Something has shifted in the conversations I have been having with people across UK higher education.
Over the past year or so, colleagues in leadership roles and on the front line have been reaching for similar language to describe their working environment: impulsive decision-making, light on evidence and heavy on turbulence; a management culture that seems to generate uncertainty rather than absorb it; a sense that the next restructure, the next announcement, the next reversal, is always just around the corner.
What strikes me is not that people are frustrated – frustration in HE is hardly new – but that so many of them, in so many different institutions, are describing the same thing. Universities appear to be operating in a state of permanent crisis.
The texture of life under permanent crisis
The colleagues I talk to are not describing dramatic, isolated incidents of bad leadership. They are describing something more pervasive and harder to fix: an atmosphere in which calm, forward‑looking thinking has become increasingly rare, in which the default response to any problem is immediate visible action, and in which the experience of working in a university increasingly resembles fire‑fighting.
Decisions arrive without clear rationale. Restructures are announced before the evidence that triggered them has been shared. Policies are reversed before they have been embedded. Courses are closed or launched with speed.
This is not a complaint about hard decisions. Universities face genuine and serious pressures, and nobody working in HE leadership has an easy job at present. The complaint is about the texture of the decision‑making and its apparent disconnect from evidence and consultation, its preference for speed over robustness, and the way it leaves the people expected to implement decisions feeling like passengers rather than participants.
When that becomes the normal experience of working life, it corrodes something important: not just morale, but the basic sense that institutional decisions are made in ways that are comprehensible, reasonable and open to challenge.
The cascade of crises
Universities are now operating in an environment in which genuine crises have become almost continuous.
In the past decade alone, institutions have had to absorb the consequences of Brexit, pandemic, cost‑of‑living pressures on students and staff, sustained funding pressure, a shift in political attitudes toward higher education, the rapid rise of generative AI, concerns about international student recruitment, and a sustained demographic challenge in some parts of the country. Each of these is real. None of them is the institution’s fault. Together they have produced something significant: a sector whose leadership capacity is almost permanently absorbed by managing the consequences of external shocks, leaving little time or space for the slower, more deliberative work that strategy actually requires.
There is a well‑understood dynamic in organisational research in which prolonged crisis conditions gradually reshape the default responses of leaders and institutions. When the environment produces frequent, urgent demands, the habits of mind associated with crisis response, speed, decisiveness, centralisation of authority, communication that projects confidence even when uncertainty is high, start to feel like normal good management.
The problem is that these habits, entirely appropriate in a genuine emergency, become counterproductive when applied routinely to decisions that are not actually emergencies at all. The instinct to act fast, to announce rather than consult, to project certainty, starts to produce exactly the atmosphere of managed turbulence that staff experience as impulsive leadership.
When strategy stops deciding
One way in which universities have tried to grapple with this barrage of external factors is by investing considerable time, energy and creative effort in producing strategic plans. Long consultation processes, all-staff events, polished documents with ambitious titles and inspiring values statements. These plans are not cynically produced. Senior leaders and their colleagues genuinely believe in them when they write them. Yet many staff would tell you privately that these documents have limited grip on day‑to‑day decisions when it matters most.
Strategic plans have become so expansive and aspirational that they cease to guide choices. When almost every goal, value and aspiration is declared a priority, the plan cannot resolve the inevitable conflicts that real resource allocation involves.
This is not a trivial failure. The central purpose of strategy is to help an institution say no as well as yes, to create a basis for choosing between competing goods. Without that, “strategy” becomes a vocabulary for rationalising decisions that were really made on other grounds. At the same time, the link between strategy and budgeting is often tenuous. When financial pressure arrives, decisions about cuts, restructures and reinvestments are made in haste and retrospectively dressed in strategic language, which produces exactly the impression of impulsiveness and arbitrariness that staff find most demoralising.
