160 Strategic Leadership
a framework for integrative and systemic thinking about the institution’s context,
and for the eventual preparation of a summary analysis of its position. The effort
should move systematically by means of statistical and content analysis from
specific data points, trend lines, and events to the patterns and driving forces that
they reveal. The trends spelled out here represent a powerful set of pressures and
opportunities, some of which are approaching end points where change becomes
systemic. The problems related to the affordability of higher education are of this
kind. At the same time that concern is focused on external realities, there should
also be an effort to find connections, themes, and structural relationships in the
trends that are most significant for a particular institution. Achieving this level
of integrative analysis requires an institution to have full command of its story
and identity, its mission and vision, and its management information systems and
strategic indicators.
As it makes these connections between the worlds outside and inside the
academy, the institution is able to construct its own set of contextual issues and
priorities; in effect, it builds a watch list of critical variables and relationships
that will determine its future. Those insights about the forces of change with
the highest leverage will become critically significant as it goes on to define its
strategic position through an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses and its
opportunities and threats.
Brief examples will show how the PEEST process should develop a particular
center of institutional gravity. Within the sphere of social and political trends, for
example, it may be the demography of regional high school graduates, changing
federal financial aid policies, and family income patterns that will matter most to
institution A, a small regional private university. It follows these trends in depth
and develops systematic quantitative analyses because it knows that its tuition
increases cannot exceed wage and salary growth in its recruitment area. For nearby
institution B, a state university with a large variety of professional programs, it will
be patterns and trends of adult educational participation that should receive the
most attention. They are heavily influenced by the tuition assistance policies
of local businesses and the increasing competition from proprietary institutions
and distance-learning providers. They will need to follow employment patterns
and policies closely. Across the state, a large research university, institution C,
is preoccupied by trends in federal and private funding of scientific research and
instrumentation, which are the keys for its overhead income, and its recruitment
of graduate students, who also serve as laboratory instructors. It sharpens its abili-
ties to follow and influence trends in Washington, D.C.
The results of the same PEEST process should look very different in these
institutions, as each tailors it own analysis. It becomes clear that broad categories
like “social” or “economic” are basically markers for the exploration, differen-
tiation, and connection of the most relevant trends. As much as anything, an
environmental scan is important because it intensifies and deepens the process of
self-knowledge that is at the heart of effective strategic leadership. The institu-
tion’s identity is sharpened as it sees itself over against trends in the wider world