Small + Complex = Really Bad Combination

“Most colleges and schools which with we work are far too small to be complex. From a marketing and strategy perspective, small and complex is a deadly combination.”

Travel to a few independent colleges or schools, schedule a visit with the President's cabinet, and query them as to what their biggest challenges are each day. I suspect that you will find one of the core issues facing nearly all of them is how to integrate data - which is currently living in silos - in an effective way to make good institutitional decisions. If I had to predict how the conversation would go, they would complain that too much information exists without much integration and data mining. And, to make it worse, they would most likely complain that most people in the organization have little knowledge about what is happening in other parts of the campus.

Most colleges and schools which with we work are far too small to be this complex. Most consumers expect that a large organization will be hard to navigate and rarely client-centered. But, they tend to believe that small organizations - like a small liberal arts college or an independent school of fewer than 1000 students - will be easy to navigate and very client-centered. In other words, large often means complex and small often means client-centered and intuitive. From a marketing and strategy perspective, small and complex is a deadly combination.

As we move into a world where the consumer trend is back to the local, smaller retailers as a backlash against the impersonal, big-box companies, or nimble, agile online systems, this is an important issue. How is your school or college working toward making your organization client-centered and easy with which to work? How is your information technology organized and is it integrated? And, how many information silos exist with your organization? Answering these questions may be one of the more important strategic questions for small, tuition-driven organizations in the future.

Why Private Schools -- Especially Independent Schools -- Are Failing to Achieve Their Potential

“Private schools lament that their business model is broken and therefore unsustainable. But, they follow some uncommon business practices and exhibit severe limitations in their thinking that literally threaten their existence.”

— Ian Symmonds

Let’s talk about market share for a moment. Did you know that private schools in America serve roughly 9.6% of the available school age children in a given metro area? And, what is more shocking is that independent schools serve roughly 1% of school age children in America. Most people are surprised to learn that independent schools barely scratch the surface of marketplace penetration, generally speaking. Why is that? And, what can be done about it?

Private schools lament that their business model is broken and therefore unsustainable. But, they follow some uncommon business practices that literally threaten their existence. Consider this nexus of business and see if you can make sense of it:

1. Price: Independent schools price themselves at the highest price point in the market where a tiny fraction of their metro area can afford them, therefore placing severe limitations on their marketplace.

2. Admissions: They also attempt to follow selective admissions, placing yet another limitation on their potential available market.

3. Marketing: They place undue pressure on their advancement and strategic enrollment management people to find “more full pay families” and have aggressive marketing campaigns to sustain their operations. Heck, there are even professional development seminars aimed at finding more full pay families.

4. Diversity: Even though they have severely limited their potential enrollment down to 1% or less of the school age children marketplace, they then try to thread the needle by trying to acquire more diversity in their enrollment.

It is a crazy business model, where price goes up, enrollment goes down, and, most importantly, the overall impact of the industry is severely limited. Honestly, how can you have a tremendous impact on the world through your products and services — and even claim to be somewhat diverse — by serving 1% of a marketplace? I used to call independent schools the “Swiss watch” of the education industry until I learned that Swiss watches serve, as a cohort, a larger segment of their industry than independent schools.

I used to be deeply concerned that we have too many private schools in mid-sized to large markets that are trying to do the same thing and competing for the same, full pay families. That was five years ago. Now, I am worried that independent schools - and, to some extent - all of the high tuition, small enrollment schools out there trying to live in that limited space - are on a path to irrelevance and extinction if they don’t start addressing this limitation in thinking and creativity.

The late management guru Peter Drucker reminded schools that they live and operate in the non-profit space. The mission of non-profits is transformation, not profit, as it is for corporations and not policy, as it is for governments. He would argue that the only reason a non-profit would grow is that you believe the world would be a better place if more people had access to your goods or services.

I have a simple thesis: if the independent school industry wants to thrive and create more impact in the world, it starts with developing best in class products and services that can be scaled and delivered to different audiences. And, if more people had access to independent schools through different modes, my guess is that their impact would indeed spread beyond their existing market share.

