Universities and colleges love their strategic plans. Plans beget task lists. Task lists beget work agendas. Work agendas beget Targets. Targets beget Annual Evaluations. And all of it provides a serene sense of control: a belief that we can control the future simply by planning our future work flows.
The thing is, it’s mostly nonsense.
To see why, consider Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously said “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless. But planning is indispensable”. Or boxer Mike Tyson, who once said “everybody’s got a plan… until they get punched in the mouth”.
There are a lot of punches in the mouth lurking out there. What happens when you build your strategic plan on providing teacher training, and then the government changes the funding formula? That’s a punch in the mouth. Build out your law faculty just as the industry shifts and student demand tumbles? Also a punch in the mouth. Give out a 2% faculty raise just before the government decides to impose a 7% cut? You’d better believe that’s a punch in the mouth. And no strategic plan protects you from that.
But if strategic plans are bunk, strategic planning still makes a great deal of sense. As Lawrence Freedman says in his rather excellent Strategy: A History, strategy is about employing whatever resources are available to achieve the best outcome. As resources change, so do strategic options. Hence Eisenhower’s comment about the importance of planning, even in the absence of plans. As situations change, it’s important to think through new ways of getting to the desired objective or – if resources get scarce enough – to entirely redefine the objectives. The best strategies are thus ones that are open-ended. This is why plans – things that attempt to set the future in stone – can sometimes be the antithesis of good strategy, especially in turbulent times.
All you really need to guide an organization is: 1) a sense of where you want to go, 2) some ideas about how to get there, and 3) a set of metrics to know whether you’re getting there. The real problem most universities have is being able to articulate where they want to go. Partly, this is because institutions often describe goals in mindless and nebulous ways (e.g. “we will achieve excellence”). But it’s also partly because many professors have almost no interest in the collective success of a university, seeing it merely as an administrative platform for their own research interests. Colleges, which have a much more inclusive sense of institutional purpose, have an enormous advantage over universities in this respect, which makes their plans and their strategy much more cohesive.
In short: planning is important to keep a sense of direction. But plans? They take up a lot of time and are often out-of-date by the time they are implemented. More of the former and less of the latter, please.
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You left out the worst part of strategic planning: it’s time-consuming and alienating. A plan is either extremely vague, as you point out, or it doesn’t include the vast majority of a diverse faculty. In fact, insofar as it prioritizes something else, it can only be perceived as a threat by most of the faculty.
Let me give an example: If the plan is to increase community engagement, experts on dead cultures or abstract sciences are likely to feel rather marginalized, even rejected by their institutions. Commanded to show how their work meets such a strategic plan, they’re (at best) wasting their time and maybe even having to engage in a demoralizing fight against the institution. And that’s all a distraction from their real work, of curing cancer or translating Persian poetry.
Yyyess. Though I think your examples are pretty good examples of what I was talking about the day before – putting the interests of the discipline before the interests of the university. (not saying one should completely dominate the other, but there has to be give-and-take)
I should make the division elsewhere, not between the disciplines and the university of which they are parts, but between intellectuals and administrators, between those whose work realizes the university’s being and the meddling overhead expenses.
“But if strategic plans are bunk…” They are not. This daily post is an excursion into semantic mischief akin to “devil’s advocacy”, interesting and thought provoking but semantic mishchief, none-the-less. Eiesenhower was smart and used all manner of good management and planning tools, as I understand it, but his statement that “plans are useless…” is not right, as neither is Mike Tyson’s claim.
A plan, by definition, is the result of planning. You can have planning without a plan but not the other way round. The plan, as you would all know and probably better than I may, is the planning process summarised in a concise, easily communicable, and clear fashion. It is essential if planning is to have any merit because it provides the indicators against which the continued relevance and effectiveness of the plan can be evaluated.
Without a plan, there is no continuing reference point against which to assess outcomes. and this shows the flaw in Mike Tyson’s statement. The reality is that *with* a plan, getting punched in the face isn’t necessarily a fight stopping calamity – on the contrary, such a possibility will have been taken into account and a contingency built in. It will lead to a revision of the plan – not a collapse of the venture.
What I’ve mentioned is particularly true of “strategic planning”. If such planning has not taken account of potential threats and diversion, changes coming out of left field, and such – then it is not “strategic” at all and doesn’t deserve such a designation.