Strategy for learning institutions
Most learning institutions do not lack plans. What they lack is strategy: an integrated set of choices about winning. The discipline behind our work, and the authors we learned it from.
By Jeff Clark
Most learning institutions do not lack plans. They have budgets, enrollment targets, facilities lists, initiative inventories. What they lack is strategy, an integrated set of choices about winning: What do we aspire to? Where will we play? How will we win there? What must we be great at? What systems make it stick? Five questions, in order, each forcing the next.
The five questions, the strategy cascade, belong to A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, who codified them in Playing to Win: Lafley as chief executive of Procter & Gamble, Martin as his strategy advisor. Martin publishes his current work free on his Substack. Read him.
Our work is the translation to education. For a school or a university, where to play is concrete and uncomfortable: which families, which programs, at what price, on what campus. How to win is harder still: why a family, a student, or a donor chooses you over every alternative. Winning is learning, full seats, and a balance sheet that can carry the mission for decades. The cascade holds. The content changes.
We run this discipline on every mandate: new campuses, networks, single functions. We came to it as operators: members of our team have run Playing to Win inside universities and schools for more than a decade. We start the debate with Martin’s question, what would have to be true, and it ends with a strategy that fits on one page and survives contact with a budget. Boards come out of it clearer than they went in.
The timing matters. Demographics, cost, and AI are repricing assumptions PK–12 and higher education have long relied on. The answer is strategy.
The strategy cascade
Five questions, in order, each forcing the next. Answers flow down; what they reveal revises upward.
- What do we aspire to? Learning, full seats, a balance sheet that carries the mission.
- Where will we play? Which families, which programs, at what price, on what campus.
- How will we win there? Why a family, a student, or a donor chooses you.
- What must we be great at? The capabilities those choices demand.
- What systems make it stick? The routines and measures that keep the choices honest.
If your institution has a plan and needs a strategy, start with the book, start with Martin’s Substack, or start with ElevateED.