Guessing Your Strategic Plan

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to try something. I'm going to guess what's in your strategic plan. And I mean your specific institution's plan. The one that took 18 months in a steering committee and probably a consultant to produce. Let's start with student success. Listed first, of course, because we want people to know we care about what matters most. Then student belonging and wellness. We care about that too. There is probably some kind of nod to underserved groups. And if your institution is writing the plan right now, you have probably developed a new secret code to avoid saying diversity, equity, and inclusion out loud. There's definitely something about underperforming academic programs, but vague enough so nobody feels personally targeted. Online learning, we're going to grow it. Graduate programs, grow those too. Employee belonging and well-being, because we cannot forget the people who work there. Partnerships, community engagement, and advancement are probably smooshed together into one priority, because nobody could agree on which one mattered more, and we were trying to save space. Technology, we are definitely upgrading something. And bonus points for dropping AI in there somewhere, because you know everybody's talking about it. How did I do? I've asked this question publicly before, and 78% of people said I basically nailed it. Which means your strategic plan, the document your institution spent enormous time and money producing, probably looks a lot like the strategic plan at almost every other institution in the country. And that should bother us. Because if every plan looks the same, it is not a strategy. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it literally defies the definition of strategy. We will get into that in a minute, but today I want to talk about why this has happened to strategy in higher education, why it keeps happening, and what it is actually costing us.

When Problems Become A Process

SPEAKER_00 2:25

What is the story being told about our colleges and universities right now? Enrollment is declining, programs are being cut, staff are being laid off, tuition revenue is shrinking, public trust is eroding. And here is the part I want us to sit with for a second. I don't think most of us are ignoring this. People are talking about it, leaders are having the meetings, cabinets are reviewing the numbers, boards are asking harder questions, faculty and staff can feel the pressure in very real ways. So this is not a situation where higher education is refusing to look at reality. But what do we actually do after we see it? I believe that what often happens is that we turn the problem into a process, and that in itself is a problem. On the surface, the process sounds responsible. We want input, we want alignment, we want the right people in the room, we want to make sure the institution is not just reacting. That all sounds reasonable. But somewhere along the way the process becomes the response. Our institutions start to feel like they are moving because the process is moving. There are meetings on the calendar, there are drafts circulating, there are updates going to leadership, there is language being refined and refined again. And slowly, without anyone meaning for it to happen, the urgency of the original problem gets absorbed into the rhythm of the institution. I think we have to be honest about that. We are very good at deliberation, at consultation. We're very patient when it comes to building consensus. And those are not bad things, but they are not the same thing as strategy. And when the environment is moving quickly, we can mistake the movement of the process for movement on the problem. That is how we end up with campuses that are very busy and still not moving fast enough. That is how we end up with people who are exhausted from meeting about the future while the future keeps arriving without them. Now listen, I am not saying anyone is sitting in a room saying, let's wait five years before we do anything. But we are sitting in a room saying things like, we need a broader framework. We need to align this with the next planning cycle. We should wait until the new president is in place. This needs to be part of the larger institutional strategy. I'm not arguing that alignment is bad, or that leadership transitions do not matter, or that institutions should just run around making disconnected decisions because the market is moving. But while we are getting ourselves ready to respond, the conditions around us keep changing. Enrollment does not wait for alignment. Revenue does not wait for a planning cycle. Students do not pause their decisions while we figure out how to organize the conversation. And competitors, whether they are other colleges, employers, creators, AI platforms, or alternative learning providers, are not waiting for our next town hall. By the time the strategic planning cycle finally arrives, we have often already spent months, sometimes years, trying to get ready to respond to conditions that have continued changing the entire time. And when that moment comes, we reach for the familiar, we bring in the facilitator, we launch the listening tour, we hold the town halls, we collect the stakeholder input. We spend 18 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars producing a document with an inspiring photo on the cover, definitely students, probably outside studying, and a title that includes the word bold or success or excellence or transformation. And then a few years later we look up and realize that the document may have named the crisis, but it did not actually change the conditions that created it. Now I know that may sound harsh, because a lot of sincere work goes into these documents. People care about them. We give real time to them. We sit in conference rooms and Zoom meetings and working groups trying to do right by the institution. I am not dismissing that. But caring about the future and making strategic choices about the future are not the same thing. That is where I think we get stuck. The strategic planning process gives us the feeling that the future has been addressed. The process feels rigorous because it is long. It feels legitimate because everyone was consulted. It feels strategic because the document is polished and comprehensive and endorsed by leadership. And I understand why we keep doing it. Familiar processes feel safe. Consensus feels responsible. If everyone else in higher education is doing strategic planning this way, surely there must be a reason.

