Planning as the Organization of Hope

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Southern Polytechnic State University

Planning The Organization of Hope Dr.
Robert A. Sevier Senior Vice President Stamats,
Inc. Cedar Rapids, IA 52406 (800)
553-8878 bob.sevier_at_stamats.com
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About Stamats

• We are an award-winning, nationally-recognized
  higher education research, planning, and
  marketing communications company. Our mission is
  to help college and university leaders achieve
  their most important marketing, recruiting, and
  fundraising goals through the creation of
  customized integrated marketing solutions.

• Research, Planning, and Consulting Services
• Image and competitive positioning studies
• Tuition price elasticity studies
• Alumni and donor studies
• Marketing communication audits
• Recruiting audits
• Campus visit audits
• Integrated marketing plans
• Brand clarification and communication plans
• Recruiting plans
• Strategy development and strategic plans
• Board presentations
• Project-specific consulting

• Creative Services
• Recruiting and fundraising publications
• Web site development
• Virtual tours
• Direct marketing strategies (search, annual fund)
• Targeted e-mail marketing systems
• Advertising
• Creative concepting
• Content management systems
• Dynamic news and events calendars
• Message boards/chats

Offices Cambridge, Richmond, Portland (OR),
San Francisco, and Cedar Rapids
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My Goals for This Session

• Explore the idea of planning
• Discuss four basic types of flawed plans
• Present a series of keys for making your next
  plan a success

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Some Key Questions

• Why do we plan?
• What are some problems with higher educations
  approach to planning?
• What are the hallmarks of a good planning
  experience?

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The Most Important Things

• Planning is a formalized attitude
• Its not the plan that counts, but what you do
  with the plan
• The core concept of planning is to probe and
  explore and identify opportunities to help you
  achieve your vision
• As soon as the first shot is fired, the (battle)
  plan begins to unwind
• A dexterous planning process is more important
  than any plan

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What Is Planning?

• John Bryson Planning is a disciplined effort to
  produce fundamental decisions and actions that
  shape and guide what an organization is, what it
  does, and why it does it
• Michael Dolence et al. Planning helps an
  organization identify and maintain an optimal
  alignment with the most important elements of its
  environment
• Leonard Goodstein et al. Planning is the process
  by which the guiding members of an organization
  envision its future and develop the necessary
  procedures and operations to achieve that future
• Philip Kotler and Patrick Murphy Planning is the
  process of developing and maintaining a strategic
  fit between the organization and its changing
  market opportunities

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Planning - continued

• Planning is the organization of hope

Stephen Blum
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Types of Plans
Our focus

• Strategic plans
• Integrated marketing plans
• Integrated marketing communications plans

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Essential Elements of Strategy

• The process is strategic because it involves
  choosing how best to respond to the circumstances
  of a dynamic and sometimes hostile environment
• Colleges and universities have many choices in
  the face of changing stakeholder needs, funding
  availability, competition, and other factors
• Being strategic requires recognizing these
  choices and committing to one set of responses
  instead of another
• Strategic thinking and planning is systematic in
  that it calls for following a process that is
  both focused and productive
• The process raises a sequence of questions which
  helps planners and internal stakeholders examine
  past experiences, test old assumptions, gather
  and incorporate new information about the
  present, and anticipate the environment in which
  the organization will be working in the future

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Elements continued

• Strategic thinking involves choosing specific
  priorities making decisions about ends and
  means, in both the long term and the short term
• Strategic thinking is about building commitment
• Systematically engaging key stakeholders in the
  process of identifying priorities allows
  disagreements to be engaged constructively and
  supports better communication and coordination
• The process allows a broad consensus to be built,
  resulting in enhanced accountability throughout
  the organization
•  

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Basic Planning Fallacies

• Planning is a science
• You can predict the future
• Consensus is achievable
• There are perfect solutions
• There is a perfect time
• Alphas have all the answers
• You know what your competitors are going to do

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The Domains of Planning in Higher Education

• A strategic planning domain is a key (and
  existing) institutional process or activity
• Most plans are executed through the coordination
  of the following
• Academic affairs
• Recruiting and financial aid
• Advancement and alumni relations (fundraising)
• Facilities and IT
• Student development/retention
• Brand marketing and image
• Finance
• Human resources

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Everybody Pulling in the Same Direction
The Plan
Academic Affairs
Recruiting/Financial Aid
Advancement
Facilities IT
Student Development
Brand Marketing
Finance
HR
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Three Types of Plans to Avoid
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The Business as Usual Plan

