Unstrategic planning

I'm back baby! You may or may not have noticed that it's been a while. I've been busy¹. Now back to our regular programming:

An inexperienced and naive version of myself thought that strategic planning was a bunch of bureaucratic hooey. Simply a mechanism to rationalize and validate what they were going to do anyway.

As I learned more about how organizations operate and how effective people lead, I came to see that strategic planning is downright essential, because if you do know where you want to go, then you have to chart out the route to get there².

Then as I gained even more experience with how organizations operate and the challenges of leadership in higher ed, I correctly observed that strategic planning in universities is quite often a bunch of malarkey. Not because strategic planning is unimportant, but the opposite: strategic planning is foundational and essential, but most of the time the plan isn't followed, or gets derailed, or never gets the buy-in or investment.

If a strategic plan is an overambitious vision of what you want, rather than a pragmatic plan of action that is eminently doable and a shared priority among all involved parties, then what you've got there is a bunch of hooey malarkey.

I've seen a lot of 'em. Universities tend to do strategic plans on 5-year time horizons. But often when there is a change of leadership, you get a new 5-year plan while you're only on year 2 of the existing plan. Considering the rate of administrative turnover that has been crushing me over the past couple decades, you can do the math. (And I've been involved in them for a bunch of orgs, and even led some, for what that's worth). My point is, I'm an old hand at this stuff by now.

Why am I droning on about how much strategic planning I've seen? Because I am ever so excited to tell you about a thing I just saw this week that blew my fricking mind. I still am in awe. My higher-ed addled brain was struck agog. I just couldn't fully believe what I was experiencing, it felt so darn unlikely and so pleasing. Imagine a really long hot day outdoors, and then a baby ankylosaurus wearing overalls lumbers up next to you, starts whistling Baby Elephant Walk, and hands you an ice cream sandwich. That's what this otherworldly pleasure felt like.

What was this strategic-planning related miracle I experienced? I saw a suitably ambitious strategic plan that was fulfilled. It genuinely came to life as foretold. It gets even better, I am now working in that very organization that accomplished this feat! I'm tickled, I'm pleased as punch, happy as a damming beaver.

I can hold two conflicting realities that may coexist with one another. The first is that in my own eyes, a fully accomplished strategic plan is a stunning masterpiece of organizational effectiveness. The second is that I realize it is no big deal for this type of thing to occur. I recognize that this is a pedestrian matter and everywhere you go, you find strategic plans that did their full job.

It's just so darn remarkable to me because I've had my head wedged deeply up into higher education for the past three decades. I am guessing in other sectors that effective and accomplished strategic plans might well be the norm! I'm just not used to it as a scientist working in the university setting.

Why is it that universities often fall short in seeing strategic plans through to completion? I think this could be a very long list. The first ones come to mind include a shifting priorities due to a rotating cast of leaders, zero incentive structure or accountability for faculty, the necessary resources were never allocated, there never were people who were responsible for seeing each part of the plan through, prioritizing the chase of philanthropic donors who have different visions, the planning effort itself may be done on the cheap so it's not well baked, or if it's done with highly paid outside consultants they will overestimate the capacity of the university to get stuff done. Because universities are institutions that are highly resistant to change, getting anything to be different is a big lift. I'm just getting warmed up. What do y'all think is going on here?

As a coda, here's more fun for me: Yesterday I was handed a plan for the next five years, still toasty from the printing press. It's my job, in part, to take some of the next steps over the next year or two. It's unspeakably encouraging to realize that the work that I'm doing has a strong change of becoming real. I've spent so many meetings, so many plans, so many wishes, of trying to make things better but it's like pushing a very hard rock that just won't move. Now in my new (albeit temporary) gig, I'll be working on a team that's pushing this rock in the same direction and it'll have momentum and go somewhere. How 'bout that!

¹ I'm generally assuming folks who would be reading this kind of endnote are interested in what I've been up to, and I've been up to so much that it's kind of wild to pack it into such a short time frame, but here I am, just done from being dizzy, so here I'll share. At the start of August, I took a 2.5 week-long vacation, in which I walked the Tour de Mont Blanc (well, some of it, I got sick and had to skip some of the stages, but it was nonetheless all beyond magical), then went to big quadrennial social insect conference in Germany. I went home for just a few days, then moved cross-country to DC to start my new gig as a AAAS Policy Fellow. I had a few days to turn an empty home into an actual home, then dove into 2 weeks of rapid-pace program orientation, and now I'm near the end of my first week actually on the job (in the Office of Risk and Resilience of the USGS). I think the last time I was this disoriented was my first week of grad school, but the learning curve on this situation is a lot shallower (meaning that there is so much to learn, one cannot possibly climb it steeply – have you noticed when people say a learning curve is "steep" that doesn't usually make sense, because if the curve is steep and the x axis is time and the y axis is learning, then a steep curve means you learn a lot in a short period of time. Maybe it's the learning itself is hard, not the slow rate of it? That's what happens, I suppose, when we verbally describe a figure without prescribing the axes.) Anyhow, it's great to be back. All my new experiences have kept me whipping out my phone to add to the list of blog posts that I want to write in the future. Which currently is 29 long, after some trimming.

² Anybody remember those TripTiks from AAA?