Leverage Urgency to Create Scaled Solutions
Turn urgent requests into opportunities to scale up.
By late September, the fall enrollment push is fully underway. Inquiry volume is shifting, goals are becoming more immediate, and campus partners are starting to feel the pressure of decisions that should have been settled earlier.
That is when every new request can start to feel like an operational crisis. The answer is not to say yes to everything or fall into a reactive posture. Business researchers call this the urgency effect: people tend to overvalue tasks that feel immediate, even when another task may matter more. If something is truly urgent, it may also carry the attention and political momentum needed to fix the underlying issue. But don't lose the chance to fix operational or procedural structures that caused it in the first place.
Stop Dodging, Start Scaling
I have seen smart leaders forced to plead for resources to execute their own strategic plans. But an urgent request from campus leadership changes that dynamic.
When a partner demands an immediate new campaign or audience segment, do not just absorb the extra work. Use their sense of urgency to bypass standard bureaucratic bottlenecks. Agree to the speed, but demand the resources, clear approval paths, or data access required to actually pull it off. As noted in the2025 State of Higher Education report from SimpsonScarborough, the most effective institutions operate with better structure and discipline.
Additionally, research from Wharton on crisis management emphasizes that prepared leaders use urgent periods not just for immediate damage containment, but to identify systemic issues and build lasting operational upgrades. You can build that discipline in the middle of a sprint if you trade execution for capacity.
The Scale-Up Playbook
Protecting your team's capacity does not always mean rejecting the work. It means setting firm boundaries around how the work gets done. Share exactly where your authority begins and ends, and use the momentum of the request to permanently improve your infrastructure.
To turn a reactive request into long-term operational scale, stick to these three rules:
Standardize the exception: Do not build a one-off solution. Turn the urgent request into a repeatable template or automated workflow for the next time it happens.
Trade speed for resources: If the deadline is truly non-negotiable, require immediate budget approval or a streamlined sign-off process to meet it.
Document the friction: Use the pain points uncovered during the urgent sprint to justify your CRM or martech upgrades for the next fiscal year.
Share Your Thoughts, Let's Connect!
Deciding how to set boundaries is often harder than deciding what to build. If you have successfully used a sudden campus fire drill to secure resources or build a permanent operational upgrade, I want to hear how you did it. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know.
Read More
The following pieces of research, web pages, and organizational data were used to create this article, providing transparency and allowing you to explore the findings further:
Harvard Business Review. "To Create Healthy Urgency, Focus on a Big Opportunity." By John P. Kotter. February 2014.
Knowledge at Wharton. "The Prepared Leader: The Five Phases of Crisis Management." July 2023.
SimpsonScarborough. "Website & Marketing Technology: The State of Higher Education (2025 Edition)." Alexandria, VA: SimpsonScarborough, 2025.
Borrow My Notes
I’ve collected observations and reflections on marketing, communications, and recruitment for more than 20 years. That archive inspired me to share these insights through this blog. Here are excerpts from my collection that helped shape this article:
"Trust the experts to do their job and get out of the way."
"The number one problem is a fixation on creating perfect processes to fit an imperfect world."
"Whatever you cannot do today can be moved to tomorrow, if you plan for it.”