Why better conversations matter more than perfect plans in Higher Education

From 10-year visions to responsive strategy

We’ve been noticing something interesting with a number of the universities we work with. A decade ago, there was a flurry of ambitious 10-year strategies – grand visions for 2025 and beyond.

Now, as those plans reach their expiry date, many institutions are thinking differently.

We’re seeing a shift to shorter horizons and 5-year strategies. It’s all about 2030.

Not because longer-term thinking has lost its value, but because the world feels more unpredictable, and the pace of change makes the idea of focusing 10-years ahead seem fanciful.

It isn’t just our observation: across sectors, research shows that traditional strategic plans often struggle when things are unpredictable and that organisations benefit when they build agility and adaptability into their planning process.

I commented to one senior leader that the HE landscape will look very different in ten years. They replied plainly: “Ten years? More like three.”

It’s a shift in horizon that says a lot about how we are all having to think. There’s a broader realisation: institutions still need direction, priorities, and alignment, but the ability to respond, adapt and learn may matter more than a fixed plan.

The fallacy of the plan

It’s a recognition, perhaps, of the lesson Covid should have taught us: that you can’t plan for every eventuality, and that the real value of planning isn’t the plan itself, it’s how it prepares your organisation to respond when the unexpected happens.

Strategic plans that looked solid in 2019, for example, were tested by lockdowns, budget shortfalls, and rapid shifts in teaching and research delivery.

The truth is that plans rarely work out exactly the way you expect, even small things can take you off course. Traditional planning models are less effective when the future can’t be reliably predicted.

That’s the problem. You make plans with limited information – unavoidably. And then hold them in too high esteem.

This is the heart of what we’ve come to think of as the fallacy of the plan.

Plans themselves are fragile. At best, they offer temporary guidance.

But the act of planning -the conversations it creates, the shared understanding it builds, the skills it develops – is where the real value lies.

In the current state of the world, universities need systems and plans that can bend, or even break but recover.

Planning vs the plan

In many universities annual operational planning has a three year focus, with plans slowly adapting year by year. The processes are often highly structured and tied to committee cycles which makes it slow. The only place all those plans are lined up next to each other is in committee meetings, so only a small number of senior people tend to see the whole picture – and only that small number of people are well equipped to respond to changing circumstances.

When it‘s all about the process, that’s a missed opportunity.

Planning is an opportunity to build shared understanding, surface assumptions, and align people around a context – not just priorities. When shared understanding is critical to enabling people to act with clarity and confidence, conversations are not just about sharing data, they’re about co-constructing meaning.

So how might planning cycles be designed in ways that equip people to respond well?

A different approach

We recently supported a university client that tried something different. Instead of issuing a top-down strategy and asking each faculty or school to “align”, they experimented with a lighter, OKR-style approach:

• Senior leaders set a few high-level objectives and a small number of things they thought might matter.
• The wider leadership group explored what those objectives could mean for their areas, together.
• Then they took these conversations back to their teams to develop local plans that aligned to the overall direction and integrated with other team’s activities.

The goal wasn’t to control outcomes but to clear the noise so people could focus on what really mattered, and creating spaces where people could see how they fitted in with other parts of the organisation.

What was particularly interesting: members of the leadership group shared perspectives they might never have voiced in more formal settings.

The result was encouraging. Teams at all levels had a better understanding of the context, saw where their work fitted into the bigger picture, and felt heard. There were fewer priorities, and more clarity.

People were better equipped to respond well when the unexpected inevitably happens.

Leading in uncertainty

Responding to change, and navigating uncertainty requires skills and behaviours that are often undervalued: listening, reflection, empathy, and hardest of all, a willingness to make tough choices about what to prioritise and what to pause.

These skills don’t develop automatically, they need deliberate space, to be practised and supported.

Teams need room to understand the wider context, explore how their work aligns with institutional strategy, and have honest conversations about what to stop or redirect when priorities shift. Building shared understanding and trust across teams, faculties and directorates matters more than a static, long‑term plan ever could.

