So, you have successfully dealt with the now -- the pivot to remote learning and governance, keeping the virtual trains running on time, sustaining your community and leadership teams, creating virtual graduations and end of year celebrations. Much has been accomplished yet there is an impending sense of dread, what next?
Big questions around what happens next fall are swirling. In truth, the most likely possibilities are the hardest ones to plan for: the reality that we will eventually come back to campus in ways that are not recognizable, and that require continuous and creative remote learning capabilities. This great unknown feels the most daunting of all, school leaders are frayed, boards are either frozen, or overly anxious. How can we begin planning when the future is so unclear? Whatever your context or financial reality, we have some ideas for boards and leaders.
Address the Hierarchy of Needs
Let’s break it down. Our conversations with trustees and school leaders reveal a few key needs - to be addressed in order!
REST UP and RECHARGE: We are likely in this for the long haul, so before diving in, take a break. We have heard from many of you that your teams are getting “crispy.” So first, stop, reflect on successes to date, and make time to renew yourselves for the journey ahead. If you are a board chair, make sure you help your heads negotiate this space for themselves and their team. We are in a strange period where plans for the end of this school year are shaping up, summer is becoming clearer and we are awaiting guidance from local and state authorities to address the conditions under which we might come back to school in the fall. This timing offers an opportunity for reflection and renewal to approach the next phase.
RESET and RENEGOTIATE: You rested. Now, consider the possibility that your board or your teams may need a reset. Is it time to call everyone back to basics to negotiate the why, what, and how of your work? Take time now to reestablish the values and aims that bind you, then confirm your goals and important work for the “next”. For example, if you agree you are scenario planning, negotiate clearly what you are planning for and who has which responsibility: school reopening? Financial planning? Tuition modelling and adaptations? Make sure you also agree to plan within reasonable boundaries. Ask: what do we know and control? What do we not know and control? Finally, don’t ignore emotions. There may be some leftover tensions. Let them surface - and ask for specific suggestions to move forward, making clear that old gripes need to be left behind. Team members may need some supports and reminders on remote work and collaboration -- enlist them in designing practices to achieve what they need. Remember trustees want to feel valuable and fix things, so guide them to the work where they can deliver.
REINVEST and RETOOL: This is critical to both short and long term impact. While it’s hard to move between “the now and the next”, let’s face it -- this year is almost fully baked and “the next” is almost here. If you’ve successfully reset and renegotiated what matters for the next, now is the time to examine how you get there. Your quick and dirty response to the crisis must now shift to sustained improvement and new capacity building for a season that will endure for many months, during which there is no “normal” return to school. Schools are operating in tight fiscal realities - but you can’t make progress with a deficit mindset. So consider where you need to reinvest and retool to get from here to there.
Reinvesting and Retooling may take money -- but more likely it takes sweat, deep thinking, creativity, and will. It forces you to think through the integrated lenses of strategy and organization (the foundation of culture) in order to build new capacities:
Strategic Learning: What was our strategic direction pre-crisis and how do we adapt it going forward? What does the crisis reveal about how we might deliver on our mission in the future?
Organizational Development: How can we assess and organize leadership? How do we align and cultivate talent? What organizational structures best harness talent for what’s next?
Be Deliberate: Spend Time, Talent, and Treasure Wisely
You’ve rested, reset, and you are ready to reinvest and retool. How do you do that and yield returns? Here’s a quick checklist to help frame your “Now to Next” work - whatever the particular focus or planning objective:
What are your guiding principles?
What general criteria or constraints have you all agreed upon for any modelling or design?
What must be protected or preserved?
What values must be adhered to, what outcomes are essential?
What scenarios are you planning for?
back to school configurations and contingency planning;
mitigation and containment of infection on campus;
enrollment dips and/or tuition models/credits and increased aid;
ways to innovate and expand revenue opportunities;
all of the above?
For any given scenario, what do you know/control and what will reveal itself later? Then, what can be done now relative to the planning you are doing?
Map your work against the following:
Who does what? How do you best divide the work without compromising effective coordination - or infringing on boundaries?
Once you’ve decided what you are planning for (and there may be several strands and elements as described above) it’s important to be clear and about what should be done by whom? How do you reimagine program and delivery without making it purely a financial exercise? How do you ensure that you have teams who can work fast and effectively - without obstacles or voices that impede progress? For example, can trustees start work with key leaders on the concrete certainties: enrollment dips, financial aid requests, and a 1-3 year period of weathering economic uncertainty while other members of your team work on innovative solutions to how you deliver the program and ensure effective, mission aligned school operations? Getting the right people focused on the right work is the key to success.
You might think about roles, and the construction of teams, in in this way:
Designers and Doers- these people improve, reinvent, and create the program design and framework you’ll need for the “next”. This is likely school led work as it focuses on pedagogy, assessment, professional learning, talent, staffing, and schedule. It also examines the operating possibilities -- and will break down along lines of learning design and program, logistics and technology, health and medical needs, and facilities.
Refiners and Resourcers- this team can assess design for alignment to principles and test for pricing. Is this where you can use your board for feedback and financial check? Clear cut scenarios such as “back to school in person” or “all remote” may be able to go to through “refinement and resourcing” faster than any hybrid or innovation scenarios that will require more work by the “designers and doers” before they are ready for “refinement and resourcing.”
Synthesizers and Communicators- this team can assist in socializing potential program changes, and synthesize for implementation, including communications to key constituents. Think beyond communications to advancement -- this is still the time to actively engage donors -- and it presents new opportunities if you can make the case that you are delivering on your mission as you navigate uncertainty. Consider starting to include key communicators during the design and refinement phases to get feedback along the way. Our next blog post tackles communications as a functional and strategic need in schools - a gap that many of our clients are identifying now as they work valiantly to inform, inspire, and connect.
Air Traffic Control: Who will act as “chief of staff” the coordinator of the work above? While the Head needs to be in this role, a person driving the details and ensuring effective communication is invaluable to organize the work as you reinvest and retool.
A Final Thought:
Strategy is only as good as the people and practices that come together to make it real. Leadership ensures that this is what happens. So focus less on planning and more on getting the right people, in the right roles, working together to address the future. Limit the time you spend on what you can’t anticipate and trust that if you’ve done the foundation work and invested in the right planning, harnessing the talents of the right people, you’ll be able to figure it out in real time. Spend your money in these spaces — and resource the best ideas now — even if it hurts in the short term. Schools that cut too close to the bone are far less likely to emerge from this period of disruption ready for the next season for growth.