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Turning Up the Heat on Student Success
Why annealing may offer a new path for change and innovation
Glenda Morgan
September 26, 2025
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I came across this article thanks to a group I affectionately call the Cool Librarians Collective. At first glance, it doesn’t seem tied to student success, but it offers a novel way of thinking about organizational change, work that sits at the heart of improving student outcomes. After all, enhancing student success almost always requires far-reaching changes that cut across multiple departments and units.
What often gets overlooked in student success is the how of change. Too often, conversations focus on the problem to solve or the outcomes to achieve, without considering the philosophy or mechanics of change management itself. That’s a mistake. Whether a student-success intervention ultimately works depends as much on execution and adoption as on the idea.
In this post, I explore a framework from the article that borrows a metaphor from metallurgy and glassblowing: annealing. It’s a useful way to think about how disruption, followed by stabilization, can reshape organizations.
Under the right conditions, an annealing approach could be hugely valuable, cutting through inertia and entrenched practices in student success that aren’t working. At the same time, it’s easy to misapply. Still, in today’s higher-education landscape, where external shocks are reshaping institutions whether we like it or not, the annealing metaphor offers a compelling lens for harnessing those pressures to build stronger organizations rather than simply wearing us down.
Fire as a forge for stronger organizations
Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash
In Annealing as an Alternative Mechanism for Management, Matthew Bothner, Richard Haynes, Ingo Marquart, and Hai Anh Vu propose an alternative approach to change management aimed at building stronger, more adaptive organizations. Borrowing from metallurgy and glassblowing, they use annealing to describe a two-stage process: first, deliberate disruption (“heating”) to challenge and break unproductive structures and practices; then stabilization (“cooling”) to consolidate and lock in the gains.
Similar to a sword maker or glassworker transforming physical objects, a manager who anneals strategically shakes up a team with a sudden disruption and, after seeing favorable change, stabilizes the team in a realigned and improved structure.
Using an annealing approach, leaders not only embrace uncertainty, they deliberately create it. They intentionally inject stress and emotion to raise the pressure and, in doing so, open up new pathways and options. Once an outcome emerges, the leader dials down the “heat” and seeks closure.
The premise is that disruption enables fresh thinking and uncovers novel ways of working that differ from well-worn solutions. It’s worth emphasizing that annealing is a change-management strategy—a way to discover new approaches—not a method for steady-state operations. The authors illustrate the approach with examples from Apple and General Motors.
Bothner et al. contrast annealing with what they call routine management, which I summarize in the table below.
Dimension | Routine Management (M) | Annealing (Z) |
|---|---|---|
Core philosophy | Maintain order and reduce uncertainty | Harness uncertainty and even add “heat” to spark disruption |
VUCA focus | Coping with complexity to avoid chaos | Leveraging uncertainty to explore new possibilities |
Response to Disruption | Contain, stabilize, and restore “business as usual” | Amplify disruption to break routines and enable discovery |
Risk vs. Uncertainty | Operates in the domain of risk: assigns probabilities, minimizes failure | Operates in the domain of uncertainty: probabilities unknown, outcomes emergent |
Innovation | Prefers stability; incremental change | Actively disrupts to prompt learning and innovation |
Processes | a. Chart course to known goal | a. Create conditions for goal discovery |
The concept is distinct from, but reminiscent of, Nassim Taleb’s antifragility, systems that don’t just withstand stress and disorder but actually benefit from them, growing stronger in the process. That differs from robust systems, which resist change, and resilient systems, which bounce back to a prior state after disruption.
It also calls to mind Graham Winter and Martin Bean’s Toolkit for Turbulence, which I’ll return to later and in future posts.
Annealing student success
To make the concept more concrete, I drew on Bothner et al.’s idea of contrasting routine management with annealing across a range of dimensions. The table below summarizes how I see the two approaches playing out.
Dimension | Routine approach to student success | Annealing approach to student success |
|---|---|---|
Core Philosophy | Preserve institutional stability; minimize disruption to existing systems and structures | Use disruption (policy shifts, crises, shocks) as opportunities to rethink and reconfigure student success |
VUCA Focus (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) | Complexity: manage bureaucracy, compliance, and coordination | Uncertainty: embrace the unknown and use it to explore new approaches to student success |
Response to Disruption | Restore normal operations as quickly as possible after crises (e.g., pandemic, funding cuts) or fit new regulations (eg OBBBA) into existing structures | Allow disruption to radically reshape practices (e.g., new curricula, experimenting with new modalities, tossing out existing structures eg moving advising from existing organizations to centralized or decentralized models) |
Risk vs. Uncertainty | Data-driven, incremental change: pilot programs, known outcomes preferred | Willing to act where outcomes are uncertain (e.g., adopting with new student success models or AI-enabled tools without clear benchmarks) |
Innovation | Focuses on efficiency improvements in existing systems (better advising software, streamlined processes) | Seeks transformative change (rethinking advising as holistic coaching, new credentialing pathways, flexible degree structures etc) |
Controlling the fire
Bothner et al. are clear that an annealing approach to change carries significant risks:
It can be abused by bully leaders who stir up chaos to gain or cement dominance or personal power.
