Being Strategic About Strategy

1. Being Strategic About Strategy

2. What does strategic planning look like in independent schools? What approach should you take to guide your school into the future?

3. History of Strategic Planning in Industry 1920s-1950s “When Alfred Sloan conceived the modern corporation at General Motors, he based it on hierarchical military organizations…. Business strategy started to look more like military planning, with thick books filled with reams of market intelligence, tactics and procedures.”  1980s “When Jack Welch took the helm of General Electric, he largely dismantled the strategic planning process, because [although plans became more sophisticated,] none of that improved how the company performed.” Today “Planning has become even less tenable … as the speed of business continues to accelerate and technology cycles outpace corporate planning cycles.”Greg Satell, “The Evolution of Strategy,” Forbes (Sept. 14, 2013)

4. History of Strategic Planning in Higher Ed Reinforced by accreditation requirements In order to meet external demands on the government for accountability in educational outcomes, “the accreditation commissions began to insist institutions have a strategic plan and an assessment plan.” Karen E. Hinton, Society for College and University Planning, A Practical Guide to Strategic Planning in Higher Education (2012) Strategic planning as a proactive solution to environmental changes “The emergence of strategic planning in higher education coincided with the difficulties experienced in all of education in the 1970s and 1980s, as enrollments began to fluctuate, student demographics started to change, and funding became inconsistent … [Planning was assisted by] the rise of technology-enabled data collection and analysis.”

5. History of Strategic Planning in Higher Ed Changes in the education space have caused many to rethink traditional approaches to strategic planning. “The constant and constantly changing barrage of challenges and opportunities facing higher education do not lend themselves to a long strategic planning process. “Traditional strategic planning models underestimate the politicalrealities of planning and execution in today’s environment of scarcity.” Robert A. Sevier, Stamats Communications, “Pretty Good Done: A More Elegant Approach to Strategic Planning”

6. Evolution of Strategic Planning in Independent Schools From long-range plans to strategic plans to strategic process “For decades, [long-range planning] worked well enough, but in the late 20th century, as we watched most of those plans crumble short of their goals, we shifted to ‘strategic planning,’ with its curtailed three- to five-year planning cycle. But given the increasing volatility of the economic and social landscapes, even a five-year planning cycle turned out to be problematic.… “The new strategic process … requires that we remain in a strategic posture at all times…. A process of projecting and implementing in short-term steps allows the team to periodically reconsider the original list of next steps based on … external and internal exigencies that weren’t anticipated.”  Patrick Bassett, “Strategic Planning Is an Oxymoron,” Independent School magazine (2012)

7. Evolution of Strategic Planning in Independent Schools A move to plans that are simple, shorter-term, and focused on fewer targets “True strategic thinking favors pragmatic, flexible approaches to key challenges …. It favors plans that are simple and that concentrate on a very few targets over a relatively short period of time. It anticipates the likelihood that changing conditions may call for changing targets.” Robert Evans, “The Case Against Strategic Planning,” Independent School magazine (Fall 2007)

8. Does Strategic Planning Work? Businesses with strategic plans are12% more profitableErica Olson, OnStrategy, “Leaders: Success Takes Strategic Planning” 70%+ of companies with a strategic plan don’t execute it.Balanced Scorecard Institute

9. Determining What’s Right for Your School: Implementing a Full Strategic Plan or Adopting an Ongoing Strategic Process

10. Determining What’s Right for Your School Robert Evans, “The Case Against Strategic Planning,” Independent School magazine (Fall 2007)

11. Determining What’s Right for Your School Transitions, turmoil, and desired change in market position are among the reasons to conduct a full strategic plan. “…major transition points, such as after a new head follows a long-serving predecessor, or when there has been significant turmoil in the school or a serious downturn in morale, enrollment, or finance. “Also, when a school needs to change or improve its ‘market position,’ a full plan may be indicated.”  Robert Evans, “The Case Against Strategic Planning,” Independent School magazine (Fall 2007)

