Strategy, Part 2: From Plans to Winning Moves

Why strategy disappears inside higher education institutions and what system-level moves actually look like.

This is Part 3 in a series on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. Part 1 establishes the distinction between strategy and planning. Part 2 argues that strategic thinking requires outside thought partnership. This piece goes deeper into the specific mechanisms through which strategy disappears inside institutions and what the alternative looks like in practice.

Understanding the difference between strategy and planning is necessary. It is not sufficient. The harder problem is that even leaders who understand the distinction clearly find that strategy keeps disappearing inside their institutions; absorbed into planning artifacts, diffused across functional units, and replaced by language that sounds directional without actually being so.

This is a common structural feature of how higher education organizations process strategic intent. Understanding why it happens is the precondition for doing anything about it.

Higher education is highly hierarchical and deeply segmented by function. That structure shapes how strategy is discussed, how plans are produced, and ultimately how institutions perform. Strategic language without hard differentiators or trade-offs is common in higher education and produces plans that are not easily internalized or actionable. Any serious conversation about strategy has to contend with these realities directly.

Why Strategy Disappears Inside Plans and Pillars

In higher education, strategy is typically translated into planning artifacts rather than clearly articulated directional choices that faculty and staff can understand and act on.

Sometimes this takes the form of functional plans: research and compliance, education, finance, IT, HR, and engagement each produce their own roadmaps. Other times it appears as high-level strategic pillars - five to seven aspirational themes intended to encompass everything the institution values.

Both approaches share the same underlying problem: they describe connection to values, not direction.

Institutions do not succeed or fail by function, and they do not move forward because they endorse universally agreeable ideas. They win or lose based on a focused number of system-level moves that change how the organization operates over time.

Future advantage rarely emerges from optimizing a single unit or naming broad commitments in isolation. It comes from choices that shape the system. Specifically, how quickly the institution recognizes and acts on opportunity, where friction between units is deliberately reduced or allowed to persist, how decisions move, stall, or escalate across authority boundaries.

When strategy is expressed as siloed plans or abstract pillars, the result is alignment theater rather than direction. At best, the organization achieves coordination. What it does not achieve is a shared understanding of what must change now, what trade-offs are being made, and what better looks like in three to five years.

Strategy that cannot be remembered cannot be executed. Ask how many people in your organization can name a single element of the plan, explain why it matters, and describe how their daily decisions should change because of it.

Strategic Planning vs. Strategic Capacity

Strategic planning is typically organized around coordination. It asks what each unit should work on, which initiatives fit within existing structures, and how to align activities and tactics to stated goals or pillars. These are not trivial questions, but they are fundamentally managerial rather than strategic. They assume the current organizational shape, decision pathways, and capacity constraints are largely fixed and functional.

Strategy is concerned with position and leverage. It asks what moves would meaningfully change the institution's trajectory, where structural constraints are limiting progress and what the downstream effects of those constraints are, and which capabilities, if strengthened, would amplify everything else the organization does.

The moves that matter most in research organizations are rarely contained within a single unit or initiative. They typically involve system-level changes: rewiring handoffs across functional boundaries, redesigning approval and decision pathways, investing in operational capacity that enables faster and higher-quality execution.

These kinds of moves are difficult to express and even harder to advance through unit-level plans or annual planning cycles. They cut across authority lines, disrupt established workflows, and challenge long-standing assumptions about how work gets done.

Institutions that rely primarily on strategic planning as an exercise tend to become anchored to prior commitments. Time, effort, and political capital invested in existing plans make it harder to adapt when conditions shift. What was intended to create clarity can instead reduce flexibility and limit maneuverability precisely when responsiveness matters most. 

The Undervaluation of Operations and People

One of the most consequential strategic blind spots in higher education is the persistent undervaluation of operations and people as strategic assets.

High-functioning operations are routinely treated as necessary but not strategic - a cost to be managed rather than a capability to be built, a support function rather than an outcome amplifier. This framing obscures a straightforward reality: operations and people determine whether strategy is executable at all.

Operational capacity directly shapes speed to opportunity and responsiveness to new funding or partnerships, researcher trust and willingness to pursue complex work, compliance exposure and risk tolerance, and staff sustainability, retention, and institutional memory.

Yet operations are rarely positioned as a lever for competitive or positional advantage. They are expected to absorb increasing complexity without commensurate investment or authority. The result is not efficiency; it is fragility. The events of the past year in federal research funding have made that fragility visible in ways that were entirely predictable to anyone paying attention to operational signals rather than prestige metrics.

When operational systems are weak or overstretched, even well-conceived strategic intentions stall. Strategy becomes aspirational rather than actionable, constrained not by vision but by capacity. This is the connection between the thought partnership argument in the previous piece and the execution argument in this one: a leader who cannot see the operational reality of their institution cannot make honest strategic choices about it.

Prestige Metrics as a Strategic Distraction

Compounding the operational blind spot is an over-reliance on prestige-oriented metrics as proxies for strategic success: H-indices and citation counts, total research dollars, portfolio size as a signal of strength.

These measures are easy to track and internally validating. They are also poor inputs for strategic decision-making. Prestige metrics reveal little about the resilience of the research enterprise, the sustainability of growth, or the institution's ability to absorb policy, funding, or workforce shocks.