• The business as usual plan demonstrates little
  objective rethinking of institutional mission,
  goals, or strategies, but instead relies on
  extrapolating the institutions past into its
  future
• The implied message is lets just keep doing
  what weve been doing
• Such plans evidence little rigorous analysis or
  creativity
• Stretch goals are notably absent, as are
  objective assessments of opportunities for
  improvement
• The institution simply wants to tread water
  under the assumption that things are good now,
  so why change

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The Wish List Plan

• The wish list plan sets forth a veritable
  laundry list of new initiatives for the
  institution to pursue, tied to advancing a
  far-reaching set of strategic objectives
• Participants in the planning process have been
  asked to blue sky the institutions future,
  typically responding to queries such as What
  would we do if we were suddenly given 100
  million dollars by a generous donor?
• The result is too often a non-prioritized
  catalogue of unrelated initiatives, reflecting
  little institutional consensus and determination
  of how such initiatives are to be funded

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The Perfect Plan

• There is no such thing as a perfect plan
• Getting to perfect costs too much, takes too
  long, and expends too much political capital
• In addition, perfect plans require a perfect
  understanding of the marketplace, our
  competitors, and the future
• Instead of perfect, go for pretty good in a
  timely fashion

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Keep in Mind

• I would rather go into battle with a good plan
  today than a perfect plan tomorrow General
  George S. Patton

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The Platte River Approach to Planning

• David Leslie and E. K. Fretwell, in Wise Moves in
  Hard Times, remind us that planning has been used
  as a euphemism for indiscriminate expansiveness
  
• The idea of more
• Mission creep
• Mission climb
• The result of this expansionism on most campuses
  is a barely sustainable mix of marginal to
  average programs, expensive facilities, and large
  faculties
• There are no signature programs
• Nothing that captures the attention of the
  marketplace
• Nothing with any Wow!
• A mile wide but only an inch deep

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Concerns About Planning

• Fear of hard decisions. Colleges and universities
  are highly charged political environments in
  which no one is shy about expressing dismay.
  Hard, unpopular decisions can wreak havoc, so
  leaders avoid making them
• Fuzzy, unmeasurable goals. One state system wants
  to foster collaboration between units
• A major private university wants to be the
  leader in the integration of teaching and
  research. A comprehensive university stakes its
  future on increasing access to knowledge
  resources
• The all things to all people syndrome. A large
  public university that seeks to become one of the
  top 10 publics
• Institutions such as this are fond of saying that
  they cant be all things to all people, but then
  they set out to prove otherwise
• This one wanted to elevate our faculty and its
  teaching, research, and scholarship and
  globalize the university community

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Keep in Mind
To fight fear, act. To increase fear, wait, put
off, postpone David Joseph Schwartz
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The Most Important Planning Element

• It begins with focus

The future does not belong to Coleman lanterns
Rather, it belongs to MAG-lites
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Focus on

• A target geography
• A certain kind of student
• A certain way of teaching
• A certain discipline

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Keep in Mind
A dog that chases a hundred rabbits goes home
hungry. A dog that chases one rabbit goes home
with a rabbit
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The Idea of Being Audacious

• Three levels of thinking
• Predictable
• Surprising
• Courageous (I call this one audacious)

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Audacious - continued

• The decision of Trenton State to downsize its
  enrollment by one-third and eliminate many
  graduate programs so it could energize its
  commitment to undergraduate education is a
  galvanizing decision
• Equally galvanizing was the decision by Northeast
  Missouri State University to become Truman State
  or Southwestern at Memphis to become Rhodes
  College
•  
• The decision by Indiana Wesleyan University to
  jump feet-first into distance and off-site
  education created a sense of excitement (not to
  mention possibilities) on that campus

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The Leaders Role in Planning

• Provide vision and direction
• Prioritize fewer better goals
• Provide resources
• Manage from 32,000 feet but bring the fruits of
  planning down to the trenches
• Hold people accountable

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The Followers Role in Planning

• Execute the plan
• Types of followers
• Pragmatic followers
• Alienated followers
• Comformist
• Passive followers
• Exceptional followers

Q What kind of follower are you?
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Keys to Successful Planning

• Recognize the basic fallacies of planning
• Keep it simple
• It begins with vision (the puzzle box top)
• Identify strategic issues
• Watch those paradigms
• Its not SWOT, but OTSW
• You need great data (without it, its only an
  opinion)
• Herd the elephants
• Beware the dangers of consensus management
• Dont forget the pareto principle
• Use a pay-off matrix
• Without cash its only a wish
• Its all about execution

