Far from the wintry climes of Europe in Australia, our Summer is just getting warmed up. The highest temperature in Australia since 1960 was recorded in Onslow, Western Australia, on Thursday this week. The mercury climbed to hit 50.7 degrees at 2:26 pm!
The hot, stormy weather is always a strange experience for an Englishman in Melbourne during the Christmas break. I know many of you in the North will already be scraping ice off the windscreens as the school term kicks off again.
When the rains have arrived here in Victoria, the contrast to the blue skies is evident, and we often see a tremendous rolling bank of greyscale formation heading our way.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s Rain Radar shows us the encroaching blobs of wet thunder and lightning. The more red and dark, the more intense. Sometimes the rain falls, and sometimes it passes.
It got me thinking about a question I have for you – what’s on your radar for 2022?
To lead is to have a vision.
To have vision is to see the unseen, hear the unheard, and know what others do not know. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive, finding opportunities where there seems to be nothing but obstacles.
It is seeing what you believe exists but cannot yet be seen by others. It is looking beyond your own eyes. And it is about seeing the unseen so that you can lead others to success.
I see you first
Radar stands for Radio Detection and Ranging, which means it works by first detecting objects via radio waves.
This technology was not the product of a single inventor but many inventors who contributed throughout its development. Christian Hülsmeyer claimed the first patent for Radar in 1904, but this kind of detection concept goes back to Heinrich Hertz’s experiments in the 1880s.
Radar was first used to detect ships, allowing faster and more accurate detection of potential threats on the battlefield. This application gave birth to radar guns, which are still used by some police forces today.
Wartime Advantage
World War One was responsible for advancing the development of Radar, including its use as a military defence in detecting enemy aircraft.
World War Two saw further development in Radar technology for use on ships and planes, and land with radar towers used to detect incoming air attacks during “The Battle of Britain”.
Today, Radar is used by governments to monitor borders and airports while also being used in weather forecasting; mapping oceans and landmasses; air traffic control; meteorology; astronomy; remote sensing of trees and land-use change; object tracking in space like satellites or asteroids movements.
What is now proved was once, only imagin’d.
William Blake, Proverbs of Hell.
What is on your radar?
The concept breaks down a little when we think about this question and how we imagine or extend our long-range senses. Radar detects what already exists and gives us an indication of movement and direction.
What it cannot do is reveal intention. Leadership is about this intention. This wisdom requires personal insight into oneself, not just observation of others. Leadership, therefore, involves foresight
Foresight is the state of knowing events before they occur; vision; imagination; anticipation. For example, a wise leader will foresee the problems that their team might face and prepare them as much as possible to overcome those obstacles.
This does not mean leaders should look into their crystal ball and predict every detail like an oracle -because things constantly change- but rather to envisage multiple possibilities and choose the most realistic one with an optimistic view.
The only way we can see what we do not yet see or hear what we cannot yet hear is by imagining it and preparing.
Your Talking Points
Here are a few key takeaways about foresight and long-range sensing.
We see what we imagine. Imagination is the eye of the soul, and with it, we can imagine all kinds of possibilities.
Radar cannot provide intention. What is on your radar requires interpretation.
So much talk is wasted. I’m curious about the transition from coaching dialogue to action and progress. I wonder what distinguishes successful action and goal setting from ineffective token gestures, gauzy accountability and flimsy impact.
Key Ideas.
Coaching is an emergent thinking space.
The attributes of effective action setting fall into three categories: Agency, Precision and Systems.
We must know our capacity for action and the constraints on agency.
Balance precise next steps with a broader lens on the systems we belong to.
A well-designed personal system of improvement is better than a single goal.
From Exploration To Action
There is a moment during mentoring or coaching when dialogue leads to the next steps. Everything you explore is in motion towards an action plan like the dialogic landscape tips us towards what’s next. A critical shift in the dialogue because nothing matters unless we change our behaviour.
We have explored lots of ideas together — what feels like something you might implement the next time this happens?
