are just looking for the safest route through another year.

Olivia Carter

What’s wild is how this mindset sounds so logical in the short term. “We’re being responsible, we’re protecting jobs, we’re not betting the farm.” But you get this silent drift, where resilience doesn’t mean adaptability anymore—it just becomes rigid. And the bigger risk isn’t one big failed project—it’s a decade where nothing transformative gets off the ground. I think the hardest part is even spotting when that shift’s happened. Like, how do you see the line where frugality suddenly becomes the thing holding you back?

Mark Putnam

It’s subtle, but you can see it in what gets celebrated in meetings, what gets left off the annual report. Are you benchmarking to a strategic vision, or just checking the boxes because “that’s what peer schools are doing”? When your best people start looking elsewhere for a challenge, or no one volunteers the big, impossible idea? That’s the warning sign—when even small risks feel out of bounds, you’re deep in institutional risk aversion, and in the long term, it’s a more expensive way to fail.

Olivia Carter

Tell me more, Mark.

Mark Putnam

Well, it gets trickier as the hype cycles spin even faster. You’ve got the twin traps: on the one hand, there’s the expensive shiny-object syndrome—the “innovation theater,” pilots and prototypes that never scale; on the other, the temptation to just keep the lights on and call that excellence. Take cloud, for example. Or generative AI. Everybody talks up the potential, but the real challenge is, how do you know which bets are smart, and which are distraction? I remember a decade ago, we had board conversations about Blockchain transcripts—back when it was the Big Thing. I argued we wait. The risks were real, use cases speculative. Years later, that was the right call for us. But if we’d ignored cloud or AI out of the same urge to play it safe, we’d have missed what really matters now.

Olivia Carter

Yeah, I feel like higher ed especially gets stuck in this “wait and see” default because, well, most institutions can’t afford missteps with limited budgets and credibility. But that can drift into a pattern where the only risk considered is the risk of action, not of inaction. You see every new thing as a threat first—and sometimes that means dismissing the one idea that’s a genuine breakthrough. So I guess, how do you actually make “smart bets” when the background noise of risk aversion is always so loud?

Mark Putnam

Frankly, it takes a different approach than just following trends or waiting for Gartner’s plateau. Know your institution’s appetite for smart risk—real conversation, not just platitudes. Build some portfolio slack, so trying something new doesn’t sink the ship if it flops. And be willing to speak both languages: why stability matters, but why strategic bets can’t wait for total certainty. It’s not easy, but if we keep pushing this all the way to certainty, we’ll always be playing catch-up instead of leading.

Olivia Carter

And maybe—this is just me—but it seems like the trick is admitting you’ll never get it totally right. CIOs aren’t VCs, you can’t spray money everywhere until something sticks. But you also can’t freeze up and hope the real opportunity knocks twice. So, maybe it’s about building a bias towards smart exploration—holding onto your credibility, but not letting that be the whole story. Otherwise, yeah, you end up being known as the “no police,” like you said, instead of the ones who help write what comes next.

Mark Putnam

So where do we go from here? Part of the answer, I’ve found, is keeping what I call a “shadow roadmap.” That list of bold, even outlandish ideas—stuff that’d move the needle, if only the world would cooperate. Don’t let those ideas collect dust. Bring them out at the right times: cabinet discussions, budget, strategy meetings. It changes what’s possible if you keep the conversation alive, even if the money isn’t there yet.

Olivia Carter

And for the teams—give them actual space to dream. I mean, I saw this done at a major research university. Once a quarter, everyone gathered to pitch “impossible” projects. No limits, just “What would we build if none of the old baggage existed?” Wild, right? But one idea—a predictive analytics tool for student success—ended up moving beyond the pitch, got fast-tracked, and really drove change in how the team was seen. Sometimes the most out-there ideas are the ones that break the logjam.

Mark Putnam

Exactly. And look, it’s vital to reframe how IT is talked about—not just a cost center, not just the people who say no, but as a lever for institutional strategy. Benchmark against the real needs of your campus, not just what your peer group is doing. Build psychological safety so that your staff can propose new things, and even fail without fear. Reward insight, not just the ability to keep things running on fumes. Those behaviors, over time, give your organization the permission it needs to take healthy risks.

Olivia Carter

And, honestly, it’s not naive, it’s survival. Like we talked about last time—real credibility in leadership isn’t just about sweating the details, but knowing when to sketch out the next big horizon, even if everyone else is clutching the purse strings. Any last thoughts before we wrap?

Mark Putnam

Just this—scarcity may be the environment, but it doesn’t have to be your story. As leaders, we inherit storms, but we also carry that flame of possibilities forward. Balance both—defend the present, but cultivate the next future. Liv, always a pleasure to share the mic on these big questions.

Olivia Carter

You too, Mark. I think we've barely scratched the surface on how institutions can keep imagining in tough times—so let’s keep this going next episode. Thanks, everyone, for listening, and we’ll see you next time!

Mark Putnam

Take care, everyone.