Why The Plan Is A Lie

SPEAKER_00 6:57

But I just cannot be delicate about this anymore. I want to make an argument today that almost nobody in this industry will say out loud. The strategic plan is not just ineffective, it is a lie. And the lie is right there in the name. We call it a strategic plan, but most of the time it's not really strategic, and it's not really a plan. Let me break those apart. A real strategy forces choices, hard, specific, consequential choices about where an institution is going to compete and how it is going to win. It says yes to some things and no to everything else. Our strategic plan often does the opposite. It says yes to almost everything, and it offends almost no one, and it calls that an institutional direction. And a real plan is resourced, sequenced, and accountable. Someone owns it, something gets cut to fund it. There are timelines and consequences. What we often produce instead is a beautifully organized list of institutional hopes, goals without resources, priorities without trade-offs, timelines nobody is really held to. And we have been calling that strategy for decades. Now to be clear, I am not arguing that planning itself is useless. Budgets matter, operational plans matter, execution matters. The trap is what happens when we substitute planning for strategy. Roger Martin has this essay called The Big Lie of Strategic Planning. And I remember reading it and thinking, well, this is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Because his point is pretty simple. Planning feels safe because it deals with things we control. Our budget, our staffing, our operations, the projects we can put on a timeline and manage. Strategy is harder because strategy is about making choices in a world we do not control. It is about where to play and how to win when the market does not belong to us. And that is where higher education gets uncomfortable. Because we are very good at managing the things we control. We can build the committee. We can draft the priorities. We can revise the language. But the market is not controlled by our document. Families are making decisions about value. Students are comparing options. Employers are changing expectations. Alternative providers are building pathways. AI is changing how people access knowledge. Public trust is moving in ways we cannot manage through a steering committee. Henry Mintzberg makes a related point, but I think he says it more plainly. Planning is analysis. It breaks things down into manageable parts. Strategy is synthesis. It connects disparate realities into a coherent way forward. In plain English, planning is what happens when we organize the work we already know how to do. Strategy is what happens when we have to decide what we are going to become in a world that is not organized around our comfort.

Planning Soothes Anxiety, Not Markets

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Here is what I think is actually happening underneath all of this. Facing an unpredictable market creates real anxiety. And the strategic planning process relieves that anxiety. It produces a document long enough to feel comprehensive, structured enough to feel rigorous, and endorsed by enough stakeholders to feel legitimate. It feels like something got decided. But what may have actually happened is that we spent 18 months doing something we could control, gathering input, building consensus, writing priorities, in order to avoid doing the thing we could not fully control. Making hard choices about how to compete in a market that does not care about our process. And that distinction matters because the strategic planning process is obedient. It accepts whatever we put into it. We can write any priority, set any aspiration, make any ambition sound official. The document will hold it without complaint. It won't push back and say the timeline is unrealistic, or tell us the resources do not match the ambition. It won't call us out for trying to do 22 things because we do not want to upset folks by only choosing three. But the market will. It will keep sending fewer students, fewer dollars, and fewer reasons for people to choose us, regardless of what the plan says.

