Mission and Vision 153
it carries, and autonomy more aware of the organizational requirements it must
satisfy. As we shall see in other places, the exercise of strategic leadership is about
the resolution of structural conflict at a variety of levels and in different forms
throughout the organization.
We can also see that the development of strategic consciousness provides new
resources for some of the other perplexing dynamics of organizational decision
making, including the decoupled choice system. As we have seen, in such a world
of decision making, participants carry around personal and ideological preoccu-
pations that they would like to unload on a decision, whether it is relevant or
not. Yet the meaning of the context changes where strategic leadership has been
able to define a sense of institutional legacy, mission, and vision. Now there are
strategic criteria that assert both subtle and overt rules of relevance to establish
the framework for decision making. Instead of carrying lots of excess idiosyncratic
baggage, participants can more easily devise strategies and construct agendas to
make decisions and solve problems.
In some ways, we have moved ahead of ourselves, for the ways to think about
the challenges and the possibilities of the future have been assumed, but not yet
defined. We have knowingly explored the questions of mission and vision in
isolation in order to penetrate more fully into their meaning for leadership. In a
sequential sense they are always considered with reference to the broader social,
economic, and cultural contexts in which academic institutions find themselves.
We now turn to the task of considering methods to analyze the wider field of
strategic forces with which colleges and universities must contend.