This paper addresses what characteristics of institutional approaches to change succeed in achieving stated institutional aims within a higher education context. It asserts, through an examination of two case studies, that successful organizational change depends on context-laden feedback-driven processes that result in steady incremental improvement. Further, it argues that successful organizational reform depends on polylogical leaders who: (1) develop an understanding of the cultural realities of different internal and external constituents--with themselves included as key constituents; (2) relate to different constituents in terms of their respective cultural realities in order to establish new expectations of the organization; and (3) work with each significant internal and local group to raise expectations, and then to close that group's expectation/experience gaps. The challenge of planning and implementing organizational change, therefore, lies in ensuring that constituents become creatively engaged in the process of bridging the gap between raised expectations and actual experience. (Contains 12 references.) (GLR)