How To Spot Bad Strategy

SPEAKER_00 11:05

So how do we spot bad strategy? Richard Rumelt gives us a useful framework. He says bad strategy usually has a few telltale signs. Failure to face the real challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, weak strategic objectives, and fluff. I think we suffer under all of those. Our strategic plans fail to boldly and clearly name the real challenge because we're afraid the plan won't feel hopeful and inspiring. We mistake goals for strategy. Ask your leaders what your strategy is. They'll name the strategic goals. Weak strategic objectives that don't name what you're supposed to accomplish. By when? And fluff. I want to get on my soapbox and spend a minute on fluff. Because higher education has its own very specific version of it. In the corporate world, the examples are obvious. Synergistic, innovative, customer centric. We hear those words and immediately recognize the performance. But higher education is trickier, because the words we use are not meaningless, they are things we actually believe in. But what's problematic is when things that are actually values get promoted to strategy. Let me show you what I mean, innovation. Every institution says it is innovative, but innovative how exactly? Compared to whom? For which students, in which market. Innovation started as a meaningful call to do something genuinely new, and then it got repeated so many times in so many strategic plans by so many institutions that it became ambient noise. When everyone is innovative, nobody is. And more importantly, when innovation becomes a strategic priority, it gives us permission to launch almost anything new and call it strategy. The way we proclaim innovation or innovative doesn't require trade-offs or specificity. It doesn't actually require us to stop doing anything. It just requires adding more and more, the complete opposite of being strategic. Student success is another one. And I want to be careful here because student success genuinely matters. It started as a meaningful framework, specific interventions with measurable outcomes and real accountability for whether students were progressing, completing degrees, and building stable futures. But over time it stopped being a practice and became a declaration. Now it appears in every strategic plan, every mission statement, every accreditation document in higher education. And because it appears everywhere, it commits us to almost nothing. Saying student success is your strategic priority is like a hospital saying its priority is patient health. Of course it is. That is not a strategy. That is a defense against the accusation that you do not care. And one of the most damaging consequences is that we can point to the phrase itself as evidence of commitment, while avoiding much harder conversations about which students are actually succeeding, which students are not, and what structural decisions are producing those outcomes. Belonging works the same way. Belonging as a practice matters enormously. Creating environments where students from every background can actually show up and succeed is real work. But belonging as a strategic priority has already started drifting toward meaninglessness. Because it increasingly appears in plans without staking a claim of what belonging means at your college or university, and why it specifically means that at your institution and not the next one, and why it matters over this, that, and the other thing that you could be focused on, but you've chosen not to, because belonging matters more. We don't need empty signals that you care. We need to know how it's a strategy and not just a value. Here's why things like innovation, student success, and belonging need to be under the weight of strategy and not just values. Because once a word moves into the values realm, it becomes untouchable. We cannot question an initiative tied to belonging. We cannot challenge a project framed around student success. We cannot push back on something labeled innovation. Those are our values. And when those words are values and not strategy, you create an environment where it's politically tenuous for people to question them. Is it safe for people to question the student success initiative that you put on a silver platter? Can people question whether what you call an innovation is actually innovative? If those are strategy, you openly welcome and create space for those conversations. That is exactly what Rumelt is pointing to. Not that those words are hollow, but that hollow usage protects bad strategy from ever being challenged.

