The World Doesn’t Stop Changing Just Because You’re Planning For The Future
One of the paradoxes we see in strategic planning is that schools work so hard to get better in the future – based on information about what is happening today.
The paradox comes because the school’s current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are the result of things changing. Parental expectations have changed. Students and their experiences have changed. A new generation of teachers is entering the workforce and what they think work means has changed. Of course, the economy, the culture, the demographic make-up of your community, and what is possible technologically has all changed too.
Strategic planning is often a response to these changes – a way to coordinate major institutional initiatives to effectively respond to these shifts. If all goes well, at the end of a five-year strategic plan, your school will be responsive and relevant to the brave new world of 2022. However, the year will be 2027.
That’s the problem with strategic planning. The world doesn’t stop changing just because your team is planning for the future.
The same gap is true in our everyday lives, according to Jane McGonigal, author of the wonderful book Imaginable. Ask a 45-year-old what they want to do in retirement, for instance, and they give you a list of activities they would want to engage in now if they were freed of workplace obligations. What they typically fail to consider is how their interests, temperament, health, and relationships may have shifted in the meantime.
This is a simple paradox – one that makes sense when you explain it out loud, but one which many schools don’t integrate into their strategic planning.
If you’ve been following our work this year, you probably know where this is headed. How can schools avoid this trap? Engage in futurist thinking. B
Practice time travel. Go back in time to understand what your school was like in 2002, 1982, 1962. What was happening? This exercise helps members of your community that even as technology, the economy, and the climate change, culture, parenting approaches, and student needs also evolve.
Look for signals. What are the strange, new, or unexpected events that raise questions about what might be coming down the line?
Map your context. Context mapping is a simple tool that can help you put all emerging trends together in one place – laying it out on a shared visual model that makes it accessible to all members of your team.
Explore possible scenarios. Use the scenarios we have shared this year – that’s why they’re there! But you can also explore scenarios unique to your school. One way to do this is to state one assumption behind your business, organizational, or educational model – then ask what you would do if the opposite were suddenly true. Let’s say X employer is bringing new jobs to your town, and your board is stacked with their employees. What if they go away? Imagine teachers are willing to work for less at your school because the kids are so great. Why might that stop being true – and how would you respond?
If you’ve been following this series, you know that these ideas are not unique to this article.
Nope, they’re not. We believe futurist thinking is a wide-ranging toolkit that will make your school better across the board – and starting that work now will make an eventual strategic plan better, whether or not you engage with Leadership+Design as your partner in this work.
Wayne Gretzky famously said, “I skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been.” That same adage is key for our strategy. The world isn’t static. Your strategy should lead to the future, not respond to the present.