Dialogue may create new ideas and a shared understanding, but to apply the change or next step is why we come together. Yes, there is value in the talk, and sometimes the dialogue soothes and nourishes. But the threshold looms, and we need to step back again into the fast-flowing river of our day. It is easy for plans to get washed away from us.
As your session concludes, you move from one type of thinking to another. The developmental conversation is exploratory — coaching is an emergent space. But this safe space for emerging ideas needs the complementary thinking of action setting, making plans and deciding what to try next is convergent thinking.
Questions To Close a Coaching Session
I use a version of these two questions to close my coaching sessions.
What’s a key takeaway for you?
Describe your next step.
We sift the ideas for the most likely to have the impact we want. This commitment often happens quickly, which is an indicator the dialogue was well balanced. However, it is also OK when it is tougher to see what to do next.
It is no surprise that we often experience the most precise insights in the last few moments of a coaching session. Dots get connected — talk shifts from ideas to plans.
Feedback as Coaching — Coaching as Feedback
This shift from ideas to plans also happens when we give feedback and critique to our students. Only the time available to us is much more compressed. The dynamic is still comparable.
We talk about what new ideas might look like and describe the next step. Feedback occurs in various ways: through written comments, a short verbal exchange or more extended conference.
In this way, coaching is an extended critique or feedback loop.
Provocations and reflections are shared.
Precision is gained from the talk.
Dialogue generates a new understanding.
Ideas surface.
Next steps agreed.
Commitments and plans.
Change happens.
Provocations and reflections are shared.
But what makes the most significant difference in those last steps to take action and change? What attributes of talk and the agreed actions help a person to implement those changes?
From my teaching and learning experience, coaching and facilitation fall into three categories: Agency, Precision and Systems.
Let’s have a look at each of these in more detail.
Agency
We need the latitude to take action. There is no point in showing intent, setting activities and committing to next steps that are unrealistic.
In preparing the ground for change, we must know our capacity and constraints.
What’s the point in sharing feedback with a student if there is no time to do anything with it?
Responsibility
Whose action is it anyway? If someone is to shift their thinking, behaviour and actions, the ownership has to be authentic. If a teacher or coach crafts the next step with zero input, it just feels like another thing to do. This is likely to lead to dependence on the coach or teacher, learned helplessness.
Responsibility tracks back to ideas and new tactics that emerge from dialogue, not just in the ‘Describe your next step’ phase.
If I give you advice and it fails, you will blame me. I have traded my advice for your responsibility, and that is seldom a good deal. ~ John Whitmore
The notion of a trade resonates with me. I am always treading the line between stepping up and stepping back.
One aspect is always true: I can’t do it for you. As a coach, I don’t take responsibility for your actions or your emotions.
Accountability
When the rest of your life smacks you in the face, sometimes you need a person in your corner to send you back in. An accountability partner or coach is a person to remind you and keep you on course.
Accountability is the reminder of what your past self committed to. This might be:
A brief email that reminds people of the intent, what we wrote and agreed on. I copy and paste the actions from the shared notes.
I start a coaching session with a focus on progress — what have you done?
We celebrate progress and the change in increments too.
When change happens, we have to be able to stop and smell the roses. This catches me out, and I often look for the next thing. But we gain so much from closing the loop and noticing the impact of our actions.
You might ask:
What works?
How do you know?
How can you double down?
What new questions have you unearthed?
Over time this improves action setting due to the affirmation and positive reflection that you normalise. We are more satisfied with closed loops than open ones. Each slight hunch is a test, and this type of experience encourages more experimentation.
Precision
We are more likely to take action and do something with feedback when we know what it is. When we get general comments, the intent is unclear.
Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. ~ Brené Brown
If you step away from a coaching conversation for a few days, our recall accuracy will decrease. This inaccuracy is made worse with general actions, so we must focus on precision in action setting.
There are a couple of attributes we need to incorporate to increase precision. When, where and who.
