Table Stakes Aren't Strategy

I've been reviewing many school strategic plans of late and I've been struck by how many of them aren't strategic. I'm a fan of Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and an expert on strategy. He offers a simple test for whether something qualifies as strategic: "A strategy choice is one for which the opposite is not stupid on its face." So if doing the opposite isn’t fathomable, then it's not a strategic choice – it's an operating imperative. With schools, I think of these operational imperatives as table stakes.

Apply this test to the following statements, drawn from actual independent school strategic plans:

"Achieve sustainable enrollment" 

"Ensure long-term financial health" 

"Champion faculty excellence" 

"Invest in, engage, and cultivate alumni and potential donors" 

"Develop strategic framework for determining appropriate teacher/student ratios"

Now flip each one. Would any school deliberately choose unsustainable enrollment? Financial precariousness? Mediocre faculty? Ignored alumni? These aren't strategic choices. They're table stakes, the minimum expectations for running a viable institution charging tuition. Being good at table stakes doesn't set you apart, but failing at them knocks you out of contention. Table stakes are critically important and if your school is failing at them, then they need to be addressed, but they don't set your institution apart.

Unfortunately, too often table stakes are being presented to school communities as strategy. And in doing so, schools are missing the opportunity to engage in actual strategic thinking.

Why Mislabeling Matters

To be clear, the items listed above are important. Schools absolutely need sustainable enrollment, financial stability, and excellent faculty. The problem isn't that schools are working on these things, it's that they're calling this work "strategy” and this mislabeling creates several problems.

First, it obscures the real strategic questions schools should be asking. When the "strategic plan" is consumed with achieving baseline expectations, there's no space to consider genuine positioning choices or to develop hypotheses about how the school should evolve in response to a changing world.

Second, it limits institutional imagination. By framing the future as "what we do now, but better," schools constrain their thinking to incremental improvement. They optimize existing models rather than questioning whether those models still create distinctive value.

Third, it wastes the "strategic moment." Every few years, schools mobilize their communities around the promise of charting a bold new direction. Trustees clear their calendars, faculty serve on committees, consultants conduct listening sessions, and parents complete surveys. When the result is little more than a list of what all good schools should be doing, that mobilized energy does not get leveraged as it should. It quickly dissipates. Good strategy choices should inspire a community and drive aligned action.

Finally, and perhaps most dangerously, it fuels strategic drift. A school can become operationally excellent at delivering value that the market no longer prizes. Schools can achieve all their "strategic" goals while simultaneously becoming less relevant, less distinctive, and less competitive.

What Strategy Actually Requires

Many school strategic plans are inside-out documents. They ask: "How do we do what we do better?" They inventory current programs, identify gaps, and commit to improvement. The logic is primarily internal.

Strategy requires an outside-in perspective. It begins with changes in the external environment and asks: "Given how the world is changing, what should we do differently to create distinctive value?" It's fundamentally about positioning the institution in relation to evolving needs, competitors, a changing market, and future conditions while at the same time staying true to a school's mission and values.

Consider the difference:

Inside-out thinking: "Enhance technology integration across the curriculum"

Outside-in thinking: "In a world where AI can write essays, solve complex math problems, and perform analytical tasks round the clock for little cost to employers, what capabilities will distinguish our graduates, and how must we restructure our program to develop those capabilities?"

The first is a project. The second is a strategic hypothesis about the future that requires making choices about curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and faculty development – choices that other schools might reasonably make differently.

The $40,000 Question

There's an irony in schools treating operational imperatives as strategy. These institutions are asking families to pay tuition that can exceed $40,000 per year – sometimes significantly more. At that price point, parents aren't looking for basic quality. They're not impressed by commitments to financial health or appropriate teacher-student ratios. They expect those things.

What they're paying for is distinctive advantage. They want to know: What will my child get here that they cannot get elsewhere? How will this school prepare them for a future that looks dramatically different from the past? What makes this institution's approach not just good, but uniquely valuable?

