Watch the Full Conversation (25 min)
Ask any institution how many plans it is running right now and the list gets long fast: strategic, academic, campus master plan, energy and sustainability, housing and dining. Mike Moss has led SCUP, the Society for College and University Planning, since 2014, and he sees integrated planning as the work of getting those plans to move in the same direction. In this conversation he explains how ownership, a steady reporting cadence, and the judgment of experienced staff turn campus planning from a document into a practice. He also makes the case that higher education facilities planning now has to happen through disruption instead of around it.
→ A strategic plan sets the direction. Integrated planning is how the academic plan, the budget, the master plan, and every unit plan move toward it together, department to department.
→ Every integrated plan needs a named home, such as the Office of the Provost, so that each year someone can report which outcomes moved and which were missed.
→ The plan only works if people are trained to act on it. Mike describes regular check-ins, for example twice a semester, where frontline staff report what they see before it turns into a crisis.
→ Long experience counts as evidence. Someone who has run the pipes for decades notices things a dashboard does not, and that observation belongs in the decision.
→ Scenario planning on a routine cadence ("if this, then that") gives an institution options ready when a disruption arrives, and a plan for telling everyone affected what changed.
More conversations with higher ed leaders
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Aaron Benz: Welcome to another Bow Tie Tuesday. It is my privilege to welcome Mike Moss. Mike is the President of SCUP. If you don't know SCUP, it's the Society for College and University Planning, which plays a really critical role in our ecosystem of colleges and universities. Mike, welcome to Bow Tie Tuesday.
Mike Moss: Thank you for having me. I look forward to our conversation.
Aaron Benz: I wanted to start by demystifying some terms that get thrown around, because I feel like you're at the heart of it. We've got strategic plans. We've got master plans. We've got energy plans. And now we have an integrated planning approach. How should we think about these? What's different, and what's the next evolution of what's happening today?
Mike Moss: I appreciate that. I would start with the strategic plan, because that's where we start. Once that's set, for whatever duration it's been set for, the integrated planning approach comes in. As you alluded to, there are a thousand other plans in place at any given moment that require resourcing, funding, and support, and they have to work in coordination. So while you can write an integrated plan, the integrated planning approach is actually what brings the horizontal alignment of a campus together.
It means accepting and acknowledging that campuses are a beautiful collection of loosely connected silos, working in units, departments, and colleges. The work that gets done there is in the direction of the true north that was set by your strategic plan. The approach brings those plans together by making sure they work in coordination through the academic plan and through the financing and the CBO, so that we are able to move the strategic plan forward.
What we might advocate, just as a challenge statement, is that there's no point in having a strategic plan if you have no need for change, because the strategic plan should be setting the path forward, which generally means change. So as we think about the incremental moments we have on an annual operating basis, the integrated planning approach can make sure those are collectively moving forward together in support of the direction and change established in your strategic plan.
Aaron Benz: That's really interesting. I often think of our own metrics, how we set plans and OKRs, and which metrics are running the business versus changing the business. When you think about integrated planning, is it a little bit of both, or is it more about changing the business? How do you square those?
Mike Moss: That's a great question. What I would offer is that, yes, you are tracking your performance on an annual basis, as we all do. But the integrated planning approach can bring the alignment of your faculty and your administration, everybody who's working in service of the student, toward more outcome-based conversations instead of output. It does matter how many people were served on a given day. That matters. But collectively, what was the outcome? Did it move toward an improved experience for the student or the faculty member, or were barriers identified?
So what the approach really can do is move you toward outcome discussions, which is the movement toward change. If I'm only tracking inputs and outputs, those are very important measures, and I would never say not to do that. But collectively, what's the trend line in support of? That's where we can take those performance metrics into the more strategic OKRs and KPIs and all the other acronyms we love to use. Basically, where are we making an impact toward the vision set forth in the strategic plan? That's more trend line based, with an aggregate report up, than it is a metric I know my team is performing against. Please don't stop doing that. But if we are working more together horizontally across the campus, department to department, we start to see where it all comes together in support of the strategic initiative, which most likely is driving an improvement and a change.
Aaron Benz: So the strategic plan is the big vision. This is the North Star. How are we heading there? And then the integrated plan is how all of our loosely coupled associations work together. So who owns the integrated plan? Is that even the right question?
