• We support creative and innovative school leadership at the individual and organizational level.     
  
   
• We serve school leaders at all points in their careers - from teacher leaders to heads of school.   
  
   
• We help schools design strategies for change, growth, and innovation.  
  
   
• We bring creativity, collaboration & co-creation, empathy, a "yes, and..." mindset, and experiential learning to all of our work.

Understanding Customers' Needs Is the Key to Independent Schools' Financial Sustainability

"Independent Schools are businesses" is the opening sentence in the next edition of Welcome to the Jungle, A Business Officer's Guide to Independent School Finance and Operations' chapter addressing financial sustainability of independent schools.  The addition of this chapter is an outgrowth of years of business officers struggling to define solutions to the ailing business models of independent schools, which appear to be following the route of our higher education peers.  Our colleges and universities have driven tuitions to levels where fewer and fewer customers can afford to attend their schools without significant financial aid or government loans, and those already receiving financial support need more.  Many independent schools have expanded programs and services in part to justify the value of the higher tuitions to current and prospective customers who are beginning to question the value of their offerings.  They are working to broaden their schools' appeal to new segments of customers who can afford to pay a significant portion of what it costs to provide these luxury services.  When one adds emerging competition from significantly lower cost or free competitors to this precarious situation, you have prime conditions for "disruptive innovation," a topic I'll speak to later.  

This assessment of the state in which many independent schools find themselves is rooted in a relatively cold and objective business analytics perspective, a far cry from the warm and welcoming community oriented cultures our schools proudly promote as central to providing a supportive and fertile learning environment.  Hence, there should be little surprise that our school cultures, which are a great source of strength, resist "business-like" analytics, terminology and practices.  They cite that schools are different from businesses, and therefore, should not be run as businesses.   Further, practices such as performance evaluations, merit-based compensation and brand-based marketing strategies, are viewed as foreign or even threatening to the altruistic roots of educational cultures.  The debate is not likely to end soon as to whether schools should begin operating more like their for-profit business cousins.  Does the introduction of productivity mindsets with more transparent outcomes based metrics in order to create perceptions of value represent the beginning of the end to transformative learning environments under siege or is it necessary for survival?  Only time will tell.  

Solutions to the mounting pressures on school's financial models do not simply lie in the introduction of efficiency based or incentive aligned "business practices."  As stated in the September Newsletter article written by Carla Silver, "Beyond the SWOT: Using empathy for Strategic Planning and Growth", there are inherent limitations in traditional strategy development processes that lack empathy as a critical part of establishing an authentic understanding of the needs of their customers.   Whether recognized as a tactic employed by product design and marketing consultants like Jump Associates or simply recognized as using good common sense, or recognized as modeling a true love of learning, the solutions to the financial challenges facing our schools can only be addressed through diving deeper into understanding the human needs being met by our schools already.  Greater insight and understanding as to the customer needs we have successfully met in the past will help inform plans for a more financially sustainable future.           

Clayton Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School and an educator at heart, is the originator of the concept of disruptive innovation cites its impact in a wide array of industries and individual businesses operating within them.  His analysis of how disruptive innovation may play out in schools is documented in his book co-authored with Michael Horn, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.  In keeping with the gravity of its title, he makes a powerful case as to why independent schools and colleges are susceptible to potential unsurvivable levels of disruption that may come from many new providers of educational services, like Kahn Academy, meeting at least some portion of our customers' needs at significantly lower or no cost.  

Yet, it is not this area of Mr. Christensen's expertise that I find most important to schools.  It is the idea that he poses in his more recent book, How Will You Measure Your Life?  He identifies a more compelling topic with which all leaders of independent schools must grapple.  He challenges his readers to apply the very practices and theories taught to his students at Harvard Business School to their personal lives.  He makes a powerful point that the discipline and application of tools designed for business application can be helpful in non-business applications - even to help answer the question "how one can be sure his/her relationships with their spouse, children and extended family and close friends can become an enduring source of happiness?"  

