How to avoid the psychopath’s strategy for your school
If your strategy’s opposite feels stupid, then you don’t have a strategy
What’s the strategy (or core values, or mission) of your organisation? If stating the opposite of your strategy feels silly, then you probably don’t have a useful strategy, mission or values:
Operationally effective. Human Centred. Continually improving. Highly engaged. Honest and Kind. Empathetic. Contributing to the local community. A sense of service. Taking responsibility. Working sustainably.
The opposite of every one of these can be found on the Hare Psychopathy Index. If you need to remind yourself to be any of these things, the issue lies deeper than your strategy. Using these trueisms then just leaves the individual to interpret them in too many different ways to make them useful for decision-making:
And if you have strategy that falls outside the realms of psychopathy, it may still not be strategy. Strategy is sacrifice, said adman David Ogilvy. Strategy is about making choices of what you will do, and what you will not, says Roger Martin. In a recent seminar, he made this point:
If your competition are making opposite choices and they’re losing money, then you don’t have a strategy either — you’re just doing the one thing you can do.
For international schools who play up to their global citizenship agenda, I’d set the challenge to find the highly successful international school that does not. For the Scottish curriculum designers who believe in
I’d lay out the challenge to find the country successful promoting an agenda of
- failed kids,
- meek mobs,
- irresponsible isolationists, and
- incompetent misanthropists.
I don’t believe there is one (not on purpose, anyway), meaning that as a curricular strategy, the purpose of the curriculum cancels itself out. It doesn’t help educators make decisions on what to do, and what not to do.
Strategy, when it’s well designed, helps people make difficult choices more easily. By choosing to do what you’re choosing to do, what are you implying you are not doing? Can you list it out so that the implicit becomes explicit?
We focus on the learning experience as a whole > we do not just focus on the end result.
We do “interactive direct teaching” > here’s what we do not do: …
We do “interdisciplinary learning” > here’s what we do not do: …
And if that jars too much, what are you doing “even if” the consequences might be unpalatable?
As we bring students back into school after home learning, we’re focusing on wellbeing and enjoyable learning experiences, even if it means they don’t get through as much of the syllabus as normal.
As we prepare for university admissions next year, we will retain or even improve the quality of online or blended learning experience, even if it means we can take fewer students than this year.
What are your “even ifs”?
Ewan McIntosh is founder of NoTosh, a global consultancy that has pioneered collaborative and design thinking approaches to strategy in the world of education.
