The pain of discipline versus the pain of regret

Why estate strategies need to change what happens after approval

In brief: Estate strategies do not usually fail because the document itself is not serious. They fail when the institution has not built commitment to change, when ambition outruns the current position, and when resources do not shift after approval. The discipline is to face those issues early. The regret comes when they return later, with fewer options, higher costs and less room to manoeuvre.

After months, sometimes years, of evidence gathering, modelling, workshops, consultation, drafting and governance, the estate strategy is finally approved.

It may set out a compelling future. It may describe how the estate could better support the institution’s academic mission, student and staff experience, research priorities and long-term resilience.

The harder test comes next. Does the strategy change what happens after approval? Does it change what is discussed, what is funded, what is stopped, what resources move and what people are given the time and authority to deliver?

If not, the strategy is already at risk of losing force.

In our first article, we looked at three reasons estate strategies die: Poor implementation planning, lack of funding and neglect of maintenance. Each showed how a strategy can become disconnected from the practical realities that determine whether it will lead to action.

Here, we look at three further reasons: Lack of commitment, overambitious vision and failure to shift resources.

Together, they point to a recurring pattern. Difficult issues are softened, deferred or left unresolved because the immediate pain of discipline feels greater than the future pain of regret. But in estate strategy, delay rarely makes either the decision easier or the outcome better. More often, it means the same issue returns later with fewer options, higher costs, more emotion and a weaker foundation for action.

1. Lack of commitment: When the case for change is not clear enough

Lack of commitment to change is often the default state.

That is not because people do not care about the institution. More often, the case for change has not been made clearly enough, early enough or honestly enough.

Strategy processes must properly build both the case for change and the support for change that will be needed later to underpin implementation. If people are expected to live with the consequences of a strategy, help deliver it, and accept the disruption it creates, they need to understand why change is necessary.

This can be difficult. Making the case for change often means admitting that all is not well. That can make leaders defensive. It can create anxiety that difficult messages will demotivate staff, unsettle stakeholders or invite criticism. The temptation is to smooth the edges: to talk confidently about future improvement, while avoiding too much candour about the current position.

But staff are closer to the operational reality than senior teams often realise.

They see the poor fit between activity and space. They experience buildings that no longer support the work being done in them. They see tired accommodation alongside newer facilities. They know where workarounds have become normal (so much so they no longer feel like workarounds at all). They feel the consequences of unclear priorities, underinvestment or inefficient use of space.

If the official version of the strategy avoids those realities, staff are left to reconcile what they are told with what they can see. That is where cynicism can take root. In many cases, cynicism is not a sign that people lack commitment to the institution. It is a sign that they do not trust the story being told.

The discipline is not to alarm people. It is to be clear enough about the challenge to create shared understanding and galvanise collective efforts.

A useful estate strategy has to explain why change is needed, what is at stake and what the institution is prepared to do about it. That includes being honest about difficult issues: condition, suitability, affordability, space efficiency, maintenance, competing priorities and the need to make choices.  None of these are linear or one-dimensional issues and they can lead to some seemingly paradoxical situations if tackled with too narrow a focus.  It is common, for example, for groups of stakeholders to polarise around whether the institution has too little or too much space.  Such apparent paradoxes where both sides seem to have good evidence for their case often means neither side has entirely understood the problem.

This is where the institution needs more than a document. It needs a shared understanding of the performance challenge. What has to improve? What needs to change to create that improvement? What is the cost of not acting?

Those questions are not always comfortable. But if they are avoided, implementation does not become easier later. It simply becomes harder to explain why anything should change.

When the case for change is over-softened, the consequences can be severe. In the most difficult cases, avoiding uncomfortable conversations does not protect people from the outcome; it can leave them facing a worse one later, when the opportunity to change has passed.

When avoiding change stores up greater problems

We witnessed what became a truly pyrrhic victory for resistance to change in one organisation. Five years on from an initial strategy exercise, we were invited back in to assess progress.  In our original work, we had identified a significant over-supply of space, but the changes required had met considerable resistance.

Five years later, progress had been limited and the underlying position had deteriorated. Leaders and managers had struggled to make meaningful change and important underlying vulnerabilities remained unresolved.  What had initially appeared to some stakeholders as a victory over unwanted change ultimately left the organisation with fewer choices and much less time in which to make them.

Eventually, the money simply ran out. It was a tragic and unnecessary outcome, and far from what both leaders and stakeholders had set out to achieve. 

The pain of discipline comes from facing the facts while there is still time to build understanding and support. The pain of regret comes when more difficult decisions refuse to be deferred any longer and a sudden crisis limits both action and outcomes.

2. Overambitious vision: When ambition outruns the current position

Ambition is not the problem. Untested ambition is the problem.

