Jan Garfield, PhD, CQE
Throughout my career in higher education, accreditation, organizational transformation, and performance excellence, I have observed that institutions are sustained by dedicated people, an unwavering focus on mission, and a commitment to serving students and communities. Their long-term success depends upon organizational systems, strategic discipline, and the capacity to adapt while remaining faithful to mission.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of helping to lead a faith-based liberal arts institution through a period of significant change. Financial pressures, workforce transitions, program restructuring, enrollment realities, leadership changes, accreditation considerations, and evolving student expectations converged. Just as many colleges and universities are doing across the country, we navigated uncertainty while continuing to serve students and advance our mission. We did difficult work under challenging conditions, often building the plane while flying it.
That experience reinforced a conviction developed through years of Baldrige work:
Organizational resilience is designed.
Resilience emerges from leadership, learning, disciplined systems, and a shared commitment to continuous improvement. Increasingly, resilience depends on two complementary capabilities: systems thinking and strategic foresight.
For decades, the Baldrige Excellence Framework has helped organizations understand and manage themselves as integrated systems. In research my colleagues and I conducted for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and the Alliance for Performance Excellence, leaders consistently identified systems thinking, strategic planning, leadership, measurement, workforce engagement, and continuous improvement as critical drivers of organizational resilience and long-term success. Organizations that successfully navigated disruption embedded Baldrige principles in their culture, operations, and decision-making processes. They developed the organizational capacity to learn, adapt, and improve.
Several leaders described strategic planning as their organization’s “North Star.” Others emphasized the importance of connecting daily operations to strategy, mission, and stakeholder needs. Those observations resonate with my experience. Strategic planning provides direction, alignment, and accountability. It helps organizations steward resources wisely and pursue mission intentionally.
Today’s environment requires an additional leadership capability.
Higher education is operating in the midst of demographic shifts, technological disruption, artificial intelligence, changing workforce expectations, economic pressures, and evolving student needs. The pace of change is accelerating. The future is complicated and uncertain.
Strategic foresight offers a disciplined approach to navigating that uncertainty.
Strategic foresight recognizes that uncertainty is a constant characteristic of the future. It equips leaders to explore multiple plausible futures, identify emerging trends, challenge assumptions, and strengthen decision making. The goal of strategic foresight is not to predict what will happen but to expand organizational awareness, improve adaptability, and develop strategies that remain effective across a range of possible futures.
My work in strategic foresight has strengthened my appreciation for the relationship between foresight and resilience. Organizations often devote substantial attention to immediate operational demands. Strategic foresight creates space for leaders to examine emerging possibilities, consider longer-term implications, and prepare thoughtfully for change. The result is greater agility, stronger decision making, and increased capacity to adapt.
For higher education leaders, mission-centered strategic foresight offers particular value. It invites institutions to consider how to express and sustain their mission through changing conditions. It encourages leaders to look beyond annual planning cycles and develop the capabilities needed to serve future generations of students.
This is where strategic foresight and the Baldrige Excellence Framework intersect.
The Baldrige framework provides the integrated systems that align leadership, strategy, workforce, operations, measurement, and results. Strategic foresight broadens organizational perspective and expands understanding of future possibilities. Together, they help leaders connect mission, strategy, execution, learning, and adaptation.
This work lies at the heart of SPQA’s contribution to the higher education sector. At a time when institutions are confronting unprecedented complexity and change, SPQA provides leaders with proven frameworks, meaningful assessment, expert feedback, and a community committed to organizational learning and performance excellence. Through assessment, learning, coaching, feedback, and a community committed to performance excellence, SPQA helps institutions build the organizational capacity required to navigate change thoughtfully and confidently. The framework provides structure. The assessment process promotes learning. The community encourages continuous improvement.
The significant challenges facing higher education create opportunities for innovation, renewal, and growth.
Institutions that cultivate strategic foresight strengthen their capacity to adapt, thrive, and sustain mission. They are better prepared to align resources with priorities, respond to emerging challenges, and serve future generations of students.
Resilience is the result of leadership, evidence-based learning, disciplined systems, mission-centered strategic foresight, and a steadfast commitment to mission. In higher education, that commitment is an act of stewardship on behalf of the students and communities we serve.
June 2026