A great nineteenth-century expert on strategy, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, credited his success over Napoleon to resiliency.  Bonaparte, he said “planned campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on.”

There’s a twentieth-century equivalent, too.  In the words of the great twentieth-century strategic analyst Mike Tyson, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

The pandemic – and the accompanying financial challenges it brings – is a wallop to the mouth.  As a result, I would hazard that for essentially Tysonian reasons a good number of current institutional or faculty-level strategic plans are, as of today, functionally useless.  And that’s a bit of a problem because absent a longer-term strategy, the round of belt-tightening that is going to happen over the next six months or so is going to be needlessly destructive.

(In case you’re interested in the question of how one can make cuts in post-secondary institutions, and how to do it without compromising on mission, tune in to HESA’s 1 PM EDT Friday webinar. I’ll be talking with Noreen Golfman of Memorial University, whose recently-ended term as provost was, thanks to the Government of Newfoundland’s reliance on the ever-plunging price of crude, focused on this precise issue a lot more than anticipated.)

Most strategic plans in higher education are time consuming to produce but don’t actually change very much.  Most are based – knowingly or not – on some kind of appreciative inquiry mechanism, which is simply to say that the goal of the exercise is to get people to settle on a specific set of stories or themes about what makes an institution good/better and work from there (basically, this gives you the Strengths/Weaknesses part of a traditional SWOT, though with a heck of a lot more on the former than the latter).  This is then matched with an environment scan (Opportunities, Threats) which is much more perfunctory than you would see in other sectors, mainly because i) most institutions aren’t really competing for students is a serious way, ii) they have little ability to set their own prices and precious little leeway to offer a genuinely differentiated product, and iii) most of the their funds – both tuition-related and not – are pretty stable.  So most strategic plans are really about managing incremental change which might make the institution incrementally wealthier – and hence, hopefully more prestigious – than its peers.

What’s changed with the pandemic is primarily the stability piece.  There is an awful lot in flux: not just international student numbers, but federal and provincial funding as well.  Some of this would have been the case anyway; in Alberta and Ontario the whole point of the (now on-hold) performance-based funding was meant to drive institutional strategy precisely by making some sources of income less certain, thus making institutions manage their activities more deliberately.  But the pandemic really supercharges this effect.  And in Ontario and Alberta, performance-based funding will presumably be back.

And so, what all of this means is that plans predicated on stability are now disrupted with some pretty massive instability.  There is space here for radical positive change.  There is also space for potentially significant losses as well.  What institutions need now above all is a sense within institutions of how to manage this change: be conservative and preserve what you have?  Or gamble on some large changes? 

Alberta institutions are already facing these kinds of choices – they had to, given the scale of the provincial cuts that slightly preceded the pandemic.  Take a look at the Town Hall that incoming U of A President Bill Flanagan held earlier this week – there are some quite interesting strategic initiatives being mooted in there (though to be fair a couple of these strategies could really eat in to some neighbouring institutions’ budgets…MacEwan and Athabasca will have watched that talk nervously).  They are, in effect, trying to make their strategies more resilient, just as the Duke of Wellington and Mike Tyson would recommend.

In short order, everyone is going to have to do this.  Not necessarily re-do entire strategies, but at the very least to stress-test existing strategies against higher income volatility and gauge the appetite internally for conservative vs. aggressive strategies to respond to the new situation.  Institutions can either do it explicitly, separately from the budget process.  Or they can just do it implicitly through the kinds of cuts they make.  The former is tiring, sure, (and we’re all tired) but I would argue infinitely preferable as it keeps strategy as a public object, subject to norms of collegiality. 

You know where to find us.