Estate strategies need vision. Without it, they risk becoming little more than a list of constraints, repairs and compromises. Institutions need to imagine a better future: better environments for students and staff, better support for teaching and research, better use of space, better value from scarce resources and a better fit between the estate and the institution’s wider strategy.

But one of the biggest delusions in strategy-making is that ambition and vision alone will be decisive.

We have seen too many strategies in which the bold vision of a future estate takes centre stage. A new building, a major refurbishment, a transformation programme or a masterplan image can be positive and energising. It can give people something to rally around.

But if visioning proceeds only through positive ideas about the future, two risks follow.

First, the institution may assume it is building from a stronger base than it really is. Current problems are underplayed. The existing estate may be less fit for purpose than assumed. Maintenance, infrastructure, backlog and operating costs may be treated as background issues rather than factors that shape what is possible.

Second, the institution may overlook the transition from current state to future state. It may assume that future possibilities are within reach, without fully testing the resources, phasing, funding, capacity and implementation burden required to get there.

That is how a laudable future vision can become undeliverable.

A big architectural vision can easily take centre stage. But the less visible questions are often more decisive. What investment is needed simply to maintain the status quo? What funding is actually available? What is the estate currently capable of supporting? What is no longer fit for purpose? What has to change operationally? What are the lead times? What resources need to move? What is the transaction cost of change?

Test ambition against affordability

A funding plan cannot be treated as a later exercise. It needs to sit alongside the estate strategy from the start, so ambition is tested against affordability as choices are made and cost estimates and risk margins are understood realistically.  The same is true of condition and functional suitability. It is not enough to ask whether buildings exist, or whether a project is desirable. The harder question is whether the estate is fit for the activities, expectations and priorities the institution needs it to support.

This is especially uncomfortable in an academic environment. Academic priorities are not easy to rank. No credible institution wants to suggest that one discipline is intrinsically more worthy than another. But capital is finite. Land is finite. Leadership time is finite. Delivery capacity is finite.  Indeed, when it comes to prioritisation, these factors make a critical difference in resolving competing demands for scarce resources.  For a fuller explanation of our investment appraisal approach, request the supporting note: “Principle One and the Six Tests”.

In some cases, the gap between ambition and available capital is not marginal; the institution may be facing a programme of need that is vastly larger than the funding available. At that point, prioritisation is unavoidable. The question is whether the strategy process gives leaders a disciplined way to choose or leaves those choices to be made later under greater pressure. Worse still is a failure to choose badged as “we’re going to do it all and work out how to fund it later”.  Bold indeed but misguided when even a cursory glance shows the numbers cannot work. 

Heroic assumptions are no substitute for bold, clear-eyed leadership.

This is where objective investment tests matter. Not as a mechanical scoring exercise, and not as a substitute for judgement, but as a way of bringing more rigour and candour to choices that are otherwise too easily made politically, emotionally or by default. Equally, the point is not that limited capital should mean limited creativity. In fact, the reverse is true. As Rutherford is widely credited with observing: “We haven’t got the money, so we’ve got to think.”

If a strategy avoids those constraints, they do not disappear. They return later, often in more difficult form.

The better route is to test the ambition rigorously and to be expansive about the range of options which are available (some of which could offer much more benefit than others and for much less capital). Ask what the vision depends on. Ask what it displaces. Ask whether the first actions unlock future options or close them down. Ask whether the strategy is grounded in a clear-eyed understanding of where the institution is now, not simply where it would like to be.

The pain of discipline is the willingness to test ambition before it hardens into misguided commitment or unrealistic expectations. The pain of regret comes when a compelling vision proves unaffordable, undeliverable or disconnected from the institution’s real starting point.

3. Failure to shift resources: When everyone returns to the day job

Strategies most often fail in implementation because the scale of change is underestimated first, and then under-resourced in practice.

The strategy is approved. The document is complete. The governance process has been satisfied. The institution has, in principle, agreed the direction.

Then everyone returns to their day job.

The operational pressure of the institution reasserts itself. Term-time intensity takes over. Existing workloads continue. Leadership attention moves elsewhere. The people expected to deliver the strategy may not have the time, authority, funding or support to do the work required.

The organisation waits a week, a month, a year or more.  Everyone wonders what will happen and what was the point of the process if nothing does.

The result is no change.  No one acts differently; the status quo reasserts itself.

This is not usually because people do not care. It is because the strategy process has not acknowledged the resource burden on day one. It has remained a thought process, rather than becoming a road map for the work that needs to start after approval.

If a strategy is to mean anything in practice, resources must shift to match the priorities it sets. That includes capital, leadership attention, staff time, project capacity, governance focus, reporting structures and decision-making authority.

