Strategic planning agility in private high schools facing 21st century change

Strategic Planning in Education

Every learning organization has the long-range strategic objectives that seek to balance limited resources with the overarching objective of delivering exceptional educational experiences for students. For private high schools this is particularly difficult as they seek to balance the costs of delivering exceptional education with the constraints that economic conditions are placing on all educational institutions. Seeking to accomplish the goal of enriching students so they see the inherent value of learning as a lifelong endeavor while also providing them the necessary concepts, frameworks and concepts to ensure they can compete in an increasingly uncertain, complex world requires an intensive focus on strategic planning concepts. For strategic planning to be effective, organizations must have a clear idea of how they will navigate from their existing level of educational performance and attainment to the accomplishment of learning objectives. When the learning institution including a private high school for example, understands those objectives, they then must find a way to get from their current position to that desired future position. Strategic management is at the core of this process. Strategic management involves making plans, organizing resources, and implementing control processes. At a macro level these core strategic planning processes function in unison with each other, delivering sustainable process performance and guidance for learning institutions that rely on strategic planning as their means of keeping the pace with their changing students' needs. Yet when the pace of change increases, and change itself changes, meaning its pace, severity and fundamental re-ordering of any market structure is quickly modified, then strategic planning must become more agile and responsive to the changing needs of students. The 21st century has so far been marked by such an acceleration of change. Scholars and theorists have made the observation that the more traditional approaches of strategic planning that were by nature static and often requiring long periods of research, analysis and validation of assumptions must now be replaced with more agile and market-driven approaches to sensing and responding to change (Judge, Blocker, 2008). In many learning institutions this has led to significant resistance to change, as the strategic planning processes were engrained into learning institution cultures and process became the deliverable; that is to say the plan itself and its on-time delivery was often more important than its contents (Ghobadian, O'Regan, Thomas, Liu, 2008). Considering the state of public educational systems globally today it is clear that the strategic planning process had ceased long ago to concentrate on external factors with any diligent effort or focus, and had instead become an institutionalized process merely meant to meet an internal deadline yet not deliver an urgent call for a change in strategic direction (Ghobadian, O'Regan, Thomas, Liu, 2008).

From Predictability to Turbulence: How Strategic Planning Processes Are Adapting

Given how turbulent the first years of the 21st century have been from an economic, globalization, and social context, it is clear that strategic planning processes for learning institutions including private high schools must move away from static, rigid and institutionalized processes to be more agile and capable to responding to change more efficiently. Nowhere has this revolution from an institutionalized process standpoint been more evident in the progression of strategic planning techniques in the last two decades. An example of this progression is the progression of the theory of comparative advantage as defined by Dr. Micheal Porter in a series of books detailing competitive strategies and the Harvard Business Review article, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (Porter, 1990, et.al.) where Dr. Porter defines his determinants of competitive advantage as all centering on personal productivity. His re-assessment twenty-eight years later, The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy (Porter, 2008) to seeing competitive advantage as being more centered on how integrated a learning institution is with its suppliers, partners, instructors and service providers and most of all, with the needs of students. At the most fundamental level of change, Dr. Porter's theories show the significant the shift has been in strategic planning from being inward-centric to being more aligned with external market forces over time. This has significantly changed the development and execution of learning strategies for learning institutions including private high schools. The fundamental processes that support making plans, organizing resources, and implementing controls have for decades been sequentially executed in learning institutions, with the predictable result of being out of step with the educational market dynamics as they have increased in speed over the last fifteen years. This sequentially based approach to strategically planning has proved to be entirely ineffectively during the 21st century for learning institutions in general and private high schools specifically when not only the rate of change has increased but the severity of change as well. What isn't needed anymore is a sequential set of processes for planning, organization of resources and implementing controls, but more of a continuous process that constantly scans the external environment for opportunities, threats and global economic change. This is the fundamental change between Dr. Micheal Porters' theories and frameworks in 1990 compared to 2008. Strategic planning progressed in those years away from being entirely focused on internal processes and a high degree of control specifically on internal efficiencies which made companies very myopic to being more market-focused. The internal politics specific to the strategic planning process were often more about which learning institutions' department or division would get much-needed resources and less about which new markets to penetrate or which market forces presented opportunities or threats. This focus on the internal factors of any learning institution as part of the strategic planning process led to the development of internal scorecards that features key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics of performance that were specifically designed to support and further competition for scare resources. There were no KPIs or metrics of performance to measure cross-divisional collaboration or cross-company cooperation with the intent of increasing learning performance in institutions of higher education for example. In essence many learning institutions including privately held high schools were so sequential in their strategic planning process and so myopic in their vision, they did not have an opportunity to create tailored, individualized learning programs to ensure students gained the critical guidance they needed in order to get the most out of their educations (Najjar, 2008). Scaffolding as a teaching strategy to precisely align curriculum and concepts to the needs of students can be a strategic initiative in learning institutions including private high schools to ensure students gain mastery of specific subjects. The development of scaffolding as a strategic initiative in globally-based universities has shown significant positive results as well (Najjar, 2008). In strategic planning environments where there is not that much agility available in terms of being able to create customized programs, scaffolding as a strategy is often overlooked and not taken into account.

