From plan to action: even the best laid strategic plans can go awry. Here, from the trenches, some sound advice about how to turn the vision into reality

University Business, July, 2004 by Matt Villano

University of California at Santa Cruz Chancellor Martin Chemers speaks frankly about the strategic plan that didn't happen. Right up until Last fall, says Chemers, he and a crew of his vice chancellors were embroiled in the formulation of a major strategic plan that they had already spent two years developing. Then, in November, the school received word that incoming governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would be stashing funding to the University of California system in an attempt to defray the state's $28 billion debt. Where Chemers and his team thought they were on the brink of realizing long-range goats that had been painstakingly plotted, they suddenly found themselves in crisis mode. Chemers admits that the first casualty of battle turned out to be the school's incipient strategic plan.

Today, as the planning document sits on a shelf behind his desk, the chancellor notes that he's busy merging 23 different campus business centers into one--a Herculean task even with the most dazzling of strategic plans in tow. And he's attacking the challenge on the fly. Strategy, as he puts it, "has been thrown out the window," in favor of survival.

NOTHING CAN GO WRONG ... GO WRONG ...

Of course, the sudden yanking of funds by budget-slashing political newcomers is not the only ill that can befall a well-intended strategic planning process. Sometimes, the process hums along quite nicely for years, only to be permanently stalled by lack of an action plan, faculty pushback, or other gremlins. At Ithaca College (NY), Shelley Semmler, VP for Institutional Advancement, admits that after a perfectly satisfactory and productive strategic planning process, she and her colleagues initially struggled with how to use the plan, noting they had trouble incorporating it into everyday decisions. And at Wesleyan University (CT), Vice President Peter Patton reveals that his challenge turned out to be changing the culture among administrators and getting them to accept a new approach to just about every aspect of campus life. Even at Purdue University (IN), Director of Strategic Planning and Assessment Rabindra Mukerjea admits to "strategic disconnects"--instances in which reality simply fell short of the goals laid out in the school's strategic plan.

HOW DO YOU ATTACK THE CHALLENGE?

Certainly, laying out goals is the first order of any solid strategic plan. And unless that initial task is handled well, administrators can run into no end of roadblocks later. Some schools aim for realistic goals from the get-go; others look outside the box and then seek ways to make dreams reality.

First, think big. At Wartburg College (IA), for instance, President Jack Ohle says the only things that had hindered planning at his institution were the limits of imagination. So, after previous planning experiences left him frustrated by stakeholder shortsightedness, Ohle told committee members that they were "not permitted" to discuss whether their recommendations were financially feasible. In this way, says Ohle, he could motivate committee members to "think big," and eliminate the caps on their imaginations. The no-holds-barred approach is a central tenet of constituent-based planning, says 0hle--a process in which the needs and desires of all constituents are stirred into the pot before a planning document can emerge. That kind of up-front planning can not only forestall problems down the road, he maintains, it can mean the difference between a good strategic plan and a great one.

Connect the dots. At Wesleyan University, the goal was not just to think out of the box, but to effectively connect any number of plan components and then secure faculty and staff buy-in to ensure that overarching goals were met. When Doug Bennett came on board as president in 1995, he assessed the university's larger challenges and then encouraged officials to investigate how Wesleyan matched up against other liberal arts institutions of similar size. School officials soon discovered that Wesleyan was losing top-quality students to competitors. With Patton's help, Bennett devised a multi-pronged strategy that would incorporate internal benchmarking to improve student services, revamp financial assistance packages to include more grants and fewer loans, and move student-to-faculty ratios to 9-to-1 from almost double that ratio. The strategic planning team then spent almost 18 months rounding up faculty support. In 1997, a scant two years after planning lift-off, school officials presented board members with the "Strategy for Wesleyan," a document that incorporated all of the measures into an overarching, seven-year plan. According to Patton, the plan (strategy.wesleyan.edu) has changed everything, and much of the success was due to the careful integration of the plan's many facets, and the scrupulous up-front analysis of overarching goats.

"It's safe to say that this school has come of age largely because of the measures we proposed as critical to our strategic development," says Patton. "I'm not so sure Wesleyan would be what it is today without sitting down and asking ourselves where we wanted to be at this point."