Center for Strategic Planning

Where’s the stretch?

You have a mission. Why do you need a vision? Mission and vision answer two different core questions, have two very different shelf-lives, and serve two completely different purposes. Read about the complementarity of these two organizational development components and how they shape your plans for a sustainable future.

Time for a change?

It’s time to start talking about leadership transition planning. Not the same as the succession plan you already have in place in case of an emergency. But how will this new plan be different? Who should be involved? How can you leverage strategic communications to ensure stable leadership in times of change?

Stuck in neutral?

You’re down with your message and up on your elevator speech. You advertise, promote, and publicize. You email, snail mail, and blog. You’re a doyenne of social networking and a crusader for school mission. Yet enrollment’s stuck in neutral. Why isn’t your ‘marketing’ working?

Strategic Marketing

If ever there was a time for school leadership to broaden its understanding of strategic marketing practices, it is now. Tomorrow’s sustainable schools will get busy today reorienting campus culture to an outward focus and learn to make sense of the myriad of environmental factors they face and the market opportunities these offer.

Building Your Dream Board

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a board that was a nonprofit governance dream? A dream team, skilled in leveraging every dimension of its capital – social, political, and intellectual, as well as financial? A boardroom where top local talent clamor to hang their notebooks? You are not alone. The good news is that there are ways to cultivate your dream team and dream boardroom experience.

Being Strategic in Times of Crisis

Being strategic in organizational planning is important at any time. Today it’s so mission-critical that it’s a leadership imperative. Choosing the right strategies during times of crisis can substantially improve your school’s ability to mitigate, manage, and recover from threats, risks, and fix-the-ship issues. So wherever your school is in its lifecycle and whatever challenges the external environment presents, consider the benefits of increasing leadership’s capacity for strategic thinking, decision-making, and action.

Six Leadership Roles

You’re a head of school just starting to implement a new strategic plan. Maybe you’re in the middle of one. Or perhaps rounding third. You take seriously planning and thinking strategically. So does your board. But who does what when it comes to the planning process, its implementation, and ongoing strategic thinking? Where are the land mines? Read more here to discover ways of thinking about roles and responsibilities to get strategic planning and thinking on track in your institution.

The Wise Board’s Framework

A good board knows that the vision, goals, strategies and initiatives of a strategic plan set direction, and define and generate what work will bring the school to its desired destination. But a wise board knows more and will use the strategic plan as a framework for ongoing strategic thinking. Provocative questioning, robust debate, assumption-testing, and a spirit of open inquiry scaffold a dynamic tension between what is and what might be. The wise board, concerned with what Peter Drucker called ‘the futurity of present decision-making,’ uses this dynamic tension to assure that what will matter in the future matters today.

Divine Design: Personal Strategy Making

What if in these overwhelming times of global pandemic, you could dream the Divine's dream for you?

I'd like to invite you to join me for my course in Sacred Journey Mapping, a prayer- and spiritual practice-centered approach to personal planning that gives you a seat at the strategy table with the Divine Creator of the Universe so you can explore together where you go from here.

Stop by https://www.missionvisioncoaching.com/ to learn more.