These are the capabilities that make universities responsive, resilient, and aligned.

When control replaces conversation

At a recent HELP Group session a mixed group of academics and professional services peers working in different roles and levels from several universities reflected on the tension between centrally imposed strategies and local (faculty level) needs. Much of that tension came from a feeling of being controlled and dictated to, without reference to local nuance.

There was a desire for a less directive approach: As one group put it: “Just give us a topline strategy we can align to.”

They were craving something closer to an OKR approach – clear direction and the freedom to respond as seems fitting.

For example: rather than try to increase undergraduate income by overselling the most popular courses (without telling the department that can’t accommodate the extra students or cover the additional marking), just ask them to focus on increasing the surplus. That might be solved by developing new courses, looking at post graduate opportunities, reviewing use of space, spinning something out or any number of ways that might make sense locally.

It seems quite subtle but the difference in agency is huge: “let us find the solution that works for us rather than dictate a solution without talking to us.”

Not every part of a university necessarily needs to respond in the same way to align with a high level goal. Telling people how to do something may not be the best way to innovate.

Two workshops, two outcomes

We observed this firsthand at workshops for three different organisations all focused on setting priorities for the year ahead.

Two were deemed a success. In those cases, senior teams spent a day together exploring context, interrogating strategy, challenging each other AND getting to know each other a bit better. It was all about exploring ideas and options, not refining or focusing.

In the third workshop, despite great conversations, which were exhilarating and motivating, the leadership team was impatient to reach a conclusion. In reality, they already knew what they wanted, they just wanted everyone else to get there too. My concern was that we had inadvertently facilitated something performative, that might lead to resentment and frustration in the team: exactly the kind of tension described in the HELP group.

The two successful workshops were great because they focused on understanding context, difference, building trust and appreciation for each other. Less about defining a plan and more about establishing the conditions, connections and relationships that support adaptability.

If you make a plan that can’t adapt and refocus, that’s a risk. If you don’t have the skills and networks to make that easier, that’s something to work on.

As leaders and managers you need to be encouraging and enabling people to plan and plan and plan and abandon those plans, if necessary, on a heartbeat.

A final reflection

I’m reminded of a family summer trip to Iceland (highly recommended). Part of the single ring road that runs around the whole island had been swept away by a flood. We worried we’d be stuck and unable to continue our plans. The hotel told us to keep checking the updates as it would probably be okay.

It actually was. We drove over the ruined stretch of road a couple of days later.

That ring road was littered with the remnants of giant concrete bridges – edifices of strength and power swept away by glacial melts and earthquakes.

Yes, the current road is fragile and easily destroyed: it’s just a thin layer of tarmac on top of a narrow embankment built from the broken, dust-like material around it.

Precisely because of that it can be repaired quickly and easily. Endlessly adaptive and renewable.

Plans don’t need to be rigid and permanent. They need to be adaptable and flexible.

That road’s fragility doesn’t mean failure. It means resilience.

Taking Action: What You Can Do Now as a Leader in HE

As we start a new calendar year, here are some practical ideas you could use to build adaptability and shared leadership in your institution:

• Keep planning, but hold the plan lightly.

  Treat it as a temporary guide, not a script. Have a plan B, or C.

• Create spaces for contextual conversations.

  Build in regular time for collective reflection and strategic discussions in your leadership teams – at school level, faculty level and university level. If you only talk about operational concerns you may be missing an opportunity. Learning will flow in all directions.

• Focus on fewer, clearer priorities.

  Propose a narrow beam rather than a wide beam. Make it clear what matters most – and what doesn’t.

• Develop adaptive leadership skills.

  Support your teams to develop skills that help them be more comfortable with changing circumstances. Agile project management, project review points, retrospectives, critical thinking, supportive challenge. Think experiments, with opportunities that are “good enough for now, safe enough to try.”

• Be willing to stop or redirect.

  Recognise when initiatives no longer fit your strategy, and give people permission to change direction when reality demands it.

Because this year, like every year, won’t follow the plan. And we all need to be okay with that.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.