Avoid Mimetic and Incremental Tendencies when Making Strategy

Too many strategic plans for schools are either mimetic or incremental in nature. The mimetic part comes when schools look at competitors for ideas about new programs; e.g., the school a few blocks away just built a new STEM center, so we need one, too. Parents of students sometime feed the mimetic tendency by talking wistfully in focus groups about what cool new thing is on offer at another school. Board members feed the tendency when they react to administrative suggestions about something new with questions about where else it has been tried.

Incrementalism, baked into public school planning models, is fed in independent schools by the desire of many to fix what they see as broken. Middle school sports not winning enough games? Then let’s make the strategic plan around fixing middle school sports or math or whatever. 

Mimetic and incremental tendencies are probably hard-wired into human neurology, but conflating strategy with copying one’s competitors or patching the proverbial potholes will not yield a market advantage. The Los Angeles market does not need another Harvard-Westlake and more than New York City needs another Collegiate. HW and Collegiate already own their portions of the school space. Likewise, incremental improvement, important to be sure, will never be bold enough to surmount today’s formidable challenges.

Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, writes that …

“… every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

The next great school strategy won’t be to replicate what already exists.