Message from the Dean: September 2022
As you may recall, I’m using my letters this year to talk about strategy, specifically, my approach to strategic management and the way we apply it in the Parker College. My first note talked about viewing alumni as stockholders and our focus on increasing the value of their degrees. It’s an unorthodox idea but one that helps us to align our priorities and to serve all of our constituents well. In this letter, I’m going to talk about a similarly unorthodox idea. In the academic literature, we call it “logical incrementalism” (Quinn, 1980).
Logical incrementalism grew out of a debate on the efficacy of formal planning. Back in the 1970’s, scholars and practitioners alike spent considerable time debating the utility of formal, strategic planning. The idea was simple; if formal planning worked as it was supposed to, then those organizations with the most formal and comprehensive plans should perform the best. But the data showed that wasn’t the case. Many successful organizations did very little formal planning. Moreover, even among those that followed strict and detailed planning procedures, performance varied; some strict planners performed well, while others performed poorly. At the same time, among those that planned by “the seat of the pants,” some performed poorly, while others performed well. Given this, researchers concluded that planning and plans alone couldn’t be the key to superior performance. Instead, what they observed and suggested was that plans are often quite different from real strategies. While a strategy is part plan, a plan is only part of a strategy. A true strategy is more like a series of interconnected plans, some long-term, some short-term, some specific, some general. Some plans are laid out in intricate detail, with tangible timelines and milestones, while others are more like guidance, with broad and open-ended directions. What made the whole process effective was not its formality or its comprehensiveness. Rather, what made it effective was the logical connections among the parts. This observation evolved into the principle of logical incrementalism. The key idea of which is that the efficacy of planning and strategy, really depends upon certainty and control. When we are more certain and have greater control, we are better off planning deliberately and in greater detail. On the other hand, when we are less certain and have less control, we are better off planning more broadly and generally. You can think of it this way: plan generally in the long run and specifically in the short run, and, then, allow the direction of the general, long-run plans to guide the details of the specific, short-run plans.
In a nutshell, that is the big idea of logical incrementalism. It’s also the big idea behind how we do strategic management at the Parker College. We have a simple, overarching goal—to be among the leading business schools in the country. To do that effectively, we focus relentlessly on the value of our degrees by building intellectual capital among our faculty, educational quality in our programs, professional readiness in our students, and reliability in our internal processes. Of course, doing these things increasingly requires more granular and detailed plans and processes. But all of our plans hold together because of the guiding logic of our purpose. So, while we never lose sight of where are going, we recognize that we make progress incrementally, and, in so doing, we believe we provide a superior return on investment and move ever closer to making the Parker College degree among the most attractive and sought-after, anywhere in the world.
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