A new report from Wonkhe and Advance HE, based on roundtable discussions with senior education leaders, Advance HE principal fellows and student leaders, explores how institutions might secure educational excellence during periods when the future cannot be reliably predicted. The findings warrant careful consideration, particularly the central tension identified: how can institutions simultaneously maintain their core educational mission whilst responding to external pressures that demand adaptation?
This is not merely a technical challenge related to strategic planning methodologies. It raises fundamental questions about institutional identity and purpose during periods of sustained uncertainty.
The External Forces Reshaping Higher Education
Multiple sources of uncertainty currently affect institutional planning. Political shifts continue to reshape how higher education is valued, funded and regulated. Economic pressures affect both institutional sustainability and students’ capacity to participate. Socio-cultural changes alter student demographics and expectations in ways that challenge traditional assumptions about who higher education serves and how. Technological developments, particularly artificial intelligence, require institutions to rethink both their pedagogical approaches and the graduate outcomes they can credibly promise to deliver.
These forces do not operate in isolation. They interact in ways that make linear planning increasingly problematic. An institution might develop a coherent response to regulatory change, only to find that response undermined by shifts in student demand driven by economic factors entirely outside the sector’s control. The pace of technological change accelerates whilst institutional capacity to adapt remains constrained by resource limitations and the inevitable inertia of large organisations with distributed decision-making structures.
The report identifies this environment as one where traditional strategic planning approaches may prove insufficient. Yet institutions cannot simply abandon planning altogether. The question becomes what kind of planning might prove viable when the assumptions on which plans rest remain unstable.
The Fragmentation Risk
These external pressures create tensions within institutions that require careful navigation. The report identifies several key areas of tension: between public trust and sector autonomy; between the public good and private returns on investment; between traditional academic communities and new student populations; and between the pace of technological change and institutional capacity to adapt effectively.
Financial constraints amplify these tensions in ways that risk institutional fragmentation precisely when coherence becomes most critical. When resources become scarce, different parts of the institution begin competing more directly for finite budgets. Academic departments protect their territory. Professional services units defend their staffing levels. Strategic initiatives that require cross-institutional collaboration become harder to sustain when individual units prioritise their immediate survival over collective endeavours.
The report suggests that complexity can cause the higher education community to fracture. This observation merits attention. Fragmentation undermines the institutional capacity to respond effectively to external challenges. When different parts of the institution pursue divergent agendas, the organisation as a whole loses the coherence required to make difficult choices about priorities and trade-offs. Yet the pressures that cause fragmentation, resource scarcity, competing demands and uncertainty about the future show little sign of diminishing.
From Directive to Inclusive Leadership
The report proposes that drawing on diverse expertise and curating inclusive discussions around purpose and values may prove more sustainable than top-down change management. This suggestion requires careful examination. Inclusive approaches have theoretical merit, but institutions facing financial pressure often default to directive leadership precisely because it appears more efficient. Consultation takes time. Building consensus requires sustained effort. When decisions must be made quickly, the temptation to impose solutions from above becomes difficult to resist.
Yet the report’s emphasis on inclusive leadership stems from a pragmatic recognition rather than ideological commitment. Leaders participating in the roundtables acknowledged that their capacity to drive change from above has limits. In distributed organisations where academic autonomy remains a core value, directive leadership often produces compliance rather than commitment. Staff implement changes because they must, not because they understand or support the rationale. This creates an implementation that appears successful on the surface but fails to embed genuine transformation.
The question becomes not whether inclusive approaches are theoretically superior, but under what conditions they can function effectively when resources are constrained and decisions must be made quickly. This requires institutions to distinguish between decisions that genuinely benefit from wide consultation and those where speed matters more than consensus. It also demands that when institutions commit to inclusive processes, they invest the time and resources required to make those processes meaningful rather than performative.
The Authenticity Question
Leaders expressed scepticism about whether institutions are genuinely committed to transformation or merely going through the motions of change. This observation warrants attention because it highlights a discrepancy between institutional rhetoric and reality.
Transformation requires sustained investment of time, resources and political capital. When change initiatives fail, it often stems not from flawed strategy but from insufficient institutional commitment. Organisations announce ambitious transformation programmes, appoint steering groups, produce implementation plans, but then fail to protect the resources required or to sustain attention when competing priorities emerge. The result is what might be termed ‘change theatre’: visible activity that creates the appearance of transformation without fundamentally altering institutional practice.
The scepticism leaders express about change appetite suggests they recognise this pattern from their own experience. They have seen initiatives launched with enthusiasm but abandoned when implementation proves difficult. They have participated in consultation processes that ultimately made little difference to final decisions. They have observed that institutional memory for change initiatives proves remarkably short, with new leadership teams often preferring to start afresh rather than build on previous work.
Authentic change appetite requires several conditions. Leadership must maintain focus over timeframes longer than the typical tenure of senior executives. The organisation must protect resources for transformation even when budgets come under pressure. Success must be defined realistically, acknowledging that meaningful change takes longer and costs more than initial projections suggest. Perhaps most importantly, institutions must develop the capacity to learn from failed initiatives rather than simply moving on to the next transformation programme.
The Learning Curve on Change Management
The report suggests that the sector’s learning curve for achieving transformation remains steep, despite change becoming ‘the new normal’. This observation prompts questions about what makes change particularly difficult in higher education institutions.