As independent school educators gather later this month in Las Vegas for the annual NAIS conference, I throw down an interesting concept: what if independent schools could increase their market share of school age children to at least 5% in a decade? Imagine the impact on the world. That vision starts with developing a different kind of thinking about the limitations of the business model.

I have often believed that independence is the greatest asset of independent schools. It is in their name. Independent schools, as well as most private schools, can choose their mission, their delivery mode, their access points, and the markets they choose to cultivate. Can we move beyond trying to “find full pay families” as the holy grail of their existence and this threading of the needle business model toward true relevance in the coming decade?

If Everything is Important Then Really Nothing is Important

Strategy is the art of choice and sacrifice.  In other words, if everything is important, then really nothing is important.  But, how do you make sound strategic choices?  And, what factors should you use?  There are actually four essential factors that a non-profit might use to make choice among a series of strategic initiatives.  It is all about sound strategic rationale and criteria.

“if everything is important, then really nothing is important. ”

So, why should one priority show up in your strategic plan, while another was pushed aside by the steering committee?  Creating the proper rationale for doing anything strategic is something that many schools and colleges struggle with during planning processes.  As a result, we have found that focusing on at least one or more critical parameters that a strategic priority must address can help focus your plan on the most important goals.  Here they are in no particular order.

Missional Mandate
A strategic goal must be in the plan because your mission mandates it, regardless of marketplace or revenue opportunities. 

Competitive Imperative
The competitive environment dictates this priority if your school or college wishes to remain competitive.

Revenue Driver
Our school or college can make revenue in this venture.

Element of Distinction
Adding a specific strategic goal will make your school or college more distinctive in the marketplace of sameness.  

Make sure your priorities are grounded in at least one, if not more, than each of these parameters.  Balance is also important.  It is not helpful to have a handful of initiatives that all meet missional mandates, or only a set of initiatives that drive revenue.  Balance across these four priorities helps keep a strategic plan balanced.  

What Did You Have for Breakfast?

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." This famous phrase was initially coined by the late management guru Peter Drucker and then popularized more recently by Mark Fields of Ford Motor Company. Since Field's use of the phrase, it has been tossed around thoughtfully by many marketers and thought leaders. Most of us have heard the phrase, but, I am not sure how many of us have really thought about why culture is so important, perhaps more important than strategy.

Culture is an outcome of leadership. And, I mean leadership from both individuals and long-term institutional and organizational leadership. A strong and effective leadership model creates, in fact, a culture of shared beliefs. And, people - at all levels of an organization - share this culture and transmit it to others in the organization.

Mature organizations often are marked by a a real sense of identity, clarity around their shared belief systems and operating principles. A successful leader knows that their vision and strategy is important. But, they also know that their vision will largely be lost on an organization if it is not in line with the shared culture or an organization. So, word to the wise: read the tea leaves of the culture before you launch a vision or strategy.

A simple rule of thumb for organizational effectiveness might be this.

• Read the tea leaves to learn the culture or an organization.

• Create a vision and set of strategies that are in line with or can leverage that culture.

• Transmit the shared vision in language that is embraced by the culture.

• Rinse and repeat.

And the cycle continues, assuming that the culture is strong and healthy. But, what should you do if the culture in unhealthy and is in need of change? We will follow up on that topic in our next entry.

Strategy is Finding the Intersection Between Mission and Market

Strategic planning - or essentially the art of making good plans with clear strategy - is about finding the intersection between mission and market. And, to understand mission and market, you have to first understand that mission means internal to the organization and market generally means external. It is the old SWOT analysis in practice, as the SW of a SWOT stands for strengths and weaknesses (internal) and the OT stands for opportunities and threats (external).

