Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is a useful (if lengthy) book if for whatever reason you are thinking about going into a strategic planning process.  It traces the history of the concept of strategy through its initial application in the military, then through politics, and eventually – post World War II – into the world of business.  Along the way it continually asks the question “what is strategy, anyway”, before eventually landing on a definition which is basically around leveraging strengths to obtain a goal with the minimum effort.

This is not a bad definition, but in practical terms I prefer a more prosaic metaphor: the easiest way to think of strategy is as a voyage.  You select a destination and figure out the best way to get there, given various obstacles.  Environmental scanning in this metaphor becomes a scouting exercises: what are the obstacles?  Are there ways around them?  What are the pros and cons of these various short-cuts/diversions?

Now for private sector entities, this is a pretty clear-cut exercise.  You identify what it is that from expanding or being more profitable – perhaps lack of talent or capital, or access to foreign markets – you come up with a variety of possible solutions to these problems, evaluate how well each will work for your company and move ahead.  The solutions won’t always be the same: depending on the industry, or prevailing economic conditions, or specific corporate cultures, what is right in one situation is not going to be right in another.  The point is to identify a destination and the obstacles thereto, come up with some reasonable courses to get to the destination and then come up with some rules of action that everyone in the organization can understand to guide decision-making at the local level so that everyone can contribute to the execution of the strategy. 

This, to put it mildly, is not how strategic planning works in higher education.

One reason for this is that universities are too loosely-coupled to either have an objective which can be described as common to all its parts.  But I argue that’s not actually the most important reason.  Rather, the more important reason is that there is an unspoken commitment against naming any obstacles, because all must forever be sunshine and light.  Which in turn makes the development of strategy very awkward.

It’s not that universities are irretrievably Panglossian or incapable of naming the problems they face.  Rather, it is the nature of the document itself that is the issue.  Corporations, generally speaking, don’t publish their strategic plans for the world to see: they are internal documents. As such, they can be honest about the nature of the obstacles and challenges facing the organization.  Contrast this to most university strategic plans, which are not only public but also usually considered a major opportunity to communicate with government and philanthropists.  If you’re going to appeal to those groups, you can’t go around talking about obstacles, you have to keep things nice and sunny and optimistic (plus, very often universities’ main obstacles include some combination of “government isn’t giving us enough money” or “our major donors are very hard to please”, or “we don’t seem to be very good at certain things”, sentiments which are difficult to say out loud given the audience).

Basically: imagine that you are Bilbo Baggins.  You’re off to the Lonely Mountain to help Thorin Oakenshield and his band of stout, bearded and embittered exiles to regain their treasure, and you must plan a successful journey but under no circumstances are you or anyone else in the party to discuss the various obstacles on the way, such as goblins, wargs, giant spiders or the bloody great fire-breathing dragon hidden in the heart of the mountain.  Talk about the treasure, sure, and talk about the equipment needed to get there, but Don’t Mention the Monsters.  Basically, what you get is a list of tasks/goals without any sense of why these particular one were chosen over others and how they contribute to an overall objective.   It’s just “let’s do stuff!” without any sense of direction.

There are a couple of ways of dealing with this problem.  The simplest way is to engage in what might be called “shadow planning”.  That is to say, you start the process the way a company would: with a clear focus on what the real problems are.  Interim drafts are unstinting in explaining what the problems are, and in linking specific solutions to problems and building a strategy around those.  Then, as you get closer to the final draft, anything that seems negative sort of gets peeled away.  This ensures that the plan is coherent, but still permits the use of the final document as a public relations vehicle.

I’ve gone through a few exercises like this, and it kind of works, sometimes.  The knotty problem here is that for it to be effective, a lot of people must read and really absorb what is being said about the monsters to overcome, so that they understand why the final set of pillars and tasks look the way they do in the final copy.  The problem is that not a lot of people read draft strategic plans.  And unless that happens, even if the plan is more coherent, it will still be the case to most people the final text seems divorced from the Monsters problem. 

There is another, more radical solution.  And that is to stop creating strategic plans, because maybe the trouble outweighs the benefits.  Channel Dwight Eisenhower, who is credited with the saying: “plans are worthless, but planning is everything”.  Plans often don’t survive contact with reality (as anyone who released a plan in the 18 months before COVID most surely knows).  But planning: constantly planning, evaluating threats and working out, iteratively, how to overcome them: that is invariably good. 

Maybe the right approach to strategic planning isn’t some big set-piece thing you do every five years.  Maybe it’s something that a few members of Board, Senate and administration do together on a monthly basis, providing updates to the community.  Removed from the requirement to produce a showy public document, maybe the documents which emerge from planning exercises can be more honest.  In turn, this might increase the share of an institution which takes planning seriously.

Possibly this is too big a step for institutions.  Possibly, the cult of Gleb Krzhizhanovsky and the five-year plan with its associated propaganda documents is simply too strong to break, and the shadow planning I described earlier is the best we can do   But it would be really interesting if some institution were to try it sometime.  I think it’s a worthwhile alternative approach.