Strategy, Part 1: Strategy Cannot Be Done Alone

Why Thought Partnership Is Not a Luxury in Higher Education Right Now

This is Part 2 in a series on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. Strategy vs. Strategic Planning: Why Winning Requires Deliberate Choice establishes the distinction between strategy and planning that this piece builds on. The pieces that follow work through what practicing strategy actually looks like in research-intensive institutions.

Strategy has become the word of the moment in higher education. It appears in job postings, leadership retreats, board presentations, and consulting proposals.

Everyone is talking about it. Far fewer institutions are actually doing it.

That gap is not primarily a knowledge problem. Most research leaders understand, at least in the abstract, that strategy is about deliberate choice under uncertainty and that planning is about coordinating execution once the choices are made. The distinction is not obscure. What is genuinely hard is doing the strategic work; the slow, honest, disquieting thinking that has to precede any of it, while simultaneously managing the operational weight of leading a complex institution in a volatile environment.

This is the problem that rarely gets named directly: strategy, practiced well, cannot be done alone. Not because leaders lack the intelligence or commitment to do it, but because the conditions required for genuine strategic thinking are almost structurally unavailable to the people responsible for it.

What Strategic Thinking Actually Requires

Genuine strategic thinking requires three things that are in chronic short supply for research leaders in higher education right now.

The first is cognitive slack, the mental bandwidth to step back from the immediate and think about the system rather than the next problem in the queue. This is not a time management issue, but rather a capacity issue. Leaders who are absorbing the full operational weight of their institutions, representing the institution across an expanding set of stakeholders, and responding to shifting federal policy have no margin left for the kind of sustained, unhurried thinking that strategy requires. The urgent reliably displaces the important, and over time the institution loses its ability to think ahead at all.

The second is honest information. Strategic thinking depends on an accurate picture of what is actually happening in the organization - not the summary version that travels up through layers of staff, but the ground-level reality of how things work, where the friction is, what the risks are, and what the organization is actually capable of executing. Most leaders in higher education are working from an incomplete picture, not because anyone is withholding information, but because complexity gets absorbed and translated before it reaches the top. The result is strategic decisions made on optimistic assumptions that the organization cannot support.

The third is a thinking partner who is not inside the system. This is the one that institutional culture most reliably undervalues. Higher education has a strong norm of internal deliberation that includes committees, task forces, faculty governance, leadership team retreats. These processes are valuable for building consensus and ensuring representation. They are not designed to surface the honest, unpleasant questions that strategic thinking requires. The people in the room have roles to protect, relationships to maintain, and institutional histories that shape what they are willing to say. An outside perspective is not a substitute for internal deliberation. It is a complement to it and one that can ask the questions that insiders cannot, challenge assumptions that have calcified into received wisdom, and hold space for uncertainty without needing to resolve it prematurely.

Why This Is Harder in Higher Education Than It Sounds

The structural conditions of academic leadership make all three of these requirements exceptionally difficult to meet.

Cognitive slack is systematically consumed by the volume and complexity of the role. Research leaders are managing faculty relationships, compliance obligations, budget pressures, staff retention, and now a federal funding environment that is shifting faster than any planning cycle can accommodate. The expectation that strategic thinking will happen in the margins of this workload is not realistic. It requires deliberate protection - a decision that some of the leader's time and attention will be reserved for thinking, not just doing.

Honest information is filtered by the same institutional structures that are supposed to support good decision-making. Staff absorb complexity before it becomes visible to leadership. Problems get translated into manageable summaries. The distance between what is actually happening at the operational level and what leaders understand to be happening grows over time, until it becomes visible only in a crisis.

And internal thought partnership, while valuable, has real limits in a shared governance environment. The people closest to a leader in higher education have their own institutional stakes. They are not in a position to say, consistently and without qualification, that a stated priority is unlikely to survive contact with organizational reality, that a planning document is a political settlement rather than a strategic direction, or that the institution is accumulating fragility it cannot see because the metrics it tracks do not measure it.

This is not a criticism of those relationships. It is an honest description of what they are designed to do and what they are not designed to do. The distinction matters because conflating internal deliberation with strategic thought partnership is one of the reasons higher education keeps producing planning artifacts when it needs strategic clarity.

What Thought Partnership Looks Like

Thought partnership in the strategic sense is not coaching, though it shares some features. It is not consulting in the traditional deliverable-driven sense, though it produces useful outputs. It is closer to what Atul Gawande described when he wrote about the value of an outside observer for expert practitioners, someone who can see what the practitioner cannot see precisely because they are not inside the performance.

In practice, for a research leader, it looks like this: a sustained relationship with someone who knows the terrain of research-intensive higher education well enough to ask informed questions, who is not invested in any particular answer, and who can hold the complexity of the leader's situation without needing to simplify it prematurely. Someone who can help distinguish between a real strategic choice and a planning artifact dressed up as one. Who can push back on optimistic assumptions before they harden into commitments. Who can name the thing in the room that the internal team cannot quite say out loud.

This kind of relationship is high-value precisely because it is rare. Most of the support available to research leaders: consultants, coaches, and peer networks are either too transactional, too removed from the specific terrain, or too embedded in the institution to provide it. Leaders who invest in genuine strategic thought partnership have made a deliberate decision that this kind of thinking support is worth protecting, and have done the work of finding the right partner for it. That decision is available at any budget level. Most leaders simply haven't made it yet.

Strategy is not a document. It is a practice. And like most practices worth developing, it is better with a good coach than without one.

The Stakes Right Now

Higher education is facing a convergence of pressures that makes the absence of genuine strategic thinking increasingly costly. Federal funding volatility, shifting immigration policy, enrollment decline in many segments, and growing public skepticism about the value of academic institutions are not problems that a well-constructed planning document will navigate. They require leaders who can think clearly about positioning, make visible trade-offs, and act with discipline on a small number of deliberate bets.

For much of higher education's recent history, sustained uncertainty was the exception rather than the rule. Institutions could afford to plan in five-year cycles because the terrain was stable enough to make those plans approximately accurate. That condition no longer holds. Adapting to what comes next requires leaders who have built the capacity in themselves, in their teams, and in their external relationships, to think strategically on a continuous basis. That is a different capability than producing a comprehensive plan, and it is the one that actually matters now.

Building that capacity is not complicated. But it requires a decision that most higher education leaders have not yet made explicitly: that strategic thinking is not something that happens at the annual retreat, or emerges from the planning process, or gets delegated to a committee. It is a discipline that requires protection, support, and honest partnership. And it starts with being willing to say, out loud, that you cannot do it alone. 

Further Reading
Personal Best  |  Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, 2011
Gawande's essay on why expert practitioners — surgeons, teachers, athletes — perform better with an outside observer who can see what they cannot. The argument translates directly to leadership: the higher the stakes and the more complex the environment, the more valuable an honest outside perspective becomes. One of the most useful short pieces on the value of thought partnership available. More thoughts on the power of coaching: Atul Gwande on how a coach (or thought partner) can get you unstuck. Watch the full video: How to break the hidden limits of expertise

A Plan Is Not a Strategy  |  Roger Martin, HBR On Strategy Podcast, 2023
Martin's precise account of why planning and strategy are not the same thing, and why organizations default to planning because it is more comfortable. The foundation for the distinction this series builds on. 

Thinking, Fast and Slow  |  Daniel Kahneman, 2011
Kahneman's account of why expert judgment is systematically overconfident under uncertainty, and why outside perspectives are not a sign of weakness but a corrective for the cognitive limits that affect every capable leader. The chapters on optimism bias and the planning fallacy are directly relevant to how higher education sets direction.