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January 15, 2026
Preparing For Strategic Planning
As a teaser to ISCA's Annual Governance Conference on February 10th - Designing the Path Forward: The Board's Role in Leading with Strategy, I am sharing with you today a recent blog from our keynote speaker, Nishant Mehta, "Ten Ways to Guarantee Your Strategic Plan Changes Nothing."
In his blog, Nishant states that strategic planning doesn’t usually fail because leaders lack insight or good intentions. It fails because the hardest parts of strategy—making real trade-offs, saying 'no' to worthwhile ideas, and confronting limits—are often avoided. The result is plans that feel comprehensive and inspiring but leave organizations busy, stretched, and unchanged.
Highlights from the article include:
- Strategy is about choice, not activity—long lists of initiatives dilute focus rather than create impact.
- A true test of strategy: What did you stop doing? If nothing ended, strategy didn’t begin.
- Culture matters more than structure—without an honest culture diagnosis, even well-designed plans stall.
- Most plans are built on aspirational capacity, not what people can realistically sustain.
The full article unpacks these patterns and challenges school leaders to rethink how strategy is actually practiced.
This is a great preview to what Nishant will be sharing at our conference on February 10th! If you haven't registered yet, do so today! Click HERE for conference details.
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