Long-time readers will know my views about the difference between strategies and strategic plans.  A strategy is a course of action, a set of beliefs about how to succeed.  A plan is, above all else, a list of goals to achieve over a given period.  One does not require the other.  Sometimes plans can change from one edition to the other with no change in actual strategy (though bits of meta-strategy – vision, mission, etc. – get some light editing to make a document look “newer”). 

And that’s fine: goals need updating!  Even if strategies don’t change, the way they are pursued does not necessarily remain the same.  Times change, and therefore so do plans.  This is the perfectly OK reason why most strategic plans don’t actually involve much strategy.  I mean, in a world of perfect honesty, we would just call these “plans,” not “strategic plans,” but that’s a minor point.

Conversely, there are a whole bunch of institutions – mainly in Ontario – which have recently made astoundingly bold strategic decisions without ever bothering to pre-announce them in a strategic plan.  I’m talking about colleges like Northern, Sault, and Cambrian.  All of them, institutions with hundreds of students in Northern Ontario, made a very clear and emphatically strategic decision to become institutions where the vast majority of their student populations are in the GTA.  

You may not agree with those decisions, but you can’t say they aren’t strategic.  And they didn’t come out of a plan.  And that’s fine too!  Strategy is often emergent, and only rarely can be fully planned.  But while strategy doesn’t have to emerge from a planning process, there’s nothing saying it can’t come from come from such a process.  Given that, why does this happen so infrequently?  Why are so few plans strategic, and why does so little new strategy come from plans?

The reason for this is simple.  New strategy is like a new pair of shoes.  New strategy pinches.  When you adopt a new strategy, it means throwing away a part of your identity as an institution to adopt a new one.  It might be a need to offer a new kind of programming to acquire a new kind of student.  It might be a desire to shift away from pursuing regular avenues of research in favour of a plan to focus more on community research needs.  Whatever it is, it’s throwing away a comfortable pair of runners or crocs and slipping into something sleeker, more formal.  A change in strategy, in short, should produce short-term pain.  It should pinch.  It should hurt.  In fact, if it doesn’t hurt, that’s evidence that what is being proposed is not that much of a strategic shift.

But now, here’s the problem.  Universities (and to some degree colleges as well) when acting collectively, display extreme algophobia – that is, fear of pain.  Anyone’s pain.  No one within the institution should feel pain.  Because if someone else in the institution is allowed to feel pain, then one day someone might want me to experience pain.  And that would never do.  Thus, institutions, working collectively, seem to be sufficiently conservative and risk-averse to make significant strategy shifts very difficult. 

So, there is a story here that one could tell: that in universities strategy and planning are actually opposed to one another.  Planning needs to be inclusive and precisely because of inclusion cannot be strategic, while strategy – or at least new strategy – can only come from bold unilateral moves at the top.  And I think there is at least some truth to this story. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Yes, overall, academics are going to be change resistant, and their loyalties to their respective disciplines gives them a systematically different (and usually more utilitarian) view of the university as a whole than people with institution-wide responsibilities.  But I think the real problem is not so much various groups inside the university arguing their own case than it is the episodic nature of planning, the fact that administrations often only ask these groups to take an outward-looking at their changing operating environment once every five years. 

Imagine an institution where instead of planning every five years, there was an annual exercise including (at least) both the Board and Senate which did three things.  First, it would look at medium-to-long-term financial trends, with lots of time to question assumptions, imagine different scenarios, etc.  You wouldn’t necessarily expect people to come to some kind of consensus, but they would at least come away from the session with a sense of different possible scenarios for income from government and students, as well as for staffing costs (which make up about 70% of expenditures). 

Second, it would look at the biggest changes in the demand for and delivery of higher education.  And I don’t just mean that in the sense that institutions would need to look at market competitors (though, seriously, every single public institution in Ontario needs to take a really close look at what Northeastern is doing to the B-school market in Toronto, there is a huge transformation going on in plain sight and very few people seem to have noticed); I think it’s important to have people look at hopeful models of institutional transformation to help people get over the (often justified) fear of change.  And third, it would mean exploring collectively what, given finances and changing environment, directions an institution should consider exploring to thrive.

Spend 1.5 days a year consistently on what amounts to environment scanning and you will have an institution that is strategically competent.  It will have a sense of what kinds of pathways can lead to success and failure.  It will have a sense of its own strengths and limitations, and of its ability to take on new challenges.  It will have a sense of the goals it wants to pursue, and how best to pursue them.  It will, in a word, have a strategy.  And it will know when strategy needs to change to take account of (or advantage of) changes in the external environment.  The actual planning can occur on whatever cycle or schedule is necessary; the point is the institution will have a strategy, and one which is widely understood.

If these prescriptions remind you of something, they should.  They’re pretty close to what I called for when discussing “rapid collegiality” a year or so ago (or again back here).  Strategy and collegiality can and should go together. or at least they should providing “collegiality” is not misconstrued as “consensus” or “unanimity”.  It’s not so much that rapid collegiality is an analgesic which dulls the pain of strategy: think of it more as though the exercise and diet regimen that makes it possible to break through higher levels of pain to achieve greater things.