For most of our educational clients, understanding the mission side of the address is easy because they have a solid understanding of internal mission, culture, and the values of the school or college. It is not hard for them to make plans that address concerns of internal stakeholders because they have researched them, asked them questions, and generally have a good idea on how to be responsive to their issues and concerns. Our experience is that most colleges and schools have a real handle on how to create plans that are aligned with mission.

Here is the challenge, though. Most schools and colleges are less adept at reading the tea leaves of the external environment. They are not adept at understanding demographic trends, competitive forces, and large shifts in delivery or business models. These leaves them at a distinct disadvantage in understanding the trends and forces that are likely to shape their industry. As a result, they tend not to be responsive to external trends and forces.

Our experience tells us that the biggest ideas, opportunities, and resulting strategies generally come from the outside. Creating plans that align with mission are important, but if most ideas in the strategic plan generally pander to internal needs rather than external forces, the resulting strategic plan is incremental at best, usually absent of a big idea. More importantly, it fails to find the right intersection between mission and market because external trends were less important in the data collection and planning process.

Finding the intersection is a tough balancing act, because at the end of the day it means managing change and tension between what internal stakeholders believe is sacred to an organization and what the market wants or needs. Our experience tells us that the best plans possess an equal measure of internal and external data and reality, and those research inputs are carefully synthesized and applied to the unique circumstances of the school or college. And, perhaps most important, best practices would tell us that it is important to revisit the external trends side annually, because that is generally where the dynamic shifts occur.

Great strategy finds the intersection between mission and market. Mission changes little over time, but market opportunity is shifting constantly. The best schools and colleges are constantly challenging their assumptions and reading the external environment to find the right address.

Getting the "Why", "What" and "How" Right

What is right in front of us tends to capture our attention and, as a result, garners the most of our time and resources. Schools and colleges are very responsive organizations by nature, especially to the needs of internal stakeholders. And, as a result, they often make decisions and prioritize activity in very operational and tactical ways, depending upon what is directly in front of them, capturing their time and attention.

But, it is important to remember that this is actually the opposite of how great organizations function. They take the long view, rather than the short view, and understand what they are ultimately trying to accomplish as it relates to prioritizing activity and resources. And, in order to do so, they focus on this simple equation:

• “Why” they exist, or, what are they really trying to accomplish in the long-term; what problems are they ultimately trying to solve? This is often called their vision or North Star.

• “What” they are focusing upon in the long-term, meaning what five or seven major initiatives or strategies are they employing to accomplish their “why”. These are often called strategies.

• “How” should they break their long-term objectives in to shorter, bite-size action plans for the immediate and short-term future. These are often called tactics.

The most mature and effective schools and colleges organize their greatest resources around their greatest priorities. And, they do this because they have clarified why they exist, what they are ultimately trying to accomplish, and how that translates into long-term strategies and short-term action plans.

Rethinking Educational Strategy

I’ve been thinking about how we have organized and packaged education in order to achieve intended purposes. My thinking has led me to believe that we have some cross-purposes at work.

Currently, education falls into two broad product categories: 1) transactional (cheap, ubiquitous) and 2) transformational (expense & relationship-intensive).

And, current educational outcomes also broadly fall into two categories: 1) a better life (job, money) and 2) a better world (transformed people/communities).

If we want a better world - and from the looks of things I think we need it - then the greatest strategic challenge is to increase the access through enhanced price and delivery of transformative education.

Three Major Shifts to Watch

Many of our clients spend a little time at the outset of a strategic planning process reflecting on their past plan. It is healthy and reflective to remind an organization where they have been, what priorities they recently set for themselves, and how they fared in accomplishing them. And, to be honest, it also is a good homework exercises to get people grounded on the work at hand. It is hard to think about the future without an understanding of the past.

That reflection phase is always helpful and typically bears some fruit of understanding. But, undoubtedly, a few on the client team will make an obvious observation about the last strategic plan: it did not prepare them for what major cultural and environmental shifts occurred in the past five years. And, that is a valuable lesson to learn early in a planning process.

