A message from Didier Contis, Vice Provost for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer:
Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of meeting with hundreds of people across UW–Madison’s IT community. Each conversation has added another layer to my understanding of what it means to do IT work at this university, in this moment.
And here’s what I keep coming back to: we’re all navigating a lot right now. Budget pressures. Organizational changes. The relentless pace of technology evolution — generative AI being just the latest wave we’re trying to ride while still managing everything else. The cybersecurity threats that never take a break. The challenge of doing strategic work when every day brings new fires to fight.
The survival trap
In the IT field, we’ve developed a culture that celebrates survival. Many of us wear our battle scars like badges of honor: the all-nighter that saved the system, the weekend spent restoring services, the vacation cut short to handle an emergency. “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” right?
But constant stress doesn’t always build strength. Sometimes it just builds scar tissue.
I grew up in France in a family that valued resilience — my mother taught us to face challenges head-on, to find a way forward no matter what. But she also taught us something from Voltaire’s Candide: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” We must cultivate our garden.
At the end of Candide, after the protagonist has witnessed chaos and suffering across the world, he arrives at a simple conclusion. The answer isn’t to conquer everything or to merely survive it. The answer is to tend to what’s within your control — your garden — with care and intention.
What is our garden?
In IT, our garden has three elements:
- Our teams. Are we creating environments where people can thrive, or just demanding output? Are we building psychological safety, or perpetuating a culture where people can’t admit when they’re struggling and fear admitting to mistakes?
- Our systems. Is our infrastructure overgrown with legacy “weeds” that drain resources? Are we making time to retire what no longer serves us, or just patching and hoping?
- Our culture. Are we nurturing collaboration and trust across this distributed IT ecosystem, or operating in silos that deplete rather than enrich?
Different approaches to the same challenge
In my two-and-a-half decades at Georgia Tech, I learned that different contexts require different approaches. Research computing has different needs than student information systems. A clinical setting requires different protocols than a classroom. One size does not fit all.
The same is true for resilience and self-care. There isn’t one right way to manage stress during challenging times. What works for one person might not work for another.
As I was thinking through these ideas, I asked a few colleagues to share their own approaches. Their perspectives are worth hearing — not as prescriptions, but as examples of the different ways people tend their gardens.
I manage stress by reading widely — both books and articles — to gain fresh perspectives on the challenges I’m facing. I also make time for hobbies like needlework and gardening that require my full attention and keep me away from screens. And I prioritize spending time with friends and family to recharge and blow off steam.
Lauren Bruce, Interim Director of DoIT Communications
The practice that helps me most is keeping perspective: I’ll do my best and offer the effort I can, but I’m not doing open heart surgery. No one is going to die if it takes another day to deliver a good product.
In HR, we plan as much as we can, but there are many things outside our control. We need to find the flexibility to meet our customers’ needs. That may mean things don’t happen at the speed people want, but we push where we can, hold where we need to, and always work toward the best possible solution. Accepting what we can’t control makes it easier to focus energy on what we can.
When I think about managing stress and staying resilient in challenging times, I remind myself to “pause, reflect and recenter.” This typically involves dedicating time and energy to activities that nourish my life force and give me joy. Feeding my mind, body and spirit usually involves three types of activities.
First, I spend time outdoors — hiking, hunting, fishing and gathering medicines. Second, I take time to check in with family, friends and other relationships that are an integral part of my social support system. Finally, the routine participation in temazcal ceremonies (traditional sweat lodge ceremonies) with relatives from different Nations of Wisconsin helps me remain balanced, centered and focused.
Since “taking care of business” consumes a large part of our lives and identities, it is essential for us also to take good care of ourselves in the process.
What strikes me about these approaches is that they’re all grounded in intentionality. They’re not about just powering through or toughing it out. They’re about making deliberate choices — big and small — about how to create sustainable patterns.
What we can control
So what does cultivation look like in practice? A few things:
- Weeding. What can we stop doing? What legacy systems drain resources without adding value? What meetings don’t need to happen? What “zombie projects” can we finally sunset? How do we become comfortable that not all innovation ideas will be successful? Sometimes, the most productive thing is creating space by removing what no longer serves us.
- Planting. What deserves intentional investment? Mentorship that develops future leaders. Innovation time that’s actually protected on calendars. Professional development that goes beyond mandatory training. Well-being initiatives that acknowledge people are whole humans, not just resources to optimize.
- Tending. What needs ongoing attention? Relationships across the IT community. Communication channels that work for different people. Small gestures of appreciation (check out Brené Brown’s “marble jar theory“). Check-ins that go beyond status updates and foster genuine connection.
The in-between space
I won’t pretend I have all the answers. We’re in an in-between place — between what we’d like to do and what we have the resources to do, between what we’ve always done and what we need to do next, between structures we inherited and ones we’re trying to build.
That uncertainty is hard, but it is also an opportunity. We get to help shape what comes next — not by imposing a grand plan from the top down, but by cultivating the conditions where good solutions can grow.
Looking ahead
I will share these reflections with a room full of IT professionals navigating their own challenges at the Information & Technology Leadership Conference on Tuesday. I won’t offer perfect answers — such things do not exist. But I hope we can start a different conversation about what resilience means and how we practice it.
The most resilient IT organizations aren’t the ones that just survive crisis after crisis. They’re the ones that create sustainable conditions where people and technology can grow together, tending their gardens with intention and care.
We’re not going to solve everything in December, or in 2026, or probably ever — because cultivation is ongoing work. But we can start being more intentional about where we focus our energy. We can start making deliberate choices about what we nurture and what we prune.
I’m grateful to Lauren, Adam and Dominic for sharing their perspectives for this post, and I’m looking forward to the conversations at the conference. In the meantime, ask yourself: What does your garden look like? What are you cultivating? What needs weeding?
The answers will be different for each of us — and that’s exactly as it should be.
— Didier