Mike Moss: No, it is. And it does have to have ownership, but that's going to be based on the culture of the institution. I think we could all agree that if everyone owns something, no one makes decisions on anything. It's just too distributed. So think about the way your cabinet, or your hierarchy of decision-making, is structured. What levels of authority and decision-making have you created in your culture to make decisions that roll up to the movement of the strategic plan? In that structure of your culture, you will have ownership.
If you think about the ways we design decision-making teams, DACI or RACI and all those different models, in every one of those models someone has the accountability. So it may be a department. Maybe we just say it's the Office of the Provost, because right now this plan is focused on our academic performance at this institution. The plan forward is academic plan oriented, supported by a campus master plan, supported by the energy and sustainability plans, supported by housing and food programs, all of that. But it rolls up through someone's office for final accountability, and that should be stated up front.
I just picked on the provost. It could be someone else, but it needs to have a home. Otherwise, one of the challenges we often have in strategic planning is that the plan is written so broadly and so focused on the future that it's hard to see specific accountability for its destination. As long as we're doing that in the cascade of a unit plan or a department plan, those will roll up into someone's accountability to say: this year we moved the plan forward, here are the outcomes that worked, here are the outcomes we missed. And then we do the next cycle of unit planning for the next year of implementation.
Aaron Benz: Right. So while the strategic plan can be very broad, it'll naturally tilt toward the provost, the CFO, or somebody to help own it, maybe even IR. Every institution might be different. And then ultimately, how do the rest of the plans roll up to that? A huge piece I pick up on with the integrated plan is how we become dynamic. How are we able to be agile toward what we don't know? We think things are going to go a certain way. If you're dealt a royal flush, you're going to win the hand. But what happens when we're not? Institutions that might not have that dynamic ability yet, maybe they're on yearly update cadences and they want to get there. How do they start? What are the first steps?
Mike Moss: I'm going to pick up on your analogy to answer the question. Oftentimes when we're playing cards, the deck is stacked. But many of us came to the game to shoot dice. We didn't come to play cards. So the first challenge is that I'm coming to shoot dice, you're playing cards, and we're already disconnected because we had different games, and different goals, in mind.
I'm starting to sound like a broken record three minutes into the conversation, but once you understand how your culture works and you accept that that's how it will work, there's a cadence, there's communication, there's training, and there are data informed practices. All of that has to be done by intention, not by serendipity and fate. Think about the communication piece: I know that twice a semester I have a cadence of checking in on the performance of the integrated plan in my department with my reporting entity. Then they do the same thing. Now there's a cadence by which we are tracking those outcomes. And within that, I've been trained on how to use the data-informed information I'm provided.
A big piece of what really makes integrated planning work, and we might advocate this, is workforce development. Given a plan, I know what I have to do on the daily. I've been here 12 years, and I'm going to focus on the daily because that keeps me employed. There's nothing wrong with that, and I would never fault someone for it. But if we train people that on the daily they are also planners, that they are thinking about different scenarios because they're in the field, they will see things before someone two levels up, or two departments over, sees them. How am I communicating that in a cadence that lets people make proactive plans, as opposed to reactive moments that cascade into crisis? So it's a series of Cs: your culture, the cadence of communication, then the training and the data informed practice, and how that rolls back up into your culture of decision-making.
Aaron Benz: That makes sense. It's all by intention, though, right?
Mike Moss: All intentional. That is not serendipity. Please don't do it that way.
Aaron Benz: That's fascinating, because that's really the operational crux: the new rituals we create and what we emphasize. I'm sure you've heard the saying "what gets measured gets managed." That's not actually true. It's a misinterpretation of Drucker, who at least popularized the saying. You can measure a lot of things, and that doesn't mean they're getting managed. We're a data company. We have so much data, and that doesn't mean everything with a data point is managed effectively. Instead, it's about what you emphasize as an institution, from training your leaders to the new rituals you create, so that everything lines up to the vision. What is the balance? Do we have enough planning? How would a university know if it has too many plans? Is this death by a thousand plans? How do you figure out where the sweet spot is?