Close the time gap — when is the next opportunity?
How long has it been since you set the action? What is the time lag till your opportunity to try something new?
When you watch sports coaching, you notice the importance of repetitions. My son played tennis for many years, and the lag between formative critique from his coach and the next shot was short.
Next time, I want you to move your feet quicker, smaller steps.
The acquisition of skills on the path to mastery is a repetition of these tiny loops.
In tennis practice, the next chance to adjust a skill is quick and just over the net. In dialogic coaching, we have to plan for the next opportunity to apply a new idea.
Effective feedback occurs during the learning, while there is still time to act on it. ~ Jan Chappuis, p. 36
We increase precision in the action setting by expressing when the next available opportunity might occur. We move from this type of commitment:
In the next few weeks, I will find a time to use protocols at the start of a meeting.
to
Start next Tuesday’s Y9 parent workshop with some expectations and meeting protocols.
An added benefit of this precision is that my follow up can be just as precise.
‘Great I will drop you a note on Wednesday to check-in.’
Landing zone — what scenario can you apply this new idea to?
We need an exact scenario or landing zone for the new idea to build further precision in our action setting.
We aim to anchor our intent to a precise moment in the future.
You will notice from the previous example we moved from at the start of a meeting and the slippery In the next few weeks I will find a time to:
Start next Tuesday’s Y9 parent workshop with some expectations and meeting protocols.
The start of the workshop is the landing zone. It is the next opportunity. We might tune this action up even further by seeking precision about which protocols they might try.
It is worth noting we want to create some flexibility too. In this example, the person setting the action has room to manoeuvre and be creative with what protocols seem to fit.
People — who is involved?
A third attribute is an audience involved in the action. Who are you helping? Who is involved?
Connection to people helps us to add further accountability beyond the coaching and feedback loop. We can gain valuable feedback from this audience and understand the immediate result of our actions.
In our example, we identified the Y9 parent audience, but this might also be our peers who witness this work.
We might ask:
Who could you share this action with from your team to help you reflect? Who can sit back and notice the impact of this action and offer you some critique? How will you get some feedback about the protocols from the parents?
All of these clarifying questions fine-tune the action to suit the people we want to help and increase precision,
Systems
We will be more effective at setting actions when we consider our impact at a system level.
Consider your perspective and how dialogue zooms out at the right moments to take in the broader vista.
When I think about precision, which we are trying to increase, I relate it with accuracy, which is only a tiny lexical leap to narrow.
Increase precision and system awareness. Precision without system awareness will lead to alleyways of change and isolated growth.
Shifting perspectives is the great challenge of self-improvement and holistic development. To balance the precise actions with a broader lens on the systems we belong to.
Connected to goals
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, explains the limits of goal setting.
Goals are better than acting randomly, obviously. But goals are limiting in the sense that there might be far better outcomes you don’t foresee. ~ Scott Adams
We might use fuzzy goals to counter this. They provide a direction of travel, and the precise actions we set creates momentum.
Fuzzy goals must give a team a sense of direction and purpose while leaving team members free to follow their intuition. ~ Dave Gray
Fuzzy goals, responsive action setting and course corrections respond to the available information. They balance a sense of direction and freedom to explore.
The process of moving toward the goal is also a learning process, sometimes called successive approximation. As the team learns, the goals may change, so it’s important to stop every once in awhile and look around. Fuzzy goals must be adjusted, and sometimes completely changed, based on what you learn as you go.
Effective action setting connects with a general compass point or bearing (goal) — but they do not limit us to explore off the trail.
Heads-up Awareness
An essential attribute of Fuzzy Goal setting is the flexibility to adapt in response to change. As soon as we take action, the context and perspective have shifted.
Effective action planning and coaching are responsive to these changing conditions. Here is Scott Adams again; this time, he guides us to think bigger.
Your best bet is to have a system for acquiring new and complementary skills over your lifetime while always looking for better opportunities. It’s analogous to diversifying your investments. Having a single goal is like putting all of your money in one stock; it might work out, but the odds aren’t great.
