A well-constructed strategic plan, among other things is cohesive, and as I have written before in a post entitled Strategic Plans and Luxury Cars: They Look so Good on the Lot, schools create some lovely, shiny plans with muscled language and bold vision. The exercise of creating a plan–the detailed and focused process that leads […]
Landing the Plane: Finding Clarity within Complexity
this is first in a series of re-posting of pieces I wrote Pre-covid19 that are more relevant than ever during this stunningly challenging time. 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. […]
Foreshadowing and not Foreshadowing: Strategic Choices
In an environment of accelerated progress and challenge, foreshadowing is a key to good communication about organizational change. Leadership should think of foreshadowing as a necessary tool because communicating change too late can make strategic steps look like reactive ones. By giving community members glimpses of what may lie ahead, organizations can: Gauge the potential response […]
Zombies–Undead Colleges and Schools
When I was in seventh grade, I went to see Night of the Living Dead with a bunch of my classmates. It scared me something awful, and it was a bad place to be scared—news bulletin: seventh graders can be mercenary. One of my friends reached beneath my wooden folding seat in the school theater […]
Stretching the Rubber Band in a Progress Culture
When my daughter was seven, they were on the knobs to the medicine cabinet, poised to make the nose dive into the toilet if my hand knocked them on the way to the aspirin…on the coffee table peeking out from under the magazines and books…on the floor under the couch…in the corner of the kitchen […]