(This blog post is a version of a talk I gave at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting a couple of weeks ago at Western University.)

A couple of weeks ago, I made the case for the importance of institutional differentiation as a form of—or prerequisite to—strategy. Basically: an institution with a distinctive mission has a direction, a North Star by which to guide institutional actions, which makes strategic policy a whole lot easier.

Famously, though, management theorist Peter Drucker once said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What he meant by this was that mere plans—ideas and goals developed by a few people at the top of an organization—cannot on their own change the identity of an institution, which is about shared, lived values. Differentiation, to a considerable degree, is about institutional culture and identity, and culture/identity is harder to change than strategy.

So here’s the question: can strategy change culture? Well, it’s tough, but it’s not impossible. It’s not really about strategies per se, either: the issue is whether or not the process of strategy-making can be done in such a way that actually changes or affects institutional culture. I think the answer is yes, but doing so requires a real change in the way strategy gets made and used.

Here’s problem number one with strategic plans in Canadian universities: with few exceptions, they are meant to cover a period of four to seven years, with a mode of five. That’s the wrong length for two reasons. Planning—that is, making up lists of essential tasks—over five years is bananas. Five years ago, the first case of COVID hadn’t happened yet. Anything on a to-do list for that month has been overtaken by events several times since then. And yet strategy—the setting and achieving of broad, meaningful goals—can’t emerge on anything like a five-year scale. A truly differentiated strategy in an academic setting takes at least ten years to make sense, and fifteen is better. Any shorter than that and you’re ruling out any meaningful change at the level of academic programming, which is why so many strategic plans leave academics out altogether.

So why, you may ask, do institutions and faculties insist on five-year plans? Simple: Boards of Governors and administrators have a tendency to think of strategic plans as prioritization and accountability tools for Presidents/Deans, who happen to have terms of five years. Now accountability is good, obviously, but the implicit choice that gets made here is that strategic plans end up being more to-do lists for individual leaders rather than about the grander aims of the institution as a whole. Fixing this means above all changing Board views about the purpose of strategy.

(NB: Board terms tend not to be all that long either. Getting Board members to agree on strategy that extends well beyond their own terms might be an even bigger challenge).

It is striking to me the extent to which the best institutions around the world have strategic plans of ten years or more. Johns Hopkins in the United States, The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Asia, the Technical University of Munich in Europe—all of them have set out some very long-term goals and use shorter term planning exercises to get smaller tasks done. It is probably not a coincidence that Université de Montréal, which as I noted before has Canada’s most ambitious strategic plan, is also working on a 10-year strategic plan. It is only with these longer time scales that serious problems can be addressed.

But while longer time horizons for strategic plans is probably a necessary condition for changing culture, it is not a sufficient one. The method of adopting a strategic plan almost certainly matters as well. One of the most interesting examples of strategic planning is that of Duke University, which according to informed observers like William C. Kirby (who I interviewed back here) really owes its move from a regional to a national university due to its superior ability to design and execute strategic plans.

Two things stand out to me about Duke’s planning style. The first is that the President has a specific hypothecated stream of revenues which can be used to fund strategic priorities (central admin skims the returns on investment from funds deposited centrally by individual units—and to be fair this strategy is a lot more interesting when your endowment is in the eleven figures). The second is that planning is an extremely lengthy process. It’s not just that the plans are of indefinite length (though in practice 15 years seems to be about what they shoot for); on average, a new plan takes about four years to develop from initial concept to development of actual initiatives; and it stays in place until the next plan comes into place.

This at least in theory provides a lot more opportunity for the community to become involved in planning exercises of one kind or another. Once the university comes up with some major themes, it takes anything up to four years to really come up with significant details. This entails broad cross-campus involvement in planning. And it means in effect that conversations about the university’s future shape and direction are ongoing for many years at a time—long enough to start to affect the culture.

There is a saying—possibly apocryphal—attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” This is meant to convey that plans’ actual details are immaterial, because the future is basically unknowable, and contact with the enemy—with reality—always intervene and causes chaos. At the same time, though, the act of planning—of scanning the horizon, of looking at probably outcomes and working out what kinds of activities maximizes the chances of success regardless of the circumstances (or working out what specific activities work in differing circumstances) improves an organization’s ability to respond to setbacks and still head towards the ultimate goal. I don’t know how well Duke in practice exemplifies the “Eisenhower Way,” but giving yourself this long to plan, and involving lots of people across the campus in these discussions gives you the option to do this in a way that is virtually impossible when spending 6-8 months developing a five-year plan.

In short: strategic planning is one way to change institutional culture to the point where institutional differentiation sets in. It’s not quick, but then nothing about changing the culture of an institution ever is. But it requires institutions to take a longer view on strategy than they currently tend to.