When strategy does not decide, something else does, and it is usually the judgment, temperament and anxieties of a small group of senior individuals. Decision‑making becomes personalised in ways that make it opaque and unpredictable to everyone else. The plan is still there, still cited in emails and presentations, but it has ceased to function as a genuine constraint on behaviour. Is it any wonder that the experience on the ground can feel arbitrary?
The performance of decisiveness
The perma-crisis has also led to many universities internalising the logic of the attention economy, treating the performance of decisiveness as a form of leadership.
Modern universities are institutions that are always performing, to regulators, to prospective students and their families, to local and national political audiences, to funders, donors and partners. In this environment, there is an almost irresistible incentive to make visible, dramatic-looking moves. A carefully considered paper going through the proper governance structures, with evidence and consultation and a nuanced recommendation, is invisible. A rebrand, a new institute, a sudden restructure or a striking announcement of strategic intent is not.
This creates a structural pressure toward exactly the kind of behaviour staff experience as impulsive. Announcements precede analysis. Confidence is projected before the thinking is complete. Leaders feel they must have a view on every emerging challenge, from AI to micro‑credentials to free speech, expressed quickly and publicly, because visible responsiveness looks like competence, and delay looks like drift.
Staff who work closer to the evidence, who know the complexity that the announcement is skipping over, experience this as recklessness. But the leader making the announcement is often responding rationally to a very real set of incentives. In a world where standing still looks like falling behind, the performance of constant forward motion is almost compulsory.
Can we be strategically calm?
The case for doing something different rests on the observable costs of permanent crisis mode: decisions that have to be reversed, staff who have learned to wait out the latest initiative, implementation that fails because the people expected to deliver had no role in the design. These are not just ethical problems; they are strategic ones.
Rebuilding something like “strategic calm” would require changes at more than one level. At the most fundamental level, universities need to reconnect strategy to real choices. That means being explicit about what the institution will not do as well as what it will, and ensuring that those choices are visibly reflected in budgets, staffing and estates decisions. The test of a strategy is whether it changes what actually happens, and that test is currently failing in too many institutions.
It also requires a principled slowing down of high‑impact decisions. Restructures, significant course closures, major partnership commitments and large changes to the conditions under which staff work should move through defined stages: a clear account of the problem to be solved, a genuine options appraisal, scrutiny by people with relevant knowledge and appropriate authority, and a published rationale.
This is not bureaucratic obstruction, it is the minimum infrastructure of accountable decision‑making, and its absence is precisely what makes so many current processes feel arbitrary. Alongside this, leadership can do a great deal more to open up the black box of institutional decision‑making, sharing the constraints they are working within, the scenarios they have considered and the trade‑offs they have judged, rather than presenting outcomes as if they were inevitable or self‑evidently correct.
Finally, and perhaps most demandingly, institutions need to develop a more honest relationship with uncertainty. Not every external challenge requires an immediate institutional response. Not every emerging technology or policy development requires a working group, a strategy paper and a press release within six weeks. Sometimes the most strategic response is to say clearly: we are monitoring this, here is what we know, here is what we do not know, and we will bring a considered view when we have one.
Frontline view
None of what I have described is unique to higher education. Many sectors are living through versions of the same story: external volatility, hollowed‑out strategy, and a performative culture of constant decisiveness producing a lived experience of instability and impulsiveness. But universities have a particular stake in getting this right.
The colleagues I have been speaking to were not simply venting, they were registering a serious institutional failure: the failure to create and sustain conditions in which people can think carefully, plan confidently, and go about their work with a reasonable sense of what tomorrow might look like.
Universities are, at their best, institutions whose entire purpose rests on the careful, evidence-informed, long-term pursuit of knowledge and understanding. When the internal culture of an institution starts to contradict those values; when speed displaces evidence, when announcement precedes analysis, when authority substitutes for argument, something important is being lost – not only in terms of staff experience, though that matters greatly, but also the purpose of a university at all.
The question worth asking is not how we ended up here, interesting as that question is, but rather, what kind of institutions we want to be, and are we still capable of the patience and deliberation that answer requires.
