Most learning organizations react to change. The best ones design it. Designed Change is a free, research-backed assessment that measures how intentionally your organization has designed its approach to transformational change.
The assessment evaluates your organization across five strategic dimensions drawn from Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's "Playing to Win" framework, adapted for higher education: Aspirations (your shared vision for learning innovation), Positioning (where you've chosen to focus innovation efforts), Architecture (whether structures and workflows enable innovation), Capabilities (investment in talent and professional development), and Culture (organizational resilience and change fatigue).
A Learning Innovation Department (LID) is a centralized unit within a college or university that combines instructional design, technology, and strategic planning to drive institution-wide learning innovation. Unlike traditional teaching and learning centers that react to faculty requests, a LID proactively designs transformational change through a dual-function model — providing both day-to-day instructional support and strategic institutional transformation.
This tool is built on the doctoral research of Sean Hobson at Dublin City University (2024), studying how Learning Innovation Departments create transformational change in higher education. The research is also published as a chapter in "Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), co-authored with Natalie Landman. Additional research with Jeff Selingo for the Amazon Web Services Institute examines how to drive culture change in higher education (2025).
Answer 32 questions across five dimensions. Receive an immediate Transformation Readiness Score from 0 to 100, classified as Pre-formation, Emerging, Developing, Established, or Leading. Get personalized dimension-level analysis, identification of your priority improvement area, and actionable recommendations — all free and immediate.
The Designed Change assessment serves chief academic officers and provosts evaluating institutional readiness, learning innovation leaders and directors of teaching centers, instructional design teams seeking to articulate their strategic value, higher education administrators planning organizational restructuring, and researchers studying organizational design in higher education.