Today’s post is co-authored by Alex Usher and Michael Savage
Yesterday’s blog focused on the structure of strategic plans, asking whether they are built from the mission statement backwards or from upwards from a checklist of ideas people had without looking at the overall picture? (answer: for the most part they are built from checklists and hence are not particularly strategic, though they as planning documents they may work perfectly fine). Today we’re going to dig into the substance of plans in a little bit more detail, based on examinations of institutional strategic plans at 39 universities (26 of which are in Canada) and 11 colleges and polytechnics in Canada. Additionally, we examined 40 North American university faculty plans in the fields of Engineering, Law, Medicine and Public Health.
At a structural level, every plan is built around a set of themes – anywhere between two and nine of them (mode= 4, and 9 is actually crazy). Beneath that set of themes are a set of goals: things the institution specifically commits itself to accomplishing over the course of a five-year period. In most cases, strategic plans attach somewhere between three and five goals to each theme.
(As this blog has previously noted, there is absolutely no good reason for strategic plans to be five years long, other than some weird genuflection to Gleb Krzhizhanovsky and all those other fun guys at Gosplan. Yet you would have to look very hard to find plans of any other duration. Guess it must be all those hard-left radicals in senior administration.)
Below the goals are what you might call “tactics” – that is, activities which lead to or support the goals/themes. Not all strategies publish these, since they basically deal with operational minutiae: important to keep track of for the purpose of keeping on track, but institutions who want to use the strategic plan as a public communications document often prefer not to incorporate this information in their strategic plan because it makes for pretty clunky reading. By our count, only about a third of institutions put these operational-level details in their plans for public viewing.
Universities are often thought of as being isomorphic, always pursuing similar aims. And, looking through their strategic plans, you’d find a fair bit of backing for that idea. Because guess what the top three themes are, in terms of popularity?
Are you ready for this? Hold on to something:
1) Teaching and Learning/Student Success (a theme in 66% of plans)
2) Engaging in Community Partnerships (64%)
3) Improved Research Performance (58%)
The plans that fail to include these aims as strategic themes tend to include them as goals or tactics in service of another theme. Thus, when we look beyond the strategic themes, we see that efforts to engage in community partnerships are included in 98% of plans, improved teaching and learning in 96% and improved research performance in 82%.
So, surprise, surprise, Canadian post-secondary institutions want to focus on the incredibly innovative trio of teaching, research and community service. Although when we say “community service,” we should not get carried away with the idea that institutions are actually excited about engaging with the communities in which they are actually located. Remarkably, fewer than half of the institutions which claimed to make “community partnerships” or spoke more broadly of the local community managed not to mention the name of the community in which they were located. This is…not good.
There were another bunch of ideas which occasionally appeared as themes but which more often appeared as goals: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (16% of plans had this as themes, 74% as “goals”), environmental sustainability (22% as themes and 50% as goals) Indigenization (12% and 48%), and “meeting industry needs” or “labour market demands” (10% and 46%). These are all relatively standard parts of the Canadian higher education discourse, of course – nothing surprising about seeing them on this list. But it is interesting to see where they all land in terms of frequency. Maybe the most intriguing set of ideas to be found in institutional plans are around institutional adaptability or resiliency, which shows up as a theme in 28% of plans, and as a goal in another 24%. We’d argue, given the times, that this is probably an under-explored theme for most universities.
If we think of strategic plans as a navigation tool – specifically, as a statement of where an institution wants to go – it is actually quite remarkable how few institutions choose to explain when they think they will have arrived. Only about a quarter of strategic plans include some kind of metrics which indicate when certain goals will have been achieved (more among polytechnics, less among colleges). Now this isn’t totally crazy – not all goals have obvious numerical targets (e.g. “bring graduation rate up to 80%). And so some institutions have plans which don’t include metrics, but if you convert the goals into checklists, another quarter or so of plans can be said to have “measurable outcomes.” But even so, in about half of all institutional plans there is genuinely no way for an outside observer to tell whether the plan has been achieved or not.
