A key thing about strategic planning exercises in higher education is that they are pretty much the only time when universities and colleges engage widely with stakeholders – students, faculty, staff, alumni and (hopefully) key external community leaders. Strictly speaking, one doesn’t need to do this kind of consultation – in theory a President could lock themselves in a room with a few trusted colleagues, order beer and pizza and knock out a half-decent plan over the course of a weekend. But, you want a lot of engagement at the start so that people within the organization feel heard and thus more likely to buy-in to the resulting strategy.
(An aside: the relationship between consultation and planning is largely unique to non-profit organizations. Generally speaking, for-profits tend not to consult as widely, and nor do political parties, governments. But the bottom-up team-building aspects of public engagement do not always sit easily with the top-down direction implied by strategic plans. It’s an uneasy relationship).
The question for those planning public engagement is: what should you ask, to whom, and in what format?
Typically, institutions tend to focus on two formats: in-person group consultations (which, if they are very big, tend to be called “town halls”), and electronically-delivered surveys. The former provides richer data but are expensive in terms of the use of everyone’s time, regardless if whether you do these in-person or via Zoom. The latter are cheaper in terms of delivery and can provide fine data if you keep the questions open-ended and don’t force people into reductive multiple-choice situations, but you lose the interplay or cross-talk between individuals that makes the in-person stuff so rich (though it goes against some of the kumbaya ethos of public engagement, some of the most productive engagement sessions are those which involve strong but measured disagreement).
What gets asked in these sessions is a matter of taste. One approach is basically to build up from concrete preferences with respect to project priorities: ask people what they most want to see done, and then group these asks thematically into something that looks like a strategy. This is very much a “bucket” approach to strategic planning (see our distinction between “buckets” and “pillars” back here). If that doesn’t sound very strategic, you’d be right. But when you’re trying to engage people in the institution, it’s a lot easier to get them to talk about concrete priorities than it is about abstract measures like strategic visioning. If the point is to get people to see themselves in the specific objective and priorities of the final product, this is the easier way to go.
Getting people to provide feedback of genuine value to high-level strategy is tough. You can ask questions about strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats, but that’s a bit boring (and with good environmental scanning, the value of crowdsourcing the opportunities/threats piece is usually limited). One thing we do is mix questions about strengths/weaknesses with questions which get at how individuals express the culture of the institution (this helps to understand the institutional saga, which is important in crafting a narrative that people can believe in). So, ask less about what an institution’s strengths are and more what makes people proud to work there. Or – better – ask them moments when they thought the institution was at its best. At one institution we worked at recently, it became clear through this question that staff’s clearest moments of pride were related to moments when it had had enough money to build a new building. That certainly moved infrastructure up the list of potential priorities.
Of particular importance is the need to hear from key external stakeholders. A trait of effective institutions is constant outward looking to see where they can partner, add value and innovate. A process which focuses too much on internal consultations risks missing some key opportunities (though, in fairness, if the organization is in a serious mess, a more internal focus is probably warranted). Which external stakeholders? Well, one question I like to ask key internal stakeholders at the outset of a strategy/positioning to help identify key audiences is simply to ask: “if your organization disappeared tomorrow who would care”? The answers are usually pretty revealing.
One challenge in engaging employees internally on higher-level strategy questions is that it requires you to do two rounds of public consultations – one to help develop high-level themes and then a second to get more concrete suggestions on how to put the themes into action. That’s a challenge partly because it creates consultation fatigue, but also because it lengthens the timeline for planning. In my experience, most clients want a tidy 6-month process; a two-stage process likely puts you at least into an 8-month process, unless the team interpreting stakeholder feedback can turn things around incredibly quickly.
Or – and this is something I’ve been meaning to try for awhile – you could try running the consultations on high-level strategy and the consultations on more specific initiatives side-by-side. That is, use in-person meetings to talk high-level vision/mission/values as well as strengths/weaknesses and saga, and simultaneously use a series of very short quick surveys (a bit like those employee “pulse” surveys, only without the long time-series data) to test some specific propositions/policies about ways forward. This might seem like putting the cart before the horse – after all, how can one ask about specific propositions without pre-judging where the higher-level consultation might lead? But I think that’s a manageable risk: regardless of where the high-level strategy leads, there are likely some specific practical improvements that are going to need to be taken anyway.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of dozen sets of really specific questions about priorities for implementation (e.g. approaches to supporting research, or community engagement, or international recruitment), each of which have a better than 50% chance of being included regardless of which kinds of high-level strategies get chosen. And you wouldn’t need to ask all stakeholders to engage with each of these questions: individuals could opt-in to each of these individual “specialist” discussions. That way, the “interested public” for specific issues within the institution could provide much more feedback and detail on the areas that interest them, rather than having to be content with limited high-level feedback.
Anyways, this is perhaps more detail than any of you really wanted on the public engagement side of strat planning. But getting the public engagement equation right is key to developing the kind of stakeholder support that can make strategic plans truly transformative. As you might imagine (given our company’s name) it is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, trying to get it right. Better me than you, I guess.
Have a good weekend.
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A few years ago I reviewed all of the strategic plans for “internationalization” (whatever that is) at all of Canada’s universities in the medical/doctoral and comprehensive groups used by Macleans. The results were uninspiring to say the least. In many cases there was no strategy in sight, virtually no one set goals against which performance could be assessed, and I think I saw one university that actually reported data relevant to KPIs. But apparently we are all going to educate our students as “global citizens” who are happy to pose for photos with people of colour in exotic locations while they are digging wells or building schools. Almost all institutions prioritized recruitment and retention of international students, but generally failed to say why this was strategically important – presumably because the reasons were either embarrassingly self-serving (we want the money) or could not be achieved (we want to create a multi-cultural campus environment even though Canadian students shun international students). International research partnerships are apparently a GOOD THING, although no one could say why. A few of the big medical/doctoral universities were refreshingly honest about the need to be part of the elite club of top-ranking global universities, and this was really the only strategic thinking that was evident.
What was notably lacking from these plans was any evidence of internal or external consultation with stakeholders. How do faculty feel about teaching students for whom English is a second language – and what support would help them teach in an EAL environment? Do Canadian students want an international experience as part of their degree program, what should it look like, and how much should it cost? What kind of international research partnerships enhance research productivity and how can we create/support more of them? Failure to ask such questions is likely the reason that most of the internationalization plans at Canadian universities look very similar and have very little impact.
> Generally speaking, for-profits tend not to consult as widely, and nor do political parties, governments.
Surely this isn’t true. They spend millions on market research, polling, surveying, focus groups, A/B tests, social media monitoring, etc. The difference here isn’t that one group ‘consults’ and that the other doesn’t, it’s that one group can’t spend the sort of money and use the advanced methods that the other can.
One of the most impressive approaches was taken by RMIT – see https://next.rmit.edu.au/
They engaged with stakeholders world-wide to create a directions paper and then have both an open process for input as well as seeking specific input from stakeholders and community members using a variety of channels. Throughout, a strong commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion in all that they have done. Well worth a look.
Stephen