Higher education institutions often chart a future for their academic, research, and service missions through documents such as strategic plans. Some institutions have several, including an institutional strategic plan, an academic plan, an IT strategic plan, a workforce plan, a financial sustainability plan, and (depending on the institution) additional plans developed through separate processes, timelines, and leadership structures.
The problem is that it’s common for these plans to be developed in isolation, which results in misalignment. And when these plans diverge, institutions pay the price in duplicated effort, competing resource demands, and leadership teams pulling in different directions, sometimes without even realizing it.
Siloed Planning Has Real Costs
Consider a familiar scenario: academic affairs is launching a new program initiative, HR is managing a workforce restructuring effort, and IT is planning a significant application consolidation effort across the institution. Each effort has executive sponsorship, a steering committee, and a roadmap. However, as these initiatives progress, unforeseen conflicts arise and projects are stall. What’s missing is a structured conversation about whether those roadmaps are compatible, and whether the assumptions underlying each plan are the same.
When these questions go unasked, plans quietly undermine each other. Leaders find themselves managing friction instead of driving the mission. And staff (who often see the misalignment before leadership does) experience something that looks and feels like organizational chaos, even when every individual initiative is technically on track.
Strategic Plans are North Stars in Turbulent Times
The current environment makes this harder. Enrollment pressures, federal funding uncertainty, administrative instability, and rapid changes to the financial landscape have forced many institutions into a reactive posture, in which they are adjusting operational plans in response to conditions that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
Operational flexibility is necessary, but it creates a risk: in the effort to stay responsive, institutions lose sight of the longer arc of where they’re going. Operational agility without strategic alignment just means moving faster in different directions.
What institutions need during turbulent periods is not rigid adherence to a plan written in a different environment. Instead, they need a small set of shared “north stars,” or agreed-upon institutional priorities that remain stable even as tactics shift. This requires a shared understanding among leaders about how each domain’s plans relate to those anchors.
Flexibility at the operational level and coherence at the strategic level should not be in tension. In fact, they depend on each other.
Alignment as Practice, Not Document
The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) describes integrated planning not as a specific process or document, but as a philosophy and practice that builds an institution’s capacity to align resources, processes, and people around a shared mission. The goal isn’t a single master plan. It’s creating a culture and structure that keeps planning efforts connected to one another and to institutional priorities.
Most institutions have good plans and capable planners. What they often lack is the connective tissue between planning processes: structured mechanisms for surfacing tensions between domains, aligning on shared priorities, and translating those priorities into coherent resource decisions. Building that connective tissue requires facilitated dialogue across leadership teams that don’t always share a common language, and an external perspective that can name disconnects that are invisible from inside any single domain.
The Right Question
The question most institutions ask about their collection of strategic plans is: “Are these plans good?” The more important question to ask is: “Do these plans work together?”
In a period when institutions are being asked to adapt quickly and make hard choices with constrained resources, the cost of misaligned planning is higher than ever. The institutions that will navigate this period most effectively will be the ones where leaders are aligned on institutional direction and make decisions together accordingly.
This post was authored by Vice President Shannon Dunn, who advises clients on strategic planning, CIO executive leadership, educational and classroom technologies, and initiatives that transform institutional academic and administrative capabilities.
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