Strategic planning is dead, long live strategic agility!

How can we bring about whole school improvement using agile strategy? Tim Logan reports

​Nonna Nerina is the world’s first agile grandmother! In the stunning Italian countryside, Nerina used to run pasta-making workshops from the kitchen of her villa. When lockdown hit, she had to cancel all of her classes. However, with the help of her granddaughter Chiara, Nerina took her pasta making online to keep her business going, and now uses the proceeds to provide meals for children in need! https://nonnalive.com/

Whether it’s companies pivoting suddenly to start making PPE, businesses like Nerina’s adapting to new ways of engaging with customers, or multi-disciplinary teams collaborating to deliver new products or services (such as vaccines) in previously unimaginable timeframes, the language of agility is everywhere. So many people around the world now understand “agility” in visceral ways — the energy, stress or emotion of responding quickly to rapidly changing circumstances. Whether this is the loss of a job or business, new restrictions on our movement or, for so many, the tragic death of a loved one.

What less people realise is that for more than two decades, there has been a growing community of Agile professionals for whom personal, team or organisational agility is their daily concern, and their bread and butter! People who know deeply that ‘the work of change, is the work of changing’ (Steve Peha). And furthermore, they have learned through thousands of transformative successes and spectacular failures that, to create lasting adaptive change in organisations, we need to build rapid learning and deep collaboration into the DNA of the way we work.
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And the evidence speaks for itself. The reality for companies that have embraced this new way of working is that they have not only survived the challenges of the pandemic but thrived. As Jeff Sutherland highlighted in a recent keynote, while thousands of non-agile companies faced bankruptcy in the first half of 2020, agile companies such as Pegasystems, Amazon and Tesla prospered. MIT Sloan Management Review also predicts that only 17% of today’s leading companies will be leaders 5 years from now. The companies that will remain leaders ‘including organisations like Apple and Alphabet continually find new sources of competitive advantage by reinventing their businesses and adapting to evolving market conditions.’ (MIT Sloan Management Review Research Highlight January 09, 2020)

But what does this all have to do with schools? Well, certainly our schools, leaders, teachers, parents and students have had their fair share of recent and radical changes to which they have had to adapt! But also, learning is our business (isn’t it?!). So surely schools should be some of the most agile organisations in our societies! Hmmm…?

Unfortunately, too often our schools have been governed and structured by the idea that learning is what the students do (if we’re lucky!). And although many schools have increasingly embedded professional learning into their systems, the fact that the organisation itself should be given its own opportunity to learn through regular cycles of action, reflection and adaptation still sounds like an idea from another century!

And yet our schools have learned and adapted at unprecedented speeds in recent times, many incredibly successfully. So, as we take a moment between crises to pause and reflect, we should ask what can schools learn from recent experiences that will help us to be more agile in future? What will help our communities — our students, staff, parents and leaders — to be resilient and well-prepared to thrive in a post-pandemic world of no normal?

“There is no such thing as a new idea… We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” — Mark Twain

One thing that we have learned as school leaders is clear. Old ideas like the ‘5yr strategic plan’ became largely irrelevant overnight! The glossy 50-page brochure of good intentions has been thrown from the window of the speeding bus, as we swerve and struggle to stay on the right road (not even completely sure which is the right road!).

Even before the challenges of the pandemic, school leaders had already begun to question the traditional strategic planning process. Setting themselves a barrage of carefully-worded whole school improvement targets for years into the future, after a six-month process of community consultation seemed for some like a lot of work for not a lot of added value. As Ewan MacIntosh has highlighted, school directors know full-well that barely 20% of such targets are ever fully achieved. Even the yearly school improvement plan, written too often in detached senior leadership offices, was beginning to feel like an annual administrative obligation rather than the authentic collaborative work of changing!

