FAQs
How is "strategic thinking" for independent schools different from traditional strategic planning?
One of Dr. Jung’s mentors, Keith Shahan, head of school at the John Burroughs School (outside of St. Louis, Missouri), compares traditional strategic plans some independent school have developed to the rigid, chest-thumping, old-style Soviet Union’s five year plans.
In a provocative article in the Fall 2007 issue of NAIS’s Independent School magazine entitled “The Case Against Strategic Planning,” Rob Evans contends that “classic strategic planning is not the best path toward improving the quality of a school” and argues that “it is time we replace it with strategic thinking”—now outlined in NAIS’s The Strategic Process: 10 Steps for Planning Your Independent School’s Future.
Patrick Bassett’s PowerPoint presentation “Good to Great: Strategy & Design for Schools, Making Sense of the Future” provides the following useful side-by-side comparison of traditional strategic planning to newer “strategic thinking” approaches which he calls “strategy making”.
Strategic planning
• Executes plan by publishing document & implementation schedule wedded to 3 – 5 year cycle.
• Fixed and inflexible goals sometimes fail to reflect changing conditions and priorities.
Strategy making
• Executes “road map” (vision of destination and proposed routes) at a summer leadership retreat (board, admin with invited faculty and parent leaders) by developing three to five short-term or 12-month priorities.
• Notes 24-month and 36-month goals, but places them in a planning parking lot for successive R&D consideration.
Education Access Strategies’s approach to strategy making blends newer “strategic thinking” approaches which apply the most salient aspects of recommendations of NAIS with more traditional strategic planning approaches. Our approach also involves helping schools develop a tailored strategic planning budget model to match planning hopes with implementation realities in a “sustainability era” for independent schools.
See the PDF brochures on this website for additional information about EAS’s “Strategic Planning Services”.
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