Notes from a Comments Watcher December 2011

  A summary of a recent committee discussion of strategic planning reported that “strategy is sometimes framed as preparing for an unknown future, so we want ideas that maximize our adaptability.”  The words “adapt,” “adaptive,” and “adaptability” have been recurring in our strategic planning from a preliminary description of our institution (“a powerful and adaptive learning environment”) through ideas about facilities (“classrooms adapted to our teaching”) to ideas about student post-graduate success (“adaptive approach to life”). Many ideas arriving from alumni, faculty, students, staff and other friends of the college go to the issue of adaptability.  As our conversation about strategic planning proceeds, it may be helpful to sort out the two meanings of adaptability that emerge. The first meaning of the term has to do with the flexibility, preparedness, and self-determination that we would wish for our students and graduates on their life journeys.  Many of the strategic planning ideas go to this goal, including enhancing the curriculum to cover a wider array of life skills, growing new relationships between students and alumni mentors who will share their varied and surprising life stories, and offering more support for graduates as they adjust and authenticate their life goals.  When I review the ideas that may lead to enhanced individual adaptability, I sense the emergence of a vision statement about Grinnell graduates that describes intellectually nimble and self-motivated life-long learners who, to quote a venerable text, “are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities to serve the common good.”  The focus of the first meaning of adaptability is on the agile and resourceful individual, but it is also necessary for strategic planners to think about the second meaning of adaptability, that is, the characteristics and resources needed to insure the survival and success of the College.  The College is not a nimble individual but an ecological system. This system encompasses a remarkable amount of variation, and variation is a virtue in a world of unpredictable environmental selection.  In the face of an uncertain world, it may be more useful to think of the College as comprising sufficient intellectual and representational variation to weather environmental pressures than to think of the College as a nimble individual waiting to react to the world’s next move. Of course, another word for variation is diversity, which is one of eight cross-cutting themes in our strategic planning. Many of the ideas for the future have been concerned with new and varied programs, opportunities, and connections.  The diversity offered by ideas about people and programs, majors, concentrations and careers, travel and communication, taken together, offer a vision of a resilient institution positioned to adapt to the unknown future.  Diversity is an adaptive process. - David Lopatto