Practitioner's guide to creating a shared vision: as a new superintendent, you've been charged with moving the community's schools in an exciting new direction. How should you proceed?

You are the new superintendent recently appointed by the Board. In your new role, you will certainly face many difficult and complex challenges. The most paramount of these challenges is likely to be the establishment of a compelling vision and strategic plan for the district.

Yes, that's right. The expectation is clearly on you to move the organization in a new and exciting direction. You represent the community's best hope for its children's future. Good luck!

In reality, the process for establishing a shared vision and strategic plan is complex, time consuming and stressful. To complicate the matter, the very definition of a vision or strategic plan and the means by which they are developed will bring forth as many expectations as the number of people asked.

This was the challenge I faced in becoming superintendent of the Pleasanton Unified School District two-and-a-half years ago. Five years prior, the district had developed a vision utilizing the Cambridge Group Model (Cook, 1995), and with my entry into the district, it was time to establish a new vision and strategic plan to focus the district's efforts and resources into the future.

To accomplish this task, the first step in the process was to establish with my cabinet and Board of Trustees a definition of a "shared vision" and "strategic plan" and what process would be used to develop each. For "vision," we adopted the thinking of Bennis and Nanus (1985), who wrote that a vision is a "mental image of a possible and desirable future state of the organization."

For "strategic planning," we relied on Yukl (1998), who wrote that strategic planning is the "determination of strategic objectives, performance objectives and broad policies of an organization."

Together, vision is a "target which beckons" (Bennis and Nanus, 1985), and the strategic plan is a roadmap or guide to that desired future state.

We also agreed that to identify a vision that is compelling to students and will yield a strong positive impact on them, it must include two essential elements:

1. It must identify the skills and knowledge students need to prepare them for life after high school.

2. It must be futures-based.

We agreed that to create a compelling vision that is shared by members of the school community and the community at large, a broad range of stakeholders would need to be involved. This group would be the visioning committee.

The task of the group was to identify the skills and knowledge students would need to maximize their chance of being successful upon graduation from high school. The effort to afford students with these would direct the work of the district staff and community for years to come.

The sole focus on what students would know or be able to do was a shift from the existing strategic plan in the district, which was more a statement of what the organization wanted to improve. Such an organizational focus is certainly beneficial, but we decided to stay true to the mission of a public school district and focus on learning outcomes for all students. Consequently, the vision and strategic plan needed to have a clear focus on meaningful student outcomes.

Futures forecasting

The desire to prepare students for the future created the need for the second essential element of our process--that it be based on information gathered through "futures forecasting," an effort to identify the probable and possible futures that might become reality and impact our students. The probable and possible futures (PPFs) were found through research by the members of the visioning committee and from guest speakers (futurists and demographers).

The task of futures forecasting was simple--identify, through trend analysis and research, what the world will be like for our students when they leave our school system. Such research might include changes in the social, political, environmental and global arenas.

We found that one of the benefits of doing futures forecasting was that the ideas and whims of individual committee members about what students should know or be able to do were not considered unless they were supported by a research-based PPF. In this way, the process supported the development of a document that was grounded in research and one that did not include elements simply based on the fact that they were supported by an overpowering individual or interest group.

To support the identification of PPFs, a form was distributed to all members of the visioning committee on which they were to list PPFs (including source) and the impact the PPF might have on students and student learning. During our monthly meetings with the committee, participants shared the information collected, and in groups of three to four, identified the most critical PPFs along with what we referred to as "Student will ..." statements. These were statements of what the student would need to be able to do or know to survive or even thrive in the world if that PPF were to become a reality.

Screening probable and possible futures

The screen for whether a PPF was critical was its anticipated impact on students and student learning, and its likelihood of becoming a reality. For instance, a probable and possible future might be that by 2020, cars will be part road machine, part water craft and part airplane. We have been hearing this for years, and it still seems to be a very distant possible future.

On the other hand, the possible and probable future that the world is getting smaller with the globalization of business, improved transportation and improved telecommunication will continue to take place at a very rapid pace. This PPF is likely to happen and has a direct impact on what students will need to learn (e.g. multiple languages and an appreciation and understanding of a variety of cultures and religions). Globalization is a critical PPF for our students.

Through the efforts at research, discussion, debate and prioritization, a bank of critical PPFs and "Student will ..." statements were identified by the visioning committee. As one might anticipate, research can go on indefinitely, but by the end of seven two-hour monthly meetings, the general feeling of the group was that we had covered the vast array of relevant PPFs. The body of this work consisted of about 50 PPFs with "Student will ..." statements for each.

It was then time to identify a reasonable number of PPFs that would provide a framework for our vision and strategic plan. As we all know, an organization can only take on a limited number of goals at one time, and so the 50 PPFs needed to be winnowed down to a reasonable number of five to 10.

