5 signs that your strategic plan is actually happening

In District Administration this July, Dana Godek and Adrienne Simmons urged boards to build a full-year governance calendar: a set schedule for reviewing student outcomes, workforce data, financial health, and culture indicators. That discipline solves the timing problem. The next question is what the strategic plan progress report should contain.

A board can meet on a consistent schedule, receive a thorough update, and still have no way to tell whether the plan it approved is actually happening. Knowing when to look is the first half. Knowing what to ask for is the rest.

Any initiative raises three different questions: did we do it, did we do it well, and did it work? Most progress reports answer the first and leave the other two to inference.

A slide that says 340 teachers trained reports something real. It says nothing about whether the training was any good, or whether a single lesson changed as a result.

That gap has a cost. When the report shows only activity, a board cannot tell the difference between a strategy that did not work and one that was never fully carried out. Those call for opposite decisions: one for fixing execution, the other for moving the money. Without that distinction, a board is choosing between those options on incomplete information.

Implementation drifts in school systems both large and small. That much is unavoidable. A board learning about that drift only after the initiative has quietly ended is not.

1. What did we say would change, by when, and for whom?

Start here. Everything else measures against it.

Ask for one sentence per initiative: what will change, for which students, and by when. If the answer is that the staff will be trained or the curriculum will be adopted, that describes the work rather than the result. “Third grade reading proficiency rises six points by May” is a result that someone can check in May.

If no one can answer in those terms, you have learned something before the first data point arrives. The other four questions have nothing to measure against.

2. Is this reaching the students we intended, in the way we designed it?

Two things live inside this question, and it is worth asking for each by name: Reach and fidelity.

Reach is arithmetic. How many students or staff actually received this, versus how many were targeted? A tutoring program designed for 600 students that reached 240 is not behind schedule. It is a different program.

Fidelity is whether the work happened the way it was designed. This does not take a formal study. A handful of walkthroughs, a short check with the people delivering the work, or a review of how it was scheduled will tell you most of what you need to know.

Ask for reach and fidelity by school. Two buildings running the same initiative are often running two different initiatives.

In one, the instructional coaches spend their days in classrooms. In the other, the same coaches cover classes when substitutes fall short. Same budget line, two different programs.

3. What would we expect to see by now if this were working?
In years of presenting to cabinet, the superintendent and the board, the question that came back fastest was always the same: is this impacting student achievement? It is the right question. It is also the one the data cannot answer after two
months of implementation.

Unfortunately, outcomes lag. Reading scores will not move by November, and a board that waits for them waits a year to learn something it could have known in 10 weeks.

Other signals move sooner: attendance in the program, course completion, referral rates, and how many students are still participating in week twelve compared with week two.

Name those indicators before the year starts, not after the results disappoint. An indicator chosen in advance is a decision point. An indicator chosen afterward is an explanation.

4. Who is missing from these numbers?

A district can hit its overall target and still miss the students the initiative was written for.

Ask for the same measures broken out by student group. A plan can post real gains and leave the same students exactly where they started.

This question is also a favor to the superintendent. It reveals the groups falling behind while there is still time to respond, rather than at the end of the year when the only available move is a postmortem.

5. What evidence would convince us to stop?

Districts rarely define failure in advance. That is why initiatives get abandoned quietly rather than ended deliberately, and why proposing to stop one can feel like an accusation against the people who built it.

A premortem fixes this at the front end. The technique comes from Gary Klein, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2007: before the work begins, the team assumes the project has already failed and explains why. Brené Brown, who leads premortems with teams, says one source of that friction is “the fear of killing enthusiasm in the room.” Better to feel that at a launch meeting, when the plan can still be improved.

The board’s version is one question, asked at launch. What result, by what date, would tell us this is not working? Write the answer down. Agreeing on the exit condition while hopes are high makes stopping the program a governance act rather than a political one.

Ask now, not in year three

None of this is expensive if it is planned at launch. Reach, fidelity, and leading indicators cost almost nothing to collect while a program is being designed, but they are nearly impossible to reconstruct two years later, which is exactly when boards start asking.

A board that asks these questions is not challenging its superintendent. It is making sure both of them are looking at the same thing, early enough to act on what they see.

5 questions that make implementation visible: