We are here to help
At EXPLO Elevate, we empower educational leaders with actionable insights for institutional advancement. Our seasoned team brings decades of experience to your challenges, having collaborated with over 80 schools and organizations worldwide. We specialize in rapidly enhancing your capacity to design and implement transformative systems that reinforce your institution's identity while promoting differentiation and long-term sustainability.
Strategy Development, Strategic Plans
Strategy isn’t a plan or a roadmap. It’s really a way to navigate. We’re living in an age of acceleration. There will be no moment in time when things will be moving as slowly as they are moving now. At EXPLO Elevate, we think of strategy development as making decisions about outcomes: the outcomes that must become true for your school.
How you get to those outcomes is encapsulated in your operational plan. As the world – context – changes, your operational plan will change. But a well crafted strategy serves as the best and first tool a school has when it faces the unexpected be it opportunity or obstacle.
Great strategy is transparent, clear, actionable, and resilient.
Too often schools approach strategy creation like good mechanics. Educators are good at solving problems. Fixing things. Like mechanics. At EXPLO Elevate, however, we challenge you to approach strategy like great designers and architects. Strategy needs a designer’s view. There will be myriad problems to solve, but strategy gives us a way to understand for what purpose your school is allocating and accumulating resources to serve the mission, vision, and legacy of the school given the context of the current moment in history.
We’ve worked with many schools and we’ve looked at hundreds of strategic plans. They often fall into two categories.
- The problem solving or mechanic’s plan. These plans lack winning aspirations that can inspire a community and have a tendency to state the obvious. These are plans that are focused on trying to keep the old version of the school alive, but aren’t looking at how to make the institution truly flourish and sustain itself into the future.
- Wish list plans, also known as the dreamer’s dreams. We’ve seen too many strategic plan approaches where the entire community is told to brainstorm often with no guardrails. No idea is bad or unrealistic. The community can get very excited and in an effort to keep that excitement, many things get put into the plan. The end result is a wish list of things … most of which will never happen.
Given our vast experience in both working as school leaders and working with schools all around the world, we understand the power of context, and we have many tools in our kit so that we might tailor our work to your specific needs. We’ve also refined a way of approaching school complexity called TWO, FIVE, TEN that we’ve used with scores of schools. The key with TWO, FIVE, TEN is that it’s simple, clear, inclusive, and results in clear and actionable outcomes.
Supporting Operational Excellence
Sadly, far too many strategic plans grow old sitting on shelves in leader’s offices. It becomes obsolete almost immediately after the Board passes it. We help schools ensure the strategy they develop is resilient and necessary — that the approach to it serves the school.
Creating strategy is not an end unto itself. Passing it represents a starter’s flare, not simply permission to move onto the next agenda item.
With this in mind, we offer in addition to, or as complementary to, strategy development:
From inception to execution, we help you navigate this complex process from beginning to end. We partner with your Board of Trustees, the leadership team, and the school community to set a course that allows the school, its students, and the extended community to flourish. Our intent is to solidify deep accountability for the strategy direction the school has chosen. There is no one size-fits-all for this work. Depending on time, budget, personnel capacity, and other circumstances and resources, we customize our engagements to each school.
Though superficially sounding similar to project management, this is specific leadership support led by our most senior staff that allows for ongoing strategic execution support and counsel for the leaders who are responsible for bringing strategy into operational life. Executing on great strategic plans always calls on the need for organizational change management. We are available to apply our experience with schools, to recommend actions, to ask questions others might not ask, and to listen and respond deeply to the challenges that inevitably arise.
With excellent overall strategy, leaders will surface numerous projects to undertake. Our approach to strategy leads to a fluency with strategic work that schools can reapply to strategic sprints. With a far tighter timeline and significantly narrower scale, we are ready to help schools undertake fast movement toward resolution and the resolve to execute successfully. As a few examples, we are excited to help face topics such as: increasing parent engagement, developing smart approaches to internal communication, or creating stronger student leadership experiences.
