Strategy Every Day:
The Power of Agile Teams

On Wednesday, February 26, Stephanie Rogen and Randall Dunn (head of Latin School of Chicago) facilitated a three-hour workshop on strategy implementation at the 2020 NAIS Annual Conference in Philadelphia. As Randall described at the start of the session, it was a “workshop, not a listen-shop” — while both Stephanie and Randall presented a number of key insights for the attendees, there was also plenty of time for everyone to work collaboratively and brainstorm some actionable ideas that they could pilot when they returned to school. (Click here to access the toolkit that workshop attendees used to guide their work during the session!) Here are some takeaways from the workshop:

It’s not enough to have a strategic plan. In his role as head, Randall helped oversee Latin’s 2013 and 2019 strategic plans. (GLP partnered with Latin and helped the school design both plans.) “The first strategic plan involved lots of good work around identifying our values, but they weren't being operationalized and put to good use,” Randall said, and then asked:. “Once we've defined what matters to us, how do we integrate it? This became the driving focus  of the second strategic plan: taking the steps we had already made and integrating them for greater impact. But in order to do that, we had to absolutely change the organizational structure.”

One key strategic challenge that schools are facing is that they are becoming more and more complex organizations. When this complexity is not managed effectively, schools end up with communication silos, lack of clarity around individual roles, and mission creep — all of which make it difficult for organizations to think and act strategically. “There’s an axiom that states that the more complicated the organization, the more simple the behaviors of the people who work within it,” Stephanie said. “We want to simplify the organization so that people can be more complex, creative, and expansive in their thinking and in the ways they work.”

Many schools don’t have a clear sense of how their organization functions. Stephanie mentioned that more than 60% of the schools that GLP works with either lack an organizational chart entirely or their org chart lacks accurate job descriptions. “It’s worth looking at (or building) the current org chart and understanding where all the people are and what they are doing,” Stephanie said. “But it's really valuable to go from the headache of mapping the org chart to the joy of mapping how work actually gets done — because that helps us figure out where we want to go strategically and how to organize around the work that matters.”

“Agile teams” are not just for the tech sector. These small, independent, cross-functional teams are perhaps most frequently associated with software development, but the notion of agility has now bled into other sectors. Schools are not typically organized into agile teams, but Latin and GLP agree that this is one of the most powerful tools available for delivering on strategy. “Agile teams engage in more focused collaborative work to actually get things done,” Stephanie said. “They're different because they're a more self managing, they have a clear purpose, and they're clearly accountable for that strategic imperative. When you build agile teams, you’re not married to your org chart — you've freed yourself to organize instead around the work that matters most.”

Agile teams are well-suited to the work of strategy in schools. Latin’s recent strategic plan centers on four integrated focal points, summarized by the acronym LEAD: Learn, Engage, Advance, and Develop. Each of these categories carries a number of specific goals for the future of the school. Latin has built four agile teams — known as “LEAD teams” — each of which oversees the implementation for their LEAD area - with senior leadership helping to connect and coordinate the work. What makes these LEAD teams agile? First, they have a singular mandate (managing their LEAD zone) — they exist in order to get this specific thing done rather than just meeting for a meeting’s sake. Second, the teams were designed to be cross-functional and cross-divisional; a team might include roles such as a lower school teacher, an upper school teacher, a communications writer, and a business office accountant. “Everybody has their own knowledge area and perspective,” Randall said. “Bringing these different people in, even if they’re not linked in the org chart, helps us make better decisions. This is the bold thing about integrating and aligning strategic work — looking through the org chart and figuring out who else needs to be in the room.”

The work of an agile team might look more like leadership than implementation. At Latin, each LEAD team takes the “balcony view” (an idea espoused by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky in Harvard Business Review) because that’s the most effective way for them to carry out their mandate. “Each LEAD team is sort of like a board of trustees — trustees aren’t on the faculty, but they're helping the school run,” Randall said. “So for example, one of the Learn team’s tasks is to complete the school’s portrait of a learner. They’re not doing the work, but they have oversight of the project, so they're thinking about what the game plan is and going to specific people to have them do things.”

Effective agile teams have a clear sense of their purpose and their approach. Each of the LEAD teams built a “playbook” defining their goals, their norms, and their protocols for their meetings (they meet three times each month). In their playbooks, teams very deliberately built a sense of how they wanted to lead and how they would hold each other accountable to those ideals (something that Stephanie described as “setting the table for leadership”). “They knew that this would be a guide, down the road, towards keeping them focused on what it's all about,” Randall said. “There’s a temptation to get mired in the work, but the playbook emphasizes that you're not the ones responsible for executing the work, you're overseeing the work.”

Using agile teams can lead to a transformational shift in the head’s role. Strategy implementation is usually confined to the head and the board, but the LEAD teams are co-leading this process with both, effectively distributing leadership across the school. Randall often isn’t even in the room when teams are meeting: his role now involves more facilitation and coaching as these teams independently manage the work of strategy. “This has not only changed how Randall and his cabinet lead, but also what leadership means at Latin in general,” Stephanie said. “Because the roles have shifted, there are a lot more people leading now. And it takes the school out of the rigidity of a command and control hierarchy, which is what schools often look like on paper, and into a more dynamic structure — one where there are many pathways to learning and leadership.”