Every university has the plan. It has a name, a page on the university website, four or five pillars, and a launch event where the president walked through all of them.
Then the academic year happens. Orientation, midterms, the budget cycle, football season, commencement, and somewhere in there a funding change nobody planned for. The plan doesn't get rejected. It just goes quiet, and by the time somebody opens it again the honest question is whether any of it moved in the last nine months. Answering that takes a few weeks of chasing people, which is its own answer.
We ran a webinar recently with two people who spend their working lives on that problem.
Kristin Mulrooney is a strategic planning consultant working with the University of Vermont's Division of Student Affairs. Before that she spent twenty years at Gallaudet University, most recently in its strategic planning office. Ryan Retartha is Senior Director of Innovation, Strategy and Insights at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, and came to higher ed from arts administration. And Alex Lee, our Chief Customer Officer, moderated the conversation.
Find Where the Plan Actually Lives
Both of them now run strategy in Cascade, the strategy execution platform we build, Ryan across Mendoza and Kristin at both institutions she's worked with. So Alex started them before that: what did strategy look like day to day?
Kristin's answer was that it depended on which building you walked into. Finance built structures in Excel that matched the way finance moved work. The academic side wrote narratives, pages of prose describing how the year had gone rather than anything a reader could compare against another department. Every division was tracking something real, and all of it arrived at the board in whatever format it was born in, which left the trustees to find the common thread themselves.
"They were all individually tracking or establishing what their strategic goals were, but it wasn't connected into a central source. So I guess in a word, how was strategy managed prior? Any way possible." - Kristin Mulrooney
Ryan's answer was a single shared file. Mendoza's OKRs, the objectives and key results it commits to each year, lived between the dean's office and the provost's, visible to every senior leader, with no owner and no reminder attached to it. It sank into a Drive that got bigger every day.
"Every six weeks or nine weeks, it would be like, well, did you guys update the spreadsheet? And we're like, what spreadsheet? So we just had this dusty object that none of us really wanted to deal with." - Ryan Retartha
Neither of them was describing a bad plan. Both were describing a plan with nowhere to live between reviews.
Look for the Silo Under the Dean's Office
Notre Dame is centralized. It runs on OKRs, Mendoza presents them to the provost every year, and that part works. The break is one floor down, where the dean's calendar runs out and the strategy stops being a conversation anyone else is in.
"The strategy very much existed between the dean and the provost. The functional units and the faculty departments were all very disconnected from the strategy and had a very hard time seeing themselves or seeing their roles or knowing how they fit in." - Ryan Retartha
Below that line people improvise. Staff look at whatever they're working on, decide it probably belongs to an OKR, and produce what Ryan calls superfluous work couched under the guise of being strategic.
His first fix is decision rights: being explicit about who can approve a piece of work, fund it or stop it, because an unclear answer to that is what leaves a goal sitting still. The second fix is about what leaders think they've been handed. A plan that reads like a set of instructions gets treated like one, and everyone waits to hear what the dean wants. Mendoza's dean is Martijn Cremers, and Ryan spends a lot of his time telling colleagues that waiting is the opposite of what the dean is asking for.
"Sometimes strategy is interpreted as a to-do list, instead of a vision and a conversation. And oftentimes that vision is defaulted, in our case, to the dean. I'm always telling my colleagues, Martijn wants options. Martijn wants a couple of different visions that he can react to." - Ryan Retartha
Gallaudet started from the opposite end, with goals that emerged from the community, and still hit a wall once the vision was set and nobody had worked out what it meant on a Tuesday morning.
"There's a gap between once you have that vision set, how does it get operationalized, and how does it happen then in the daily. And sometimes those definitions is where people start to drift away from what the intent might have been." - Kristin Mulrooney
Ask Whether You'd Do It Anyway
Mendoza's first year in Cascade turned up something nobody planned for: a running argument about what counts as strategy at all. Someone would add a project to the plan, important work that their team genuinely needed to do, and Ryan would send it back to wherever the team already tracked its projects.
"It's the kind of thing that we consider to be operationally very important, but it's not strategic. What are the bets that we're placing this year that's going to move the needle on our strategic goals? That's not everything." - Ryan Retartha
By that standard his facilities team has almost nothing in the plan. Their work still has to happen, and the buildings still open in September. It simply isn't one of the bets the college is placing this year. A year of those conversations let Mendoza cut its strategic goals from six to three, once it was clear how much of the original list had been operational all along.
Ryan's analogy is the first month you ever tracked your own spending. Seeing every expense in one place is unpleasant, and it's also the only reason next month's budget is leaner.
Kristin's team asked one question of anything headed for the plan: which bucket is this, strategic or operational? Most items turned out to be work that would happen regardless, and often work owned by another division entirely, like the custodial teams who clean the residence halls every term whatever the plan says.
Put the Update on Somebody's Calendar
Deciding what belongs in the plan is half the job. The other half is whether anyone touches it once term starts, and this is where most plans quietly expire.
