All in the Game

Plus Ça Change

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

Strategic planning is all the rage these days. It's happening at my university and probably at yours, and I thought I had better read up on it. The literature is not exactly reassuring (and I cannot pretend to have gone through 20 percent of it, never mind all of it), and it leaves me with what might appear to be a paradoxical conclusion: Planning is necessary and planning won't work.

This conclusion is intimately related to what is understood to be the object of planning, and that, of course, is change. So we might reformulate the paradox as follows: Change cannot be engineered and change will always occur.

The second part of that formulation explains both why planning won't work and why planning is necessary. Because a university, like any other large organization, is made up of many units, each of which has its own history, traditions, and inner dynamics, in the course of time those dynamics will produce alterations in the system's environment independently of the planned design of anyone or any committee.

That is why, as J.V. Baldridge and E.T. Deal observed more than 20 years ago, "if you leave an organization for a few years and return it will be different," although often the changes will be so subtle and unannounced "that they are noticed only by those who leave for awhile" ("The Basics of Change in Educational Organizations" in The Dynamics of Organizational Change in Education, McCutchan, 1983).

Organizations, Baldridge and Deal explain, "are interlocking subsystems of people, goals, formal roles, technologies, and information systems," and therefore, "when something changes in one subsystem, it creates the need for changes in others." Before you know it (or at least before you have paid analytical attention to it) the system that has been adjusting and responding to unplanned changes in its subsystems has become an entirely different thing.

Of course that different thing may not be what you would have wanted had you thought about it in advance, and that's where the necessity of planning comes in: If you want to have even half a chance (probably the best you can hope for) of ending up where you would like to be, you'd better try to get in front of the changes that will occur when you're not looking; that is, you had better plan.

But plan how? This is where things get really dicey. There are at least two kinds of planning -- long-range and short-range.

Long-range planning is the more glamorous and intellectually respectable because both its vision and its mechanisms are grand -- a university transformed for the better by a process that inventories, analyzes, and assesses every bit of it. The trouble with long-range planning is that it almost never works, in part because the object of your analysis will not stand still and wait for the process to complete itself; in part because the focus on the long range deflects attention and perhaps resources away from the short-term problems that members of the community are experiencing; in part because long-range planning usually has a history in any university -- it has been tried before, and the resulting reports are filed somewhere under "dead letters" -- and the response to this latest effort is a mixture of skepticism and cynicism. Baldridge summarizes the reasons for the disappointment (and disillusionment) that often attends efforts to plan strategically for the long-run future:

(1) The process is so lengthy and complicated that planning loses its meaning; (2) the process becomes more important than the results; and (3) the plan does not make any sense to those who are actually doing the work because it is not linked to daily operations and to the budget. ("Strategic Planning in Higher Education: Does the Emperor Have Any Clothes?," in The Dynamics of Organizational Change in Education).

If you then add to this list the effect of turnover at the highest levels of the administration -- "continuity in the planning process is disrupted by the arrival of new administrators" who "bring with them their own frame of reference" -- you might well come to the conclusion reached by Ralph D. Stacey:

Agents within the system cannot be in control of its long-term future, nor can they install specific frameworks to make it successful, nor can they apply step-by-step analytical reasoning or planning or ideological controls to long-term development. (Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics, Financial Times Management, 1996)

What's left?

What's left is short-term planning: "Agents within the system can only do these things in relation to the short term" (Stacey). That is, a large-scale panoptic vision of change might look good on paper, but it is unlikely to alter very much on the ground, and what it will leave in its wake is not progress but bitterness.

That is what happened in the mid-'60s at the State University of New York at Buffalo, according to Warren Bennis, who was dean of social sciences there at the time. He saw, in retrospect, that the grand design that he and his friends tried to implement was a "classic recipe" for failure as described in an account by Aaron Wildavsky: "Promise a lot; deliver a little. Teach people to believe that they will be much better off but let there be no dramatic improvement. Try a variety of small programs, but ... severely underfunded. Avoid any attempted solution remotely comparable to the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve" ("The Sociology of Institutions, or Who Sank The Yellow Submarine," Psychology Today, 1972).

In hindsight, Bennis recommends an "incremental-reform model," that is, a model of making changes that do make some difference but not all the difference, for if you promise (or, rather, threaten) to make all the difference, many in the organization will interpret what you are doing as an assault on their professional legitimacy.