Here is James Clear with some further thoughts on the value of systems, not just goals.
goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress. Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short term, but eventually, a well-designed system will always win. Having a system is what matters. Committing to the process is what makes the difference.
But what do they mean by a system? An example from James Clear.
If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle difficult measures, and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor.
Let’s have a go at this for some different roles in an education setting:
If you are a Year 6 teacher, your goal might be to improve the quality of feedback you provide for writing in English. Your system is how often you practice, the professional learning you can draw from, the teams of colleagues working with you, the networks you tap into for inspiration, and your understanding of what works in your context.
If you are a school leader, your goal is to improve your strategic planning and development. Your system is how often you practice, the team you collaborate with, the models of effective practice you engage with, the process of change, the feedback loops you establish, the ways you increase your empathy and connection to the community.
If you are a Year 10 student, your goal is to get to the holidays and get through another week of zooms. Your system is the connections you maintain with your friends, the counteracting joy you get from play, the way you organise your tasks for this final week, the reliance on the teachers you connect with the most.
In this context, Scott Adams and James Clear refer to a personal development system made of many facets. Over time a system approach is likely to be more resilient than a single narrow A to B goal, to the changing nature of our environment.
Compatability
To improve the likelihood of action, we need to align the next step to the existing system. Innovation theory is analogous to taking action after a coaching session.
In the diffusion theory, Everett Rogers explains that Compatability is a characteristic that innovation needs to succeed.
the degree to which the innovation is perceived as being consistent with existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters. An innovation must be considered socially acceptable to be implemented. And some innovations require much time and discussion before they become socially acceptable.
Let us head back into that Year 9 Parent workshop for a moment. The action that we set was:
Start next Tuesday’s Y9 parent workshop with some expectations and meeting protocols.
Is this compatible with the existing system? What typically happens in a parent workshop? Does this align with the experience of the audience? How likely is this idea to be accepted by the group of parents? How can we adapt our actions and ambition?
These are all helpful questions to consider as we establish the following steps and on reflection afterwards. They help us to ground our ideas for change in the reality of our context.
–
Coaching is often characterised by emergent thinking, exploring options and new pathways. It is a potent mix when we balance this safe dialogue and the co-design of actions with more agency, precision, and system connections.
This quote from Marie Forleo resonates.
Clarity comes from action, not thought.
Marie Forleo
Yes, immerse yourself in dialogue and coaching, but eventually, you have to have the courage to act.
It might only need a few seconds of courage, but acting with intent will help you learn and grow.
This is a spillover from my Dialogic Learning Weekly.⚡ A weekly email designed to build your cognitive toolkit and enhance your practice. It saves you time and provokes your thinking.
The Start Stop Continue routine has been around for decades. It is commonly used as a ‘retrospective’ activity in Agile development and Scrum meetings.
Our development toolkit is filled with templates, activities and protocols for reflection, but often the simplest tool can be the most effective.
In this post, I explore the fundamental components of the reflection, how you can use it and the benefits. I also share an extended version that gives you some new options to try in your next review session.
Before you finish make sure you grab a copy of the editable PDF resource for the Start Stop Continue extended version. You can use it in your next meeting.
Start Stop Continue
In its simplest form, the protocol explores the three actions of its namesake. When you are reviewing the development of your project or even your own teaching practice, ask these three simple questions.
What should I stop doing?
What should I keep doing?
What should I start doing?
What are the benefits?
Provides a clear and comprehensive structure for agreeing on and setting actions.
Helps teams explore different types of improvements, using three different triggers.
Makes it easier for individuals to talk about what is not working and clarify issues.
Simple and memorable enough to be conducted quickly with little preparation.
Flexible enough to be valuable for individuals or large teams.
How do I facilitate the Start Stop Continue?
The first thing to do is grab a copy of the editable PDF resource for the Start Stop Continue. All of the sample questions below are included in the download.
