October 15, 1993

The idea that organizations begin development activities with varying degrees of readiness is a fundamental principle of consultation. It is presumed that whatever form development may take, there are prior conditions that either facilitate or impede the effectiveness of the intervention.

For the last three years the Washington State School Directors' Association (WSSDA) in partnership with the Executive Service Corps of Washington has provided strategic planning consultation to nearly 30 school districts in the state. The WSSDA model is characterized by an emphasis on visioning as the basis for developing the plan, broad based input from diverse community constituencies and development of detailed action plans.

In other research memoranda I describe the WSSDA process and analyze the kinds of strategic plans and planning dynamics it produces. This research note addresses the question of whether the planning process is affected by the district's readiness to begin planning and what may be done to better prepare a district to begin that process..

The recommendations spelled out in this research note are the result of analysis of the plans and planning dynamic for the first two cycles of WSSDA planning (1990-91 and 1991-92) as well as a pre-test of the approach in a school district about to begin planning this fall. Comments on experiences over the last three years come from a review of reports WSSDA's consultants are required to submit at the end of each planning session.

Most of the districts using WSSDA's model completed the strategic planning process, at least to the point of preparing a draft strategic plan. But a review of the plans and the reports of the consultants raise questions as to the degree to which the plans were implemented. Many plans while complete, in draft form, are less complete in terms of the actions they call for or the resources they identify and assign for implementation. In a few districts, the end of the WSSDA planning process has invoked another year devoted to completing the action plans and seeing to their implementation.

This discussion raises the likelihood that there are two types of readiness involved in strategic planning:

The fact that most districts finish indicates that most have been ready to engage in initial planning activity. But the variable detail of the draft plans and the need for some districts to continue planning past the time set aside by WSSDA suggests that some districts may not have been ready to take their process through to implementation.

Sensitive to the first form of readiness, WSSDA begins its annual strategic planning cycles with a convocation of participating school districts, some of their key planning team members and the consultants. The aim of the meeting is to allow the participants to get acquainted, to familiarize everyone with the process and to demonstrate, tangibly, that districts from across the state are engaged in a shared activity.

These WSSDA convocations guarantee that all participating districts are, to some degree, ready to begin strategic planning. At the very least the Superintendent, the board president and two or three other key members of the community have, as a kind of organizing team, agreed to sponsor the process, gained a basic knowledge of how planning will be conducted and prepared themselves to work with their assigned consultants to pull together a larger planning team composed of members of the general community as well as district staff.

It is common for consultants to travel to their assigned districts to help the organizing team get ready for the first meeting of the full strategic planning team. At these early pre-planning sessions some of the issues that may affect planning are raised.

Without question, the process purposefully gets the district ready. Most of this preparation is logistical, as consultants and the organizing team schedule meeting times and places, collect the necessary scanning materials, inform the community and gather the participants. It is fair to say that before the first session of strategic planning, the consultants and the organizing team have done enough preparation so that the process has been "fitted" to the district.

Even with all this preparation the process produces quite different results from district to district. A comparison of the strategic plans (Research Note #3) shows that the WSSDA process producing consistency in how the planning is conducted and much similarity in the kinds of issues districts address. The level of detail presented in the plans, especially in sections enumerating actions for implementation, are quite variable. Some districts simply don't get far enough to assure implementation.

A careful analysis of the WSSDA planning model finds no reason to believe that the process overlooks the need for action planning and implementation (Research Note #4) so these variable outcomes raise the question as to whether there are certain circumstances or conditions that predispose some districts to get through the process more easily and to levels of greater detail than others?

Presuming that consultants are of generally equal skill (and WSSDA goes to great efforts to recruit and train consultants who can effectively manage the process) and assuming that the process itself is applied in an equivalent fashion between districts there are only two possibilities to explain differences in outcome:

Review of the planning documents and consultant reports does not reveal a host of sudden events that cause the process to derail or slow down (Research Note #2); instead consultant comments uniformly point to difficulties in meeting deadlines because the group needed more time.

When all the factors that influence the pace of planning are considered, the logistical and political readiness of the teams to confront the challenges of strategic planning stand out.

Much of the delay reported by consultants is in the time it takes to arrive at a comprehensive and commonly agreed upon vision for the school district. Visioning is a key feature of the WSSDA process and strategic planning teams are encouraged from the outset to be creative, indeed they are challenged to question old paradigms and create new educational forms.

Visioning is time consuming because the group needs to spend time early on developing a skill and knowledge base to do strategic planning. Of the management skills brought to bear on directing organizations, strategic planning is one of the most sophisticated. To do it well demands both a mastery of some complicated skills (goal setting, task analysis, budgeting, etc.) as well as an intimate and comprehensive understanding of the planning environment, in this case school districts.

It would seem obvious that gathering a diverse group of people together and trying to get them to find a common vision would be a time-consuming effort. Add to the effort the need to design a vision that challenges outmoded paradigms only increases the time needed to discover the community's vision.

Undeniably a strength of the WSSDA process is the community imprint it puts on the strategic plan. But this strength comes at some cost, namely that time, an already short commodity, is stretched to its limits in reaching a community agreement.

Why is finding points of common agreement so time consuming? , the individuals gathered together for the first session have their own expectations and visions for education. They have reason be skeptical about the other participants. At the start, no one's visions are known, nor is there a clear sense of where they agree and disagree. Only through much sharing and discussion does the group come to get a sense of its commonality.