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Keep it Simple

• Get your ego out of the situation. Good judgment
  is based on reality. The more you screen things
  through your ego, the farther you get from
  reality
• Avoid wishful thinking. We all want things to go
  a certain way. But how things go are often out of
  our control. Good common sense tends to be in
  tune with the way things are going
• Youve got to be better at listening. Common
  sense by
• definition is based on what others think.
  Its thinking that is
• common to many. People who dont have their
  ears to the
• ground lose access to important common
  sense

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It Begins With Vision

• A vision is a realistic, credible, attractive
  future for your organization Nanus
•  
• A vision is a combination of gut values and a
  tangible goal Keller
• Gut values need to be the ones that are part of
  the colleges tradition and to which at least a
  large minority on campus already subscribe
• If the values articulated in a vision are too
  idealistic or vague the vision will be treated
  cynically  
•  
• The northbound train
• Conveys an unwavering commitment to a
• particular direction

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Qualities of a Good Vision

• The right vision for a college or university
  should be
• Future-oriented
• Utopianclearly offering a better future for the
  organization
• Appropriateconsistent with mission, history,
  values, and culture
• Reflecting high ideals and standards of
  excellence
• Clear in purpose and direction
• Able to inspire enthusiasm and encourage
  commitment
• Ambitious

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Identify Your Strategic Issues

• The identification of strategic issues
• Focus on issues and not answers
• Creates the tension needed to prompt
  organizational change
• Should provide useful clues about how to resolve
  the issue
• Allows insight into possible ways that the issue
  might be resolved
• If the planning process has not been real up
  until this point, it will become real now
• The planning process will begin to seem less
  academic and more meaningful

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A Lesson from Steven Covey
Circle of Concern
Circle of Influence
Things you really cant do anything about
Things you can change
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The Problem With Paradigms

• The tyranny of our traditions
• Or what I learned from Thomas Lawton

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SWOT or OTSW

• Whats wrong with SWOT?
• Inside vs. outside
• Problems and opportunities
• Data, data, data, you cant make bricks without
  clay Sherlock Holmes

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Keep in Mind
Chances are your main threat is behind you
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Herd the Elephants

• Remember the TV commercial for alcoholism
  awareness that featured an elephant in a familys
  living room
• Everyone in the family acted as if the elephant
  was not there
• The idea was that alcoholism in a family is like
  an elephant in the roomeverybody knows its
  there, but they all pretend it doesnt exist
• On numerous occasions while working with colleges
  and universities I have found myself involved in
  planning projects that didnt want to recognize
  one or more elephants in the room
• Now, I often open planning sessions by asking if
  there are any elephants in the room?
• My goal is to help clients get the elephants out
  in the open as quickly as possible
• And as with any problem, acknowledging it is
  often the first step toward dealing with it
•  

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Beware the Dangers of Consensus Management

What are the odds of everyone agreeing
on a course of action?


No Perhaps
Possibly Yes

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Pareto Principle

• In any series of elements to be controlled, a
  selected small fraction in terms of number of
  elements almost always accounts for a large
  fraction in terms of effect
•  
• What?
• In laymans terms, Pareto discovered that about
  80 percent of the wealth of most countries was
  controlled by a consistent minority of people
  typically about 20 percent. He called this a
  predictable imbalance
• We call it the 80/20 rule
• The key is Joseph M. Jurans vital few and
  trivial many
• Juran suggests that when we all have too little
  time, talent, and money, we must spend more time
  truly focusing on the 20 percent (the vital few)
  rather than the 80 percent (the trivial many)

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Pay Off Matrix
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Without Cash Its Only a Wish

• Talk is cheap
• Commitment is spelled with a
• Dont ever begin a planning process without a
  sense of the available dollars
• Dont start something you cant sustain

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Its All About Execution

• Just do it
• W3
• Who
• Does What
• When
• No snowflake

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Hustle as Strategy
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Keep in Mind
You cant build a reputation on what you are
going to do
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Think plan. Plan and do. Do and leave undone.
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Resources

• Beckwith Selling the Invisible
• Bossidy Execution
• Bryson Strategic Planning for Public and
  Nonprofit Organizations
• Goodstein Applied Strategic Planning
• Harari Leapfrogging the Competition
• Kotter Leading Change
• Kriegel Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers
• Leslie Wise Moves in Hard Times
• Nanus Visionary Leadership
• Sevier Strategic Planning Theory and Practice
• Trout The Power of Simplicity