Several factors contribute to this difficulty. Higher education institutions feature distributed decision-making structures where authority is diffused rather than concentrated. Changes that require coordinated action across multiple units face implementation challenges that more hierarchical organisations might avoid. Academic autonomy, whilst valuable, complicates efforts to standardise practices or impose uniform solutions. Different disciplinary communities operate according to distinct norms and expectations, making institution-wide initiatives difficult to implement consistently.
Institutions also face dual accountability, to academic standards maintained through peer review and professional judgement, and to regulatory standards imposed by external bodies. These accountability regimes do not always align. Changes that satisfy regulatory requirements may conflict with academic values. Initiatives that enhance educational quality in ways the academic community recognises may not produce the metrics regulators demand. Navigating these competing accountabilities whilst maintaining educational excellence requires sophisticated judgement that cannot easily be reduced to process or procedure.
Multiple stakeholder groups with competing interests further complicate the change management process. Students want excellent teaching but also manageable workloads. Academic staff value autonomy but also seek adequate resources and support. Professional services staff implement changes whilst managing their existing responsibilities. Governing bodies demand financial sustainability alongside educational quality. External regulators impose compliance requirements that consume resources without necessarily enhancing provision. Balancing these competing demands whilst moving the institution forward proves extraordinarily difficult.
The sector’s continued struggle with implementation may suggest that standard change management approaches developed in other sectors do not transfer straightforwardly to higher education. The question is not whether institutions need to transform; they clearly do, but whether they have yet developed change management approaches that work effectively within the distinctive constraints and opportunities that characterise higher education institutions.
Implications for Planning Educational Excellence
What does planning for educational excellence require when external conditions remain uncertain? The report suggests this cannot simply be about better forecasting or more sophisticated scenario planning. Both have their place, but neither addresses the fundamental challenge: how to maintain educational quality whilst adapting to circumstances that cannot be fully anticipated.
This may suggest a need for institutional resilience rather than comprehensive planning. Resilience implies the capacity to maintain core functions, in this case, educational excellence, whilst adapting to changing circumstances. It also suggests focusing less on predicting the future and more on building organisational capabilities that prove valuable regardless of which specific changes materialise.
Several capabilities appear particularly relevant. The capacity to make evidence-informed decisions quickly matters more than elaborate planning processes that cannot keep pace with external change. The ability to experiment with new approaches on a small scale before committing to institution-wide implementation allows learning without catastrophic failure. Mechanisms for genuine dialogue between different parts of the institution enable coordinated responses without requiring top-down imposition. Investment in staff development builds the workforce capabilities required for adaptation rather than assuming existing skills will remain sufficient.
Which aspects of educational provision require stability and which benefit from flexibility, also demand consideration. Educational excellence depends partly on consistent standards, clear expectations and stable frameworks that allow students to understand what success requires. Yet it also requires responsiveness to emerging knowledge, evolving pedagogical understanding, and changing student needs. Institutions must somehow maintain this tension between stability and flexibility rather than resolving it in favour of one or the other.
This suggests planning for educational excellence might focus less on detailed long-term plans and more on building institutional capabilities for sustained quality during periods of disruption. It implies investment in the organisational infrastructure required for effective decision-making: robust data systems that provide timely information, governance structures that enable swift but considered responses, communication processes that keep the community informed without overwhelming them with detail, and evaluation mechanisms that allow genuine learning from both successes and failures.
Balancing Mission and Adaptation
The central question returns: how can institutions maintain their educational mission while responding to external changes that demand adaptation? The report offers no straightforward answers, but suggests the quality of institutional dialogue about these tensions matters as much as the decisions themselves.
This observation merits reflection. In periods of uncertainty, the capacity to engage in rigorous and inclusive discussions about purpose and direction may itself constitute a form of institutional excellence. It demonstrates that the organisation takes its educational mission seriously enough to examine it critically. It creates space for diverse perspectives to inform decisions rather than allowing narrow viewpoints to dominate. It fosters the shared understanding necessary for coordinated action, even when consensus proves impossible to achieve.
Such dialogue cannot be rushed or forced. It requires creating conditions where people feel able to express genuine concerns rather than merely going through the motions of agreement. It demands that leaders acknowledge uncertainty rather than projecting false confidence. It necessitates distinguishing between core commitments that should remain stable and specific practices that can adapt to changing circumstances. And it requires accepting that even thoughtful dialogue may not resolve fundamental tensions, but can at least ensure those tensions are understood and managed rather than ignored.
The challenge facing institutions is not to eliminate uncertainty, which remains impossible, but to develop the organisational capabilities required to maintain educational excellence in the face of uncertainty. This includes the technical capabilities: robust data systems, effective governance structures and sound financial management. However, it also encompasses less tangible capabilities: the ability to sustain institutional dialogue about purpose and values; the willingness to experiment and learn from failures; the commitment to invest in staff development, even when budgets are tight; and the determination to protect educational quality, even when other pressures demand attention.
Whether institutions can develop and sustain these capabilities whilst managing immediate financial pressures and regulatory demands remains uncertain. But the alternative, allowing external pressures to fragment institutional coherence and undermine educational quality, appears considerably worse. Perhaps the task facing leadership, then, is not to predict the future but to build institutions capable of maintaining their educational mission regardless of which specific future ultimately materialises.