Lately, strategy has become part of everyday conversation.
You can hear it in passing remarks on the news, in quiet debates among colleagues, in the way people try to make sense of large, unfolding events in Iran. The question keeps surfacing in different forms: Are these military tactics part of a coherent strategy, or are they simply reactions stitched together after the fact?
I tend not to linger long in those discussions. But I do find myself paying attention to the question itself. Because once you start looking for the difference between strategy and motion, you begin to see it everywhere.
I saw it most clearly in a learning center.
On the surface, everything looked right.
Students were showing up. Tutors were busy. Whiteboards were full. If you asked the director how things were going, the answer would have been immediate: We’re at capacity.
But the longer I sat there, the more something felt off.
The students were working—seriously working. One leaned over a problem set, repeating the same steps again and again. Another flipped through pages of notes, highlighting almost everything. A third asked for help, then struggled to explain what the assignment was actually asking them to do.
No one was disengaged. No one was lazy.
And yet, the room carried a quiet sense of drift. Effort was everywhere, but direction was harder to find.
It became clear that what I was watching wasn’t a breakdown in motivation.
It was a breakdown in strategy.
Higher education uses the word strategy often, almost reflexively. Every institution produces a strategic plan, usually well-designed and carefully sequenced over several years.
But most of these are not strategies in any meaningful sense.
They are plans. Timelines. Collections of intended actions.
A strategy does something more demanding. It forces you to think beyond the immediate step and consider what follows from it. Not just what will happen next, but what will happen because of what happens next.
That distinction—between action and consequence—is where first-, second-, and third-order effects begin to matter.
And it is precisely where most academic systems, and most students, begin to lose clarity.
I’ve spent much of my career working in that gap.
At Lenoir-Rhyne University, I once developed a short metacognitive module for first-year students. The assignment was straightforward: improve early academic performance.
The results came quickly. Scores improved almost immediately.
But the more revealing outcome came later. Four years after that brief intervention, students reported that they were still using what they had learned. Not only in upper-level coursework, but in graduate study as well.
The initial gains were expected. The persistence was not.
That persistence was the real signal. It meant the work had reached beyond the first order.
Around the same time, I built a study hall program for student-athletes. The goal, again, was academic: raise GPA, maintain eligibility.
That happened.
But something else began to surface. Coaches started noticing that players were making better decisions during competition. Athletes described a growing ability to read situations more clearly and respond more quickly. In surveys, many connected their improved academic habits—especially their ability to evaluate and adjust—to their performance in games.
Over the next several years, the university experienced one of the strongest stretches in its athletic history.
The program had started in the classroom. Its effects extended well beyond it.
This pattern repeated itself in different contexts.
At the University of the Cumberlands, an academic support model implemented within a football program led not only to improved classroom performance, but to a deep playoff run. More unexpectedly, the head coach began restructuring practices to mirror the learning model.
At Denison University, work in the natural sciences was initially aimed at improving outcomes for students of color. It did that. But it also improved outcomes across the board and, in time, reduced the instructional burden on faculty.
At Florida Polytechnic University, a gateway STEM course saw DFW rates drop dramatically. What followed was not just improved pass rates, but stronger persistence in later coursework.
Each case began with a targeted goal.
None of them stayed contained there.
The common thread is not effort. It is orientation.
Most students encounter their coursework at the level of the immediate task. What is due? What is covered? What needs to be completed?
When they study, they respond accordingly. They prepare for what is in front of them.
What they are rarely guided to see is how that work extends forward. How it will be assessed. How it connects to later material. How it accumulates into something larger.
Without that perspective, their effort becomes fragmented. It is possible to work very hard and still feel as though nothing quite holds together.
The issue is not that students are unwilling to think deeply.
It is that they are not consistently shown where depth is required—or why.
There is a simple analogy I often return to.
Imagine a family planning a vacation. Flights are booked, hotels reserved, activities scheduled. But no one has answered the most basic question: What kind of trip is this supposed to be?
Is it restful? Structured? Exploratory?
Without that shared understanding, each decision begins to pull in a different direction. The plan fills out, but coherence slips.
The result is not failure.
It is misalignment.
Many learning centers operate in a similar way.
They respond to student requests. A student arrives with an assignment and asks for help. The tutor helps them complete it.
This approach is often described as student-centered, and in some ways it is.
But it assumes that the student has accurately identified the nature of the problem.
It is, in effect, a service-fulfillment model.
And like most service models, it prioritizes responsiveness over diagnosis.
If you brought your car to a mechanic and described what you thought was wrong, you would not expect them to begin repairs immediately. You would expect them to assess the system first, to determine whether the visible issue reflected a deeper one.
Academic support should operate with the same discipline.
What is needed is a shift toward a different model.
A strategist model.
This begins with a simple change in sequence.
First, there is an assessment. Before engaging the content of an assignment, the student’s understanding of the task itself is examined. Do they see what is being asked? Do they understand how their work will be evaluated? Can they anticipate where this material is going?
If that foundation is missing, additional explanation of the content will have limited effect.
Second, there is a deliberate effort to build that foundation. Students are guided to recognize how their work will be used and how it connects beyond the immediate task. This is where second-order thinking begins to take hold.
Only then does the work return to the assignment itself.
At that point, the interaction changes. The student is no longer working blindly through steps. They are working with a clearer sense of direction, which makes the help they receive more precise and more durable.
Research consistently shows that when students approach their work with this kind of forward orientation, their performance improves. They spend less time circling problems, report greater confidence in their learning, and are more satisfied with their academic experience.
More importantly, the effects do not remain isolated.
They carry.
From course to course. From year to year. From the classroom into other domains.
Strategy, in the end, is not about doing more.
It is about seeing further.
And until higher education begins to organize its support systems around that principle, it will continue to produce effort without alignment, activity without accumulation.
The work will get done.
But too often, it will not add up.
What students need is not more help completing tasks.
They need help understanding what their work is building toward.
They need what strategy experts call a strategic insight.
That is the restructure.
And it is long overdue.
