Making Strategic Thinking Actionable (And Lasting)
Every school is searching for ways to think strategically and continue to improve. While many schools are in constant iteration, strategic planning initiatives or accreditation recommendations are often the catalysts for bigger change. Let’s think about the hours we as institutions put into self-studies and strategic planning sessions and the beautiful coffee table pieces that come out of them that are then placed on a shelf, never to be seen again. How do schools ensure plans and recommendations don’t sit on that coffee table until they have to do an interim report or update the board on our progress. This happens because school leaders did not take into account organizational capacity — or the ability of the organization to engage in long-term implementation. Taking the time to create an accountability and action plan not only ensures the school makes progress towards our goals, but that they can better capture the great things happening around the school aligned to those goals.
The ARCI Model
Starting the process of tracking improvement may seem daunting at first. But what I have found through successful change implementation is an agile approach, with clearly defined responsibilities and leveraging all available resources, is vital to success. Let’s use strategic planning in the example, but the concepts apply across all areas of change management at your school and would be especially effective in responding to accreditation recommendations.
Most strategic plans have multiple areas of improvement broken down into goals. Many of these goals involve various constituents across your campus, so identifying one person to own the effort is critical. I have personally noticed that if we assume multiple stakeholders hold responsibility, action items may fall through the cracks. You need just a few individuals responsible per goal acting as a conductor or air traffic controller to keep everyone on track. I have also found the RACI method from the Harvard Business Review is a great tool to use as a starting point. I actually refer to it in-house as the ARCI model, since we believe the accountability piece comes first.
The person ultimately “Accountable” is typically the one who signs off on the goal. In the strategic planning process, this is most often the Head of School. Identifying the person responsible can be a little more tricky. For example, if a goal is to hire the most qualified candidates who are also representative of your community, the hiring process likely includes several stakeholders at the institution. Defining one or two point people responsible for identifying candidates and for tracking progress is important to ensure the initiative stays on schedule. This does not mean they will not consult multiple constituents — just that one person is ultimately responsible for driving the process and reporting progress.
Moving from Pull to Push
Once the A and the R are identified, the next step is to determine the C and I. The C in the Harvard RACI model is “Consult.” One of the biggest modifications we have made for successful action and accountability planning is to broaden this to consult, curate, collect and collaborate.
Often, when interim reports or updates are required, the Head of School sends an email or calls a meeting to quickly pull the necessary information together from key stakeholders. Inevitably administrators receive an email asking them to review a strategic plan they hadn’t looked at in a year and recall cases that might serve as examples of how the school was progressing on a goal. In my experience, I then had to reach out to my teachers or administrators for some tangible examples and key performance indicators that I could give to the Head of School for the update. This once-a-year “pulling” of data and examples was reactive and not an ideal way to dynamically live our strategic plan.
When we decided to be more intentional about dynamically living the strategic plan and assessing progress along the way, we knew we had to devise a better process. That’s when we moved from “pulling” to “pushing.” We knew that every day teachers and students were living out our strategic initiatives. Those were the examples and data we were searching for to support the Head of School at the progress meeting.
We began creating ways for teachers, administrators, and even students to dynamically collaborate, collect and curate evidence whenever it happened. We already had an email address that they were using to give examples of wow moments across campus that fed organic social media posts. All we did was turn the email into a form that also collected a category for each activity to attribute it back to a strategic goal. Let’s assume student leadership has an elegantly worded goal in your strategic plan. On the form, we included a list of activities, one of which would be student leadership, plus a short place for a description and a way to upload pictures. With some backend coding magic, the form mapped back to our strategic plan goal so that the responsible administrator had an authentic, real-time demonstration of progress towards the goal. They were no longer “pulling” information summatively at an arbitrary checkpoint, but instead simply making sure those who were collaborating, curating, and collecting information were showing off the great things happening in their areas. Better yet, it gave those responsible a great way to give kudos to their teachers, as well as feed an organic internal and external marketing campaign. #winwin
Informing
We have already seen how the responsible member of the team is informed and also how it dovetails into great internal and external communication. We know that when we are doing this well, necessary information is flowing up the conduit we have created. At the Head of School level, there is a need to view progress on a global scale while still maintaining access to detailed information. This is where the magic of data visualization and dashboards comes into play. With meaningful and dynamic dashboards, we have an easy view of progress along with the ability to dive deeper with a click of a button. When it’s time to inform the board of progress, everything from descriptions to pictures delineated by goal is readily available, providing evidence of the great things happening at the institution. High level information and selected examples can even be dynamically displayed to the board in their own dashboards, which can be customized to manage the amount of data accessible or to highlight appropriate information.
This process of creating actionable outcomes from the school’s lofty strategic goals and then devising a system that pushes information upward is a true catalyst for progress.
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