Now Offering: Plan Forward Workshops - Building Adaptive Capacity Into Your Strategic Plan
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Now Offering: Plan Forward Workshops - Building Adaptive Capacity Into Your Strategic Plan 📌
Higher Education Strategic Planning & Facilitation
Planning • Facilitation • Coaching • Assessment
Higher education leaders face complex challenges that require sophisticated solutions. While most consultants offer generic approaches, the unique context of higher education, including shared governance, a mission-driven culture, and student-centered values, demands specialized expertise.
At Liggins Abrams Consulting, we bring Fortune 500 strategic sophistication to mission-driven organizations. We understand that most strategic plans assume one future, but successful institutions build adaptive capacity for multiple possible futures. Our approach combines proven business strategy methods with deep higher education expertise, creating solutions that honor both institutional complexity and practical implementation needs.
The result? Strategic plans that actually adapt, teams that execute with clarity, and leaders who navigate change with confidence, all while protecting what matters most: student success and institutional mission.
Common Challenges We Help Address
Planning
Strategic plans lack adaptive capacity for multiple possible futures
Planning doesn't include scenario analysis or pre-built decision frameworks
Limited stakeholder input in strategic planning processes
Culture
Teams lack a shared language around student success, equity, and institutional values
Strategic priorities aren’t clearly reflected in day-to-day behaviors or decisions
Departments are siloed, with unclear norms for collaboration or communication
Data
Staff have access to data but lack confidence or training in how to interpret or apply it
Data use feels disconnected from real decisions or continuous improvement
Conversations about student success lack grounding in evidence and outcomes
Operations
Managers and team leads have limited support in navigating communication, supervision, or conflict
Cross-functional collaboration is inconsistent or depends on personality over process
Staff development is informal or ad hoc, making it hard to build shared expectations
The Difference: Strategic Methods that Fit Higher Education
The key is turning strategic insights into sustainable action. We help higher education leaders move beyond planning to implementation that sticks, with systems designed for your institutional culture and focused on student success for all students.
What We Offer
Strategic Planning
We enhance your existing strategic planning with adaptive capacity building, helping you navigate multiple possible futures while protecting student success and institutional mission.
Plan Forward Workshop Series
Our signature 3-part workshop series (Ground • Anticipate • Align & Act) that builds adaptive capacity through scenario analysis, stress-testing your strategy across multiple plausible futures, while protecting your mission and student success.
Explore Workshop Details and 2025 pricing.
Meeting & Retreat Facilitation
Interactive, engaging facilitation for leadership teams, cross-functional groups, and strategic sessions - not your typical retreat. We create focused environments where teams gain clarity, build alignment, and develop actionable next steps for complex institutional challenges.
Professional Development Workshops
Interactive, higher education-specific sessions that help teams build shared culture, improve cross-departmental communication, and connect daily work to institutional priorities. Focus areas include student success culture, data literacy, and collaborative decision-making.
Coming Soon: Core3 Workshop Series for comprehensive capacity building
Leadership Coaching
Ongoing thought partnership for vice presidents, directors, department chairs, and senior leaders navigating strategic decisions, organizational change, and leadership challenges. We provide clarity, accountability, and strategic perspective for complex leadership situations.
Assessment & Implementation Support
Comprehensive evaluation of current systems, processes, and institutional capacity to understand where your teams are, plus ongoing support that provides extra capacity to help leaders move strategic ideas forward. We help you identify gaps, eliminate duplication, and create momentum.
Let’s Talk
We’ve supported multi-campus institutions, cross-functional leadership teams, and student success initiatives that span the academic and student affairs divide.
Bring us your complexity and we’ll help you find clarity.