Strategic Planning
What is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is the ongoing organizational process of using available knowledge to document a business's intended direction. This process is used to prioritize efforts, effectively allocate resources, align shareholders and employees on the organization’s goals, and ensure those goals are backed by data and sound reasoning.
– Harvard Business School
Listening & Gathering Information
Empathy Interviews were conducted with 140 randomly selected CLS community members including alumni from each decade of the school's existence, current and alumni parents, faculty, staff, and middle and upper school students. Strategic Planning Think Tank sessions were conducted for parents and faculty/staff in October and a Community Design Day, open to all community stakeholders, was held in November.
Learn About our Consulting Partner
CLS hired Leadership + Design as an external consulting partner to shepherd Latin through the strategic planning process. Carla Silver is our L + D consultant. She is an experienced professional with a solid background in independent schools - first as a student, and eventually serving as an independent school teacher, division head, and board member for several schools. She is also married to an independent school head. As Latin's SP consultant, Carla has helped to design the numerous activities and opportunities for diverse participation in the SP process.
Strategic Planning Leadership
The primary roles of the strategic planning team are to actively collect data as part of the school's self-study, to serve as representatives of various CLS constituent groups, and to personally champion and solicit broad participation in all efforts that inform the strategic planning process. The Steering Committee receives information and input from the strategic planning team, works with the Board of Trustees, and uses this data to draft a final strategic plan.
With our mission, broad representation, and inclusivity in mind, our strategic planning team is composed of two committees: the Steering Committee and the School-wide Strategic Planning Team.