Why Saying No Feels Impossible

SPEAKER_00 15:40

This is where Michael Porter's definition becomes so uncomfortable for higher education. Porter famously said that strategy is choosing what not to do. And that sounds simple until you try to do it inside a college or university. Saying no in higher education is not just operational. How is higher education different from the corporate sector? Because saying no in higher education is emotional, political, and cultural. When we cut or consolidate a program, we are not simply reallocating resources. We are telling people that something they have devoted their careers to may no longer be central to the institution's future. That feels like an identity threat. And identity threats create a kind of resistance that most strategic planning processes are not designed to absorb. So instead of choosing, we add. We add the new initiative without removing the old one. We fund the new priority without defunding the previous one. We stack goals on top of goals until the plan becomes a catalog of aspirations rather than a set of choices. And I know that can look like ambition from the outside. Look at all these priorities. Look at all this activity. Look at all this institutional commitment. But at some point, 10 or 15 or 22 priorities is not ambition anymore. It is a way to avoid choosing. We get to pretend we are pursuing everything when we're actually committing to nothing. The resources do not stretch to cover 22 priorities. Everyone knows this. And the plan gets written anyway. The plan secures buy-in today by promising outcomes that will not be measured until later. And later in higher education has a way of never quite arriving. Because by the time year three comes, there is often a new president, or a new provost, or a new strategic planning cycle already underway. Nobody answers for the gap between what was promised and what actually happened. And in higher education, the accountability mechanisms are slow enough that this cycle can continue for decades. Boards want to believe the institution is fine. Accreditors review institutions infrequently. Shared governance structures can make rapid course correction very difficult. So the projection gets recycled. The projections, the language, the priorities all get recycled, while the underlying conditions can worsen. And that is why I think we need to stop pretending this is merely an execution problem. The strategic plan does not persist because it works. It persists because it serves a psychological and political purpose that has very little to do with strategy. It manages institutional anxiety. So what would real strategy actually look like?

What Real Strategy Looks Like

SPEAKER_00 18:18

The answer is uncomfortable because it is much simpler than the process we have built around it. First, force the strategy onto one page, not as a summary of a longer document, as the actual strategy. Because if the strategy cannot fit on one page, it is probably not a strategy. And I know some of you are probably thinking, come on, our institution is too complex for one page. I get that instinct. But that is exactly why the discipline matters. The one page strategy forces the conversation we usually avoid. What are we actually doing? What are we actually not doing? Who are we serving? Where are we competing? What will we stop funding because it no longer fits? Those answers should not require all of those pages. If they do, the thinking is not done yet. Second, replace goals with decision rules. This is a big one. Instead of 22 aspirational priorities, establish a small number of criteria that govern actual institutional decisions. Does this serve the student population we specifically committed to? Does meaningful demand exist for this in our market? Can we resource this without undermining something already working? If the answer is no, the initiative does not move forward. That is the difference between goals and decision rules. Goals live beautifully in documents. Decision rules show up in meetings where money, people, and power are actually being allocated. Third, make the budget the strategy. This is the simplest and most honest test available. Look at where the money actually went. That is your real strategy. The budget is the only strategic artifact that requires actual trade-offs. And finally, stop treating strategy as a cycle. The five-year strategic plan institutionalizes the exact behavior it claims to solve, the tendency to defer difficult choices into the future. Real strategy is not a ritual we perform every five years. It is a practice embedded into ongoing institutional decision making. Who are we serving? Where are we competing? What are we choosing not to do? Those are continuous questions, and maybe that is the hardest part of all this. I actually understand why we do it. I understand why we cling to the process, why we want the retreat and the steering committee and the listening tour and the beautifully designed document. Because uncertainty is frightening, especially in institutions filled with people who care deeply about what they have built. The strategic plan creates the feeling that the future has been organized into something manageable, something discussable, something that can reassure everyone that leadership has a direction. But while we are busy producing consensus, the world outside keeps moving. Students, technology, employer expectations, competition, they are all changing. But we mistake the comfort of the strategic planning ritual for the presence of a strategy. And I think somewhere deep down, many of us already know the difference. You know when an institution is making hard choices. You can see when a leader is actually willing to define what the institution will and will not become. You can feel when something real is happening. We deserve better than performance. We deserve strategy, and we can do better at it. If this episode made you disagree or question my assumptions, I'm glad. Because that is precisely what strategy should do. Thank you for listening to this episode. I'm looking forward to looking beyond the Ivory Tower with you again.