It can exhaust participants, eroding morale and undermining trust.
It can derail routine work, creating loss of focus and operational slippage.
Because annealing operates in uncertainty (not calculable risk), outcomes are inherently unpredictable.
To minimize these risks, and make annealing viable, the authors argue that three conditions should be in place:
Robust status (leader legitimacy)
The leader must be trusted and credible enough to “add heat” without losing authority.
For annealing to proceed, the annealer must have robust status—gained through recognition and esteem from others who are both highly regarded
More specifically, robust status on the part of the annealer is essential for two main reasons: It not only signals credibility [snip] but also affords the social support necessary to start and sustain an effective annealing process.
As a disruption that counters convention, annealing can make a weakly situated, non-credible boss seem just as desperate and crazy as Weber’s “madman”
Emotional energy
The leader needs to have what they refer to as emotional energy and the support of the organization which also needs the bandwidth, psychological and relational, to absorb disruption and learn from it.
a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action,” [snip] [and which is] social: Unlike the stamina a marathoner develops in solo training, EE is gained (or lost) in “interaction rituals” with others, in networks.
Supportive context and resources
There must be enough slack (time, capacity, networks) to experiment, and a clear, justified case for why disruption is warranted now.
not all environments impose the uncertainty necessary to justify the initial heating. “Never waste a crisis” is a familiar political proverb. In the same vein, “Crisis is ... a labeling to help make action possible” [snip] In contrast, in a purely risk-based domain, annealing can be coded as arbitrary—as disruption for its own sake. Unless the annealer, in the absence of apparent uncertainty, can frame the disruption as vital—for example, as a needed case of contrarian thinking
My concerns about annealing change
Annealing as an approach holds a lot of appeal even though it sometimes makes me think of being managed by my high school gym teacher. But it could be effective in a realm like student success that often requires decisive action and new ideas. But even if Bothner et al.’s three conditions (trust, energy, and a justified need) are met, I worry annealing can still go wrong and fail to deliver good outcomes. Here are my concerns.
Leader fit and legitimacy.
For annealing to work, the leader must be trusted, possess emotional energy, have strong networks, and be able to justify the change. Yet weak leaders are rarely strong in self-awareness. How do we ensure the leader is the right one, and that these conditions are truly in place, before “turning up the heat”?
Ethics in student success.
Student success isn’t just another operational domain. Can we ethically run a change process with unknown outcomes when student well-being and progress are on the line?
Guardrails and supports.
Even if the leader is the right one, how will she know when the heat is too high or the hammering has gone on too long? We need explicit guardrails so temperature and duration stay within bounds. I believe such guardrails are possible, and I’ll outline them in a future post.
Bothner et al. focus on the macro-conditions that enable or undermine annealing, but they largely ignore participants except as people who can become exhausted or lose faith. That’s problematic for two related reasons:
Resistance is part of the system.
People can and will resist change, under routine management and certainly under annealing, where outcomes are deliberately left open. If the goal is a higher probability of a better state, the model must account for and address resistance.Participants need support, not just a bold leader.
All the success conditions center on the leader or external context. But if a stronger organization is to emerge, participants also need resources and scaffolds. The leader’s trust and energy only go so far.
Fortunately, Graham Winter and Martin Bean’s Toolkit for Turbulence offers practical tools to support and scaffold participants through adversity. Their focus isn’t on intentionally triggered annealing, but many of the tools apply. In my next full-length post, I’ll outline methods from their work that can help sustain people through an annealing-style change.
Parting thoughts
The difference between routine change and annealing change is probably overstated, and likely lost on many participants in routine change, who feel as if they’re being put through the fire and hammered anyway. It can be a tough sell to propose an annealing process with all the pain and fatigue it implies.
That said, the distinction feels increasingly unnecessary. In higher education, especially in student success, we’re caught between recurring crises and entrenched structures that haven’t worked. As crises hit, an annealing approach to change management could be a useful way to create new structures and practices and to build stronger organizations better able to support student success.
In my next full-length post, I’ll outline practical guardrails for using annealing in student success and show how tools from Winter and Bean’s Toolkit for Turbulence can equip staff to thrive through change rather than be exhausted by it.
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