Think, Operate, Adapt: The Three Capabilities That Technology Cannot Buy

The DIVO programme at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, presented at EUNIS 2025, makes this visible through contrast. Before DIVO existed, new technologies arrived at the university through traditional procurement: a need was identified, a vendor was selected, a system was deployed. The people who operated the systems were users of decisions made elsewhere. After DIVO, the process runs differently. A hypothesis is formed about a problem or opportunity. A small, multidisciplinary team tests it in a controlled environment. The results are evaluated against pre-defined criteria. The decision to proceed, modify, or stop is made by people who understand both the technology and the institutional context it is being applied to. The organisation is not just implementing change. It has learned to think about change in a different way.

Jisc's maturity model for digital transformation, used across more than 40 UK institutions in recent years, identifies three stages of organisational progression: reactive, proactive, and integrated. What distinguishes the integrated stage is not the sophistication of the technology in use. It is the presence of what Jisc calls a 'digital culture' - a shared orientation among staff that treats continuous learning, process improvement, and data-informed decision-making as normal features of daily work rather than special projects. That culture is not installed with a platform. It is built through sustained, deliberate investment in how people think about their work.

Finland's CSC research on AI transformation in HEIs identified the 'ability to change' as the most critical and most underdeveloped layer in most institutions' transformation capacity. The AITO Framework maps AI's effects across four domains - research, education, collaboration, and support functions - and finds that the barriers to progress are almost never technical. They are organisational: staff do not have the vocabulary to evaluate AI proposals critically; leaders do not have the frameworks to distinguish AI applications that create strategic value from those that automate existing inefficiency; teams do not have the habits of reflection that would allow them to learn from pilots rather than simply completing them. Building these capabilities requires a different kind of development investment - one oriented toward how people think, not just what tools they use.

The WEF's 2026 report on brain capital, produced with the McKinsey Health Institute, makes the business case in economic terms. Proactive investment in brain skills - analytical thinking, adaptability, complex problem-solving, and technological literacy - is associated with measurable gains in productivity, innovation, and retention. A 30-country study cited in the report found that adaptability and self-efficacy were the leading determinants of whether employees felt they were thriving. These are not soft variables. They are the operational foundation on which everything else sits.

Gartner's 2025 prediction that 65% of HEI CIOs will identify operating margin improvement as their primary technology investment criterion by 2028 reframes what 'think, operate, adapt' means in practice. It is not a philosophical aspiration. It is a financial necessity. Institutions that do not build staff who can rethink processes, redesign operations, and learn from results at institutional speed will spend the next decade buying solutions for problems their own people cannot diagnose accurately. The consulting fees for that approach are significant. The opportunity cost is larger.

The three dimensions are sequential in development and simultaneous in practice. Think: investing in how staff understand their function, what good looks like, and how to evaluate whether a decision served the institution's actual goals. Operate: documenting the process logic that currently lives only in people's memories, so the institution can redesign it deliberately. Adapt: building the organisational habit of treating each programme cycle, each enrollment season, each curriculum review as data - and asking what it tells us. None of this is a technology purchase. All of it is a development investment. And it is the investment that determines whether every other investment lands.