From my view, the past five years had three major themes with significant impact:

1. Identity - Individual identity, and the rights associated with it, entered in a new era in the past five years. This includes all of the basic and foundational elements of identity, from race, ethnicity, and gender. We are in a time of redefining identities and the role of the individual within that context.

2. Tribalism - The further fracturing and division of culture and society has accelerated tribalism, where people gravitate only to their groups. The includes geographic migration where people move to other regions, social and news media consumption where people only engage with channels that affirm their beliefs, and clubs and organizations that share values. The net effect is a cultural “echo chamber”, where people do not want to build community with others that they do not believe are similar.

3. Environmental Disruption - The pandemic was a fierce force in nearly all industries and it had a profound impact on eduction. It was an environmental disruption and, from the looks of things, we will continue to have more of them. From earthquakes to hurricanes to wildfires to terrorism to medical crises, education will need to remain flexible and adaptable to a constantly changing environment.

As clients go back and look at their past plans, they start to understand that they were largely unprepared for the three major forces from the past five years that drove the cultural narrative. I’ve always believed that the largest threats to the future of education do not come from within the classroom but from the changing landscape. Best to read the tea leaves of culture and build plans around these trends.

Use an Incubator as a Means to Manage Change

One of the challenges we hear most often from clients is how difficult it is to manage change. Often, really great and necessary strategic initiatives stall simply because the culture of an organization cannot manage the change necessary to move forward on a good idea. And, the death of great ideas can often be what I call “dualism”, or the idea that an organization has to be “all in” or “all out” to enact a concept. It is that “either/or” thinking that kills great ideas.

I often believe that building a new idea incubator to “pilot” or “try on for size” new strategies is a way to mitigate and manage the change in an organization. Most schools or colleges are happy to be innovative and try new ideas if — and here is the big catch — it does not impact them directly or change their work environment. Creating an incubation hub is one way of building safe change, innovation, and experimentation into a school or college culture.

Consider making short-term commitments — such as three years — to a few new ideas emerging out of a strategic plan. Put those programs and ideas into an incubation hub and see what sticks. Place your most innovative faculty and teams into that hub to grow and water the seeds. It is a great way to creatively operationalize new ideas that emerge out of your strategic plan.

Placing Growth in Context

Why exactly would a school or college grow? The thought of increased enrollment often becomes a lighting rod conversation with faculty on many campuses, with many assuming that with growth comes limitations or sacrificing some critical cultural aspect of the organization. We’ve all heard the argument:

If we grow, we won’t be the same, special place that we once were.

—Faculty

I have often believed that sentiment is inherently biased and limited in perspective. Now, with a sizable portion of the independent school and college sector experiencing some level of enrollment growth, it might be wise to place the concept of growth in context.

My experience tells me that great schools and colleges focus on growing not to earn more revenue but because they believe deeply that their mission benefits others. Keep in mind that schools and colleges are non-profits which are, by their nature, designed to transform society.

Remember, we have three broad industry sectors with three distinct missions in America.

• The corporate sector has a mission to make a profit.

• The government sector has a mission to create and manage policy.

• And, the nonprofit sector has a mission to transform society. We do that through education in our division of this sector.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting that making money is a bad idea. Not at all. Actually, I believe it is an outcome of having a relevant mission. But, having a mission and vision that is contributing to something larger than your organization is where the real growth exists.

In other words, growth is about impact. So, when I hear a school or college tell me that they don’t want to grow, I honestly assume that they have placed some natural limitations on their ability to impact or influence the world.

I believe that those organizations that believe so deeply in their mission also truly believe the world would be better if more people bought their product or service. Far too many organizations create strategic plans for growth to strengthen themselves. We need to use our plans to strengthen our world. It is more inspiring when you are working toward not just a better organization, but a better world. When you think of growth in terms of external impact, it places your work in a far more inspired perspective.

