The Toothpick and the Tesla

Recently, a Tesla Cybertruck was rendered inoperable. This complex machine, celebrated for its engineering and technological sophistication, was disabled by a single toothpick. It’s almost absurd, but it’s also a perfect reminder: in any complex system, whether a Cybertruck or a university, the smallest overlooked detail can bring the entire operation to a halt. Everything is connected. Everything matters.

What can we learn from this incident? First, universities must understand their organizational critical nodes - the points of dependency that quietly hold the institution together. When executive leaders set performance mandates or launch new initiatives without understanding these nodes, problems inevitably emerge. Payroll, IT, scheduling, billing, academic records, and financial aid are not isolated units. They are interdependent systems. A disruption in one reverberates across all the others, and ignoring these vulnerabilities can lead to financial instability, enrollment declines, or even accreditation risks.

In my own leadership roles, I’ve long championed corporate partnerships and affiliate programs. On the surface, these initiatives seem straightforward: organizations sign an MOU, and their employees and family members receive a tuition discount. Enrollment grows, partnerships deepen, and new internship pipelines emerge. But beneath that appealing simplicity lies a web of operational questions:

•             How do we track eligibility?

•             How do we verify employment—and re-verify it?

•             Who qualifies as a family member?

•             How do these data points integrate into our systems at scale?

•             What is the capacity of our financial aid and student accounts teams to manage this?

A good idea is only as strong as the systems that support it.

Second, when leaders don’t understand how systems relate to one another, diagnosing problems becomes nearly impossible. Universities are often described as siloed organizations, and for good reason. Divisions compete for limited resources, and this may limit collaboration. But system problems never stay within one division. They spill across boundaries and solving them requires cross-divisional cooperation and a willingness to see the institution as a whole.

For the past three and a half years, I’ve had the privilege of helping build an organizational “Camelot.” After a declaration of fiscal exigency, those of us who stepped forward committed ourselves to rebuilding an institution that mattered deeply to its community. The director of HR and I were tasked with restructuring the university’s divisions. We reduced seven divisions to five, then we sat with fellow executive leaders to discern how best to realign units in ways that supported both efficiency and mission.

As the institution shifted from cutting to rebuilding, a new Vice President for Finance and Administration joined the team. Together, we convened weekly meetings with key stakeholders: the Registrar, Financial Aid, Advising, Student Development, Academic Programming, Student Success and Retention, Institutional Technology, Institutional Effectiveness, Admissions, and others depending on the moment. Every Monday morning, we gathered to talk about enrollment, retention, and student success. We proposed initiatives, surfaced challenges, revisited earlier decisions, and learned, week after week, how deeply interconnected our work truly was.

These meetings accomplished two essential things. First, they ensured that any initiative we pursued had been examined from every angle, with potential issues identified and addressed before implementation. Second, they cultivated a culture of genuine organizational empathy. We listened to each other. We learned from those closest to the work. We developed a shared understanding of the university’s inner workings, and from that understanding emerged a richer capacity to imagine what was possible for our students.

The results were transformative: one tuition rate for all students, free textbooks, a guaranteed schedule, affiliate discounts, expanded dual enrollment, and strengthened community college partnerships. These initiatives didn’t emerge from isolated brainstorming. They emerged from collective insight, shared responsibility, and a deep respect for the complexity of the institution we were rebuilding.

The toothpick in the Tesla is an important lesson. Executive leaders must see the institution as an interconnected system where small vulnerabilities can have serious consequences. When we encourage cross-divisional collaboration and when we honor the complexity of our systems, we create the conditions for organizational empathy and success. The stakes are too high to accept the silos and to remove ourselves from the actual work of the institution. We need to understand the nature of the work, so we understand fully and deeply what our “vision” and our performance benchmarks really mean for those doing the work. We need to hold ourselves responsible for the conditions we create so those whom we serve can do their work effectively. And if something in the system is disabled through our own neglect, then as executive leaders we need to hold ourselves accountable.