"Better marketing of the school's stories" can be a good component of an operational plan, but it's not a strategy. It just promises to better communicate the same value proposition. But what if the value proposition itself needs to evolve?

When Fundraising Drives the Plan

It's worth acknowledging why so many strategic plans look the way they do. It's not unusual that they're timed to precede capital campaigns. Development offices need concrete projects to fund: new athletic facilities, renovated science labs, expanded financial aid programs, enhanced technology infrastructure.

There's nothing wrong with capital projects. Schools have legitimate facilities needs. But "campus renewal" is not a strategy, it's a capital expenditure. The strategic question would be: "What kind of physical environment does our educational model require that doesn't exist today, and how does that environment enable distinctive programming we couldn't offer otherwise?"

When strategic plans are used primarily to rationalize fundraising priorities, the strategy itself disappears. What you end up with is not a strategic plan but a "capital campaign plan," and the distinction matters. There is nothing wrong with a capital campaign plan aimed at plant renewal especially for a school facing significant deferred maintenance. In many cases, that is exactly what's needed. By neglecting facilities for too long, the school has failed to meet basic operational imperatives; it has fallen below the table stakes required to remain competitive.

The Elements of Genuine Strategy

Genuine strategy development for independent schools includes several elements often absent from most current plans:

A clear hypothesis about the future. Not vague nods to "21st-century skills" or "changing world," but specific thinking about demographic shifts, technological disruption, economic changes, or evolving educational competition that will affect the school's viability and relevance.

Distinctive positioning choices. Clear articulation of what the school will do differently from competitors, and why those differences matter. Not "we'll do everything well," but "we'll be exceptional at this particular thing, for these particular students, in this particular way."

Acknowledgment of trade-offs. Strategy involves saying no. A real strategy would identify what the school will not pursue, what it will de-emphasize, or where it will accept being merely average in order to be extraordinary elsewhere.

Integration. Strategic choices should reinforce each other, creating a coherent model where each element makes the others more effective. This is how strategy creates defensible competitive advantage.

Risk acknowledgment. Because strategy involves placing bets about the future, genuine strategy development clearly names the assumptions being made and the risks being accepted. In this area, I like to use a tool from Roger Martin that I've used with schools faced with making significant choices.

Strategy is about placing bets, not hedging them. Hedging can feel more comfortable in the short term, but it leaves you with too little conviction to create real advantage. Hedging ensures you never invest deeply enough in any direction to see meaningful results.

Two Plans, Two Purposes

School may need two separate documents:

An Operational Imperative Plan that lays out the work needed to maintain institutional health, improve existing programs, upgrade facilities, and strengthen operational capabilities. This is essential work and deserves serious attention and resources.

A Strategic Positioning Plan that articulates the school's distinctive choices about future direction, makes explicit hypotheses about how education needs to evolve, and commits to specific positioning relative to other educational options.

The first document is about maintaining table stakes. The second focuses on creating advantage.

The first fortifies the institution. The second differentiates it.

The first secures the school's strengths. The second secures its relevance.

The Choice Ahead

This critique is not meant to disparage the dedicated trustees, school leaders, and faculty who labor to produce strategic plans. The vast majority are genuinely trying to serve their schools well. The problem is structural, not personal.

Schools operate in a risk-averse environment that is preservationist in nature. They serve multiple constituencies with different priorities. They rely on tuition revenue that requires maintaining enrollment. They face competitive pressure to offer everything other schools offer. And they're often led by consensus-oriented processes that drive toward broad agreement that can lead to trading off short term health (and harmony) for long term sustainability.

All of this makes strategic choices – particularly bold ones – difficult. It's safer to commit to operational imperatives than to bet on a distinctive future. It's easier to get agreement on "we should be better" than on "we should be different."

But safety and ease are not strategy. And in an era of rapidly changing educational competition, from improving public schools to emerging micro-schools to online options to declining birth rates, playing it safe may be the riskiest choice of all.

Independent schools face a genuine strategic moment. The question is whether their "strategic plans" will help them seize it or cause them to miss it entirely.