The last month has demonstrated to all of us just how quickly the world can change. And, for the education industry, this new level of volatility spells the disruption that many have feared for a long time. We have all worried that the financial model of the private education industry could be brought to its knees by a massive economic reset. Are we at that time?
Entrepreneurs have long known, however, what disruption feels and looks like. The financial industry and the tech sector understand disruption at an up close and personal level. In fact, some of the best entrepreneurs force disruption on an industry in an effort to bend demand in their favor. But, this disruption is different. COVID-19 is an external force that is changing the way people work now and will work in the future. All placed-based enterprises are rethinking their future. Whether you are in retail, food service, entertainment, hospitality, travel, athletics, or any other sector of the economy, everyone is busy rethinking how they operate.
The typical private school or college takes a long time to create a strategic plan that, unfortunately, often reinforces what they have been doing in the past, rather than what they will be doing in the future. Our work at ISA has historically focused on pushing schools and colleges such as these out of their comfort zone, using external trends, generational and demographic shifts, and changing marketplace contexts to create both the need and desire for change. Urgency and motivation for change has been something that we have had to create. Now, the virus has done that for us. And, nothing will be the same after this.
The genie is out of the bottle. Consumers will expect excellent schools and colleges to be able to nimble enough to get online quickly and sustain themselves in the future. There will be more competition in this online space than ever before, including both for-profit and non-profit players. We have long stated that there is likely to be market contraction followed by consolidation in the private education industry. After the COVID-19 dust settles and leaves a changed world, it will have served to accelerate these forces and the landscape will be forever changed.
So, what are the components of strategy in this new world? I see four critical components emerging that, together, form a new breed of educational planning. Let’s call it Stealth Strategy, and it shares four key elements. The first two have always been in place and the last two are more important than ever before.
Culture - I still believe the most important element of any healthy organization is the strong culture that has been curated by stakeholders. Capitalizing on your culture and leaning into your core business becomes critical in this new normal of strategy as we seek to leverage the connection and relationships we have developed with those who know and love us.
Direction - Call it a North Star or a “why” or a vision of a preferred future, I also believe that organizations must have something bigger than them that drives them. This long-term direction is what keeps an organization and stakeholders alike working together. It is what inspires them.
Agility - Successful organizations in the future must be agile, making decisions both thoughtfully and nimbly with well-curated information, and able to implement them quickly. And, they must be able to reconcile opportunities against their long-term direction. It is what we call finding the intersection between mission and market. Most educational institutions were not built for speed or endurance; they were built to feed themselves. The new normal will force all organizations to be agile, or they will not endure.
Scalability - Finally, as we are seeing today, schools and colleges of the future must be able to ramp up, or scale down, depending upon circumstances. Fixed assets - including faculty and facilities - cannot slow them down or impede their ability to mobilize and implement the decisions they have made. The ability to move from idea to implementation becomes a hallmark of a new strategy paradigm.
The for-profit world has been operating with some of these assumptions in place for a long time. They have understood that long-term direction must be equally met with short-term strategy in an effort to meet the changing marketplace. Rather than hearing schools or colleges talk about trying to be innovative, as if it were an organizational attribute or characteristic, the future will favor those practices a new breed of stealth strategy.