Innovations are occurring in K-12 education. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to not apply what we know about learning. And increasingly more difficult to ignore the current system’s shortcomings. Obstacles often cloud opportunities. Sometimes the most difficult obstacles are between our ears. What’s holding your school or district back?
Our Approach: Mobilize and Enable
We work with superintendents and school leaders to prepare you to create value, conditions, and capabilities for innovative solutions for students, community, and your unique context.
Cultivate and develop a compelling rationale to do something different by looking in, looking out, and looking back. Understand the current situation, the trends we cannot ignore, and the lessons we have learned.
Think, strategize, and plan differently. Use service design approaches to conceive something that could exist. Design small moves, test, iterate and improve, try again.
Design an approach to organize people, actions, and structures that contribute to momentum rather than undermine it.
Strategic plans lead to strategic initiatives. A strategic initiative is a choice made by leaders to improve a specific result. The fit of a strategy for the problem to be solved and the quality of the implementing that strategy is work for educational leaders.
Our Approach: Manage, Monitor, Learn
We work with superintendents and school leaders to assess the current implementation, the strategic fit to the problem, systems of support, capabilities of people, and capacities of the organization.
Investigate the practice to plan alignment through structured observations, steps, and dialogue to face facts not fiction.
Determine the quality of the strategy fit to the problem to be solved and the quality of the implementation. Create a culture of learning that supports routines to adjust, adapt, and persevere.
Develop structures, processes, and routines that become habits that serve improvement efforts.
A very human default is to blame people, personalities, and performance first. From this lens, we make judgments. Decisions follow. Relationships deteriorate. Problems don’t get solved. People don’t grow. Performance stalls.
Our Approach: Confront and Construct
We work with leaders to diagnose and address relationships that are getting in the way of the work.
Facilitate difficult conversations while expanding leaders’ capabilities.
Examine the current culture, patterns, and habits that may hinder the candor and care that accompanies higher performance.