Know Thyself - Before Somebody Else Does

20 May 2026

Dil Sidhu considers why universities would benefit from sharper outside eyes, rather than an internal review, to fully understand what they are doing today, and whether it is enough for the strategy they will need tomorrow.

In the world of legal services, the saying that ‘He who defends himself has a fool for a client’ is a fine line that may offend some, but it does make you stop and think. It is the same when reviewing your own higher education institution. Universities are particularly good at making the case for themselves. They have missions, histories, rankings, access plans, student experience strategies and, increasingly, strategies for having strategies. The 5-year plan is more of a wish list for the future than an attempt to address the light-speed pace of change taking place today.

What they have less often is a sufficiently unsentimental view of what is really happening now. Not what the last committee paper says is happening. Not what the annual report says should happen. What is happening in the market, in the classroom, in the inbox of a prospective student, and in the nervous conversations of employers, wondering whether universities still understand the problems they are trying to solve.

Know thyself is a magnificent instruction. Unfortunately, too many institutional reviews translate it as admire thyself. A school looks at its portfolio and asks whether the modules are properly aligned. A university reviews its student journey and asks whether existing processes are being followed. These are useful questions, but not strategic ones. They measure the institution against its current shape, rather than against the future arriving with a hammer.

The better question is, are we doing what we do well? It is, will what we do still matter when the world has moved on? The ice hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, is credited with the familiar line, "Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been." Higher education has often been excellent at explaining the ice. It has been less consistent at moving before the puck has gone.

This is where external expertise matters. Not because outsiders are wiser by default. The world has no shortage of people with a slide deck, a framework, and a confident invoice. The value of the right external perspective is that it breaks the closed loop. It asks why a process exists, who it serves, what behaviour it creates, and whether it belongs to yesterday's logic dressed up in tomorrow's language.

My own view has been shaped by a slightly odd career path. In business restructuring, you learn quickly that organisations rarely fail because nobody cares. They often fail because too many people cared about the wrong things for too long, and any change felt like a strategic betrayal, creating a cloud of denial. In higher education, the crisis is usually slower, more polite and served with better coffee, but the principle is the same. A gap between reality and belief is still a gap. So, mind your own gap, but with external insights.

Systematic Inventive Thinking offers a useful discipline here. Innovation is not always about adding something shiny. Sometimes it is about subtraction: what would become clearer if we removed a legacy assumption? Sometimes it is about task unification: what existing asset could do more than one job? Universities are full of hidden assets, but many are trapped inside old categories.

The Science of Ethical Influence and Persuasion add another uncomfortable lesson. People do not change because a strategy has eight pillars and a photograph of diverse students on the cover. They change when the case is credible, when the messenger is trusted, when evidence is visible, and when the next step feels possible. External review is not simply a diagnostic exercise. Done well, it becomes part of the influence architecture for change. These are just some of the tools that external perspectives can bring to collaborative work in higher education.

Having worked across London Business School, the University of Manchester, Columbia Business School, Coursera, Birkbeck and Cambridge, I have seen the spectrum from elite global brands to complex civic institutions, from digital scale to local transformation. The pattern is clear. The future rarely arrives as a single dramatic event. It arrives as minor changes in learner expectation, employer language, technology adoption, competitor confidence, and student patience.

So, what should higher education ask of external expertise? Not a beauty parade of recommendations. Not a consultancy performance where everyone nods at phrases like "future-ready ecosystem". The task is sharper. Hold up a mirror with inconvenient lighting. Map the gap between institutional belief and market behaviour. Assess whether current measures reward future relevance or simply past activity. Identify what should be stopped, combined, reframed, or accelerated.

The point is not to outsource judgement. Universities should never surrender their academic purpose to market fashion. But purpose without disciplined external challenge can become sentiment. Tradition without scrutiny can become a drag. And self-knowledge without outside evidence can become institutional theatre.

He who defends himself has a fool for a client because defence is not diagnosis. Higher education does not need more confident self-defence. It needs better self-knowledge, braver external challenge, and the humility to accept that the future will not be impressed by how well we explained yesterday.

Dil Sidhu has worked across business restructuring, organisational change, executive education, and digital learning. His higher education career spans London Business School, Alliance Manchester Business School, Columbia Business School, Coursera, Birkbeck Business School, and the University of Cambridge. He is a Cialdini Method Certified Trainer and collaborates with leaders on the Science of Ethical Influence and Persuasion.