In preparing a presentation for a upcoming conference, I found a theme that resonated with me and a few others who were reviewing my early drafts. Without delving into the details of the presentation, I will state the presentation focuses (in part) on the nature of school planning that leads to innovative practices being adopted; specifically, I was working with information technology that changed practices.
During an interview, I asked a participant to draw the differences between the planning he had learned in his professional preparation and that is commonly presented in leadership textbooks and courses. He drew these (well these are my digitized versions):
As he explained it:
We are taught this clean process of deciding what you want to measure then coming up with a plan. Once you complete your plan, you evaluate how you did and redirect. I see that as too long and too ineffective. When I lead successful projects, I find we skip around from goals, to plans, to measurements in a circular and dynamic manner. I want to know when I am failing immediately so that my staff and I can come up with a new plan and students are not exposed to something that isn’t what we want.