Integral Strategy 119
story into a set of distinctive concepts, themes, meanings, purposes, and values.
In doing so, we create a set of conceptual touchstones to which participants in
the work of strategy can repair as they seek to capture and elucidate the bearing
of the institution’s sense of itself for the future.
Strategic leadership uses the power of a systematic method in its work as a
discipline. Yet the method comes with cautions. If we do not keep the story con-
nected to concrete events, it will lose its power to energize and motivate the par-
ticipants in a community. Abstractions are necessary, for without them we could
not communicate widely, create policies and systems, and relate our educational
responsibilities to the wider society. Yet abstractions draw their vitality from the
currents of life out of which they have emerged and through which they must
be continuously renewed. In studying strategic plans and related documents,
one finds a large series of concepts and values that institutions use to describe
themselves and their purposes. To illustrate with a consistent example, we can
turn again to Centre College, for its current leaders have recently thought and
written self-consciously about the values that define the Centre story. For one
member of the faculty and leader in the planning process, the common thread
in the many forms and memories of the Centre experience is “a combination of
high expectations and high commitment, of ambition and affirmation, or rigor
and reward. It’s tough love” (Wyatt 2003, 7). As one chemistry professor used to
put it, “At Centre the collar fits a little tighter.” Students experience the college
as an intimate educational community of intense relationships and high expec-
tations that showcases a student’s multiple talents in the classroom, around the
campus, on the playing field, and on stage. Other leaders at Centre, including
its current and preceding presidents, have reached for words such as “transfor-
mation,” “empowerment,” “education of mind and body,” and “leadership” to
describe the educational purposes of the college. In exploring these elements of
the larger story of liberal education, the college’s own story is enriched.
Our emphasis on narratives prompts the question of how they are to be related
to the practice of strategy within a formal process. Is the institutional story a
lengthy chapter in a strategic plan, or is it found in one or more summary state-
ments, or is it not part of the strategy document at all? How does the story function
in the formal strategy process?
Identity Statements
Because institutional circumstances and stories are so different, there are many
answers to these questions. Yet despite the variety, it is clear that strategic leader-
ship depends upon effective ways for the connection to be made, for values and
insights derived from the story to be present explicitly in the strategy process.
To accomplish this, we propose that strategy documents should include a brief
section on institutional identity, unless the task has already been accomplished in
other easily available documents. The identity statement should synthesize and
summarize the institution’s story, thereby constituting with mission, vision, and,