I won't admit how my wife responded when I shared Mr. Christensen's idea that asking yourself questions like "What did my wife hire me for?" might actually lead to a better understanding of one's relationship and lead to greater marital satisfaction.  This form of questioning is grounded in empathy, a desire for deeper understanding, and is an extension of his suggestion that answers to business challenges like how one might sell more milkshakes can come with posing questions like "What did I hire the milkshake to do?"  So, if we can use business analytic techniques to better understand our own personal situations, why not apply them to our schools?  Do we, as leaders of independent schools know the answer, or perhaps multiple answers, to the question, What have our parents hired us to do?  This is a very different question from what are we selling?

Mr. Christensen's call to ask ourselves these important questions about things that really matter to us is no different than Dev Patnaik's call for using empathy "to reach outside ourselves and connect with others."   Both recognize the benefits of really understanding the needs of others whose needs we are attempting to serve.  In the article, "Beyond the SWOT," Ms. Silver notes that Henry Ford's success is tied to the fact that he went well beyond the quick solution of simply "designing a faster horse" in addressing the problem of getting people from one place to another faster.  Empathy goes beyond asking what do you need, it means observing, being curious about your user and playing the role of cultural anthropologist - a human centered mindset.  

So, what would a cultural anthropologist say as to the customer needs we as independent schools are serving?  Are our schools, programs, curriculums, etc. intentionally designed to fully meet a need we have identified, studied and understand?  Or, are we offering programs born partly out of our own experiences as former students, and partly from our professional training and education?  Do we really understand the fundamental needs we are meeting and whether, consciously or subconsciously, what our customers are buying?  

Parent survey data compiled by Independent School Magazine tells us that parents are most concerned about safety.  Academic rigor, college placement and character in various definitions and forms follow.  This kind of survey tells us a little about the tangible elements of our schools that our customers value, but does the data give us a clear understanding of the true human needs we are serving?   

Let's take a few steps back from the world of independent schools and education and look at basic human needs as a source of potential insight.  Humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" and the subsequent bookMotivation and Personality.  His hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs.  

So what might Maslow say about the independent schools and our roles in helping our customers fulfill these basic human needs?  The programs and services independent schools offer begin in the realm of safety and have an implicit, if not explicit, role in offering economic security, resources and property that may be linked to employment due to our graduates matriculation to colleges and careers that may not have been possible otherwise.  Above these levels, it is more difficult to make direct connections between benefits from programs offered and actual customer needs.  Ask any middle or high school student about what is important to them and friends will be near the top of the list.  What about our parents?  I bet their answers won't be too far apart.  Who can deny the strength of the emotional, parental-type bond between kindergarteners and their very first teachers?  What is this worth to a parent assessing choices around his or her child's education and questioning their career versus family decisions?

And yes, we not only serve students, we serve parents and in some cases generations of families.  We serve families from a wide array of socio-economic backgrounds and demographics.  It is unlikely that they all have the same needs or are consciously buying the same things. The list captured in Maslow's hierarch above is only a small sample.  One need appears to consistently play in our favor, the need for belonging, whether for clearly understood reasons or for simply the security of not being alone. 

Let's introduce another business concept worthy of consideration.  The "hierarchy" implies the higher up a need is in the hierarchy, the greater its value.  Hence, people are likely to be willing to pay more for satisfying the needs being met farther up the pyramid.  What are the business/pricing implications of a school that is meeting needs higher up the pyramid?  How might we parlay our understanding of these needs into a new mix of student learning program designs as well as parent education programs? 

Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods - And How Companies Create Them cite the emotional connection between customers and products and services as the primary difference between luxury brands that have been successful from those that fail to sustain their market position.  They describe a concept that is somewhat similar to Maslow's hierarchy concept where a luxury product must have a tangible functional difference that the customer can observe that relates to a superior performance attribute.  The superior performance attribute combined with the brand ethos to engage the customer emotionally.  Their research suggests that emotional connections rooted in meeting a customer's need in areas of self-care and nurturing, helping form stronger human connections, satisfying a desire for adventure or learning, and helping to define one's style and personal identity form the strongest connections and therefore, sustain customer relationships through escalating price points more effectively as compared to other brands that fail to meet these deeply rooted needs.   They state, "The emotional aspect of products and services will be the key difference between consumers' ultimate choice and the price they will pay."

