Strategic Position 157
The first step in that process requires a disciplined method to discern the driving
forces in the wider world.
Ironically, the strategic plans of many institutions, especially of smaller col-
leges, often offer little, if any, serious analysis of the realities of their context.
When they do, they often contain a long and fragmented list of events, data,
trends, and contingencies that may or may not have a significant bearing on the
institution itself. In another common approach, strategic plans often describe in
general ways the unprecedented pace of technological and social change, but its
implications are not translated into an agenda of intentional change. The lack
of focused attention on the meaning of change represents a void in the fabric of
strategy development.
There are good reasons to be cautious about environmental scans, but not
enough to abandon them. Like strategy development itself, everything depends
on how it is done. To be sure, they often misfired in earlier generations of strategic
planning, frequently because they tried to predict the future. Fifteen years ago, for
example, planners inside and outside of the academy knew for a fact that informa-
tion technology would make most brick-and-mortar universities obsolete by the
early twenty-first century. Both in higher education and the corporate world, the
enthusiasm for futuristic thinking dims when it tries to predict specific events and
trends and their precise impact on an organization. Whatever else it may be, the
future is inherently uncertain.
PEEST
The proper diffidence about prediction should not, however, discourage a dis-
ciplined approach to reflection about change. The aim should be to develop a
multidisciplinary capacity to think systematically about the meaning and direc-
tion of trends that have already appeared, and that are inescapably shaping the
institution’s future. Technology, for instance, may not replace fixed-site universi-
ties, but it is transforming the practices and capacities of education within them.
The capacity to assess systematically the future consequences—the futurity—of
inexorable driving forces such as technology becomes an essential dimension of
the work of strategy, especially as a method of leadership.
To analyze the forms of change, many institutions use a strategic approach
that has come to be called the PEST method, which is an acronym for the basic
categories of political, economic, social, and technological trends. Depending
on the industry, organizations may add other trend lines. Natural resource and
manufacturing companies would be shortsighted not to add environmental
trends to their list of domains to watch closely. Educational institutions should
obviously include educational trends within the set of realities to which they
must respond. Thus, we have PEEST as an acronym for an environmental scan
for higher education. Already apparent is the need for f lexibility in devising the
factors to analyze continuously. If the PEEST categories strike the members of
a planning team as too limited or artificial, they can and should define a set of