Mike Moss: So, Aaron, you're asking the planning guy if you can plan too much? No, I feel that. When I first started here at SCUP, there was a cartoon on the refrigerator in the kitchen, Dilbert or something like it, that ended with "plenty, plenty, plan, plan" as the answer for management. We can get exhausted with the cadence of doing foresight, doing planning, and using analytics to decide what might happen next instead of what I know I need to do today.
Again, it's a cultural thing. But you do have to acknowledge that some of us on a campus are, by title and by role description, planners. That is our job. And then there's everybody else, who actually does planning too, because everybody knows how their job fits into the work of their unit or department. How you tie that together doesn't have to be formalized plans, but it is planning. If I see something and I know it could be done differently, and I've been running the pipes for 35 years, I will see things the metrics may not. What is the cadence of discussion that moves that up into a discussion point that is now data supported? And does it have to be data required, or can it be data informed?
I would advocate, and this is Mike's opinion, not SCUP's, that the most experienced people on campus are a data point. That knowledge hasn't necessarily been captured by a computer. It's not in the Salesforce system or in any of the software. But the person has been doing it for 40 years, and that is a data point. Oftentimes we are getting so formalized and tech dependent that we forget the most important assets we have on campus are humans: the students, the faculty, the administrators, all of us. The human element is more important than the tech. The tech will hopefully make the humans more effective, but let's not ever lose human discernment. When somebody who's been doing something knows something and says something, that should be paid attention to and put into the discussion of decision-making.
Aaron Benz: That's cultural too. How do you give people the space to call out judgment where they see it? There aren't very many people more red-pilled on AI than I am, but one of the things I've learned is that human judgment is more important than ever. The people with judgment are by far your most irreplaceable people, because they can see the forest for the trees. Regardless of the systems, they're able to spot when the system's not working, when the plan's not working, or when the scenario is changing.
Which brings me to my next question. Let's say the budget pressures are officially back, in full force. I'm hearing that a lot of universities are losing staff or having to cut, or they've had open positions they haven't been able to fill, and now they're being told those positions are going away. When things aren't all great and you're under pressure, how do you think about integrated planning? If a VP is asking, "Are we doing integrated planning right?", what questions should they be able to answer, so that even if not everything is perfect, you'd say they're doing it?
Mike Moss: Aaron, you just asked the master class question. I'll do my best, but that's the question. Where we would start that conversation is: within the folks you are working with, what are the core questions that must be resolved? Whether it's something that just happened and you're responding, or something you're planning against, the most important change to the question you asked is that we are planning through complicated times. We're not planning against complicated times. That is a very different optic and mindset when we think about how we bring people together for decision-making.
While I would always advocate that there's never an empty seat at the planning table, it doesn't always have to be the same people in those seats. How are you bringing in the right people at the right time for the right decision? That's a planning table that's not empty, and it's constructed of those who can actually answer the questions that need to be resolved. So what are your core questions?
Once you have those core questions and you're planning through difficult times, what we might advocate, with pretty good support, is that what's happened in the last six years far exceeds the number of turbulent moments we had in the previous 12 to 15 to 20. Just pick a campus and ask the question.
Aaron Benz: No doubt.
Mike Moss: And I don't think any of us see that slowing down anytime soon. Regardless of the sources, the convergence and speed are real. As we think about planning through that, we did not come up with this at SCUP, and it's properly cited on our website, but it's VUCA Prime. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and we usually plan against those things. We would plan against the volatility we could see coming and the uncertainty we knew was in front of us. But now, because of the convergence and speed, we have to work through it and plan through it. It's active, dynamic planning all the time. We're doing alignment and calibration all the time.
So we're using a different version of VUCA. Look up VUCA Prime. There are some great articles on it. It's vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. We have the strategic plan vision. Once we have that vision, how do we communicate an understanding of what it means through the entire organization? At each level, it needs to get more specific about what it means for that service. Then, with that clarity, I can make decisions and do scenario planning and contingency planning on the regular cadence we talked about earlier.
If I'm regularly doing some scenario planning, and to oversimplify, it's "if this, then that," then when one of those moments of convergence and speed does happen, I at least have some options thought through ahead of time. They may not be completely fleshed out, and they shouldn't be, because you didn't have the data to show it was necessary. But you've done some "if this, then that" thinking, and now you have the agility to respond to whatever happened.