Governance does not end at approval

This is where governance matters after approval. Approval should not be the point at which the strategy disappears into the organisation. It should be the point at which ownership becomes visible, actions are agreed, progress is reported and review mechanisms are put in place.

Who owns the next stage? What needs to happen first? What must be funded? What must be stopped or slowed to create capacity? Which decisions need to return to the senior team? How will the institution know whether the strategy is still useful, still realistic and still guiding decisions?

Without that discipline, the strategy may not only be inert, it may be steadily unpicked.  Battles lost in the strategy process are re-fought in ‘business-as-usual’ mode (as one old colleague of mine remarked: “If you don’t like our strategy, don’t worry, there’ll be another one along any day now”).

This is also where academic and professional leadership need to connect. Estate teams may understand the physical, technical and delivery constraints, but many estate changes depend on academic behaviours, curriculum patterns, research priorities, departmental expectations and the willingness of senior academic leaders to support the case for change.   Hard won but modest progress can be readily undermined as the weight of culture and historic customs and practices reassert themselves every day. 

A useful estate strategy should become the basis for action: a road map for the work to be done, the decisions to be made, the resources to be moved and the progress to be reviewed.  A ‘too agreeable strategy’ will leave many battles to be fought during implementation; a more challenging strategy will resolve many of those battles by framing decisions and allocating resources for implementation.

The pain of discipline is accepting the day-one burden of implementation. The pain of regret comes when the first year disappears and the institution realises that the strategy has changed little.  Each chance wasted amplifies the risk that the next strategy process will achieve less.

What better looks like

A better approach is to be more disciplined earlier.

That means building the case for change honestly, including being candid about the magnitude of change and setting the stage for difficult conversations. It means creating shared understanding and common purpose before decisions harden. It means building in time for consultation and genuine engagement, but also anticipating resistance to change.

It means testing ambition against funding, condition, fitness for purpose, capacity and implementation. It means facing difficult decisions both early enough and creatively. It means recognising that a strategy has a resource burden from day one – shifting from a thought process to a road map.

It means using clear investment tests to expose trade-offs early, rather than allowing every project to appear equally urgent until the capital runs out.

It also means using governance to support better decisions, not simply to “sign off” the document.  “Sign off” is an almost sure signal that the governance process is a hurdle to manage not a genuine meeting of minds.

Good governance should help keep the strategy visible. It should ensure that ownership is clear, actions are agreed, progress is reported, risks are surfaced and the strategy is reviewed as conditions change. It should help the institution ask whether the strategy is still realistic, still useful, still guiding operational decisions and still driving performance.

Senior teams need time in the strategy process to think properly about the organisational challenge. They also need to understand the key numbers: “the dials in the cockpit”. They need to know where they are now, not simply where they want the estate to be. They need to understand what has to change, what can be funded, what cannot be funded, and what resources must move if the strategy is to lead to action.

None of this should feel extraordinary. It is the discipline good estate strategy should make routine.

The institutions that navigate the next few years well will not simply be those with the most ambitious estate strategies. They will be those that make the case for change clearly, test ambition against reality, shift resources towards agreed priorities and keep ownership visible after approval.

The pain of discipline is real. It asks institutions to face facts, test ambition and move resources either before it is comfortable to do so or before it is simply too late to act.

But the pain of regret is usually greater, because it arrives later – when choices are fewer, costs are higher and confidence has already been lost.

A useful starting point

If progress has slowed after an estate strategy has been approved, the useful question may not be “Why has no one delivered this yet?”

It may be “Did we create the commitment, decision discipline and authority needed for implementation to begin – and shift resources to match the strategy?”

What to take from this

• A strategy is only useful if it changes what happens next.
• Commitment to change depends on shared understanding, not avoiding uncomfortable facts.
• Ambition needs to be tested against funding, condition, fitness for purpose and implementation capacity.
• The funding plan cannot be treated as a later exercise.
• Objective tests for prioritisation help expose trade-offs before every project appears equally urgent.
• A strategy that does not shift resources will not shift performance.
• Governance of the strategy process is not a hurdle for ‘sign off’ but a mechanism for surfacing and resolving conflicting perspectives.
• Governance discipline after approval keeps ownership, action, reporting and review visible.
• The pain of discipline comes early. The pain of regret usually comes later, with fewer options and higher costs.

In our previous Insight article, Why estate strategies die, Bryan Thomas explores three patterns that we repeatedly see: Poor implementation planning, lack of funding and neglect of maintenance.

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About the author
Bryan Thomas is the founder of CPB Projects, a specialist consultancy helping education institutions make better long-term decisions about estate strategy, space and buildings. CPB’s work combines deep technical insight, sector understanding and independent judgement – helping senior teams protect scarce resources, reduce risk and make decisions that stand up over time.