12. Determining What’s Right for Your School • Lack of resources/commitment and recent negative experience with strategic planning are among reasons to not conduct a full strategic plan. • “If the organization lacks the skills, resources, or the commitment of key decision makers to complete an effective strategic planning process… • “If the campus community had a recent experience with strategic planning that was destructive… • “If the campus community has undergone a series of negative events and they need the assurance that leadership understands the situation and is taking immediate action.” • Ron Mahurin, Stamats Communications, “Sometimes the Last Thing You Need Is a Strategic Plan” (Feb. 9, 2016)

13. Determining What’s Right for Your School • Questions to ask yourself about strategic planning • “Before proposing a new full strategic plan, a school’s head and board chair might ask themselves: • Is it really necessary? • How much of our last plan did we complete? • Do we not already know what the school’s key needs are over the next few years? • “Often, the answers to these questions suggest the value of a strategic thinking process, which may occur over a series of faculty meetings and a board retreat.”  • Robert Evans, “The Case Against Strategic Planning,” Independent School magazine (Fall 2007)

14. Strategic Planning vs. Strategic Thinking? Strategic plans and strategic thinking don’t rule each other out.A strategic thinking approach — “a flexible learning process that relies on school managers constantly listening and synthesizing what they hear and learn from all sources” — “does not necessarily rule out a formal strategic planning process, but it assumes that any formal plan is open to change and refinement so the school leader is always open to responding to rapid change. The strategic plan arises from pragmatic, flexible strategic thinking that relies on judgment as much as on spelling out action steps and the measurement of benchmarks.” Strategic Planning for Schools website (https://strategicplanning4schools.com)

15. Conducting a Formal Strategic Planning Process Strategic Plan: Basic Steps Define and review vision, mission, and values. Conduct an environmental scan. Collect constituent feedback. Identify strategic issues. Develop strategic goals and objectives. Create implementation plans. Develop markers of success. Monitor, evaluate, and update as new information dictates.

16. Conducting a Formal Strategic Planning Process Strategic Plan: Steps to Avoid Arbitrarily selecting who will be on the team/committee Solution: Select members who have the expertise needed. Thinking of it as an event rather than a process Solution: Build in a mechanism for checking data and making course corrections. Not educating team members about the process Solution: Document process; discuss and gain buy-in from team before moving forward. Failing to gather data before holding strategy sessions Solution: Ensure that collecting constituent feedback and conducting environmental scans are part of the early stages of the process.

17. Conducting a Formal Strategic Planning Process Strategic Plan: Steps to Avoid Not allowing enough time Solution: Be realistic about how much time every step will take. Biting off more than you can chew Solution: Limit yourself to no more than five broad goals. Setting “what” goals instead of “why” goals Solution: Create a vision statement at the beginning of the process so that you know why you want to achieve something. Not addressing the underlying problem or issue that needs to be solved Solution: Ask: Is this a resource problem? A people problem? A process or system problem? An organizational problem?

18. Conducting a Formal Strategic Planning Process Donna Orem John Gulla and Olaf Jorgenson, “Measuring Our Success,” Independent School magazine, Spring 2014 • The importance of • measuring • performance • “Any strategy is a hypothesis. Performance measurement has to be built in and applied to see if what you are doing has the desired effect.” Making measurement meaningful by tying it to behavior and decisions “As Douglas Hubbard, a specialist in applied information economics asserts… ‘If we can’t identify a decision that could be affected by a proposed measurement and how it could change those decisions, then the measurement simply has no value.’”

19. Adopting an Ongoing Strategic Approach • Creating an infrastructure to be strategic: Collect and analyze data in an ongoing fashion • Create a leadership or board group to drive data collection and assessment. • Identify what you need to know. • Establish a research agenda and calendar. • Determine the best, most cost-effective method of finding the information: Outside consultant or school staff? Method: Focus groups, online survey, interviews, literature or research scan, telephone surveys, etc.?

20. Adopting an Ongoing Strategic Approach • Creating an infrastructure to be strategic: Questions to guide your data collection and analysis • What are our priorities? • How well are we doing? • What global, national, and local trends do we need to be aware of that might affect our school? • Will local demographics sustain our school in the next 5 to 10 years? • Where should we apply our financial resources?