Sponsors, partners, and policymakers are more influenced by execution reliability, compliance confidence, and institutional readiness than by abstract indicators of scale or reputation. When prestige metrics dominate internal strategic conversations, the organization optimizes what is visible and reportable rather than what determines future capacity and adaptability.

The practical implication: institutions navigating a volatile environment by prestige metrics are flying with incomplete instruments. The dashboard looks fine while the underlying conditions deteriorate. A later piece in this series examines in detail what prestige metrics actively conceal, and what a more useful set of signals would track instead.

What Putting Strategy into Practice Actually Looks Like

For research leaders, practicing strategy in today's environment requires deliberate shifts in how decisions are made, measured, and resourced. Four specific shifts matter most.

From unit plans to cross-cutting moves: instead of asking each unit to produce a strategy, identify a small number of moves that require coordination across units and materially improve execution. These are the moves that actually change the system.

From long-range plans to rolling priorities and pilots: use shorter planning horizons with clear decision points. Let evidence, not calendars, drive adjustments. An initiative that is not working in six months should be re-directable without that redirection being treated as a failure.

From prestige indicators to operational signals: track metrics that reflect execution quality: proposal cycle times, rework and error rates, staff workload and retention, researcher experience. These are leading indicators of whether the institution can execute on anything at all.

From static structures to adaptive capacity: invest in systems, processes, and people that make change easier over time. Adaptive capacity is not a byproduct of good intentions. It is a deliberate investment.

Strategy as a Discipline, Not a Document

When strategy is practiced well, it does not live in a plan. It shows up in how trade-offs are made, how resources are allocated, and how quickly the organization can respond without chaos.

In practice, strategy is less about documents and more about resilience. It is visible in how organizations absorb shocks, coordinate across units, and maintain direction when circumstances change, often in ways no strategic plan could have anticipated. This is what it means for everyone in the organization to understand the assignment: not to know the pillars, but to understand why the current bets are the right ones and what their work contributes to them.

Case Study: Navigating a Shifting Higher Education Landscape

Higher education is facing converging pressures: declining public trust, enrollment shifts, new federal classifications limiting loan access in certain professional degrees, and immigration policies affecting international students. In response, many institutions are making reactive, defensive moves.

Common reactive responses include:

• Cutting low-enrollment or categorically labeled low-value programs
• Doubling down on marketing campaigns
• Expanding remote and online learning options
• Launching standalone AI degrees or concentrations 

Individually, some of these may be defensible. Taken together and pursued without a clear view of future advantage, they risk trading long-term position for short-term optics.

Why These Moves May Undermine Future Advantage

Elimination vs. Repurposing. Programs that appear outdated or under-enrolled often contain valuable assets: faculty expertise, curricular building blocks, industry relationships, and experiential components. Strategic pruning may be necessary, but indiscriminate elimination forecloses the possibility of recombination, reinvention, or integration into new offerings. Strategy sometimes requires deciding what to transform, not only what to remove. It also requires the honesty to let go when something is genuinely not working.

Marketing Cannot Substitute for Value Creation. The problem facing higher education is not a shortage of offerings. It is growing skepticism about value. Better marketing will not resolve that. Value must be demonstrable in outcomes, experience, relevance, and demonstrable public benefit. Marketing can amplify value. It cannot manufacture it.

Remote Learning as Default vs. Differentiation. Expanding remote learning is often framed as a growth strategy, but in a crowded and commoditized digital environment it frequently reduces differentiation. As AI becomes ubiquitous and digital content easier to replicate, in-person, applied, and experiential learning may become more valuable, not less. Strategy requires deciding where physical presence and human interaction create advantage and where they do not.

AI as an Amplifier, Not a Standalone Product. The rush to create AI-specific programs reflects imitation, not positioning. Without strong disciplinary foundations and real-world context, AI education risks producing shallow credentials. The more durable move is to embed AI as an amplifier of expertise - integrating it into curricula to strengthen judgment, application, and critical thinking rather than treating it as a self-contained offering unless you have experts that truly provide something different.

Why This Is Strategy and Not Planning

What distinguishes these choices as strategic is not the actions themselves but the trade-offs and bets they imply. Are you betting that scale matters more than differentiation? Are you prioritizing speed to market or depth of experience? Are you optimizing for short-term enrollment stability or long-term institutional relevance?

Answering those questions openly and aligning actions accordingly is what turns reaction into strategy. Make deliberate bets based on what is likely to create future advantage, not simply what seems urgent. Consider trade-offs across programs, experiences, and investments rather than isolated cost-cutting or promotional measures. Treat experiential learning and operational excellence as differentiators in a landscape where AI and remote options cannot replicate human engagement.

Further Reading
How Big Things Get Done  |  Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, 2023
The data-grounded account of why large initiatives fail and what the ones that succeed have in common. Flyvbjerg's argument that system-level execution discipline matters more than top-level vision is directly relevant to the cross-cutting moves argument in this piece.

The Black Swan  |  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007
Taleb's framework for thinking about rare, high-impact events and the institutional overconfidence that leaves organizations unprepared for them. Particularly useful for understanding why prestige metrics provide false security in volatile environments.

Career Advice from the AI Frontier  |  Avital Balwit, Digitalist Papers, 2025
A rigorous and unsentimental account of what AI is actually changing about the value of knowledge work and credentials. Directly relevant to the AI as amplifier argument in the case study section, and to the broader question of how research-intensive institutions should be positioning their educational offerings.