Trust is often at low levels when these groups begin. Community members doubt whether administrators are listening; administrators wonder if the public understands the difficulties of providing education; community members questions the priorities held by each other. All are used to win-lose negotiation, competition and protecting self interest.

For trust to develop and the necessary foundation for the plan to emerge, members of the planning team need to hear and then understand the various points of view held in the group. As the consultants report, the needs and values represented in the group are varied and narrow. Only through much discussion does a common set of values and vision emerge.

At base, any strategic planning process that involves community members and representatives of the professional education hierarchy, is political. Who has the power to make the decision and see it implemented is an unstated but real question alive in any strategic planning meeting.

Since the WSSDA process calls for political differences to be resolved through discussion and modified consensus building, conventional school district power politics are subverted. As abhorrent as dictatorial, top down planning is in a community setting, it is efficient. Democratic processes take time.

A special political problem arises when a district has already engaged in planning activities. It is not uncommon to find a district having abandoned strategic planning a year or so before asking for WSSDA's assistance. Even more common is the existence of prior or on-going planning activities of a more focused nature than strategic planning, e.g. a facilities or curriculum plan.

Strategic planning can be seen as competitive to other planning processes and may draw criticism from those involved in the other activities. One way or the other the results of other planning processes must be considered as a new, more comprehensive strategic plan unfolds. The debates about the relative meaning and merits of plans along with the need to fit pieces of other plans into the strategic plan only places a heavier toll on the team's time and energy.

Another feature of strategic planning retards the process and slows action planning: the political complications of making choices. The ink is hardly dry on the vision statement, however, when the planning process forces a move to the more concrete and a focus on what it realistically achievable. It seems reasonable planning teams resist this transition and their fears that the vision will be abandoned to budgetary and bureaucratic imperatives are real.

The slow process of making decisions can be exacerbated in groups where leadership fails to emerge or where the strategic planning team lacks confidence in handing off their plan for school administrators to implement. The final stages of many of the strategic planning processes WSSDA sponsored involves negotiation about who "owns" the plan, whether the planning team should have a continuing role and who is ultimately accountable for implementing the plan.

Each of these elements suggests ways in which readiness can be assessed prior to the start of the planning process and steps that may be taken at the inception of the process to increase readiness.

The four elements of readiness identified above all point to circumstances that can be identified and addressed before strategic planning begins. This section looks in greater detail at each of these readiness elements and isolates ways to determine their presence in a district before starting the strategic planning process.

As noted above the existence of other plans is a mixed blessing for a strategic planning team. Some advantage may be extracted if the team can build upon work that has already been done. Indeed, it is possible to conceive of a modular strategic plan fitted together from components developed from other planning activities. Prior planning may mean that some members of the new strategic planning team are already skilled in some of the planning techniques to be employed. Persons knowledgeable about planning methods can be used to help facilitate the process.

These advantages can easily be outweighed by the disadvantage of having to deal with other teams who feel threatened that their work will be undone by strategic planning. Some of the benefit of having experienced planners on a team is canceled out if they hold to differences in terminology and style. Occasionally someone with minimal planning experience can interfere with the process, contesting the consultant management of the team.

Even within experienced management circles, strategic planning techniques are advanced and somewhat arcane. Most college educated persons are never exposed to the logic of strategic planning; it is an approach new to many on the planning teams including the school administrators. Obviously the speed with which the team members understand the process and correctly employ its techniques increases how much they will be able to achieve.

For the purposes of strategic planning diversity is really a function of community change. Demographic, technological, leadership and economic forces all shape community development. While no community is ever immune from change, its character takes on different forms and dimensions from one district to the next.

One of the foundations of strategic planning is that current conditions are likely to change, so some instability would be expected in any community that undertakes planning: an act of change in its own right. But certain types of change may introduce elements that reduce the ability of a planning team to finish their work.

Diversity in values, opinions and perspectives, offers, in the long run, a great advantage to a school district: as new challenges are encountered, the community has a rich array of methods of analysis and options to employ. In the short run, however, diversity can result in conflict and an inability to see the world from relative perspectives. To the degree that disagreements result from the application of different and diverse frames of reference, trust levels and the readiness to make group decisions may be reduced.

Failure for leadership to make tough planning decisions and to see to the implementation of the plan can stall the process. If trust levels are low about the commitment of the district to implement the plan or if the group simply lacks persons talented, capable and courageous enough to act as leaders the plan will be incomplete.

If these elements of readiness are important influences on the outcome of strategic planning some advantage would be derived from knowing their status before the process begins. That logic led to development of a methodology, or protocol, for determining the readiness of a school district and the community both to begin and bring to completion a strategic planning process.

The method was pre-tested in the Stanwood School District in October, 1993.

The techniques described here to assess district readiness for strategic planning are hardly novel, most are borrowed from methods employed in public opinion research and community studies. At the heart of the approach is the use of key informant interviews employing focused, but open-ended questions.

The approach described here is not to be mistaken with the technique of "environmental scanning" commonly used in many strategic planning models. Scanning is far more comprehensive and quantitatively oriented than readiness assessment. It may be, however, that some of the information gathered from the assessment will find use when scanning begins early in the plan's development. Because portions of the data collected through the readiness assessment may be politically sensitive, it may be wise to maintain the confidentiality of some interviews.

School districts enter into strategic planning in different states of readiness. Two conditions must exist before planning begins if it is to successfully lead to innovative, community-based visions, detailed action plans and full implementation:

This paper outlines a methodology for assessing a district's readiness for strategic planning.