The reaction of the public educational districts over the last twenty years in the face of an onslaught of budget constraints and a gradual lack of support is a case in point. As budgetary dynamics within public-based learning institutions and the broader economic factors outside learning institution conspire to create a force of change no single school or district could hope to dominate only react to, strategic planning has become much more of a critical exercise to stay attuned to massive changes in budgetary and economic conditions over time.

Strategic planning as an approach to defining the future long-term direction of any learning institution received a wake-up call during these years that the entire process, so myopic and insular within learning institutions, was becoming viewed as formalistic and useless against the rapid onslaught of change such a sequential process could not respond to. Instead what was needed was a more strategically outward-facing series of strategies for continually monitoring students' unmet needs, and even more fundamental than that, the strategic shifts in entire academic disciplines brought on my rapid changes in the economic, social, and political structures of nations and global economies in general.

Strategic Market Planning and Social Networking Are All Critical For Effective Educational Institution Strategic Planning

The contributions of Porter (et.al.) to defining strategic planning as a continuous process, not one that is only completed once a year and then rigidly adhered to, along with the fact that learning institutions had no idea what the demand curve of the educational sectors of their markets they relied on for their revenue looked like (Docters, Durman, Korman, Schefers, 2008) forced a revolution in strategic planning. At the core of this revolution in strategic planning was the move away from purely measuring efficiency first to measuring the fit of educational and teaching strategies to the unmet needs of students over the long-term. The Boston Consulting Group's Growth/Share Matrix (Collis, Montgomery, 2008) was the first strategic planning framework that sought to integrate the internal strengths of any organization (whether for-profit or non-profit) with the needs, opportunities and threats in the organizations' or learning institutions' core markets of students served. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Growth/Share matrix also defines the relative of risk and potential for revenue and profit growth by quadrant as well. General Electric (Collis, Montgomery, 2008) pioneered the development of this framework, working in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group to tailor its specific market sizing and profitability measures to the conglomerate of businesses that comprised GE at the time. One of the key assumptions of the BCG Growth/Share Matrix is that there must be continual monitoring of the market, specifically competitors and relative market share growth over time. Only by continually measuring and monitoring these two attributes can the Growth/Share matrix be an effective framework for strategic planning. GE, through their Crotonville Learning Center in Connecticut also defined a series of external customer-facing processes that managers at GE could use to gain the critical information they needed to populate the BCG Growth/Share Matrix and use it as a planning tool. Soon other larger multinational corporations (MNCs) with complex value chains and series of unrelated businesses also relied on the key concepts of the BCG Growth/Share Matrix (Panshef, Dorsam, Sakao, Birkhofer, 2009). In conjunction with Harvard University's creation of the Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies (PIMS) database, the BCG Growth/Share matrix could then benchmarked across industries. Educational institutions are continually refining the use of these frameworks and concepts in defining how their specific design of curriculums and programs will align to the unmet needs of their students.