And then the reverse has to happen. It has to go back out. How do you communicate that this happened, this was the scenario we were prepared for, and here were the contingencies, so the people who depend on my decision are informed? And the people affected by my outcomes, I need to inform them too. You have to think about who depends on your decisions, what your outcomes are, and who depends on those. There's your horizontal alignment. That's integrated planning in practice: I know the dependencies and the outcomes, and who's affected by both.
Aaron Benz: I love that. The goal isn't that every decision gets forced all the way up to the top, with one person making decisions all the time. It's how you design your system so the person who has the right judgment on the circumstance makes the decision, and then that decision cascades back to the other parties who are affected.
Mike Moss: Exactly. That's where the tech-enabled human comes into play. We may have a hundred different software systems on campus, and that may even be a small number depending on the campus. But somewhere in there is a solid communication tool. At minimum, you've got email. And you've been trained, because it goes back to workforce development. I was trained to be data informed, and when I'm data informed, I'm also trained on who to communicate with. Those systems should be part of the cadence that informs decision-making. Then, when there are really existential moments, they are actually existential. It's not just a combination of 500 small things. It's a moment that brings the whole campus together, because you can only plan for so many scenarios, particularly for something from outside the campus.
Aaron Benz: Two more questions for you. First, when you think about SCUP, whether it's universities, colleges, or business partners, what can the community do? What can you all do? What's the next stage of what you're building in this community you're charged to lead?
Mike Moss: Accountability goes both ways. It's easy enough for me to sit in front of this microphone and say, here's what you're accountable for when you're doing good planning. But I would ask your audience to also hold the associations accountable for working together in community and in support of the campus, not as individual, loosely connected association silos. I think it's fair that we're asked those same hard questions, and the core questions to us should be coming from campuses now. It's in the name: we associate around a mission. Some associations, like SCUP, are designed to involve more than one discipline, and then there are the discipline-specific ones. But collectively, how are we being held accountable for bringing solutions to y'all on campus that are durable, sustained, and not dependent on episodic funding that may or may not happen next cycle?
Another adjacent piece that has been really challenging for all of us in the space is the questions about the value of higher ed as a whole. In the communities where we're located, and as we know there are thousands of them, people depend on that university or college. It is the employer. It's how people have housing. This is not some small crisis for some school you've never heard of. This is industry wide. So how are we all coming together, the campuses and the organizations around them, to have that conversation nationally about the value of higher education and how it can evolve to the specific needs of the individual and of a community? We know the answers. We just haven't necessarily found the right channels. So how do we hold ourselves accountable to that and get after it?
Aaron Benz: That's awesome. An integrated planning approach, not just for universities, but for you all too. Last question: what are you most excited about for the future?
Mike Moss: All of that. I would never want to belittle or diminish the challenges in front of us, because they are mighty and they're real. People are losing employment. We've had to do a reduction in force. We're all in this moment, and it's very challenging. It should be driving, and it is driving, the conversations you bring forward on Bow Tie Tuesday. There are still things we need to do in service, but what does it look like to start doing that in service differently? I think we can all agree that the durability of higher education is here, but not in the way we've survived past moments, whether it was the real estate crisis or other things. I've been on the earth a long time, and there's always been disruption. But this one feels like it has a different long tail to it.
To deliver the value we owe society, I'm really excited about how we're being challenged to come together differently, and to serve differently, because, as you noted, AI is here. Is it red pill or blue pill? I always get those confused.
Aaron Benz: Red pill, definitely.
Mike Moss: As we think through how that plays out in all industries, it still requires an educated populace. We just have to imagine how we might do that differently, plan for it, and then do the dynamic implementation along the way. That's exciting. It's nerd planning for sure, and I love the nerdiness of the planning, but the implementation and its outcomes are what really have me excited. I have great hopes of being a grandfather someday, and I cannot wait to see what higher ed has to offer my grandchildren. I think that will be amazing.
Aaron Benz: That's awesome. I'm right there with you. I can't wait to see whatever the next act is for what colleges and universities look like in the future. Mike, thank you so much for coming on Bow Tie Tuesday. It's been a real privilege, and we'll have to do another one sometime.
Mike Moss: I really appreciate it. Thank you for your interest in SCUP, for giving us an opportunity to talk about what we're doing, and for getting me to wear a collared shirt today.