VET & TAFE
More decision making, not goal setting
Universities need to think about the future in a more constructive manner, writes Lenore Cooper.
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An interesting point.
Other prominent failures in strategic thinking are newspapers, and many have argued in these pages and elsewhere that universities will be as relevant as newspapers printed on dead trees unless they deal with what they argue to be the main existential challenge to campuses of online learning.
Lenore is right – it is time to move beyond the tick the box approach to strategic planning. The formulaic produces plans that mean almost nothing to most people inside or outside a university. In my time in universities, I’ve been guilty of writing many a formulaic plan, but I’ve seen the light!
The ability to respond quickly to strategic challenges demand not only a new planning process, but also a new thinking process – the ability to recognise both what needs to be ‘unlearned’ and to keep an open mind rather than relying on your interior worldview to assess strategic options and possibilities.
How we see the world and how we make meaning of it, including what we understand universities to be and how they should operate, will have to change if our universities are to be agile enough to first recognise a strategic challenge that matters when they see it, and two, move beyond accepted behaviours, processes and status quo thinking. This doesn’t mean losing sight of the core of fundamental values about education, learning and research, but it does mean letting go of some of our ways of thinking about how a university operates and how decisions are made.
This sort of shift in thinking will challenge planners and all others who ‘do’ strategy in universities, because it means changing the way things are done, both in their heads and in the organisational strategy conversation – and that’s painful.
Being open to the new and the possible, and unlearning what is no longer working and letting go of it, are two skills not displayed that often in the strategic processes of many universities today, but they are two skills that will characterise successful universities in the future.
Maree Conway
Thinking Futures