2021: A Year for Leading with Questions, Part 2
Indira Gandhi once said, “The power to question is the basis of all human progress.”
In the midst of a pandemic, here is a question that feels especially relevant to the basis of our progress:
Are you reacting or are you responding?
When the pandemic hit, a number of Boards and Heads of School were in reaction mode. They asked us questions like:
Should we open in September or wait?
Should we do a full-court press on enrollment to hedge against fleeing families?
Should we pre-emptively freeze faculty salaries and / or 403B contributions?
Our answer was the same each time: Build different models of the future, assign them probabilities, and weight the risk and reward of each approach.
For example, we told everyone who would listen to create three models for enrollment (and thus most of a school’s operating revenue): -10%, -20%, and -30%. One school we work with devoted an entire Finance Committee meeting to discussing these models. Yes, -30% was a doomsday scenario, but it also shook loose some creative thinking about solvency. Their enrollment ended up flat but they spent more money than anticipated on COVID-19 protections, so the exercise prepared them to respond rather than react.
Reacting has its basis in the recency bias, short-term thinking, emotional contagion, and binary thinking—among other things.
Responding has its basis in long-term thinking as well as “thinking in bets,” to quote Annie Duke. [1]
As your school continues to face challenges big and small, it’s worth asking: are you reacting or are you responding?
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[1] Thinking in probabilities is the more common phrase for this mindset.
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Check out the other posts in the “2021: A Year for…” series:
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