What we talked about
Ben Helland unpacks how strategy turns into outcomes for learners and employers at Western Governors University (WGU). As Principal Product Strategist, he partners with the Schools of Business and Health to design long-term roadmaps that serve working adults and an expanding 18–24 segment. He explains why WGU measures every big bet against three lenses:equity, completion, and return:and how a jobs-first mission shapes programs, support, and pace of innovation.
Show notes
Ben Helland entered college thinking he would become a child psychologist, spent years in a PhD program he quietly hated, dropped out without marketable skills, and then spent the next five years learning finance, BI, and cost accounting entirely on the job. That circuitous path turned out to be the exact preparation he needed to run strategy for one of the largest universities in the United States. At WGU, where nearly 200,000 students are enrolled right now, he applies scenario-based planning to help schools make decisions whose consequences will not show up for years.
What we covered
- WGU measures every initiative by three criteria: equity (does it expand access?), completion (will students finish?), and return (does it improve their earning potential?), Ben says if you grade opportunities through that rubric, you naturally see different competitors than any other higher ed institution would.
- The School of Health and the School of Business require fundamentally different planning horizons: nursing programs are so tightly regulated that strategy has to be laid like plumbing before construction begins, while the business school can pivot quickly and experiment freely.
- Scenario-based planning, the tool Ben learned at WGU and has since brought to clients through his firm Veridat, forces teams to write detailed stories about four possible futures defined by the two largest uncertainties outside their control, not to predict what will happen, but to have predetermined responses ready when signals of any scenario appear.
- A large European publisher with 10,000 employees hired Veridat to run this kind of planning just as generative AI arrived in early 2023. At that scale, Ben says the strategy-to-execution gap only closes if long-term directional decisions are broken all the way down to hiring choices and budget plans that a frontline employee can understand.
- He turned around a small business for a local owner who had tried to sell for a year without success, acting as interim CEO, Ben rebuilt staffing norms, training manuals, leadership structure, and legal compliance from scratch until the company was acquisition-ready, which he describes as learning more in that engagement than in almost anything else in his career.
- His advice to his younger self: the distance between where you stand and the floor when you are in your twenties is much smaller than it feels, take risks then, because the recovery time from failure is short, and betting on yourself carries better odds than most people assume.
About Ben
Ben Helland is Principal Product Strategist at Western Governors University, where he partners with the Schools of Business and Health on long-term planning for an institution that now has at least one alumni in every county in the United States. He also runs Veridat, a strategy and advisory firm he founded after his first stint at WGU, and previously worked at ETS launching skills-based assessments for K-12 students.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-helland-b7084b56
- Website: https://wgu.edu
Episode 70 of the PreVetted Podcast.