Adoption at Mendoza runs on one fact. Updates are due by the 15th, the dean reviews the OKRs at the end of every month, and nobody treats that as a bluff, because he does it every month. Only managers use the platform, and nobody more than three levels below the dean. When one of them says there's no time for updates, he doesn't treat it as a scheduling problem.
"It becomes a coaching conversation. How is strategy not higher on your priority list, that you don't feel like you can take the time to really engage with this platform?" - Ryan Retartha
The pull from the other direction wasn't planned. Department heads and associate deans started building their own reports for their own unit meetings, so the platform stopped being something they fed and became something they used.
"Just by way of it becoming more valuable downstream, it increases usage overall and makes it a more effective tool for the executive leadership team." - Ryan Retartha
Kristin watched the same shift happen in one conversation. The executive director of Gallaudet's Office of Belonging and Engagement had inherited a plan written before he arrived, adjusted it, and reported against it for six months. Then he came to her office and told her the plan didn't describe what his team actually did. They were reporting on work that sat just outside their own mission. Could they scrap it and build a new one?
She said yes straight away, because the question was the point. He had stopped filling in someone else's form and started using the plan to define what his office was for. He also produced the most practical habit of the session: he blocked an hour every Friday for his updates, and kept the appointment until it stopped feeling like an interruption. A few months in, he no longer needed the full hour.
Build the Report for the Person Reading It
The last connection to make is between the reporting and the decisions the institution was going to take anyway. Leadership at Gallaudet had been circling a revenue problem for a while. Her team rebuilt the report so the margins for every department sat next to each other on one page, and the conversation changed in the first meeting. Programs they had treated as marginal were carrying the place. Others they had protected weren't.
"What they thought were small programs actually had huge returns, and sometimes vice versa. And until they saw that everything back to back, they couldn't make those decisions." - Kristin Mulrooney
Nothing new was measured. The numbers had existed the whole time, scattered across enough places that nobody could hold them side by side.
Mendoza's other discovery was that its leaders didn't want the same report as each other, which was easier to accommodate than to argue with. The dean wants context and narrative, because narrative is what he carries to the provost. The associate deans and academic directors want program health: enrollment, yield, career outcomes. Once each of them got a version built for what they do with it, the incentive to keep the data underneath current went up on its own.
Reporting is also where the headwinds get handled honestly. Ryan holds the OKRs steady through the year, but when visa and loan problems put a KPI out of reach, he'd rather move the number than spend three quarters explaining the miss.
"I'd rather make a change so that we're still being honest with ourselves about what's possible, instead of spending the next three months, six months, nine months saying, well, we're not going to make it." - Ryan Retartha
Their monthly MBA meeting shows what all of it is for. Senior staff open with the KPIs as a snapshot of program health, then spend the rest of the hour on what to change and where to put people. Nobody spends that hour reconstructing how the numbers got there, and the functional leaders know that if yield has dipped, they're expected to arrive able to say why.
Give People Enough Structure to Think
Kristin's argument for all of this is a playground, where the point of a fixed structure is what children do on top of it. Nobody has to think about where the climbing frame is, so they spend their attention inventing games the designers never imagined. Her son turned every playground he ever met into a hockey rink.
"You give people enough structure that they can see the consistencies, and then they have the time for the critical thinking, the innovative ideas, the what ifs. This discipline is going to give you freedom." - Kristin Mulrooney
At Gallaudet that showed up as leaders letting go of an area they'd been fixated on, because the reporting showed it was visibly moving, and turning instead to something nobody had known was a problem.
Both expect the pressure on that structure to grow. Ryan's teams now produce analysis, proposals and research faster than they did three years ago, which he likens to playing four or five hands of blackjack instead of one. Kristin's point is what follows from that: every one of those hands generates material that has to live somewhere, and without a central source the answer is more tabs in more spreadsheets.
Asked what they'd do differently, Ryan said he wouldn't have waited so long to bring people in. He had wanted the whole system built and polished before anyone else saw it, and a system like that is never finished, so his senior leaders met it months later than they could have.
Kristin's answer was less obvious. Building the plan is what exposed which units had no regular meeting where progress got reviewed, and a unit without that rhythm has nowhere to put an update in the first place.
"It wouldn't have mattered what we did. It was establishing those behaviors first." - Kristin Mulrooney
For anyone still running strategy on PowerPoint and Excel, they each left a question rather than a recommendation. Ryan's: how much of what you're tracking has to be current at any given moment? Enrollment and revenue at a business school move week to week, and a file that was accurate last Tuesday can't answer a question about today. Kristin's: how many hours a month go into keeping those files up to date, and what does that come to across a year?
Neither takes long to answer. The answers usually explain why the plan went quiet in the first place.
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This article is based on a webinar hosted by Cascade, featuring Kristin Mulrooney (Strategic Planning Consultant, University of Vermont) and Ryan Retartha (Senior Director of Innovation, Strategy and Insights, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame), moderated by Alex Lee (Chief Customer Officer, Cascade). You can watch the full recording here.
Cascade is a strategy execution platform used by teams to plan, track and report on strategy in one place.
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