Planned strategy, as the term implies, is the end result of a lengthy consultative process with stakeholders about the organization’s direction and priorities. Planned strategy starts with articulating what the organization wants to be (usually called the vision) and how it wants to impact the world or its purpose (usually called the mission). These will then be fleshed out with values, the intangible qualities or characteristics that govern how people in the organization behave and interact. It then proceeds to identify priorities over a certain time frame in order to achieve the vision and mission, and tactics, the specific types of activities that, when completed, will move the organization forward. An organization that holds itself accountable for its strategic plan (rather than just having it gather dust in all its glossy glory) will also have some way to measure their success through targets or key performance indicators.
Strategy doesn’t stop at planned strategy, however. We also need emergent strategy. Our education organizations function in changing environments or contexts. Because of this we need to have an emergent strategy that responds to these changes. Our strategic plans can’t be static documents, frozen in their glossiness, because the context in which we operate isn’t static it is dynamic. Our strategies and thus organizations also have to be dynamic. There is simply no point in moving forward with a strategy that is no longer relevant because the context has changed. The concept of emergent strategy comes from Henry Mintzberg, a renowned thinker on making organizational strategy practical and reflective of the complex, dynamic landscapes in which organizations operate.
Emergent strategy can respond to rapid, urgent changes in the environment, or more gradual ones. Examples of rapid, urgent, unforeseen events that significantly impact education organizations are a pandemic, an extreme weather event (flooding, hurricane, fire, snowstorm), a financial market crash, an unexpected change in government policy with respect to international student visas or a government mandated tuition freeze.
Surprisingly, recognizing urgency, and a need to respond to it with emergent strategy is not always obvious to education leaders. Identifying a need for emergent strategy stems from regular environmental scanning and connections to important external stakeholders and sources of contextual information. And it stems from accurately assessing which events and changes in the environment will affect the organization and which are just background noise.
Some changes in the landscape are more gradual but still necessitate emergent strategy. Gradual change is no less important and no less impactful than rapid, urgent change. The effect of these gradual changes can be like the frog sitting in a pot of water that didn’t notice until it was too late that the water was gradually getting hotter. Examples in an education context include a gradual decline in enrollment in a program because it fails to keep up with changing industry needs and a gradual decrease in the quality of courses because the organization fails to keep up with trends in education technology.
The landscape or context in which our education organizations operate isn’t static or frozen. Nor should our strategy be. Planned strategy gives us a starting point and initial direction. Emergent strategy allows us to make changes and adjustments as necessary based on events or evolutions in our context. Adding the planned strategy versus emergent strategy nuance to the strategy implementation of our education organizations allows us to have consistent direction but also be responsive to what is going on around us. This is a crucial nuance to layer into our strategic planning capabilities as an education organization.