This retrospective model will help you and your team explore what is working, what is not effective and what might be useful to try.
To support this and make it easier for participants, use some of the example questions below:
Start
What practices do you need to START doing?
Outline some of the new ideas that you want to start?
What are the habits you want to start?
Stop
What negative practices do you need to STOP?
What are the low-impact processes which need to stop?
What do you need to stop investing in?
Continue
What established practices do you need to CONTINUE doing?
Which aspects of your work need to be maintained?
What needs continued investment to maintain the impact you want to see?
A useful hack from Sarah Beldo, Head of Content and Communications at Miro, is to switch the order a little:
I’ve found that people find it easier to think about what already exists – both the good (“continue”) and the bad (“stop”), before venturing into uncharted territory (“start”).
Beyond the core Start Stop Continue routine, we can extend the reflection protocol in a few different directions. I think these provocations offer some much-needed nuance to the activity.
For example, the option to Pause, and not just Stop, is a useful distinction. The addition of shifting the thinking frame forward and back in time helps us to consider some important strategic modes of reflection.
I have developed the following additional provocations to complement the core trio and help you facilitate a comprehensive reflection.
Improve
What aspects of your practice can you IMPROVE?
Which parts of your project have room for growth?
What changes can you make to increase the impact?
Pause
Which elements of our work need to be PAUSED to allow resources to shift elsewhere?
Which projects would benefit from a short developmental hiatus?
Which projects are a priority and would benefit from other elements being PAUSED?
Fast Forward
Which aspects of this project would benefit from an increase in pace?
How might we increase the speed of development?
In the future what might be a block or challenge to the success of this?
Rewind
What have we learned from the story of development so far?
If we returned to the beginning of this project what would we start with?
What can we learn from how this problem was handled in the past?
Challenge
Which assumptions do we need to CHALLENGE?
What bias do you need to talk about and better understand?
What will you do to disrupt and challenge the status quo?
Download your editable PDF
If you are interested in this extended version of the model you can download an editable PDF. Just subscribe to my weekly newsletter and I will send you a copy.
Potential Uses and Applications
You have reached the end of a teaching placement, and you want to capture your reflections.
Your team is making progress with the implementation of a new programme prototype and you want to refine the approach.
You want a simple structure to use with your coach to reflect on the past few weeks.
During a weekly catchup with one of your team, you want to implement a simple structure for personal/professional mentorship.
At the beginning of the term, you want a framework for some collective reflection for your class.
You have moved into new learning spaces and need a tool to review what is working and what needs changing.
A Pre-Mortem is a strategic planning activity that imagines a project has failed. This type of thinking helps to identify and mitigate risks early on in the planning phase.
Exploring the worst-case scenario is traced to great Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, who called it the premeditation of evils, “premeditatio malorum”.
What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.
~ Seneca
Adding the Pre-Mortem technique to your planning toolkit will help you project your thoughts ahead, comprehensively assess the challenges to a project and adapt your plans.
I have developed a set of Pre-Mortem worksheets for you to take away. It outlines all of the steps you need to follow and provides a clear structure. Before you finish make sure you subscribe and grab a copy.
One of the biggest challenges to a successful project is the quality of planning. A plan is weaker when it overemphasises a positive outcome. A Pre-Mortem activity helps to balance this outlook by allowing time and space to explore failure scenarios.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!
Benjamin Franklin
However, it is not negativity for its own sake. We are not simply amplifying the negative voices in a group or the whinges.
The structured Pre-Mortem process steps through how to explore each scenario, identify the causes and outlines methods that respond to each potential risk.
Prospective Hindsight
Instead of being reactive to problems, in this activity, you will use the thought experiment: Prospective Hindsight. You might even be able actually to say you are going “back to the future”.
Prospective Hindsight is casting our mind forward into a future time and then imagining what we might have wished we had learned by looking back.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing
William Blake
Prospecting is a powerful imaginative disposition when working with any strategic planning and is something I use frequently.