Additional Services
From inception to execution, we help you navigate this complex process from beginning to end. We partner with your Board of Trustees, the leadership team, and the school community to set a course that allows the school, its students, and the extended community to flourish. Our intent is to solidify deep accountability for the strategy direction the school has chosen. There is no one size-fits-all for this work. Depending on time, budget, personnel capacity, and other circumstances and resources, we customize our engagements to each school.
Full of earnest, knowledgeable, creative, and devoted members, boards of trustees often act as a group like ADHD learners. Their attention is easily shifted or lost. They can become distracted by shiny objects. They may not really engage. As veterans of serving on various boards, we are guilty as charged as well. That said, the volatility of any independent schools context requires that boards must improve their focus, resolve, and willingness to learn. Today’s independent school boards must know how to operate generatively.
Whether we are leading a board retreat or facilitating board learning, we help them center best practices and become aware of emerging practices.
The state of play in independent schools has changed remarkably over the last decade and has accelerated since. We help boards understand the changing dynamics with a specific focus on how these dynamics are relevant to their particular school. We support boards in their work and skill development around being strategic and generative while avoiding getting mired in the operational static. We are also keenly interested in how to help schools create and maintain a healthy partnership between the board and school head.
Generally, there is one leg missing from the stool that supports the head of school. Heads get a kind of support from the Board, and they get a certain kind of support from their leadership team; however, they struggle to get the kind of support they need from a colleague, someone who understands the breadth of work a head engages and thus provides the listening ear and counsel a head needs.
Each year, we take on a small number of coaching engagements with school and non-profit leaders. We call them Riverbank Relationships. These relationships generally involve two one-hour meetings per month where we work as a thought partner with our clients to help them address their most pressing issues, support their development, and offer insights that can help them navigate their work.
Leading and managing people is challenging, time-consuming, and if done well, is the secret sauce to high-functioning and healthy school communities. What are concrete management skills that can help you handle conflict and lead change? Why has the role of so many department heads changed so little when they should play such a critical role in the leadership and management of a school? How do you take a strategic stance on your work and not get swallowed by reacting to the daily barrage of the urgent? How do you do all of this and keep students at the center? From one and two day professional learning opportunities and retreats, to ongoing cohort work, we work with schools to deepen their leadership and management muscles.
A really good audit or assessment is invaluable. A knowledgeable person from the outside can uncover insights that can be difficult for school leadership to put their arms around. Or a leader does have an idea that an area needs work, and needs someone from the outside to help tell the story. To make real progress to a new state requires a nuanced understanding of the current situation.
We know how to look and listen deeply to your school’s work in these critical areas. We like asking provocative questions so that we can help you see what is happening, but also to help you see what might be next.
| Academics | Athletics | Experiential Education | Faculty Satisfaction + Support |
| Health and Wellness | Governance | Leadership Team + Structure | Risk Management |
| Signature Programs | Student Life | Residential Life |
EXPLO Elevate’s strategic partner, Viv, has worked with 95+ institutions on brand development and updates, marketing audits, messaging, enrollment communications, and website development. Viv offers custom digital solutions ranging from brand awareness efforts to organic and paid media campaigns to content and design implementation.
We believe in the power of data to power good decision making. We have deep quantitative and qualitative analytic capabilities that can uncover insights that can fuel transformation.
We use topic analysis and sentiment assessment to review what is said in focus groups and interviews to assure we don’t get swayed by the loudest voices.
We build surveys, analyze enrollment data, build elegant and easy to use dashboards, conduct institutional research, and are known for creating easy to understand visualizations of data.
Schedule Design
There are only three real design tools in a school: curriculum/program, creation of and use of space, and use of time. That’s it. For us, the mechanics metaphor is helpful again. Most schools approach daily schedules as something to be fixed. As a result, schools are littered with stories of failed attempts to change the schedule. Teachers often wince at the mere mention of changing to schedule.