In Wired to Care, Dev Patnaik notes that "reframing" a situation or problem can lead to innovation.  Henry Ford brought a new frame from which he viewed the problem.  It wasn't until Kodak realized that they were not really in the business of selling chemicals and film, but in the picture business that they were able to change the trajectory of their business.  Fisk and Silverstien's research found that BMW serves needs in both personal identity as well as a sense of adventure in handling the ultimate driving machine.  Viking cooking products leveraged the "kitchen as a theater" movement in in-home entertainment and are viewed by customers as central to connections formed around meals prepared for friends and families.   Callaway's Big Bertha's helps the average golfer overcome feelings of inadequacy and compete with a different tier of golfers.

In a less provocative way, Pat Basset, former President of the National Association of Independent School shared his view that our schools could benefit from applying a "value proposition" mindset to assessing our programs and pricing decisions.  In a challenging, but non-threatening way, Pat introduced this topic in his "New Normal" article in which he charged member schools to use a value proposition lens through which to guide decisions.  He challenged school heads to begin thinking more like businesses, to sunset programs that were of lesser value even though they may have sentimental roots and to control price growth.  Mr. Bassett noted that the value proposition is an equation that must be in balance.  Price must be equal to or greater than the benefits or outcomes.  How high up the tuition scale a school may go will be dependent on how high up the perceived value scale it goes.  

Maslow's hierarchy might offer some perspective on the relativevalue of needs that one may serve. Is it possible that some of the answers to our financial sustainability problems may lie in how we might better serve the needs identified nearer the top of the pyramid that entail deeper emotional connections with our customers?  What is a fair price for meeting these needs?  What is the role of our schools in serving the needs of our parents in addition to those of our students?  

One could make the argument that we are currently priced at levels our parents are willing to pay, the rest of the revenue we need to make the economics work comes from other sources we have cobbled together.  So, perhaps we already have a pricing structure that is parent need based rather than student program cost based.  Therefore, are the questions around out financial future and affordability really rooted in the alignment of tuitions with the perceived level at which we are meeting evolving parent needs?  What does this have to do with student learning?  We must make this connection more apparent.

We must balance the consideration of parent need-based pricing with decisions pertaining to student learning, program design, diverse pedagogues and efficient use of human capital, oops, our faculty and staff.  This represents a huge challenge.  We must push each other to reframe our views of schools to include all of the needs we serve looking farther up the hierarchy of needs or ladder of benefits.  Our student programs must contain visible evidence of differences that are intentionally included to address to esteem and self-actualization dimensions.  The debate over "how to" questions like the best ways to teach need to be shifted to customer-oriented questions like "what must we have in place to support student learning" and "is our mission aligned with the customer needs we must serve to find a financially sustainable future."  

The key to independent school financial sustainability lies in how effectively we serve the deeper emotional needs of our customers through providing educational experiences for their children that includes visible evidence that parent needs are also being satisfied.  Our ultimate fate will be determined by how well we accelerate up the hierarchy of needs (building cars) as compared to our emerging competition, not how well we have mastered serving lower level of needs like program safety and employment type needs (raising faster horses).   Getting outside of our comfort zone and using empathy and other business analytic tools that may be foreign to school leadership practices may actually help us find ways to ensure we can remain "in business for" a long time.

Each month, Jonathan Martin shares his top picks for some of the most thought provoking articles, books or other media he has uncovered.

The Smartest Kids in the World is not, by any means, the smartest book of the year: it disappoints on several fronts.   Amanda Ripley clearly intends her book to be for "general readers"-- but defines down "general reader" from the New York Times to People, and the result seems off-putting, even patronizing.   She takes readers too deeply into the personal lives of her subject students; she makes generalizations too broadly, sometimes simply  inaccurately, about US education; she has a bias against technology in education that taints much of her perspective--(in my own, admittedly biased, reading). 

