I’m in a bit of a pickle, and I thought you might be able to help. We recently launched a strategic planning process at our school. In the spirit of inclusivity, I was asked to create a comprehensive 700 question survey for our parents, students, faculty and staff, alumni, neighbors, vendors, prospective parents, grandparents, and town council staff. The results are in.
!@*#
We have over 2000 responses (but most only completed up to question 250) and the answers are ALL OVER THE PLACE. Everyone seems to have different priorities, wants, and needs from the school. Apparently our math program is a dismal failure. Half of our parents think we are too traditional and the other half think we are too progressive. Most parents love the uniform - although 85% felt that wearing a jacket and tie in junior kindergarten can be a little stifling in the sandbox. Grandparents want Grandparents and Special Friends Day to be a little more fun - fewer singing children and more booze and karaoke because “they don’t get out much.” Forty percent of the faculty and staff think we are “killing them” with too much change; 42 percent think we aren’t changing fast enough. Eight percent took the opportunity to let us know that they would like the pencil sharpener fixed in the faculty lounge and that the ink for the ditto machine hasn't been reordered since 1986. The greatest area of consensus: the neighbors hate us.
Ellen Dee, how are we expected to create a strategic plan out of this? We hear you do some strategic planning consulting. Please help.
Yours,
Exasperated Associate Head of School for Curriculum, Instruction and Strategic Initiatives and Facilitator of Community Whims and Wishes and Lead Liaison of Neighborly Relations
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Dear Exasperated,
First of all, you are the Associate Head of way too many things. I’d start with just simplifying your title.
After that, take a deep breath. You are not alone and certainly not the first person to launch a strategic planning process with an unwieldy survey that basically tells you everything about your school that you already know.
Look, we aren’t anti-survey. Well, actually we are. We think most of the time surveys aren’t particularly insightful or illuminating. If you want to do a parent or staff satisfaction survey, it can be helpful in tracking trend over many years. Find a good simple professionally developed survey, administer it once a year, and then track the responses longitudinally. Fine. But please do not conflate surveys with strategic planning research. We have yet to see a survey that yields anything surprising or imaginative for a strategic planning process.
We know you had good intentions and wanted to ensure that every member of your very, very, very extended community would feel like they had a voice, but that is not how strategic planning works.
Strategic planning requires
- a deep familiarity with the mission, history, and values of your school,
- qualitative research and anthropology to unearth the current needs of your primary stakeholders,
- and the ability to understand how certain forces - fringe trends and technologies - might impact the future of your school.
From there, you might have a good chance of projecting an ambitious, thriving, and highly desirable, mission-aligned future for your school.
Here at L+D we like to say that Strategic Planning feels a little like time travel, so fire up the flux capacitor, get in the old Delorean(see below) and take a journey backward and forward through time. It also takes real
imaginative thinking and envisioning
. Most surveys are not designed to fuel the imagination. Instead, they usually box us into a set of predetermined responses that measure the status quo. Thus, we tend to respond to surveys by simply tinkering with the status quo rather than really imagining new possibilities.
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Our suggestion:
Ditch the strategic planning survey.
Instead engage members of your community in
empathy interviews
,
collect artifacts
of the past and present, and study the current
fringe trends
- educational, political, economic, technological, environmental, social - and
imagine what the world will be like in 10-20 years
. Determine some key ambitious priorities that, if you focus on them for 5-7 years you will be playing at the top of your game. Then you are planning strategically.
As for your current survey, there is probably some low hanging fruit out there. For goodness, sake, get the grandparents liquored up - that’s an easy win. And no junior kindergartener should be wearing a jacket and tie to school. Finally, if you find a solution to appease the disgruntled neighbors, let us know. We haven’t found one to date!
Yours,
Ellen Dee
P.S. If you are thinking about strategic planning in the 2020-21 school year, now is the time to identify a partner or consultant to support you. Leadership+Design fills up fast - often by March or April. We love to work with schools that are adventurous and willing to approach strategic planning with a beginner’s mindset and a collaborative spirit. Contact us at
info@leadershipansddesign.org
to request a proposal or chat with us.
Speaking of collaboration, we are ending our month-long theme of collaboration, but be sure to
check out all of our recent work
, including a podcast episode, about the inherent joys and challenges of working in groups.
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