Mr.Khay

Strategic Design Toolkit for School as Learning Organization

School as Learning Organization has proven its indispensable tool for schools today to respond to the fast constantly changing environment where schools must prepare students for the complex and uncertain world. Learning Organization offers the ideal solutions to school through engaging learning at all levels, retaining knowledge capitals for innovation and continuous improvement. Being adopted by the global organizations, UNICEF, UNESCO and the OECD as a framework for school reform, the Integrated Model of SLO (Kools & Stoll, 1996) outlined the seven dimensions for the transformation journey to LO. Since SLO transformation journey is not a standalone, it is required to be initiated, agreed and approved by the top Leaders in schools to structure the journey in the policy and strategic documents. Having SLO transformation journey at the strategic levels will ensure the convergence, consistency, transparency and continuity of SLO transformation to be achieved. In addition, SLO as a strategic priority will also ensure sufficient fund allocation for operational actions. For all the actions to converge to SLO transformation, the SLO must be institutionalized in the strategic plan to align with the vision, mission and values of the school. 

School has multiple strategic priorities for competitive and sustainable operations. The key challenge is adopting the SLO strategies in the middle of the strategic plan cycle / period. Another vital consideration is aligning the SLO transformation with the school’s vision, mission and values, which the SLO may divert from all of these most important statements of the schools. Should school wait for their strategic plan cycle to end for the beginning of SLO transformation? In the disruptive circumstance of changes, school needs to radically adopt new strategies rather than a sitting duck watching the change to vanish. It will escalate to a bigger risk for schools to just think about it and take no actions. It is strongly recommended for school to design a strategic prototype which is in smaller scale and easily deployed to test the effects before going to the whole change at school. Why take into account the strategic design? 

Strategic Design phase is argued to be identical to the strategic analysis or situational analysis before formulating the strategies. There are several advantages of conducting the strategic design / strategic analysis. First, it helps inform the school it’s performance gaps and opportunity gaps. Second, it maps out the threats and necessary response to reduce or to eliminate the threats. Then strategic analysis can guide the key strategic priorities or school strategies to sustain and to be competitive. Strategic design needs explicit tools to conduct the school’s situational analysis for informing the strategic approaches. Several scholars argued strategy in a generic term “ a way to win”. Inspired by the nature of strategy ( to be winners), school, irrespectively not for profit, must design strategies to win ( sustainable operation, parent’s and student’s satisfaction and competitiveness). Strategic design is a critical and leading step for the strategy formulation and execution. Therefore, strategic design or analysis must be thoroughly triangulated to generate a comprehensive current and future performance data of schools for the next step.

There are several situational analysis tools available for choosing. The most common tool is SWOT analysis tool box which allows school to assess their internal strength, weakness and external threats and opportunities to impact on school current and future operation. PESTEL (Politics, Economics, Social, Technology, Environment and Legal) analysis is also an ideal tool for analysing the external environment which may cause disruption or opportunities for the organization / schools. To dive deeper into school specific performance, we recommend the Gap Analysis tool to evaluate the current performance (knowledge and financial aspects) against the future performance. Self evaluation of school current performance also yields benefits on school’s informed decision making for strategic approach or for setting a new strategic direction. Another value-added tool for strategic analysis is the school performance alignment using the Congruence Model by Nadler-Tushman to assess the five key organizational building blocks to align with school vision, mission, value and goals. This Congruence model framework is considered as a diagnosing tool for school to analyze their current performance. In addition, Ishikawa diagram or Fishbone diagram is also beneficial for schools to diagnose their internal efficiency, deficiency and effectiveness. Another self-diagnosing tool for school is Baldridge Excellence Framework which is proven as a quality improvement tool for the organization to build excellent quality for competitive advantages. Baldridge Excellence Framework laid the key six process criteria and one result criteria for measuring excellence performance. However, The first important step to do is self-evaluating the organizational profile illustrating two categories- Organization Environment and Organizational Relationship. 

Should schools apply all of these instruments for strategic design? The answer is “Yes” if you think one tool does not generate comprehensive school’s performance analysis for designing the SLO strategies. To become an effective SLO, school must fulfil all the seven-action oriented dimensions in the Integrated Model of SLO (Kools & Stoll, 2016). However, school has to define their strategies to achieve the SLO transformation in the frame of the performance results stemming from the schoolwide strategic analysis. Therefore, it is paramount for school to apply multi strategic analysis tools to generate comprehensive and true of current performance for the desired future performance to be sustainable in the hostile, complex and constantly changing environment.