The common theory of strategy usually goes something like this.
The present is littered with challenges, failures, and ideas that haven’t taken off yet.
The beauty of the future is that it has not happened. It is a blank canvas on which the ideal can be projected without the lumps and bumps of the present day.
On this canvas the outline of a future is drawn which is powerful yet uncomplicated. A commitment to doing something for the people an organisation is seeking to support, sell stuff, or otherwise provide a service.
To then fill in the outline an organisation will set staging posts to measure progress propped up by a range of activities that propel the firm from the present day to the future.
Deliberate
This approach is known as deliberate strategy. It is a way of working that prizes forward planning, the organisation of resources, and the dissemination of a single way of working into organisational management structures.
This mode of strategy will be familiar to students’ unions. The end goal could be something like ensuring every student has a great time at university.
The key interventions might include advice, peer support, investment in clubs and societies, and sorting out that tricky commercial space. There will then be a set of enablers like financial stability, internal HR processes, investment in insight, and other useful drivers of activity.
There is nothing wrong with this way of working. For organisations that are clear about their future, have the resources to significantly change their activity, and the leadership capacity to align the whole organisation behind a clearly defined set of goals it may be the best approach.
However, there is an alternative students’ unions may wish to consider.
Emergent
Henry Mintzberg is one of the most important public administration theorists of the 20th century. Mintzberg imagines organisation strategy like a potter at a wheel.
The raw ingredients exist (staff, committees, money, representatives, and so on), but the shape of the pot only comes into focus when hands are applied to it. This is strategy by doing. Strategic intent only becomes apparent through patterns in retrospect.
This would mean that students’ unions would have much looser resource allocations and move across departments, programmes, central university structures, representative groups, and ways of working, where the challenges and insight lead them. The focus of activity is much more organic and there is greater latitude for staff to engage with challenges and opportunities as they emerge.
Emergent strategy places greater emphasis (perhaps the greatest emphasis) on the initiation ideas and the provision of the materials to affect change within an organisational context.
Rather than having a committee of people to decide things, highly organised spaces, or detailed workplans, the students’ unions would develop the most effective ways of devolving decision making and resources and then retrospectively analyse what seems to be working in order to decide organisational direction.
What to use when
This is not to say that everyone can do what they want all of the time. Accounts still need doing, HR processes still need to be in place and students would dearly miss sports if the sports manager decided to be a course rep coordinator.
It is instead a useful frame which acknowledges the world is too unpredictable, and higher education is particularly unpredictable, to be entirely certain about what the future looks like. It is a shift of emphasis which places the focus on creating the conditions for doing the work rather than directing it.
Emergent strategy may work particularly well in students’ unions with a diffuse membership whose needs can’t be met through one approach. It might help multi-campus unions develop campus specific ways of working. It could certainly be useful in smaller teams where everybody does a bit of everything.
And, it is helpful for those students’ unions who are unclear about what their members want. Emergent strategy holds that clarity will not come from endless analysis but in letting people get on with the work and then doing more of what worked and less of what didn’t.