Yet her book deserves notice.   Ripley honors students' experience of school, illuminating international educational  practices through the eyes of students she follows literally around the world--- to Poland, Finland, and South Korea.  Through their authentic experience she evaluates instructional practice: would that we did the same more regularly. She cross references the anecdotal and individual perspective with compelling, authoritative data-- particularly the information coming from what is increasingly recognized as the world's best repository of cross-national educational outcome data, the OECD PISA test.  

Much of what she finds confirms and affirms independent school practice at its best: "all students must learn rigorous higher order thinking to thrive in the modern world: the only way to do that is by creating a serious intellectual culture in schools."   Teachers must be hired from the top of any cognitive classification (quality of schooling, SAT scores, college GPA), and must be valued as autonomous professional academics.    But she asks questions that are worthwhile of our consideration:  do we over-emphasize athletics? What is the value-add of small class sizes?  Should we have higher standards and certain demarcations for demonstrated achievement linked to graduation?   

In the frenzy of schooling that occurs in late spring and then the respite we all take in summer, it might have been easy to overlook, or just plain not get to, Peter Gow's herculean, thrice weekly, series of posts on EdWeek entitled Independent Schools: Common Perspectives.   But they are worth catching up with; here are two favorites: 

• September 3rd's School Starts Again  "it's nice to imagine, sitting here as summer comes to an end, a kind of education that just naturally occurs, in which kids are set--or better, set themselves--to tasks that are so meaningful and engaging that they become, like the very best jobs, not work but an ongoing source of pleasure, validation, pride, and new understandings that nourish the spirit and excite even greater levels of curiosity."

• August 12's "On Not Being a Borg"  "Schools that have truly transformed faculties and practice have been really good at reaching out, at engaging even skeptics in the collaborative work of understanding where the school must go and why." 

In the spirit of this month's theme, "Hybrid Thinking,"  it's worth going back a couple of years to a set of online videos you might have missed: Everything is a Remix. Fun, fast-paced, fantastic: they are great viewing for students, faculty, and parents alike: maybe even your board would enjoy it. Number 3 is the best of the four: 

"Nobody starts off as an original.  We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding.  After that, things can get interesting.  After we've grounded ourselves,  it's then possible to create something new through transformation taking an idea and creating variations. This is time consuming tinkering, but it can  eventually produce a breakthrough." 

Strategic planning is broken - at least as an exercise in strategy.

School leaders tend to approach strategic plans with a legislative mindset, where the goal is to find something that a coalition of interests can agree with. No wonder strategic plans are often generic rather than sharp. How many plans have you read that call for "academic excellence," "global citizenship" and 21st century something-or-other?

Hybrid thinking is a key antidote - and an essential for current century strategic development. Innovative schools need to move beyond the lens of representing diverse constituents (e.g. board, community members, faculty, parents) and instead work on generating the capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously.  

How can you do this?

• Translating jargon across silos. When I served on a strategic planning committee earlier in my career, we were nearly derailed by the insistence of a Board member that the school develop a dashboard. The word felt corporate, overly quantified, threatening to the core of an academic mentality. It evoked fears that caused tremendous (and unnecessary) faculty resistance. But reframed at its essence - "how can we track the school's health and progress?" - it's a wonderfully generative (and unthreatening) question.   
• Recruit and hire people who have already demonstrated the ability to think in many different ways. In The Innovator's DNA, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen recommends looking for people who have successfully bridged divergent industry or function in their career; experience living aboard is also correlated with effective hybrid thinking.    
• Assign roles and practice unfamiliar lenses. Edward de Bono suggests assigning 'thinking hats" to ensure that different ways of thinking are represented at the table. But this is also an exercise in practicing new ways of thinking. What if you had the CFO assigned to look after creativity? What if you had the art teacher practice watching the bottom line? In the end, you'll probably want your business officer to be the one who signs off on your budget - but each participant will be better able to work as a hybrid thinker.

Does this take time? Yes. Effective group function means attending to group maintenance as well as getting things done. To cultivate hybrid thinking, you need to make your goals explicit - and structure activities that directly lead to this aim.

But in school process, you often have to go slow to go fast. The benefits? Sharper thinking. Less turf fighting. And strategic clarity that extends beyond any one silo in the school.