At Elevate, we try to put the mechanics voice on the sidelines for a while, and ask essential but often unanswered questions such as: what specific impact do you want to have on students’ learning and experience? What will your faculty need to know and be able to do before day one of the new schedule? How can we be transparent and inclusive in the process of creating the next schedule? The schedule design process is an area where our experience is extraordinarily deep. (And to pat ourselves on the back, when was the last time you heard about announcing a new schedule at a faculty meeting and the faculty stands up with a standing ovation? It’s happened to us multiple times.)
Governance Support
Full of earnest, knowledgeable, creative, and devoted members, boards of trustees often act as a group like ADHD learners. Their attention is easily shifted or lost. They can become distracted by shiny objects. They may not really engage. As veterans of serving on various boards, we are guilty as charged as well. That said, the volatility of any independent schools context requires that boards must improve their focus, resolve, and willingness to learn. Today’s independent school boards must know how to operate generatively.
Whether we are leading a board retreat or facilitating board learning, we help them center best practices and become aware of emerging practices.
The state of play in independent schools has changed remarkably over the last decade and has accelerated since. We help boards understand the changing dynamics with a specific focus on how these dynamics are relevant to their particular school. We support boards in their work and skill development around being strategic and generative while avoiding getting mired in the operational static. We are also keenly interested in how to help schools create and maintain a healthy partnership between the board and school head.
Executive + Leadership Coaching
Generally, there is one leg missing from the stool that supports the head of school. Heads get a kind of support from the Board, and they get a certain kind of support from their leadership team; however, they struggle to get the kind of support they need from a colleague, someone who understands the breadth of work a head engages and thus provides the listening ear and counsel a head needs.
Each year, we take on a small number of coaching engagements with school and non-profit leaders. We call them Riverbank Relationships. These relationships generally involve two one-hour meetings per month where we work as a thought partner with our clients to help them address their most pressing issues, support their development, and offer insights that can help them navigate their work.
Middle Management Professional Learning
Leading and managing people is challenging, time-consuming, and if done well, is the secret sauce to high-functioning and healthy school communities. What are concrete management skills that can help you handle conflict and lead change? Why has the role of so many department heads changed so little when they should play such a critical role in the leadership and management of a school? How do you take a strategic stance on your work and not get swallowed by reacting to the daily barrage of the urgent? How do you do all of this and keep students at the center? From one and two day professional learning opportunities and retreats, to ongoing cohort work, we work with schools to deepen their leadership and management muscles.
Audits, Assessments and Recommendations
A really good audit or assessment is invaluable. A knowledgeable person from the outside can uncover insights that can be difficult for school leadership to put their arms around. Or a leader does have an idea that an area needs work, and needs someone from the outside to help tell the story. To make real progress to a new state requires a nuanced understanding of the current situation.
We know how to look and listen deeply to your school’s work in these critical areas. We like asking provocative questions so that we can help you see what is happening, but also to help you see what might be next.
| Academics | Athletics | Experiential Education | Faculty Satisfaction + Support |
| Health and Wellness | Governance | Leadership Team + Structure | Risk Management |
| Signature Programs | Student Life | Residential Life |
Branding + Enrollment Marketing
EXPLO Elevate’s strategic partner, Viv, has worked with 95+ institutions on brand development and updates, marketing audits, messaging, enrollment communications, and website development. Viv offers custom digital solutions ranging from brand awareness efforts to organic and paid media campaigns to content and design implementation.
Institutional Research + Analytics
We believe in the power of data to power good decision making. We have deep quantitative and qualitative analytic capabilities that can uncover insights that can fuel transformation.
We use topic analysis and sentiment assessment to review what is said in focus groups and interviews to assure we don’t get swayed by the loudest voices.
We build surveys, analyze enrollment data, build elegant and easy to use dashboards, conduct institutional research, and are known for creating easy to understand visualizations of data.