Every Effective Strategy Starts With a Compelling Vision

If every effective strategy starts with a compelling vision, why do so few schools and colleges spend time creating one? Where is their vision? Interestingly enough, in all of our work with independent schools and colleges, fewer than 20% of them possess a vision statement when we initially work with them. Sure, all of them have a mission statement but very few actually possess a vision statement. What's the difference?

There is an enormous difference between a mission and a vision. Try these definitions on for size.

• Mission Statement = What you do or the reason for your organizational existence. Mission is about your organization and the past and present.

• Vision Statement = Why you do it or the successful completion of your mission rendered in terms of contributions to society. Vision is always about something larger than the organization itself and it is future looking.

From my experience, very few organizations actually change their mission over time. Sure, they might change the current language describing their purpose, editing the actual statement, but they really don't alter their general purpose or reason for existence. But, since a mission is actually a "rear-view window" sort of glance, does it really help move an institution forward? Not really. It actually helps most organizations stay grounded in the past. And, that can be a real problem toward embracing change.

Most strategists would agree that vision is far more important than mission or core values to formulating strategy and empowering an organization to work together. Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have have shared his vision for equality ("I have a dream") or if John F. Kennedy, Jr. would not have shared his vision for NASA ("by the end of the decade we will place a man on the moon")? It turns out that a compelling vision is about something bigger than us and, ultimately, what really drives people to work together and energizes a movement. Why is it, then, that independent schools and colleges fail to articulate a vision if they are so important? Probably because it is hard work and requires imagination and thinking beyond the organization.

But, here is another practical reason why a vision is so important. It informs communications. Want to know an easy way to spot an organization that does not possess a compelling vision? They focus on branding and messaging first. Vision really should inspire the way we articulate our school or college culture and programs. Rather than focus first on “messaging” or “branding”, we need to remember that it all starts with vision. All great communication programs start with an excellent vision. This is the best order in which to start a communication process:

1. Visioning is the most important aspect of any organizational exercise. It all starts with vision, and great visions are long-term, ambitious, and bigger than the organization.

2. Great positioning is the result of a strong vision. Positioning is finding that which is singular and differentiating about your organization. And, keep in mind that positioning is competitor-centric.

3. Strategic planning is the work of setting priorities and then creating a three or five year plan that helps operationalize the vision and positioning platform for the current short term chapter of an organization.

4. Marketing is the art of creating value for the client by turning that vision, position, and plan into a short-term strategic marketing focus. And, keep in mind that value is in the eyes of the beholder, so marketing is a client-centric process.

5. Branding is the cultural expression of organizational values.

6. dentity is the visual expression of those values.

7. Messaging is simply getting the talk points down.

The problem is that most organizations jump right in at #4 through #7 in this process, failing to get the larger picture in focus, rather than doing the important work of creating a vision. I believe that setting long-term vision is just as important in creating empowering communications as it is defining organizational objectives.

Vision is bigger than mission, because it is bigger than the organization and it answers the question of "why you do what you do", not just "what you do". It is the why that is so important in not just developing strategy, but in creating compelling communications.

Does your organization have a vision? And, how is it informing your communications program?

#Edufails - What Mistakes Do Schools and Colleges Continue to Repeat?

Sometimes the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Our experience tells us that the education industry keeps making the same mistakes, dodging the same bullets, and asking the wrong questions about their influence, sustainability, and resiliency. And, from the looks of things, it appears that the industry is at their old tricks again.

One year ago I wrote a post here called “The Reckoning Begins”. It was on the backside of the pandemic, as educators were just starting to lift their sights to the future. An excerpt from that post a year ago:

Educators and economists alike have been predicting a reset of education for years. They have warned that the occurrence of one or two catastrophic events could reshape the entire education landscape. They have argued that tuition was too high, expense structures were too bloated, and private schools and colleges were not centered on the needs of the market, just the needs of a minority.

Our industry has been plagued with seeking solutions to the wrong problems for some time. That time is over and we will see the innovative, strategic schools and colleges rethink their role, programs, learning systems, and expense structures. The smart ones will start now, or have already started.

