SPS Strategic Plan: Draw Forth What is Best

We’re pleased to provide a link to the recently released Strategic Plan for St. Paul’s School. Strategic planning efforts are process driven, and they begin with listening tour that provides a sense of what type of plan would suit the institution best. For some, the “strategic plan” is more of a framework for operational alignment designed […]

Mission and Vision: What’s the Difference?

Both are critical, each is different. There is a lot of misinformation out there about these two key components of strategic planning. A quick search on the web reveals countless articles, blogs, and even YouTubes and TikToks that discuss the topic. The problem is that most of these articles are written to generate advertising traffic […]

Quicken the Pace of Planning at Schools and Colleges

A Unified Planning Framework for Culture, Strategy, and Brand At many non-profit institutions, particularly educational institutions, strategic plans show a preference for addition over consolidation—for expansion over alignment. This programmatic and operational accretion drives steady increases in budgets and staffing, and concomitant growth in goals for endowments and annual philanthropic support. Higher Cost, Slower Pace = […]

All Hail the Memorandum

Purpose-built document formats in office communication can aid organizational alignment. In olden times, the Memorandum was the mainstay of organizational communication. It was a way to document something that needed to be shared and remembered; its format held just enough formality to garner attention, but not so much that it felt arduous or overwhelming to […]

Three Design Rules (and One Paradox)

Laziness, Novelty, and Fear of Loss are Powerful Motivators for Humans. As a designer, I can rely on a single assumption to guide most of my work: humans are lazy. (This is ‘trumpian shorthand’ for “people tend to maximize benefit and minimize effort around self-interest.) Whether I am enticing them with advertising, seeking to change their […]