More Human Strategic Planning
It isn’t common to be flexible, adaptive, and curious in times of stress, disruption, and change. As people and as organizations, we default to a stress response.
That’s why we need tools, habits, and mindsets to help us take advantage of these rich and complex times of flux.
We all saw the ability that schools have to pivot over the last 18+ months. Times of disruption are opportunities to plan for the future because they offer a small window where people are emotionally in contact with the ineffectiveness of their past ways of being. This is exciting. If we are able to arm ourselves with optimism, hope, and curiosity, we have the chance to springboard from this time into a human-centered future.
The post-March 2020 era has shown us that we need to consider multiple scenarios, stay (or become) agile, practice cycles of experimentation and iteration, and expand our sense of what’s possible. We need to be intentional about our future, even (especially!) when the future is uncertain.
Fear isn’t the only fuel capable of helping organizations manage times of change. We shouldn’t need another pandemic to maintain this sense of openness and possibility.. When things are in flux, it’s a good time to accept – not resist – what’s happening.
It’s time for a more human approach to strategy.
We recently wrote a new 12-page white paper to capture the lessons of strategic planning over the last 18 months. It’s available, now, for free – just click here and we’ll send it to you.
Strategic planning should harness the benefits of your community’s shared humanity, rather than working against it. It should leverage the upside of messiness, creativity, optimism, and our potential for shared purpose. It should also push folks to grow in healthy ways.
In this white paper, we outline five ideas at the heart of a human-centered approach to strategic plans:
Idea 1: Embrace The Expedition as a Metaphor. In an expedition, you embark with a sense of adventure and openness to what’s new, as well as a practical awareness of, and preventative mindset about, potential dangers ahead. You have a destination in mind but you stay flexible as to the route.
Idea 2: Uncover Needs Before Offering Solutions. Does your team understand the needs that are present in the community? Do they understand the possible opportunities for the school? Before you seek answers, have you found the right questions?
Idea 3. Collaborate Deeply With Your Community. An idea may seem easy to execute when the folks who would need to implement the idea aren’t in the room; an idea may sound equitable until you check with the folks who have lived a different experience. It’s also true that people believe in what they help create. By engaging with your community deeply, you get everyone ready to move to action.
Idea 4. Think Like A Futurist. Thinking like futurists allows teams to consider a longer term direction and be more likely to shape the future rather than simply react to it.
Idea 5. Focus On A Few Winning Hands. “Winning Hands” (a metaphor shared with us by our collaborator Christian Talbot) are market differentiators. They often take advantage of emerging trends and shifts in context. Sometimes they amplify something a school is already doing, but with a kind of “10x” impact. It’s those few hands where a school might metaphorically move its chips to the center of the table.
We believe that a creative, human-centered strategic process offers a unique opportunity to schools ready to rally their community around a vision of their future while simultaneously building the excitement and energy they’ll need to get there.
Again, if you’d like to request a copy of this white paper, please click here.
If you’re interested in partnering with Leadership and Design on this journey, please e-mail us at info@leadershipanddesign.org. Our schedule is already filling for next year and we’d love to work with you.