So, here we are, about to start the second quarter of 2022, and I have to ask myself an honest question:

Have we made any real progress toward solving some of our systemic issues?

From my vantage point, we have made some progress, but it has been incremental at best. There are a handful of schools and colleges that have learned mightily from their pandemic experience and pivoted wisely and courageously as a result. But, to be honest with the you about the industry, from my view, most schools and colleges have not made those choices. They continue to live in the incremental world, working around the edges of innovation and redesign, not doing the real work at tackling the hard issues.

So, what are the mistakes that schools and colleges continue to repeat? This will be our focus in the spring and summer of 2022 through a series we are calling #Edufails. We hope you join us on this journey of uncovering the mistakes that, if we are not intentional, we are doomed to repeat.

A final note on this series. The point of #edufails is not to dig on the education industry. Ok, maybe a little bit, as we deserve it. But, the real point of this series is to highlight the obvious mistakes we continue to make so that we do not repeat them again in this moment of rebirth after the pandemic. I am hoping we will raise awareness of these issues so that our future behavior breaks the cycle of our past behavior.

The series will always be under the hashtag #edufails and will be posted here, on our Twitter feeds and on our podcast on Spotify.

What If We Created Strategic Plans and Didn't Communicate Them?

Education is a pretty predictable industry. It tends to follow similar calendars, cycles, processes, and systems. Sometimes that is a very reassuring attribute. And, sometimes it can lead us away from thinking differently about our circumstances.

Let's focus more on DOING than SAYING.

What if we created strategic plans and didn’t communicate or share them with anyone?

Most schools and colleges spend an average of nine months to create a strategic plan. They gather lots of data and input, engage their stakeholders, and then create a set of priorities that were formed from the feedback. At the end of the process, they build a communication program and launch the new strategic plan to great fanfare. Hopefully, they follow the plan and implement as intended, communicating with their people all the way. Five years later, they will probably do it again. Pretty predictable cycle, right?

What if we created strategic plans and then didn't share them? No kidding. Not with anyone. Instead, we just decided to DO them. Like major companies do. Think about Google for a moment. They don't need a keynote presentation to share their new software. They quietly engage us for our advice and then, one day, a new product designed just for us emerges. Some of the new products delight us and others dismay us and they fail. But, regardless, they are dedicated to the act of DOING, not SAYING, what they are going to do.

Actually, I am not advocating that we stop communicating about our strategic plans. Good communication plays an important role in closing the feedback loop with our tribe of support, creates a foundation for a campaign, and builds trust in the community. But, I have noticed that schools and colleges love to tell the world where they are going yet tend to be very slow and inflexible in living out their plans. Wouldn't it be an interesting exercise to finish a strategic plan and not communicate it with anyone? And, then, after a couple of years of implementation, go back and ask stakeholders what they think the school or college priorities are at the moment. That would give us a good sense of whether our actions were speaking for us.

Let's focus more on DOING than SAYING. We all know that action speak louder than words. Excellent communication is an important goal in itself. But, let's not confuse activity with meaning. People care about what we do, not what we say.

Defining Innovation - Let's Get This Right

We hear a lot of folks talking about educational innovation today as if it were an educational philosophy or platform unto itself, like Montessori education, Jesuit learning, or single gender teaching.  It is not.  Innovation is not an educational platform, it is a mindset, and it has been around in every industry from the beginning of time.  This is not a new idea.

According to our good friends Wikipedia (an innovative entry itself), here is the definition of innovation: 

"Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulate needs, or existing market needs. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. "

So, to learn what innovation means to the future of education, let's review what innovation has meant to other industries.

• Innovation breeds choice. Most good innovations provide customers with more choice and an increasing stratification of offerings.

• Innovation decreases price. Most good innovations find a way to live out Blue Ocean Strategy, giving consumers more choice with less cost.

• Innovation enhances the experience. Most great innovations make the product experience better for the end user, the customer.

