One of the oddest conventions in strategic planning – in higher education, anyway – is that Strategic Plans should last for five years. I know of no reason why five years is considered a standard length of measurement other than that when Stalin decided to resume planning in 1928 after the “pause” of the New Economic Policy and the defeat of his left-wing opponents Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, he decided to do so in five-year increments. After that, pretty much everyone started doing it: India only gave up five-year planning last year, and while government planning was never really in style in the west, a number of organizations, particularly in the non-profit sector, adopted five years as a standard planning horizon.
(I put out a call on Twitter, to see if anyone actually knew how Stalin landed on five years, as opposed to four or six. There were few useful answers, though “keeping it to the number of digits on one hand” seemed to be the most common assumption. However, I am reliably informed by HESA Towers’ chief expert on Soviet heavy industry, Nadiia Kachynska, that it was two-time Gosplan Chief Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, the chief ideologist of Soviet Planning, who justified five-years because that was roughly how long it took to complete a major infrastructure project and to transition specialists from one economic area to another. So there.)
Now, there aren’t a lot of things in Canadian higher education that are normally considered analogous to Soviet industrial manufacturing, which does make you wonder why “five” is the magic number. But then again, university decision-making does replicate many of the more ponderous aspects of central planning under Actually Existing Socialism, so why not? Perhaps more germanely, five years just seems like a “natural” horizon for planning – it allows serious multi-year plans to come to fruition without making too many unwarranted assumptions about what the world will look like more than a few years down the road. A compromise, basically.
But the way I see it, using five years is a serious mistake, an unfortunate outcome of conflating the process of strategy (which, by its very nature, is long-term) with the process of planning (which is not always but usually short-term). It’s also an unfortunate outcome of the tendency to use strategic plans as day-to-day management tools rather than as back-of-the-envelop guides to action.
The correct hierarchy of strategy and planning in universities, more or less (it may change a bit depending on circumstance), is as follows:
Let’s start with vision/strategy statements. These are basically big discussions about what kind of organization an institution wants to be, what it wants to be known for, and how it thinks it can leverage its own resources to get there faster. Basically, who do we want to be, and how do we achieve that. It is exceedingly rare that the answers to these questions change in a significant way within a five year period. In fact, a better time horizon for vision/strategy documents is probably about every fifteen years. That’s about how often it makes sense to revisit basic principles about what an institution stands for, and how quickly strategic vistas actually change. Institutions should sit down every fifteen years and say to themselves: what do we want to be a generation from now? What are the kinds of changes do we need to earn/execute in order to get there? These are not plans, per se. No one in their right mind plans over a 15-year horizon. What they are, instead, are statements of intention.
Beneath these strategic visions/strategies are plans – that is, an actual list of tasks that move the institution in the direction of the strategic vision/goals. These are very helpful because they provide institutions with multi-year horizons on specific tasks and activity areas. Institutions need to do this periodically because conditions change, and course corrections need to be made given evolving internal and external conditions (e.g. your institution gets hit with a big budget cut or gets a major philanthropic donation or a flood of international students, or whatever). Five years is way too long between these activities. The limit of sensible prognostication about what the future will hold is probably about 36 months, so a series of three-year plans in pursuit of the fifteen-year vision/strategy – possibly more frequent if a major external shock occurs –makes sense. And of course, beneath those three-year plans are a series of one-year task lists, which is what anyone under the level of a Dean or VP should probably be held to for management purposes.
Now you can sort of see why people want to do five-year strategic plans: it’s both because three-year plans are a hassle and because leadership turns over more often than every fifteen years, and each new president wants to leave a mark. So, five is kind of a compromise between those two. The problem is that – for universities at least – five-year plans are usually too short for serious visioning and strategy, and too long for serious planning. Not always, but usually.
The question is, of course, even if everyone believed this – would we be able to move off the five-year standard? It’s become so wide even though it isn’t ideal – like the QWERTY keyboard over the Dvorak keyboard – that it’s not clear a reform movement could ever overcome the inertia that the current regime of five-year plans possess.
Gleb, buddy: you have a lot to answer for.
Tweet this post
I’m not sure about other institutions but at mine five years is the length of an administrative appointment for Assistant/Associate Deans and higher, up to and including the President, so I’ve assumed that we have five year plans so that they can point to something that was measurable or achievable during their time in office.
Three notes about time frames in university and college planning. First, let’s not forget the concept of “production cycle,”which has a formal meaning, and in some cases accounting formulas. Krzhizhanovsky was in practical effect describing a production formula. More specifically, he was describing an industrial production cycle that the Soviets later discovered when Krzhizhanovsky’s plan was actually functioning that two sectors of the economy were in play — heavy industry and agriculture. “To transition specialists from one economic area to another” is an ironic euphemism; the plan required the forced relocation of agricultural workers to the industrial sector, which some might say was a human disaster leading to famine. That, however, is not the point. The point is that different activities may have different cycles, and strategic plans in higher education must recognize that within, if one prefers, 15 years, for example by identifying a cyclical time frame for each element of strategy. Second, universities have long production cycles. Adding a new undergraduate program, for example, has a seven-year cycles to steady state. One year to plan the program and secure internal and external quality assurance approval. One year to put the program in place: faculty, staff, and student recruitment; physical infrastructure; library acquisitions. Four years to “steady state.” If the plan has built-in performance indicators, another year for evaluation: did the program do what the university expected it to do? Diploma programs have shorter cycles. Professional and graduate programs have longer cycles. University planners can and should pay plan around production cycles. It is doable. Strategic plans and budgets should “roll” instead of being set for fixed periods. Third, this, by the way, is confounding for government performance funding schemes that rely and annual performances. Some should be multi-year. Governments should not expect quick results. FYI: Krzhizhanovsky was not the head of GOSPLAN when the first five-year plan was in full operation, and ran into trouble when sectors with different production cycles bumped into one another. There is a lesson there for the construction of plans in post-secondary education.