Strategic Planning: Lessons learned from leading seminars

I've now led two sessions with charter school leaders on strategic planning.  Here are a few things that I've learned. 

1. writing a good mission statements is more difficult than some people think.

• Teams writing the statements are too big and everyone wants to have their pet phrase in the statement, and no one wants to say, "no."
• Teams want to included everything about their school that anyone would possibly want to know.  Because of that, they include things that are not mission.  They include goals.  They included the ways that they will complete the mission.  In other words, it's as if they are creating a summary of their strategic plan's executive summary.  
• The schools don't complete a strategic plan, so they try to make their mission statements a summary of their strategic plan.  
• On the other end, the mission statements doesn't include enough and ends up being more of a vision statements.  It's idealistic to the point that it doesn't specify what the organization will accomplish.  

2. Developing strategic goals can be difficult.  People want to included goals that are not strategic.  They end up with so many goals that some will never and can never be tracked.  Some will never even be attempted.  Leaders will say that they are still goals.  It may be that certain ends are still dreams, but that doesn't make them goals.  Goals are the ends that you actually can attain and can develop a plan to attain within the planning period.

Strategic planning takes work, discipline and objectivity.  I hope that my sessions have been helpful to schools as they make their strategic plans.