What Makes A Plan Strategic?
The higher-education consultancy RHB reviewed 108 active plans from public and private institutions across all fifty states, totaling 2,389 pages, and concluded that 92 of the 108 were not strategic. Instead, they were operational documents that used the vocabulary of strategy to describe a collection of incremental improvements, a tendency in independent and international schools that we criticized in an earlier post.
Strategy almost always requires change. It means behaving differently or making a choice that competitors will not make. Peter Eckel proposes a diagnostic he calls the opposite test (Roger Martin makes the same point here). Take any initiative in your plan and imagine pursuing its opposite. If no institution would ever choose the opposite, then the initiative is not a strategy. "Provide educational excellence" fails to meet the strategic threshold because no school would publish a plan to deliver a poor education. Excellence stands as an obligation that accrues to every institution in the sector. So are most of the verbs that animate these documents: enhance, strengthen, broaden, and deepen, among others. They describe effort rather than direction.
Independent schools often follow the pattern described above when drafting their plans. The most familiar version, identified in David Haney's writing on planning in difficult times, relies on enrollment growth to close a budget gap, using new tuition revenue to cover a shortfall that a harder conversation about costs or programs would actually address. Growth as a financing mechanism is a tactic, and one that may not be achievable given current demographics. A real strategic choice would be one a peer school in your market might hesitate to make: designing for a smaller enrollment, reorganizing the program, narrowing the mission, or repositioning against the competitor everyone else imitates. When a plan could be transplanted into the next school down the road by simply swapping the crest, the planners have made no strategic choice at all. This is mimetic convergence, and the RHB data shows how widespread it has become. The plans cluster around the same handful of themes because so few commit to a defensible, albeit more difficult, choice.
Only 27 percent of the plans provided metrics or key performance indicators. The remaining 73 percent relied on grand, immeasurable language. Schools seldom struggle with aspiration. They struggle with the underlying architecture: baselines, checkpoints, a designated person responsible, and a board prepared to ask at each interval whether progress is real. This vagueness relegates the strategic plan to a set of wishes rather than true drivers of behavior in the organization.
A strategic plan written without an environmental scan is built on assumptions, and untested assumptions tend to age badly. The institutions in the RHB study that skipped this step, more than half of the group, set direction without first establishing what was actually true about their ecosystem: their market, competitors, and the students and families they hoped to attract. A school that has not measured its conditions cannot set an accurate baseline, so it cannot tell whether any goal has been met or merely asserted. It conflates the views aired at a town hall listening session with the sentiment of the whole community, thereby risking confusion between the loudest and the most consequential constituents.
Marketing appeared in roughly half the plans, almost always in the narrow sense of promotion: telling the story and raising awareness. Marketing aims to nurture relationships, build brand awareness, and guide customers through the entire journey from awareness to post-purchase engagement. Promotion seeks immediate results, such as clicks, leads, or conversions, and is designed for short-term impact. Both are important, but only marketing, properly understood, counts as strategic.
The sixteen strongest plans shared recognizable characteristics. Their leaders began with honest self-examination, naming unflattering truths alongside genuine strengths. They listed the people on their committees, reinforcing that the plan was a mutual responsibility. They assigned a specific officer to oversee each component of execution, so energy did not fade once the document was printed and shipped. They worked from what one president called abundance thinking, the assumption that resources can be reallocated toward a genuine priority rather than the reflexive claim that the money is not there. And they kept students and the program at the center.
One president offered a line on planning amid crisis and uncertainty for you to use in your next strategy retreat. A crisis does not just create new problems; it also exposes those already present. The best plans were not discarded when the pandemic arrived. They had already identified the right challenges, so the strategies held up even when things moved at a pace different from what was expected. A strategic plan earns its name when it identifies the problems that disruption will eventually force into the open.