To accomplish this task, committee members worked to clarify and combine PPFs. They advocated for PPFs to retain, and we used the "Focusing Four" process (Garmston and Wellman, 1997) to identify priority PPFs. At the end of the process and after many hours of discussion and debate, we had identified seven critical PPFs.

It is important to note that the committee members worked well together over a long period of time at least in part due to our having established operational norms at our first meeting. Consequently, the discussion and debate sessions during this stage of the process were very civil and productive.

One of the interesting outcomes of the process was that for many months we had a number of interesting and compelling PPFs related to technology. As we worked to clarify and combine PPFs, we decided that our student outcome statements did not lend themselves to an isolated and independent PPF related to technology. Instead, we saw that technological skills and knowledge were best applied as tools to achieving multiple goals of the vision.

On another note, one negative tendency the committee members had to work through was the desire to combine PPFs simply to be inclusive. Such action would only serve to dilute or confuse the meaning of the PPF and to therefore diminish its impact.

After identifying the critical PPFs, the next task was to associate to each two to four "Student will ..." statements that if achieved would give the student the skills and knowledge they needed to be prepared for and thrive within such a future state. "Student will ..." statements were developed by each committee member during the year as the PPFs were identified.

For the final seven PPFs, we first associated to each all relevant "Student will ..." statements. We then implemented a process of rich discussion along with debating, advocating and prioritizing to yield a manageable and meaningful two to four "Student will ..." statements for each PPF. The PPFs provide the basis for the vision of the organization and the "Student will ..." statements guide the development of the strategic plan.

The visioning document

After a year-long process, we finally had our visioning document: "Strategic Plan 2004: Our Vision--Building on the Past ... Planning for the Future." It contains the major dements that are associated with the seven PPFs: student achievement, innovation and creativity, personal development, global orientation, interpersonal communication, environmental awareness and lifetime planning.

Student achievement is purposely the first of the elements presented because it entails the underpinnings upon which the other six elements heavily depend. The remaining six elements follow in no priority order. For each of the seven elements, there is a PPF statement that we believe will shape the student's world, and for each PPF, there are "Student will ..." statements that clearly identify the skills and knowledge the students will need to prepare them for that future.

There is not room here to present the plan in its entirety, but it is available on line at the district's Web site (www.Pleasanton.k12.ca.us). To clarify the structure and power of the plan, the "Student achievement" element of the plan is presented here in full.

Student achievement

Probable and possible future--The body of knowledge will continue to increase exponentially and be more universally and readily accessible.

1. Students will meet or exceed rigorous academic standards, especially in the core fields of mathematics, science, language arts and history/social science.

2. Students will learn to use technology to gather, analyze and synthesize information in order to construct their own bases of knowledge.

3. Students will accept responsibility for their education by participating in their learning devices and becoming life-long learners.

The next step in the process was to introduce the plan to the public and to consider suggestions for modification. This was done over a period of three months, and in the end, the Board took formal action to approve the document. This step went fairly well in that we ended up changing very little.

Importantly, the entire visioning committee met to consider all recommended changes. The group considered each suggestion, and we implemented a process to seek clarity and to debate the merits of the suggestion. We then did a simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" process to determine whether the recommended change would be made or not. This process was effective and efficient, and in the end, the changes dealt more with clarity than content. We now had what we could confidently call a "Shared Vision" document and a start on the strategic plan via the "Student will ..." statements.

To provide detail to the strategic planning aspect of the visioning document, advisory committees were formed for each of the seven elements. They are currently developing short- to long-term goals that, when achieved, will bring the vision to reality.

An inclusive process

In selecting the advisory committee members, we welcomed one and all to participate. The advisory committees will report back to the visioning committee annually the recommendations they make to the superintendent regarding short-, medium- and long-term goals to achieve the vision, and they will be invited to make recommendations regarding clarity and content of the visioning document and strategic plan elements. The members of each advisory committee also provide a valuable resource to support the implementation of each plan element.

In conclusion, we believe that our students will successfully meet the challenges of the future if, within five years, we are able to provide programs and experiences that enable them to exhibit strong academic achievement, be innovative and creative, have positive personal development, possess a clear global orientation, be environmentally aware, possess effective interpersonal communication skills and do lifetime planning.

References

Bennis, W., and Nanus, B. (1985). Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge. Harper and Row: New York, NY.

Cook, Bill (1995). Strategic Planning. The Cambridge Group. Montgomery, Ala.

Garmston, R., and Wellman, B. (2000). The Adaptive School: Developing and Facilitating Collaborative Groups. Four Hats Seminars: Calif.

Yukl, Gary (1998). Leadership in Organizations. Prentice Hall: New Jersey.

John Casey is superintendent of the Pleasanton Unified School District.