Three Metaphors for School Strategy

Over the last several months we have done a significant number of Board retreats -– from Beijing to Boston, from Charleston to Chattanooga. I am always fascinated to meet the people who express their connection and devotion to a school through Board service. We work Boards hard during the brief time we join them. We strive to surface critical topics and push them to locate their challenging work at the right altitude. 

The most satisfying aspect of the work for me has been to witness the remarkable board stewardship of high-quality school heads. I learn so much from them – from their patience, mission focus, and child-centric humanity. Each school and each leader reveals themselves in moments. A critical moment for any school and school head is strategy creation. This is where we can begin to help.

At times the events of the world around schools seem rudderless, making even the idea of school strategy confounding. To our way of thinking, however, it is a great school’s ability to face all sorts of complexity that defines its value. 

Metaphor #1: Strategy  and Luxury Cars

“Check out the new 2020 Strategic Plan—well-equipped, versatile, nodding to the past, styled for the future.”

For a moment, think of a strategic plan as a luxury car comprised of elegantly styled components. It is flashy; the engine sounds great; the styling is sleek. It represents the best of the elements of other luxury cars, and just as importantly, it has a few components not found in any of its competitor’s vehicles. When it arrives off the assembly line, there is a celebration of completing its design and assembly. But in truth, the car hasn’t done anything yet. Paradoxically, it has arrived, and it has not arrived — it simply exists. It is all potential.

The greatest challenge for educational institutions is not finding ambitious language to define strategic goals — we have proven time and again we can create a good-looking plan (to extend the metaphor, we can build beautiful cars with a great deal of performance potential). The greatest challenge is executing the vision of the language we create. Read any group of strategic plans from secondary schools, colleges, or universities, and you will find ample worthy goals — we build some beautiful-looking vehicles for strategy. However, not all of them (or perhaps only a very few of them) have the muscle to lay the foundation for successful implementation. My premise is: that the secret to high-quality implementation lies in how a school creates strategy as much as it does the operational plan that brings the strategy to life. The process we use to determine WHAT our strategy should be also determines our ability to achieve the plan's vision (the HOW).

Strategy creation and implementation are not separate tasks but one whole with two interrelated components.

Additionally, the goals of plan creation must include a vision of implementation. In short, our mistake is often that we focus on WHAT we want to create to a degree that dwarfs HOW we actually plan on achieving it. Indeed, the WHAT is often engaged without any vision of HOW to “get it on the road.”

Institutions don’t simply succeed or fail in strategic change implementation in the days, months, and years after the plan is announced. Rather the plan creation process itself significantly determines the degree to which a plan succeeds or fails. At EXPLO Elevate, we call this the “Hidden #3,” which is the process of creating an ambitious strategic direction that must equip the school to not only achieve its core aspirations but also be stronger for all the strategic processes that follow.

Metaphor #2: Avoid the Strategy Archipelago 

A well-constructed strategy, among other things, is cohesive and schools create some lovely, shiny plans with muscled language and bold vision. The exercise of creating strategy — the detailed and focused process that leads to its unveiling is powerful and additive in and of itself. However, too often developing strategy and sharing its final version is more of an end than a beginning. This happens for a number reasons — here are just a few:

• Boards and leaders fail to recognize that strategy involves difficult choices regarding resource allocation (and accumulation), and they are not prepared to back strategy with necessary resources of time, space, people, and money. Schools are too willing to imagine that institutional change can somehow be free. Against all evidence to the contrary, schools leave most important strategic work underfunded… or not funded at all.
  
  
• Sometimes creating a plan exhausts the community enough that members don’t want to think, much less act, strategically for another five years.
  
  
• Executing on a plan takes sustained engagement from the school community (Board, families, friends, faculty, staff, and leadership) not simply from administrative leadership and/or governance.
  
  
• Things change. The variables of context that produced the plan change so constantly that the Plan struggles for traction against the backdrop of a forever shifting landscape. The underlying lesson here is that good strategy is resilient. Good strategy allows for the navigation of a mercurial sea of changing circumstances rather than a rigid roadmap of the future that becomes obsolete as soon as it is written.
  
  
• Teachers in particular are preservationists -– we choose year after year a profession that offers us basically the same rhythm and structure that we experienced as five year olds. When strategy involves significant curricular shifts or adjustments in the use of time in the day, the faculty can become frustrated if not recalcitrant… I do not say this as criticism but rather to point out that the people who both know the most about (and are the most immersed in) the way things are now demand and deserve a compelling case for change. Making such a compelling case is hard.