21. Adopting an Ongoing Strategic Approach Committing to generative thinking Governance Futures Project (adapted from Chait et al., Governance as Leadership)

22. Ways to Think Strategically: Approaches Organizations Use Both in Preparation for a Full Strategic Plan and in Adopting an Ongoing Strategic Posture

23. Ways to Think Strategically Design Thinking: A “building-up” of ideas A process “of creating new and innovative ideas and solving problems…. It can be as effective in technology or education as it may be in services or manufacturing….“Unlike critical thinking, which is a process of analysis and is associated with the ‘breaking down’ of ideas, design thinking is a creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas. “There are no judgments in design thinking…. Wild ideas are welcome, since these often lead to the most creative solutions.”Fast Company, “Design Thinking… What Is That?” (March 20, 2006)

24. Ways to Think Strategically Design Thinking

25. Ways to Think Strategically Design thinking in managing change … and in re-imagining strategic plans “Instead of seeing change as the implementation of fully formed ideas on a grand scale, we are allowing ourselves to ask big questions, explore different options, and then rapidly prototype changes. An essential part of the process is iteration and an openness to pivoting and/or rethinking solutions as we move forward.”   Mark Silver,  Hillbrook School Head, Leadership + Design’s The Monthly Recharge (Dec. 2014) “We began by re-imagining the whole concept of ‘strategic plan,’ seeing it less as a list of goals and more a set of shared, memorable experiences. The planning process included more than 40 creative visioning sessions …. And the resulting plan, in addition to the traditional printed booklet, took on a variety of interactive forms.”Matt Glendinning, Moses Brown School Head, Leadership + Design’s The Monthly Recharge (Nov. 2014)

26. Ways to Think Strategically Appreciative Inquiry: “Identifying the positive core” “Appreciative Inquiry [AI] is a way of being and seeing. It is both a worldview and a process for facilitating positive change in human systems, e.g., organizations, groups, and communities. “Its assumption is simple: Every human system has something that works right — things that give it life when it is vital, effective, and successful. “AI begins by identifying this positive core and connecting to it in ways that heighten energy, sharpen vision, and inspire action for change.”  Center for Appreciative Inquiry, “What Is Appreciative Inquiry (AI)?”

27. Ways to Think Strategically Appreciative Inquiry

28. Ways to Think Strategically Balanced Scorecard: A “balanced” view of organizational performance “The balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system that is used … to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization, improve internal and external communications, and monitor organization performance against strategic goals. “It was originated … as a performance measurement … framework that added strategic non-financial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more ‘balanced’ view of organizational performance.” Balanced Scorecard Institute, “Balanced Scorecard Basics”

29. Ways to Think Strategically Balanced Scorecard • Tools • Strategy map • Scorecard (goals, measures, target) • Dashboard (visual representation of goals, measures, and targets)

30. Ways to Think Strategically Jobs-to-Be-Done Theory “The secret to winning the innovation game lies in understanding what causes customers to make choices that help them achieve progress on something they are struggling with in their lives. To get to the right answers … executives should be asking: What job would consumers want to hire a product to do?” Dina Gerdeman, “Clayton Christensen: Customers Don’t Simply Buy Products — They Hire Them,” Forbes, Oct. 4, 2016 “When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we ‘fire’ it.”Clayton Christensen, author of Competing Against Luck

31. Ways to Think Strategically Jobs to Be Done: How to define “jobs” so as to generate bold ideas for new solutions “1.  What are the high-level jobs to be done? 2.  What are the current approaches and what pain points result? 3.  What benchmarks exist in the full range of competing offerings and analogies? 4.  What performance criteria do customers use? 5.  What prevents new solutions from being adopted? 6.  What value would success create for customers?” Stephen Wunker, “Six Steps to Put Christensen’s Jobs-to-Be-Done Theory Into Practice,” Forbes (Feb. 7, 2012)

