The purpose of this research was to articulate the pressures faced by USA higher education leaders lived experiences and the relationship to problem definition, attention focus, and strategy choice. A conceptual Model of Strategy Choice by Higher Education Leaders is proposed to capture the dynamics between exogenous pressures and problems and leaders' choice of strategy, and decision-making. The model addresses two social processes (sense-making and decision-making) associated with reproducing and altering institutional logics. The findings highlight distinctions between conventional, pre-transformative, and transformative leadership thinking and their association with different dimensions of problem definition, organizational learning, and strategy choice.