• Innovation produces integration. At the end of the day, most great innovations end up living within an ecosystem of products, with mixed price choices and mixed delivery options. Innovation rarely remains a stand alone product category.

The future of education is not about innovation that eliminates everything we know to be true about our industry. It is far more than that. I think we need to start looking at innovation at the way it will play into our ecosystem by driving more customer choice, better price, and stronger integration into our product lines. Unless we want to argue with history, I think we are safe to say that placing innovation in context might be useful to our campus conversations.

Rethinking Strategic Planning

The typical 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 must do in the future. As the COVID dust settles, the education sector must rethink how they engage in strategic planning.

Wrapping Up Strategic Plans

ISA is excited to wrap up strategic planning processes for many schools, colleges, and nonprofits this month and throughout the summer. Those include Portland Community College (OR), Friends of Children’s Hospital (MS), Brookwood School (GA), Maclay School (FL), St. Barnabas Episcopal School (FL), Miami Valley School (OH), Ancona School (IL), Harvey School (NY), Trinity Episcopal School (NC), Escuela Bilingüe Internacional (CA), and Cedar Creek School (LA). Each of these organizations completed their strategic plans by courageously pivoting during the pandemic to online collaboration, which truly informed their future plans. We are delighted to applaud their launch of plans over the course of the summer and the fall.

Were Schools Prepared for the Pandemic?

Were schools prepared for the pandemic? Yes, many were very prepared, but the answer may not be as simple as you think.

From our standpoint, many of our own ISA client schools were very prepared for the pandemic. While we have not seen any strategic plans that specifically referenced pandemic planning, we know that many of our own clients had developed remote and online learning strategies as part of their most recent strategic plans.

Similar to a restaurant with drive-through or delivery services, these schools had already created alternative models for delivering education to their students long before the pandemic hit. They pivoted quickly and adapted effectively to the new normal that education has experienced over the past six to nine months. And, now they are busy using that competency to think about how technology and extended relationships can bring more relevant and personalized learning experiences to their students in the future.

If you fail to prepare you need to prepare to fail. It just goes to show you that planning for the future works and that we should expect disruption as normal and something to be anticipated and planned in the future.

Developing Strategy in Times of Turbulence

We have to look up, way up, out of the weeds of daily planning, to see what is really happening in the world. Major industry sectors, including business travel, education, and real estate - are being reset. How well you respond is really about how clearly you see the future.

#seethefuture

if you are waiting for things to get “back to normal” before you create a new reality for your future, you will be sorely disappointed. There is no “going back the way it was before” as the world has profoundly changed and will continue to do so in the next four months. Time really does equal lost opportunity.

The famous management guru, Peter Drucker, understood the importance of developing strategy during uncertain times. He left us with many quotes of wisdom, but this one seems to be unusually relevant now.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic”

— Peter Drucker

Why Vision and Strategy Are More Important Than Ever

The current health crisis that we are all experiencing will pass. At some point, we will have a vaccine and treatment for it and, hopefully, business and industry - and our daily lives - will return back to normal. At least we hope so.

But, when it does, it will be a new normal. Things will have changed in our world - significantly. A majority of homes throughout the world have now experienced remote work and education. Some will have experienced large gaps in education and employment, while others will have maintained or even deepened their work load or schooling. Depending upon their experiences and preferences, we will see new pathways to work and learning established and fortified. We will enter into a new work world that will be forever changed.

How will place-based education, remote learning, and blended learning fit into a new global environment post COVID-19? The answer to that question is dependent upon your organizational vision and strategies for reaching it. If your goal is survival, that will not be enough. If your goal is to reach new audiences and build new pathways to reach them, COVID-19 will provide that opportunity. And, if your goal is to build a new model of education for the future, where the issues that have plagued the industry forever (assessment, credentials, scheduling, cost) are addressed with a new urgency, you have found the right moment in time.

But, it all hinges on having a clear vision for the future and the strategies that support it.

A New Breed of Strategy

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.