Faculty-level plans are a bit different. For one thing, there are a lot fewer fancy words about mission and vision, for the very simple reason that faculties (professional ones anyway) have a greater sense of common purpose. This does not mean that they are less strategic in outlook: in fact, faculty plans tend to be more strategic in the sense that their plans are made of pillars not buckets. In effect, because they have narrower interests, strategic plans tend not to be used as instruments for trading off political interests (which is a very important factor behind the “bucket” style of strategic plan). That doesn’t, however, mean their structure is all that different from institutional-level plans. The top three themes are still research, teaching and either labour market alignment (Engineering) or unspecified community engagement (all other fields), and only half of them provide anything like enough detail to provide metrics for determining whether or not the plan has actually been accomplished.
This isn’t quite a comprehensive look at institutional plans: we’ve still got a few to plough through in Canada, and we’re looking at trying to make some reasonable comparisons to plans in other countries. We expect to put this out as a publication sometime in the next few months: if you have any suggestions for additional things we could look for or compare, we’d love to hear from you.
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Resources (not just cash). What is required to enable the accomplishment of the journey? How many institutions actually identify what will be needed and where the support will come from to get the job done? I have seen very few university strategic plans that actually do this and those tasked with trying to figure out how to achieve the goals are left scrambling. For this, they must move beyond begging the government for more funding. What will they be willing to trade off in committing actual resources on hand to ensure the change comes about?
Thank you for interesting reflections on strategies. It would be interesting to know whether strategies include explicit references to reviews, follow ups or evaluations in addition to measurable goals. Do you think strategies in general actually can make a difference for long term development of institutions? And what is the reason so many strategies fail, are forgotten, or are simply not used (and still university management keep producing these documents)?
I think having a strategy is vital for an institution, otherwise you get to hear, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” and the institution gets left behind in a changing world. While not everything requires change, not everything can remain the same in perpetuity, either.
The main problem with university strategic plans is the lack of buy-in by those who ultimately have to implement them. Some get upset their ideas were not chosen, or simply don’t like change because they’re comfortable doing what they’re doing the way they’re doing it.
The biggest resource I see that is vital to success is people’s time. If people don’t have the time, change won’t happen. While it’s not unique to the academic world, though they seem to be particularly good at it, often the people who have the ideas and vision don’t want to be bothered with the minutia and administrivia required to achieve the vision; these things take time and a clear understand of how things work. The big question about that time is where does it come from? Will it be volunteer time as part of academic service by faculty? Will it be additional work added to current staff? Does the institution put funding into an office or person to oversee and manage the changes? Will faculty get course relief to apply their time to the strategic plan? That’s where the need for good planning comes in.
All that leads to theories of change. Once you know where you want to be at some point in the future (i.e. 5 years out), you need to work backwards step-by-step to figure out what needs to be done to get there. Working backwards from a goal tends to allow for a more direct route to success than working forwards constantly sorting through forks in the road. This will need to include milestones/metrics so that you know you’re on your way to the right place.
This can’t be done by one person. Not only do you need the “visionary” with the ideas (or with the ability to synthesise a collection of ideas), you need people who know how the institution works and how to make the changes happen. These two (often) different types of people then need to figure out how to work with each other, and again that takes time and effort. However, if they work well together, and have the backing of those with the resources, then the change can come about.
The problem I have seen with strategic plans in Higher Ed is that they are done in a bubble. You have a one-time committee formed that is paired with an external consultant that do some stakeholder engagement and generate some sort of document or framework with some pillars or buckets of things that sound good. The hope is that individual decision makers within the institution will intrinsically follow. There is either very little thought given to how that plan aligns with things like organizational structure, business systems, etc. or very little follow through on aligning such items with the strategy to actual make it happen. The plan is really just a first step and the one-time committee and/or consultant have no real power to enforce the changes required for subsequent steps to happen.
The upside of buckets is that they partially overcome the fascination with the new. Nobody ever seems to have a strategy to continue reading old books, maintaining the study of the natural and human world, and just generally following curiosity. A pillar approach seems to threaten pushing aside everything we love about universities in favour of whatever is new and shiny.