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Strategic By Design: Iterative Approaches To Educational Planning, Shannon M. Chance

Shannon M. Chance

oday’s tumultuous economic and political conditions require universities to adapt—fast. Leaders must attend to unforeseen crises, events, and opportunities in ways that align with their core missions, promote their universities’ continued existence, and help achieve disparate goals (Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence 1997). Good planning and good plans involve iteration; simple cause-and-effect thinking is no longer enough. Universities can—and frequently do—suffer when they use linear, mechanistic thinking (Presley and Leslie 1999; Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence 1998). Leaders can make too many erroneous assumptions about the future. And, when users view strategic plans as fixed road maps, they often fail to recognize …