Incremental reform is, by definition, short-term. Rather than looking forward to a future imagined as the wholesale reverse of present conditions, incremental reform accepts present conditions as the baseline context in relation to which this or that improvement can be achieved in a relatively short time -- if, that is, there is an administrator alert to a need, and resourceful enough to supply it.

What this means in practice is that the chief executive officer, the provost or the president, will concentrate on making what Baldridge terms "jugular-vein decisions," a phrase he borrows from the provost of a large university who explains it thus:

I am more than happy to let my enemies run the long-range planning committees. They are off in the corner running their statistical projections, devising their "mission statements," and making up their master plans. In the meantime, I am doing the unimportant stuff -- at least from their point of view. I am setting the budgets, selecting the key people, and financing the key programs. In the long run I am confident that I will have more influence over this institution's future.

Those decisions, to which Baldridge gives the kinder, gentler name of "medium-range" decisions, are, he says, an appropriate response to the "uncertain future" of most institutions, and in the context of that uncertainty (which he would raise to a principle) the hallmark of successful management is not planning, but flexibility: "We obviously must have plans and we must have planners, but we must match those plans with built-in flexibility that will carry the institutions through when the planners are wrong" ("Strategic Planning in Higher Education").

If planning alone cannot carry the day, and if the exercise of flexibility is a necessary (if insufficient) ingredient of success, then the key to everything is a concept that has not yet been mentioned -- leadership. Not the leadership of the planner (although that will be required, too), but the leadership that is able to perform, and enjoys performing, in a situation where the goals are uncertain and the paths for reaching them only dimly outlined, if at all.

It is in this twilight zone -- somewhere between perfect organization and no organization at all -- that the academic leader can (perhaps) work his or her magic. Were everything organized down to the last detail, the result, say Shona L. Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, would be "gridlock"; but were nothing organized and everything open, the result would be "chaos." The space in between these two extremes is bounded enough to provide some constraint, but not so bounded that it leaves no room for "adaptation." The leader who can operate in that space must always be alert to both the long-range hopes of the enterprise and to its short-term needs, and therefore, they conclude, "the key to effective change is to stay poised on this edge of chaos"(Competing on the Edge, Harvard Business School Press, 1998). "When systems of any kind ... are poised on the edge of chaos between too much structure and too little structure, they 'self-organize' to produce complex adaptive behavior."

The edge of chaos, says Michael G. Fullan, "has both structure and openendedness" (Change Forces: The Sequel, RoutledgeFalmer, 1999).

Of course that will work only if there is someone willing and able to perform adaptively, someone who has developed what Baldridge calls a "response capacity," a term he takes from the vocabulary of military strategy and transfers to the battlefield of higher education.

The administrative leader, like the "successful commander must be quick on his feet, must know when to adapt the original plan to the changing realities, must constantly scan the battlefield environment for the transformation, and must respond rapidly with critical decisions." Constantly "monitoring the environment" for "trends, changes and needs," the administrative leader becomes the master of "contingent and strategic thinking" (Baldridge) and accepts with equanimity the knowledge that "definitive theories of change ... do not and cannot exist" (Fullan).

But he or she cannot do it alone. There must, says Bennis, be a "nucleus of persons who continually read the data provided by the organization ... for clues that it is time to adapt." "One cannot," he insists, "structure these critical nuclei" -- the skill cannot be taught to temperaments alien to it -- "but an organization cannot guarantee continuous self-renewal without them."

In a college or university setting, this "key group of believers is the senior faculty," and without their support and participation, change, Burton Clark tells us, will never stick: "A single leader ... can initiate the change, but the organizational idea will not be expanded over the years and expressed in performance unless ranking and powerful members of the faculty become committed to it and remain committed even after the initiator is gone" ("The Organizational Saga in Higher Education," Administrative Science Quarterly, 1972).

These observations by Baldridge, Bennis, Fullan, and Clark teach us one additional lesson: What is required, in addition to resources, planning, flexibility, and leadership, is luck; for given all the factors that militate against successful change -- a scarcity of resources, frequent administrative turnover, a faculty so captive to its past history that anything new can only be perceived as a threat, leaders who can plan but not adapt, leaders who can adapt but in the absence of prior planning have no idea what they are adapting to or for -- the accomplishment of real and healthy change is little short of a miracle. Let us pray.

Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes a monthly column for the Career Network on campus politics and academic careers.