There is another reason that strategy ceases to move forward (or at least stall) and that is, the cohesiveness they represent in the ideal splinters almost from day one of the plan’s life. Rather than holding together in a unified vision under a sort of single understandable flag, the components become a strategy archipelago where the organization finds itself trying to move so many initiatives forward simultaneously that they cease to feel, look, and most dangerously, be purposefully connected. In essence, the strategy becomes just a lot of stuff the organization is doing rather than a vessel for the vision and direction of the school. Each component sadly becomes its own island.

There are numerous reasons that a strategy archipelago develops, but the most important might be a result of what happens, or more accurately doesn’t happen, before community work on a strategic plan begins. When I taught English literature, we studied the role of antecedent action, that is, things that occur before a play, short story or novel begins that affect the actions, events, and relationships in the work. Similarly, the new plan is affected by what precedes it. It has its own antecedent action.

In order to know what will be most important in a new strategy and in order to glue the strategy to its execution (operational plan), a school should:

• Determine the things in the school that should never change. It should be a short list. Schools have a terrible habit of anointing too many things as sacred and thus off limits to change. Many schools continue to embrace the statement, “we’ve always done it this way’ as a kind of ancient law. Taken to its logical extremes, this paralyzes schools, Boards, and leaders.
  
  
• Acknowledge and articulate those things publicly.
  
  
• Determine (at the leadership and Board level) the top line vision for the plan. It should be concise, clear, and immovable.
  
  
• Understand the need for the plan. By the way, “because our accrediting agency makes us” is not a sufficient reason.

These bullets comprise the requisite antecedent action for strategy. Without vision or purpose, without a bold idea, strategy becomes an archipelago more than the way to move the organization forward. Strategy is not simply things a school is doing -– it is instead something the school is becoming. It is aspiration; it is a case for support; it is clarity above the din of the school’s rhythm; it is both the challenge we choose and the commitment that the school will face and rise to meet.  Strategy is NOT tactics, and it is NOT a checklist. An organization achieves its strategy through tactics. Tactics are a means to an end–they are not the end itself.

Metaphor #3: Land the Plane: Find Clarity within Complexity

The cockpit -– all those screens and switches, too many to count, plus lights, blue, yellow-orange, red. If things are really rough, a buzzer might sound. The voices from the tower are muffled in the radio. If this plane is an organization, its strategy and its people are being tested in the face of rough air and a low ceiling heading toward a foggy landing.

Clarity. When we need it most, it is most difficult to come by.

In complex organizational moments, schools need some understanding in order to debrief what has occurred, in order to understand what is happening in the present moment with accuracy, and in order to discern what is coming next. Yet our crystal balls look like a low ceiling landing into the Atlanta Airport. But have no fear! … planes land safely all day, every day.

In some ways leading a school in an uncertain environment can indeed feel like being caught perpetually trying to land a passenger plane with limited visibility. So what instruments are required to find the way forward in the fog and bad weather? What will ensure the institution is headed in the correct direction (strategy) at the correct altitude and speed?

For a moment, let us consider (and then challenge!) this:

• Mission and strategy determine direction. Strategy is a projected flight path and a destination. It doesn’t go anywhere on its own, but it inspires departure, and it keeps us on track when clarity is difficult to achieve. It requires us to trust it the way pilots trust a compass.
  
  
• Leadership controls altitude. Leadership makes the decisions large and small that provide the corrections to ensure that the turbulence and low visibility that can accompany progress don’t prevent a smooth landing. Many factors can drive a plane off course, drive it down, push it up. Leadership has its hands on the controls to steady it even when the way forward is hazy at best.
  
  
• The community determines the speed at which we travel toward the destination. Not that leadership doesn’t have influence here, but it is inextricably linked to the community as a whole. The community is not comprised of simply passengers, they together are the co-pilot. The community’s readiness (its learning curve about the strategy and its tolerance for progress) is the driving force controlling the speed at which an organization moves forward.

Metaphors like this can be enlightening, but their accuracy is also limited and often flawed. It appears helpful in that they offer to simplify complexity in order to allow us to wrap our arms around the outer edges of it; however, pushing to understand the nuance of the individual organization’s context is requisite in order to create the sort of clarity that defines long term strategic success … the sort of clarity that will land the plane smoothly over and over again regardless of the weather. Rather than representing individual silos such as the bullet points above indicate, it is more accurate to assert that there is a Venn Diagram between mission and strategy, leadership, and the community. To a degree determined by context — the people, the moment in the organization's history, the marketplace, etc. — each plays a part in organizational direction, altitude, and speed.

What organizations need is the strength to embrace complexity as complexity and to discover clarity of purpose and resolve despite that complexity, and they need the resilience/antifragility from all constituents to help navigate direction (strategy) and to control altitude and gauge speed.

So… “please make sure your seat belts are buckled, your trays are in their upright and locked positions, and prepare for landing. We will have you on the ground soon.”