Why Your August Strategy Buzz Disappears by October

Written by Ewan McIntosh, NoTosh

There’s a particular kind of optimism that only exists at the start of a school year.

The corridors are clean. The displays are fresh. The calendar still looks almost manageable. Everyone has had just enough distance from last year to believe this year might feel different.

And then comes the August “strategic moment”, where the vision for the year or years ahead is shared.

There might be a staff launch, an opening keynote from a guest speaker that ties back to the school’s vision.

There are new priorities to which everyone is expected to align.

There are all those carefully chosen words about ambition, belonging, learning, wellbeing, innovation, community, and, if you’re particularly unlucky, ‘excellence’.

Despite the word salad and endless PowerPoints, there is usually energy in the room.

You see, people want to believe in what lies ahead. They want the new year to feel purposeful. They want the school strategy to mean something. They want to be part of a school that is moving forwards, not just surviving another cycle of terms, reporting deadlines, parent evenings, teacher cover pressures and calendar creep.

And, for a few weeks, it works.

The language feels fresh, and the goals make sense. The whole senior team is talking about the same things to their people. And people are still asking the right questions.

Then October arrives.

And October has a talent for telling the truth.

By October, the calendar has filled itself in. The meetings have multiplied, the urgent has elbowed the important out of the way. The beautifully simple priorities from August now have to compete with everything that always happens in schools.

Staffing issues, timetable problems, that parent complaint (again). There’s a budget wobble, and yet a new initiative that was nowhere to be seen in August now sounds too good to ignore.

The team is already beginning to feel tired, asking about Thanksgiving plans, already wondering how it got this busy, this quickly.

This is the point where strategy usually starts to die, because too few people were equipped to see it through it once the year became real.

Most strategies don’t fail at the planning stage, or in documentation, or in the Board meeting. Most strategies fail when to comes to ownership.

We often treat strategy as if the hard part is getting the plan right, and making sure the Board feel ownership. So we spend months choosing priorities, refining wording, building diagrams and preparing the launch. We try to make the strategy clear enough, inspiring enough, memorable enough.

And those things matter.

But they are not enough.

A strategy that only lives in August optimism will not survive October pressure.

The real test is whether people use it when they are tired, stretched and surrounded by competing demands. The only way they can do that is if they, the people closest to the action, feel ownership of the goals and vision of the school. Ownership equals understanding. 

Can a middle leader use it to decide what their team should stop doing?

Can a teacher use it to make a better choice about learning design?

Can the operations team use it for hard choices when time, money and people are tight?

Can a leadership team use it to say no to a perfectly good idea because it is not the right idea for now?

That is where strategy becomes leadership. And that is why distributed leadership matters.

Distributed leadership is not about assigning titles to everyone, creating endless committees, or asking already busy people to do more work under the banner of “empowerment”.

It is about making sure more people have the language, authority and confidence to make decisions that serve a clear direction of travel.

Strategy-led leadership teams behave differently once the year gets busy. They revisit priorities constantly, always asking better questions as competing ideas, people and hard work vie for attention:

• Which priority does this serve?

• What are we learning?

• Where has our signal become noise?

• What are we still doing just because we’ve always done it that way?

• What would we stop this week if we were serious about our strategy?

• They say “no” more often than “yes”.

The strategy becomes a thinking tool, not a ceremonial document.

This is hard in schools because schools are full of good ideas. But by October, the problem is rarely a shortage of good ideas: the problem is usually too many good ideas competing for the attention of the same exhausted people.

A strategy that cannot help you say no is not a strategy. It is a wish list.

A good “no” protects the work that matters. It protects time, attention, staff energy and the few priorities that will make the greatest difference.

And when leadership is distributed, “no” becomes less personal. It is not one person blocking progress. It is a shared discipline.

So maybe the real work of August is not getting everyone excited. That part is relatively easy. The real work is preparing for October. Remember that the busyness will return, the calendar will fill, the urgent will become loud again, the old habits creep back in.

And when that happens, the strategy will need more than enthusiasm; it will need leaders everywhere. So try this before the year runs away with itself:

Take one strategic priority and ask your leadership team:

1. Where will this priority be tested by October?

2. Who outside the senior team needs to be able to act on it?

3. What will we need to stop, simplify or refuse if we are serious about it?

4. What language do people need so they can make decisions without waiting for permission?

If the answers are vague, that is useful. It means the strategy is still too dependent on the people who wrote it. Fix it by involving more of your middle leaders, earlier, and certainly before you do the big staff speech.

August gives you optimism.

October shows you the system.

Build for October.

About the Author:

Ewan McIntosh, Managing Director, NoTosh (www.notosh.com) | ewan@notosh.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewanmcintosh/