AI Fails to Understand Strategy
It has been my position for years that strategic plans are rarely strategic. In fact, following a review of over 100 strategic plans that I did in 2010, I came to the conclusion that strategic plans were dangerously formulaic. Some thirteen years later, having reviewed hundreds more, I hold to my earlier assertion. Key learning: if something is formulaic, it can be replicated easily by means of an algorithm.
Lack of Moral Courage Reaches Crisis Proportions
It is disheartening to see so many US independent schools, of varying sizes and histories, grappling with existential crises as we enter 2023. These crises were not necessarily born during the Covid era; although some were, in many cases, their roots can be found 20 years ago, in the lead-up to the Great Recession. The signs were there: a need to 'blend and extend' loans past their original amortization schedules (e.g., blending in other debt and extending a 10-year schedule to 30 years); write-offs of pledge payments that were never honored; reductions in enrollment; increased discounting of seats; fewer donors with the capacity to make large gifts (which masked underlying business model problems). The list goes on.
Value and Future-Ready Schools
Future-ready schools, it could be argued, exhibit three characteristics: (1) they know who they are and what they stand for, (2) they are fixated on speed and simplicity, and (3) they are obsessed with scaling up their ability to learn, innovate, and seek good ideas, irrespective of the origin of those ideas. So say co-authors Aaron de Smet, Chris Gagnon, and Elizabeth Mygatt in a recent article on future-ready organizations in Rotman Management. Although the co-authors were talking about companies, the characteristics of traditional hierarchies are to be found in schools inasmuch as they are found in companies, and the aforementioned characteristics could just as easily be in future-ready schools. Ultimately, this is about value: knowing what your families value, and obsessing about delivering that value.
Reality Isn't What It Used to Be
"With a growing range of virtual interfaces continuously evolving around us, reality isn't what it used to be[,]" writes Amy Webb, Professor of Strategic Foresight at New York University's Stern School of Business, and author of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology (2022). Webb posits that leaders need to consider carefully these evolving interfaces. To my mind, school leaders in particular need to consider these developments and emerging signals…
Lack of Managerial Competence
Inasmuch as the pandemic has brought out the best in many heads of school (and, thankfully, their teams), it has also managed to shine a spotlight on a number of leaders who have been catechised by means of leadership workshops and leadership development programmes into believing that an individual with vision and an ability to inspire others is what defines a school leader. The cottage industry that supports and promotes leadership development in this vein, irrespective of whether it is stated explicitly, focuses on the difference between management and leadership (oft-used statement attributed to Drucker: management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things), to the detriment of competence in management.