Here are a couple of quick thoughts on institutional strategic plans and how they tend to fall into two big categories.

Most institutions typically prefer plans that are about control.  That is, they want the plans to focus people’s agendas within an organization on a few key goals.  Sometimes these plans take the form of task-lists; other times they are focussed on a few institution-wide goals, complete with metrics (not surprisingly, these are the kinds of plans that the big consulting companies are more temperamentally-inclined to provide).  There is nothing wrong with these types of plans – they are the right plan for many situations.  The problem is when people think this is the only type of plan or misunderstand when this kind of plan is needed.

This kind of planning has its origins in highly regimented mid-century large American corporations (have a gander at Henry Mintzberg’s Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning for more).  And these kinds of plans work if and only if the organization is a) in a period of relative stability and b) the organization is tightly coupled and typically has direct, top-down co-ordination of activities.  The first of these is sometimes the case in higher education, the latter almost never.  

One thing to recognize about this kind of planning is that precisely because it is meant to take place in conditions of relative tranquility (or at least lack of paradigmatic change), they never represent a change in actual strategy.  It takes for granted that all that mission/vision/ values stuff stays the same from the previous plan; all that needs to be updated are the tasks and goals.  To put it more bluntly: these are indeed plans, but they are not really strategic.  Again, there are many times and places where this approach makes sense: just not always.  

The other type of plan is something which is in fact much more focused on institutional culture and behavior.  It is what you might call a “visioning” (Mintzberg uses the term “left-brain”) type of activities, focused much more on extracting, synthesizing, and codifying strategic behavior already present within the organization combined with consensus building around new visions and goals.   Most institutions don’t need to re-do their strategy all that frequently and so they don’t always need this kind of approach.  That said, because large institutions in particular are extremely loosely coupled and different parts of those institutions frequently have very little to do with one another, these visioning exercises (they aren’t actually plans) often act as a kind of stand-in for corporate team-building.

Now here’s the thing: in fact, institutions usually need only one or the other of these two types of activities: planning exercises which largely eschew vision and strategy or strategy/vision exercises which largely eschew plans.  But the problem is that for some reason, nearly everyone is stuck on the idea that every university or college plan is supposed to do both these things at once; that is, make plans that are both visionary *and* designed to control. 

Why is that a problem?  Well, it is because the kind of work that goes into each of these two kinds of planning are quite different from one another.  The control-type plans are essentially works of analysis; that is, looking at data, scrutinizing work-plans, developing monitoring systems and KPIs, etc.  More visionary plans tend to be works of synthesis, requiring a lot of groups participation and listening, weaving together and crafting of viewpoints and narratives, etc.  It’s not impossible to run these two sets of activities sequentially (vision first, then control), but trying to do them simultaneously is very difficult and can lead to muddled results.

In a sense, all of this is really an extended meditation on the well-worn adage that “strategic planning” is actually an oxymoron: you can strategize or you can plan, but to a significant degree the two are actually in conflict.  New control plans might be required periodically, but new visionary strategies are usually only required when the internal or external environment changes in a big way.  Institutions could save themselves a lot of time and energy if they were a little bit more thoughtful about understanding what kind of outcome they need before starting out on the journey.