Once You See the System, You Can’t Unsee It
Behind the Read
Last week, I published a piece on LinkedIn titled Read Auburn Closely: It May Be Telling Us What Comes Next, focused on Auburn’s governance restructuring.
Many of you also received that same piece here in this weekly newsletter.
Rather than use your inbox as a second place to repeat the same argument, I want to use this space more intentionally.
Let me explain.
This idea comes from an experience I had years ago.
I was an invited guest for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Philadelphia airport. By then, I had recently left academia to move into full-time consulting, and I was traveling constantly. Airports were not just familiar to me. They had become part of the job.
I knew the Philadelphia airport the way someone knows a space they pass through almost every week. I knew the terminals, the gates, the security lines, the delays, the rhythms of departure and return. I traveled through it so often that I began recognizing, and sometimes building relationships with, employees I saw regularly.
But no matter how familiar the airport felt, I had only experienced the public version.
I knew there was a system underneath it. Every organization has one.
What I did not understand was how that specific system worked, or how carefully it had shaped my experience without my noticing.
That changed when my tour guide opened the first restricted door.
The first layer showed me how the traveler experience had been curated: the art, the restaurant placement, the traffic patterns, the subtle design choices that influenced where people walked, lingered, waited, and spent money.
The second layer revealed the operational system underneath the public space: the movement of luggage, equipment, supplies, vehicles, and people across the airport property.
The third layer was the command center. Not air traffic control, but the place where security feeds, gate access, passenger flow, and operational movement could be monitored and coordinated in real time.
The fourth layer was the administrative office, where I met the CEO and the leadership team responsible for overseeing the airport as a whole.
Each layer changed what I understood.
The terminal floor had not changed.
My read of it had.
I have traveled through that airport many times since. I still experience the same gates, delays, signage, restaurant corridors, and security lines. But I no longer experience them as isolated inconveniences or random design choices. I understand them as part of a larger system built with intention, constraint, tradeoffs, and consequence.
Institutions work the same way.
Every policy change, governance decision, curriculum revision, budget shift, committee restructure, and public controversy has a terminal-floor version: the visible thing people react to first.
But underneath that visible event are deeper layers.
There is the system itself.
There is the process that carries the system.
There is the authority that shapes the process.
And there are the outcomes experienced by the people living inside it: faculty, students, staff, leaders, communities, and the public.
Most people only see the outcome.
As leaders, our work is to read the system producing it.
That is what I want this newsletter to support: making the system visible.
Here’s how this will work.
When I publish a public thought leadership piece — on LinkedIn, the blog, or wherever the conversation is unfolding — I’ll link it here for you.
Then I’ll use this space for something different: the read behind the read.
Not a recap.
Not a duplicate argument.
But the deeper institutional reading underneath the public piece: the system I was studying, the doors I opened while writing, the questions that shaped the argument, and the pattern I think leaders need to see.
Because, just like my experience with the Philadelphia airport, once you see the system behind it, you can’t unsee it.
Warmly,
Nicole
P.S. As we move toward the start of a new academic year, I’ve opened five complimentary Strategy Call spots.
If there is a governance shift, team dynamic, leadership transition, or institutional pattern you want a sharper read on, you can schedule a call here:
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