Located only a few hundred kilometers away from one another along the St. Lawrence, l’Université Laval and l’Université de Montréal are the province’s two biggest and most research-intensive French-language institutions. Both released new strategic plans in the past year or two. Université de Montréal’s plan runs from 2022-2032 and Université de Laval’s was released this past fall and runs from 2023-2028. Bound to some extent by similar political, economic, and social conditions, you might expect the two institutions to have similar types of styles and objectives. You would, however, be wrong. In fact, these two institutional plans are an interesting case study in just how different strategic planning exercises and their resulting outcomes can really be.

L’Université de Montréal doesn’t tiptoe around what it wants to be. It sets out a strategy to be the most influential French-language university in the world. This is, in a word, awesome. It might just be the most ambitious goal statement of any university in the country right now – or maybe ever (the University of Toronto had an informal goal of “world domination” under David Naylor but to my knowledge, this was never written down anywhere).  Memo to everyone: more of this, please!

U de M’s plan has 3 pillars: Dare to Change, Live our Pluralism, and Unite our Efforts, and three “objectives” (they could equally be called “strategies”), namely: to be an adaptable institution, to provide students with meaningful education, and to play a part in solving great societal problems. Think of this as a matrix. Each interaction of a pillar and an objective generates a “strategy” (though they could equally be called “goals”). In theory that gives you nine strategies, though a tenth was shoehorned in presumably to make it an even ten.  

It seems clear from the text that as far as U de M is concerned, the influence it seeks can only be generated by affecting change on areas of social import, be it through research or the production of graduates equipped to effect meaningful change. The obvious indicators are reflected, the plan tells us, by how much the media turns to the university for answers, and how many of its researchers are at the centre of prominent debates and moving discussions of social importance forward.  This is in addition to a more traditional set of metrics such as how many U de M researchers are leading important discoveries, and even how much the university is able to garner support from donors towards its projects.

But what is truly remarkable about the plan—apart from its overall goal—is that first pillar, “Dare to Change.” It’s pretty rare to see and institution recognize that internal resistance to change is a key barrier to achieving greatness and that an audacious turn is required. The tendency towards stasis

is pretty common at universities; for the most part they are siloed conglomerates where individual units are less inclined than you would hope with respect to internal collaboration or sacrificing much for the greater good. For the most part, that’s just considered “the nature of the beast.” To set a goal of actually changing that is pretty unique—and developments at U de M over the next few years are worth watching.

U de M’s plan is what you might call “top-down.” It sets some ambitious goals and largely leaves aside the details of how it intends to achieve its ten strategies (though it is possible that there is more detail in operational plans that are not available to the public). Laval’s plan, on the other hand, is almost the exact inverse of this. It covers some similar terrain (the end goals are still described in terms of social and community change) but it’s very “small ball” in terms of what it sets out as goals.  It is organized around six “chantiers” (which literally means “building site” but is probably best rendered as “works in progress”): lifelong learning, “knowledge, science and society,” a vibrant campus, “personalized services,” climate action and community well-being. Each of these has a team associated with it, led by one of the vice-rectors (or, in the case of community well-being, the rector herself).

Of the six chantiers, four of them are extremely internally focussed. Only the first two—one of which is about starting to focus on a new learning market and the other about research—can be said to be externally focussed: the remainder are basically a laundry list of ways to make the university better for students, faculty, and staff (the one on “personalized services,” which quite clearly includes services for staff, trying to alleviate administrative burdens, seems interesting and worth following). One could call this a “platform” strategy: it does not set big ambitious goals but seeks to create the support that will allow the community, especially faculty, to be ambitious. Less generously, this is simply an agenda for senior administrators to work on over the next five years rather than an act of collective goal setting.

(One question that springs to mind here is what effect Laval’s system of elected rectorships has on strategic planning. Does it make rectors more likely to prioritize internal, service-oriented maters? Do strategic plans spring to some extent from successful rectors’ election manifestos? If so, does that give the plan a degree of “pre-approval” from the community?)

Both plans claim to be ambitious and audacious, but they clearly appeal to different institutional cultures and people. At the risk of oversimplifying: U de M plan is about setting an audacious collective goal and explaining how everyone at the institution will benefit from it, while Laval’s eschews specific goals but simply says “here are six areas we think we need to work on in order to show our worth.” But to some extent, the difference between these two plans is the difference between strategy (U de M) and planning (Laval). One sets the direction of travel, the other tries to make the voyage faster/more efficient/more comfortable/whatever. Two institutions in similar circumstances can have very legitimate reasons for choosing to prioritize one type of strategic plan over another: and these two contrasting plans are maybe the best example of this truth that we’ve ever seen.