January is supposed to be a clean reset. New calendar, new energy, new goals. But anyone who actually works in higher ed AV/IT knows the truth: nothing resets. The students still show up. The tickets still come in. Budgets still have gravity. Projects don’t politely pause for a ceremonial countdown.
That’s what makes the January Road to 10K theme land: Start Your Engines, New Year’s, Same Goal. It doesn’t ask people to reinvent themselves. It asks them to recommit—more honestly, more intentionally, and with a clearer sense of how the day-to-day connects to the longer road.
In this episode, Ryan Gray is joined by Atkins Fleming, Erin Maher-Moran, and Scott Sanders to unpack the question behind the theme: what does a new year actually change when your environment is moving too fast to treat January as anything more than a date?
One of the early tensions that shows up is time itself. For some, a year feels like a huge bite—almost too big to be useful. The pace of work has shifted toward shorter windows: quarters, milestones, rapid decisions, constant pivots. Even when organizations still plan around annual budgets, the operational reality often feels like a loop of shorter cycles stacked on top of each other.
At the same time, higher ed has a strange duality that corporate environments don’t always share in the same way. Atkins names it clearly: the work lives in both the micro and the macro. Teams plan around semesters because semesters are real. They bring predictable deadlines and pressure points. But those same teams also have to think in five- and ten-year arcs—technology standards, building lifecycles, organizational structure, and how the institution wants to evolve. The hard part isn’t choosing one horizon. The hard part is making sure short-term actions actually support the long-term direction, instead of accidentally pulling you away from it.
That’s where culture comes in. Not culture as a poster or a slogan—but culture as what the institution rewards, funds, and protects. The conversation moves quickly into a question that sounds simple but is rarely treated like one: is the higher goal trouble-free, or best-in-class?
It’s a deceptively sharp distinction. Trouble-free is what most people say they want when they’re exhausted: stable systems, predictable rooms, fewer fires, less chaos. Best-in-class is what institutions talk about when they’re competing: experience, differentiation, recruitment, outcomes, impact. Both matter, and both can be valid strategies. But the operational consequences are huge. If the organization wants trouble-free, standardization becomes the engine. If the organization wants best-in-class, experimentation becomes part of the cost of doing business.
And that’s where the conversation gets blunt in the most helpful way: best-in-class only works if leadership actually tolerates risk. Many institutions claim they want innovation, but punish the people involved when experiments fail. That creates a predictable result: teams stop taking intelligent risks. They stop suggesting ideas. They stop putting their name on anything uncertain. Innovation becomes performative, and stability becomes the real default—whether anyone says it out loud or not.
Ryan describes living through both sides of that shift, and the reality that leadership direction can change over time. In one era, the expectation might be steady and reliable, and the team has to inject new thinking into the mix. In another era, leadership might push differentiation and cutting-edge moves, and the team has to protect the other side of the equation: stability, scalability, daily success. That back-and-forth is more common than people admit, and it’s exactly why the New Year’s Same Goal framing is useful. The goal doesn’t change—serving students, supporting teaching, enabling outcomes. But the intention behind daily decisions has to flex with what the institution truly prioritizes right now.
Scott adds another layer that is increasingly hard to ignore: the student experience baseline is no longer set by what classrooms used to be. It’s shaped by what students already have in their personal lives. When home setups include high-quality audio, big screens, seamless switching, and immersive experiences, a classroom that feels modern to a team can feel underwhelming to a student. That doesn’t mean every space has to become a showcase. But it does mean experience expectations aren’t standing still. Institutions are competing, and the classroom is part of the story students experience—not just the content.
Interestingly, Erin points out that within the same institution, different teams can live on different sides of this divide. Classroom technology often leans toward slow-and-steady stability because scale demands it. Live event production, by contrast, can skew more toward what’s new and what’s next because the mission is different and the venues are fewer. That contrast becomes a useful lens: sometimes the same organization needs both engines. The key is knowing which one you’re driving in each environment, and not letting the wrong priorities leak into the wrong context.
From there, the conversation shifts into something that doesn’t always make it into “January goals” talk but probably should: assessment. Not annual assessment. Constant assessment. The group frames it as a continual alignment check: does it look right, sound right, feel right, and match the direction the institution is actually pursuing?
A practical example comes up in the form of student feedback loops—QR code surveys that capture what students experienced in the room: lighting, temperature, visibility, audibility, where they sat, whether the basics actually worked. That kind of feedback becomes a voice-of-the-customer input, and it matters because the true customer experience isn’t just the instructor perspective—it’s also the student in the seat. If teams don’t ask, they don’t know. And if they don’t know, they’ll keep optimizing for assumptions.
This also ties into performance management, and what it means to build a culture of improvement without turning it into a culture of fear. Ryan describes a shift toward quarterly coaching conversations—more frequent checkpoints intended to reduce the weight and weirdness of annual reviews. Erin and Atkins describe a similar reality in practice even if it’s less formal: regular one-on-ones that do more for real development than timed evaluation cycles.
But maybe the most grounded part of the episode is where “start your engines” becomes less metaphor and more policy: self-care and time off as leadership responsibility.
Someone jokes about needing to Gantt chart their life, but it opens a real point. Most people know how to plan projects at work. They know how to schedule milestones, protect critical path items, and stack the big rocks first. But those tools don’t always make it into personal and restorative planning. The result is predictable: people reach the end of a cycle with unused time off they’re about to lose, or they’re depleted and trying to recover while the work keeps accelerating.
In the discussion, vacation planning gets framed as more than a personal preference. It’s a performance issue. If someone always waits for the right time to take time off, the right time never comes. The only way time off becomes real is if it is scheduled early—like any other priority—and protected.
Even more important is what happens culturally when someone is out. Erin calls out something many teams quietly fail at: if someone is on vacation, nobody should be contacting them. No messages, no quick questions, no passive pressure to stay connected. And if the organization can’t function without them, that is not their fault—it’s a systems problem that needs to be fixed. Redundancy, documentation, cross-training, and shared ownership aren’t just operational virtues. They’re what make a healthy culture possible.
The episode closes with each guest naming a focus for the year: Atkins balancing major initiatives like new classroom standards and new buildings with work-life balance; Erin prioritizing health and modeling stability for a family transition while keeping the Road to 10K push moving; Scott onboarding new team members and shifting from lone-wolf habits into a more connected, supportive approach. Ryan adds his own challenge: finding a hope and dream for 2026 that extends beyond getting through a major building milestone—a reminder that sometimes the new intention isn’t a bigger goal, it’s rediscovering the ability to imagine one.
That’s the real value of this month’s theme. Start Your Engines isn’t a hype slogan. It’s an invitation to ask better questions at the moment people are most likely to run on autopilot. What are we optimizing for right now? Stability or differentiation? Short-term velocity or long-term direction? Revving hard or moving forward? And are we building a culture where people can sustain the work without burning out?
Connect with Atkins Fleming
- Email: atkins@txstate.edu
- HETMA: treasurer@hetma.org
Connect with Erin Maher-Moran
- Email: ErinMaherMoran@hetma.org
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-maher-moran/
Connect with Scott Sanders
- Email: scott.sander@sennheiser.com
Connect with Host (Ryan Gray)
- Email: editor@higheredav.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanagray/
- Website: www.HigherEdAV.com
This show is a production of Higher Ed AV Media. Visit www.HigherEdAV.com for new content every day.