32. Ways to Think Strategically Embracing the discomfort of strategy making “Adopt a discipline about strategy making that reconciles you to experiencing some angst… Rule 1. Keep the strategy statement simple Two choices determine success: the where-to-play decision (which specific customers to target) and the how-to-win decision (how to create a compelling value proposition for those customers). Rule 2: Recognize that strategy is not about perfection. For that to happen, boards and regulators need to reinforce rather than undermine the notion that strategy involves a bet. Rule 3: Make the logic explicit.The only sure way to improve the hit rate of your strategic choices is to test the logic of your thinking.” Roger L. Martin, “The Big Lie of Strategic Planning,” Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb 2014)

33. Ways to Think Strategically • The importance of the questions asked • “’In a world of rapid change, answers quickly become outdated or obsolete. But great questioning leads you to new and better answers. • “Questioning is … a critical starting point of problem-solving and innovation.... Thoughtful inquiry can help us begin to see and understand the challenges around us more clearly. Questions also spark the imagination…. Learning how to act on our questions can lead us toward solutions and creative breakthroughs.’” • Warren Berger, quoted in Scott Goodson, “Warren Berger Tells How to Ask a ‘Beautiful Question,’” The Daily Beast (March 8, 2014)

34. The Role of Vision in Any Strategic Approach

35. The Role of Vision Vision as a “north star” for strategy “Too often, we [approach strategy making] with a collection of needs instead of a north star to guide us, that is, a firm vision statement of why the school exists. The former approach almost always results in enhancing what we know while the latter can open new thinking.” Donna Orem, “Your School’s Big Dream: Creating a Vision for the Future,” NAIS Independent Ideas blog (April 18, 2017) “A visionstatement tells everyone the type of community or world the school envisions for its constituency as a result of the work of the organization.” The Enterprise Foundation, Effective Strategic Planning

36. The Role of Vision • Questions to guide school vision statements • What do we do best? • What is our core business? • What needs can we satisfy that others can’t? • What kind of image do we want? • What do we want to be known for? • How big do we want to be? • What are our ethical and social responsibilities? • What value do we want to have to our customers? • What do we want to be in 5 years? • Why vision statements are important • They keep the entire school community focused in the same direction. • They serve as a guide against which to make budget decisions. • They keep schools future-focused.

37. The Role of Vision • Making your vision statement “sticky” • Articulate your organization’s “core idea.” • Don’t zoom out, choose. • Make the vision concrete. • Show why faculty, staff, students should care about it. • Consider the virtues of single focus. • Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

38. Resources Greg Satell, “The Evolution of Strategy,” Forbes Karen E. Hinton, A Practical Guide to Strategic Planning in Higher Education Robert A. Sevier, Stamats Communications, “Pretty Good Done: A More Elegant Approach to Strategic Planning” Patrick Bassett, “Strategic Planning Is an Oxymoron,” Independent School Magazine Robert Evans, “The Case Against Strategic Planning,” Independent School Magazine Erica Olson, OnStrategy, “Leaders: Success Takes Strategic Planning” Balanced Scorecard Institute, “Balanced Scorecard Basics” Ron Mahurin, Stamats Communications, “Sometimes the Last Thing You Need Is a Strategic Plan” John Gulla and Olaf Jorgenson, “Measuring Our Success,” Independent School magazine, Spring 2014 Strategic Planning for Schools website Richard Chait, William P. Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor, Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards Fast Company, “Design Thinking… What Is That?” Mark Silver,  Hillbrook School Head, Leadership + Design’s The Monthly Recharge Matt Glendinning, Moses Brown School Head, Leadership + Design’s The Monthly Recharge Center for Appreciative Inquiry, “What Is Appreciative Inquiry (AI)?” Dina Gerdeman, “Clayton Christensen: Customers Don’t Simply Buy Products — They Hire Them,” Forbes Stephen Wunker, “Six Steps to Put Christensen’s Jobs-to-Be-Done Theory Into Practice,” ForbesRoger L. Martin, “The Big Lie of Strategic Planning,” Harvard Business Review Scott Goodson, “Warren Berger Tells How to Ask a ‘Beautiful Question,’” The Daily Beast Donna Orem, “Your School’s Big Dream: Creating a Vision for the Future, ” NAIS Independent Ideas blog The Enterprise Foundation, Effective Strategic Planning Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die