So, when our systems no longer make sense, (as Will Richardson loves to ask) why do we persist with them? Instead, perhaps we need a ‘new and curious combination’ of ideas, connecting our very real need and desire to improve (or perhaps transform!) our schools, with what we’ve learned about successful agile strategy in other sectors.
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According to McKinsey & Company (2018) among the most important characteristics of an agile organisation are:

• A shared purpose and vision — having a clear “North Star”?
• Opportunities for continuous learning and igniting people’s passion.
• Networks of empowered teams with opportunities to shift roles, rather than rigid hierarchies of fixed positions.
• Experimentation and entrepreneurial drive is actively encouraged.
• Systems and processes are characterised by visible work-in-progress, action-oriented decision-making and rapid learning cycles.
• Active partnerships are encouraged with the wider eco-system.
• Shared and servant leadership across the organisation.

In fact, this isn’t so far away from ideas that have been around since the 1990s of the school as a ‘learning organisation’ (Senge, 1990). Just looking at the OECD’s work on this in 2016, shows very clear alignment with these attributes. Such a school would have:

• A shared vision centred on the learning of all students.
• Opportunities for all staff to engage in continuous learning.
• Team learning and collaboration among all staff.
• A culture of inquiry, innovation and exploration.
• Systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning.
• Opportunities to learn with and from the external network and partners.
• Learning leadership growing throughout the organisation.

This certainly sounds like the kind of school that most of us would love to work, learn and grow in! But the million-dollar question is, how do we get there?


We can certainly learn from the successes and challenges of others charting courses into this new territory already. There are some fantastic and innovative educators and entrepreneurs around the world making these connections real already in classrooms (with EduScrum, Leysin American School’s Edge Program and L-EAF) and whole schools (Blueprint, Agora, Learnlife).


But what we have also learned from ‘agile transformations’ in other sectors is that if you’re waiting until you think you’re fully ready to make as start, it’s already too late! The agile mindset encourages precisely the kind of attitude we have needed to ride the recent turbulence of the pandemic — plan, act, reflect, adapt in short cycles. So here are a few ideas that you can consider testing out in your school:

• Start small with a Kanban board up in your team workspace or classroom. This can be used to identify your “To-Dos” to meet your team or class learning goals (in the left column — of three), what you’re working on together right now (middle column) and what’s met your ‘Definition of Done’ — agreements of quality and completeness (right column). Key aspects of this are that the work becomes visible, team members are held accountable by regular check-ins on progress (called ‘Stand-ups’) and adaptation is enabled by the frequent reflections on progress and close collaboration.
• Ready for something bigger? Look for ways you can encourage more cross-functional teaming across your school. Grade level teams or subject department teams may be commonplace — though the depth and quality of collaboration within them will certainly vary! But what about trying to gather people’s energies around cross-cutting ‘projects’ — such as, redesigning the way a particular space is used, or developing specific aspects of teaching and learning? Again, these are not necessarily new ideas (remember the PLC?) but keep them agile by building in visibility, accountability and intentional cycles of reflection and adaptation.
• You really want to go for it in a big way?! Replace your outdated strategic planning process with cycles of ‘Strategic Doing’. This is a very well-structured and dynamic process designed to help to address strategic (but complex) opportunities — such as, school improvement. Ed Morrison and his team at the Agile Strategy Lab have developed it in partnership with many universities across the US and have seen it have a huge impact on enlivening and re-energising communities and organisations to overcome significant barriers to progress through ‘action-oriented collaboration’.

There are lots more ways to get and stay agile as we look forward to a post-pandemic world. So do get in touch if you would like to know more. There is also a growing ‘Community of Practice’ around Agile in Education on LinkedIn (and other social media platforms) that I would very much encourage you to investigate further. Lastly, do check out the Agile Research Consortium (https://www.arc-for-schools.org), who are gathering resources as they emerge to support these positive transformations.
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Tim Logan is a consultant and principal supporting schools around the world to drive improvement and evidence-based innovation through advisory, change management and training services.
Website: www.futurelearningdesign.com
Email: [email protected]