“I can imagine a time when we …”
“It is clear that in the future we might be…”
“When this is in place the benefits are likely to be…”
Strategic planning is all about prospecting, to imagine a future scenario – what Prospective Hindsight does is explore and recognise the risks and issues that might occur.
When and Who
To gain the most benefit, use the Pre-Mortem exercise with your core team at an early stage of the project planning. Potential risks and issues that you uncover may need time and resources to address.
The Pre-Mortem is a planning activity, and so unsurprisingly, it needs to occur during planning. The outcomes of the task feed into your project planning.
Instead of a post-mortem, when we look back on what went wrong, we establish this reflective practice even before the project has started.
Gather a core team who have a clear understanding of the proposed project plans so far. The outcome should be relatively straightforward and agreed upon; time should be spent exploring the risks, not what the project is about.
Disposition and Mindset
Establishing the right mindset is essential to the success of the Pre-Mortem: open to sharing risks and identifying responses to those risks.
Explicitly discussing the potential failure scenarios is a challenging type of talk. Our positive bias, especially for a project we have invested in, means we don’t like to be deliberately negative.
This deliberate and strategic negativity is a strategic muscle we are not often activating.
The Pre-Mortem also requires us to grapple with increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. This is a delicate balance and might need strong facilitation. Our tolerance for uncertainty is an indicator of our creativity.
Pre-Mortem Worksheets
Works Well With
Below I have outlined a range of other methodologies and mental models that the Pre-Mortem complements.
Playing the Devil’s Advocate
This activity works well with other mental models and planning exercises. Playing the Devil’s Advocate is something many of us have experienced.
It is a subjective version of the Pre-Mortem. An individual takes it upon themselves to imagine that something might go wrong.
The problem with that interjection is that the approach and disposition are often not mirrored by others in the group. A genuine insight might be discarded because others do not want to think negatively or are not ready for more uncertainty.
A Pre-Mortem brings the whole group into that thinking at the same time – that is its strength.
The Tenth Person Rule
The Tenth Person Rule is the deliberate opposition to a decision when everyone else agrees. If everyone else is saying “Yes”, the tenth person (or the last) is ethically bound to say “No”.
This opposition, regardless of personal belief, instigates further debate and challenge. The outcome is more coherent due to that conjecture, even if it remains the same.
The task of the Tenth Man is to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios…to challenge conventional and received wisdom. The aim is to look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective, to engage actively with and to reconsider the status quo.
The Tenth Person Rule was popularised by the film World War Z and had some real connections to approaches within Israeli Military Intelligence.
The Reversal Method
The Pre-Mortem activity works well with this creative thinking method as they both help create a new perspective.
The Reversal Method is a lateral thinking tool that encourages us to change how we think about a problem. In Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono explains it might be used for the following reasons:
To escape from the absolute necessity to look at the situation in the standard way.
By disrupting the original way of looking at the situation one frees information that can come together in a new way.
The main purpose is provocation. By making the reversal one moves to a new position. Then one sees what happens.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT Analysis is a standard managerial and leadership model used during planning and review. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles and Threats.
The Pre-Mortem focuses its lens on Threats in a much more systematic way than the SWOT Analysis. These two methods would complement each other well.
Running a Pre-Mortem activity could be done to create the outcomes linked and included in a comprehensive SWOT for a project.
De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats
These parallel thinking processes fit into six key areas. The Black Hat type of thinking is most relevant to the Pre-Mortem exercise. We want Pre-Mortem participants to do Black Hat thinking:
The Black Hat is judgment – the devil’s advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; things might go wrong — probably the most powerful and valuable of the Hats but a problem if overused.
What balances the planning process is the use of Green Hat thinking once potential risks are identified. A team would explore new ideas to address the problems identified during the Pre-Mortem.