The KPIs and metrics that were created as a result of the ability to monitor relative strategic position more frequently and with greater accuracy served as a turning point in strategic planning for businesses and educational institutions. First, strategic planning had evolved from being a yearly exercise that had become ritualized and as a result nearly worthless over time to one that was responsive to the changing market conditions. Second, the availability of PIMS data and the BCG Growth/Share matrix or framework made it possible to create strategic plans to be monitored and evaluated much more effectively than had been the case in the past. The "monitor' component of the strategic planning process was now at an equitable or level position with the planning and organizational resource functional areas. As a result, the strategic planning process quickly changed the information process workflows in many learning institutions including private high schools to support market knowledge and the quantification of opportunities and threats (Hughes, Morgan, Kouropalatis, 2008).

Conclusion

Strategic planning's progression from being based on frameworks that sought to contextualize and quantify educational strategy decisions in a vacuum away from the turbulent environments they existed in was short-lived. Aside from promoting a myopic view of the world, these strategic planning concepts lacked the necessary agility and responsiveness to the unmet needs of students. The use of Balanced Scorecards (BSC) (Beard, 2009), a focus on process improvement and the development of collaborative, consortia exchanges to underwrite shared costs and therefore free up more funds for educational programs are considered best-in-class practices in strategic planning for public and private learning institutions. As privately funded high schools face the daunting task of underwriting expensive learning programs, the need for a high degree of collaboration in the strategic planning process is clear. The growing use of Web 2.0 technologies (Adam, Vocino, Bednall, 2009) for gaining insights into students needs and also serving as the foundation for creating collaborative purchasing and procurement exchanges is a critical area that learning institutions must concentrate on in their strategic planning processes going forward as well. Appendix A is based on the research completed in the development of social networking applications based on the Web 2.0 technology platforms (Bernoff, Li, 2008). These technologies are revolutionizing the development and refinement of strategic planning processes throughout the global community of private funded educational institutions, with the most acute needs for this level of collaboration being in privately held high schools.

Appendix A:

TABLE 1: WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS

Applications

Descriptions

Blogs

Online diary or journal entry on the Internet, which primarily supports text, photo (photoblog), video (vlog), and audio (podcast) formats

• Google, AOL, and Yahoo offer free blogging platforms

Mashup

• Web service that gathers related content from more than one source

• IBM's mashup applications enable project managers to match team resources with a map to identify the geographical locations of the resources

Peer-to-Peer Networking

• A technique for effectively sharing music, audio, and text files

• Napster and Gnutella are popular peer-to-peer networks

Real Simple Syndication (RSS)

• Feed-based technology that, with the aid of an RSS reader, enables users to subscribe to newly released content such as text, Web pages, sound files, photos, and video

• RSS feed may contain the full content, for example a podcast, or simply a link to the content

Social Media

• Encompasses all online tools (blogs, podcasts, Wikis, social networks, vlogs) and Web sites enabling people to share content, such as text, audio, picture s, and videos

• Popular social media sites include YouTube (video) and Flickr (photos)

Social Networking

• Web sites that permit users to create online networks and communicate with friends and colleagues

• Social networking sites include MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Friends Reunited, and business networking sites include LinkedIn and Ryze

Tagging

• Allows users to bookmark or rate online content to share their recommendations with other online users

• Typically used by publishers of media sites attempting to benefit from users' recommendations

• Popularized by sites such as Digg and del.icio.us, which enable users to publish, categorize, and share their bookmarks

Wikis

• Enables users to create and edit the content of a Web site, leveraging the expertise of online users

• Consumer Wikis enable users to comment on content, in addition to editing content

• Wikipedia, a community Wiki encyclopedia, includes approximately 1.3 million English-language articles

Source: (Bernoff, Li. 2008)