156 Strategic Leadership
hidden in the segmented steps of strategic management. In this chapter we shall
focus on the external forces of change, and in chapter 12 on intentional change
within the institution. When strategic planning functions at its best, it often
reaches the level of leadership tacitly by making sense of change systemically and
by creating a compelling agenda for action.
Change and the Paradigms of Human Agency
We should recall from our earlier discussion of paradigms that a discipline of
strategic leadership requires a conceptual framework that can effectively interpret
the meaning of change. We encounter again the fascinating and central question
of how academic organizations and the professionals who inhabit them should
think about their work in relation to change and external realities. Once more,
thinking about the presuppositions of our own thinking becomes a preliminary
step in understanding strategic leadership as a discipline of change. Organizations
devoted to learning need to become learning organizations.
In its purest form, the teleological assumptions in the paradigm of the academy
define the highest good as a self-sufficient world of ideas where change does not
really exist. In such a perspective, the university is the place where a collegium
of scholars sets unchanging standards of excellence for a scholarly community.
Although this model creates a powerful narrative of meaning, it cannot create
an understanding of the nature of change and how to respond to it. Change falls
outside its systems of significance and intelligibility.
The concepts that change can improve things, that innovation is able to
enrich tradition, that initiative is possible, and that discontinuities offer new pos-
sibilities all belong in a different order of thought. These perspectives all fit with
the master image of responsibility. As we have seen, this paradigm of thought is
rooted in the capacity of human agents for intelligent response, adaptation, and
initiative in coming to terms with the changing field of forces in which they live
(Niebuhr 1963). The motifs of responsiveness and response-ability take us into
a world of thought that illuminates the ways that leadership functions strategi-
cally in response to the reality of change. Effective leaders seek to anticipate and
understand change creatively and congruently, all in dialogue with a community
as they together choose a direction for the future.
The Environmental Scan
If strategic leadership is to respond effectively to change, it needs a set of disci-
plinary tools, not just models of thought. It has to find appropriate ways to grasp
the realities of change in the wider world. In the standard practices of strategic
planning, this is called an environmental scan. As we have seen in other contexts,
strategic leadership must try to turn the insights about social and historical forces
into occasions for self-understanding. Ultimately, an understanding of change
outside the institution has to be transformed into intentional change within it.