The Green Hat focuses on creativity, possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
Strategy has been a key area of my work over the last 12 months. Planning and developing it, reviewing and critiquing it. I know this year will be the same. I stumbled upon the work of Freek Vermeulen on strategy and I want to share a few key provocations with you that resonated with me.
Your organisation’s strategy might be called something different – in education, these are typically
School Improvement Plans
Annual Improvement Plans
Strategic Improvement Plans
You get the idea. Anything that is laying out goals, actions and strategies for the future of your school or organisation is ripe for this critique.
If you are one of my school partners, watch out! We will be using these provocations and ideas to explore your plans for 2018 and beyond.
Freek Vermeulen has 5 provocations for critiquing strategy documents, or as he puts it:
Let me present you with five such common excuses for a strategy or, put differently, five examples of why the things on the PowerPoint are not strategy.
Are you really making choices?
Straight of the bat, this is my favourite of the five. It forces us to carefully consider what it is we are choosing as a result of the strategy. Or do your plans just include everything? “We are focusing on everything”, means you are focusing on nothing.
I enjoy the fact that strategy is seen by Vermeulen as a choice about what to do, and what not to do. Of course, this reminds me of the Pareto Principle and how we should know what has the highest impact. I am looking forward to having conversations with teams about what they have chosen not to do!
Or do you just stick to what you were doing anyway…?
An extension of not making choices is that you write a strategic plan that just describes what you are already doing. The mental model of Path Dependency is a good one to learn about here because it refers to a bias towards past events.
We have issues about letting go of past programmes and we tend to collect and compress new ideas. When previous commitments have been made we err on the side of historical preference. This means that strategy documents, like the ones you have where you work, just describe what is already happening.
more often than not, strategies adapted to what you were doing anyway results in some vague, amorphous statement that would have been better off in a beginners’ class on esoteric poetry, because it is meaningless and does not imply any real choice.
Your choices have no relationship with value creation (you’re in “The Matrix”)
Again the emphasis here on high value or high impact strategies. Everything you are choosing to implement needs to be closely related to the change you desire.
In schools this is all about improving the learning experience for students, ultimately improving learning. If an idea or programme does not relate to creating value why are we doing it?
Without a proper rationalisation of why your choices are going to help you create value, I cannot call it a strategy.
You mistake objectives for strategy
This is a really common issue that makes reading organisation-wide plans and documentation quite a challenge. Put simply an objective or goal describes a future state you are aiming for. A strategy is how you will get there.
Objectives typically have something that you can measure. You might use SMART goals to help craft them effectively. Objectives should be
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-bound
An example objective from my business this year is:
3 new long term partnerships in Melbourne / VIC by the end of 2018.
You can see it is quite specific and time-bound, despite it being a long period of time it is realistic and achievable (I hope!)
One of my strategies for how I might achieve this is to:
Speak at local events
Pretty straight forward. But surprisingly we often get all these things muddled.
You need an idea and a rationale – a strategy – of how you are going to achieve all this. Without it, they [objectives] are an aspiration, but certainly not a strategy.
Nobody knows about it
Who normally writes your strategic improvement plan? Who checks and critiques it? Normally this group can be quite small – typically the leadership team, plus outside consultants, might craft the plan.
But what good is a great strategic plan if nobody in the organisation knows about it!? What goes hand in hand with the imperative to make a strategic plan accessible is the language used. Too verbose or nuanced and it becomes a barrier for others to access.
This is a nice example from Oakleigh State School who have created an infographic for their plan – and I can imagine that this makes it much more accessible to a wider audience.
I always remember strategic plans just being a box to tick when I first started experiencing them as a subject coordinator. If they are accessible and written in an open jargon free way they should be actively used throughout your work. They shouldn’t just be a box to tick or to fill a folder.
Ultimately this is about changing something and how your strategy impacts on the day to day behaviour of those in your organisation. I will leave you with this final provocation from Freek Vermeulen about this:
A strategy is only really a strategy if people in the organisation alter their behaviour as a result of it.
There you go five great provocations to help you improve your strategic planning
