How Faithful Christian Schools Use Planning and Improvisation to Advance Their Mission

In a previous article, I asked, Do Christian schools need a strategic plan? The summary in a sentence? While they don’t need a traditional, corporate-style strategic plan, they are wise to plan and think strategically.
Then, at the end of the article, I alluded to this follow up article related to a topic that I’ve been discussing with my own team lately. What happens after you make a plan? What happens when new and unexpected opportunities arise? What do you do if you are six months into a plan and discover information that you didn’t have when the plan started?
In faithful and flourishing Christian schools, plans are not rigid roadmaps set in stone. They are also not etch-a-sketch documents meant to be rewritten several times a day. They are starting points and guardrails. A good plan protects us from chasing every new shiny object or opportunity, but it also offer a foundation for what we might think of as improvisation. While I’m not an accomplished musician, I’m mesmerized by how great jazz musicians can improvise, with what seems like incredible ease, over a melody. What I’ve come to appreciate is that there is a comparable skill associated with adapting and improvising with a strategic plan.
You Can Plan and Be Flexible at the Same Time
It’s tempting to think of planning as fixed an inflexible. Make the plan, get people on board, execute the steps, monitor your progress, and achieve the goals. If only the real world was that simple. As Mike Tyson alleged said, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.” Hopefully we are not getting physically assaulted in the course of a day, but we sure do have the educational ministry equivalent occur from time to time. When that happens, how do we respond?
Plans are valuable because they clarify the mission and top priorities. They get everyone moving in the same direction, They help us move together, in unison. They also create a framework for reflection, feedback, and improvement.
With that said, no plan is perfect and no plan is complete. Circumstances change, problems arise, opportunities reveal themselves that we didn’t expect. Similarly, sometimes you can’t see the most promising possibilites at the start of a plan. It is only once you get down the road a bit, or live in the plan for a time, that you start to see incredible new opportunities that fit the plan quite well. Faithful schools understand that plans are tools, and we can use them creatively. They guide decisions, but they must also remain flexible enough to allow for mission-minded progress and improvisation.
The Role of Improvisation
Improvisation is about building on top of the plan. In a school setting, it can take on a variety of appearances. Maybe a plan prioritizes academic improvements, but an unexpected community crisis (or say, a global pandemic) requires a shift in focus toward student care and well-being. Or, perhaps there is a planned curriculum update, and a sudden grant opportunity or gift from a donor allows you to do 10x more than you thought possible.
Plans often reveal gaps or new challenges, prompting us to adjust and refine our strategies. In addition, as much as we want people to give their best feedback in the planning stage, it doesn’t always work that way. Some team members are timid or inhibited at first, or perhaps new team members join who have fresh and valuable insights.
Here is another possibility. When enacted, plans help us grow and learn, and amid that learning we may very well see possibilities and opportunities that would have been invisible to us previously. This is not a problem. It is all part of using and improvising around a mission-minded plan.
Of course, improvisation requires skill to do it well. It requires listening to the needs of the community combined with wisdom from God’s Word while staying grounded in the school’s mission.
Back to the Jazz Example
Jazz musicians know how to improvise, but it comes from lots of preparation…I mean, a ton of practice. They understand the chord progressions and the melody (think of those as the plan), and they devote ample time to improvising from a place of experience and incredibly deep understanding. They improvise in awe-inspiring ways only because they know the music so well. When they find themselves in the middle of the song, they are ready and free to delve into a solo without going too far astray.
This is just how improvising works with a strategic plan. You get to know the plan inside and out. You have it memorized. You know how the parts are interconnected. You understand its nuances and key features so well that when an opportunity presents itself, you are able to turn it into something that serves and supports the plan rather than take you off track. The new opportunity just adds more depth. Before you know it, a simple plan has a half dozen layers that takes your school to an entirely new level.
This is not easy. It requires careful thinking and discipline. Those around you who would rather just set the plan aside and pursue the new thing will probably get annoyed with you at times. They may think you are being too rigid. Why? Because it is easier. It doesn’t require the level of strategic thinking and intense study necessary to execute on, and improvise within, a plan with excellence.
Many people are used to just leading an organization one day at a time, one month at a time, one school year at a time. That works for many things, but it cannot achieve what is possible with an entire team working toward a set of multi-year goals. This sort of multi-year, big payoff planning requires study, lots of conversation and clarification, and the hard work of getting as many people as possible engaged and on board with what you are trying to accomplish. Then, and only then, can you begin to experience the equivalent of playing what seems like a perfect jazz solo on top of an already amazing melody. While it is incredibly hard work (harder than you think), once you experience it, I guarantee that you will want more of it.
Disclaimer: Do you use AI to write the articles on Substack? The ethical use of AI is an important topic. When new technologies emerge, they often evolve faster than our ability to make sense of the ethical implications. As such, I offer this disclaimer to provide a transparent picture of my own journey and approach. I’ve already made mistakes, even embarrassing ones, but I will strive to quickly learn from them and provide a transparent view of my present approach. As such, this disclaimer will be updated over time.
The full initial draft (in writing or as an audio dictation), words, and ideas for my Substack articles always come from me. From there, I often use AI for editing Substack articles. I regularly use Grammarly and/or Microsoft Word’s built-in Spellcheck or Grammar Check (both of which are a form of AI) to aid in proofreading and editing my work on Substack. In instances where I use AI for something other than background research or editing my original work, you can expect that I will cite or note it in the article.
I also regularly use DALL-E to generate the images for many articles. In addition, I sometimes use royalty free images. If credit is required by law, requested by the creator, or simply the courteous thing to do, you can expect to see the credits right below the image.
I continue to evolve in my experimentation with the use of ChatGPT, Grok, CoPilot (and various other ChatBot technologies) to serve as an editor for my Substack publications.
What does this mean? There are three common scenarios, though I hope to experiment with others in the future (and I will update this accordingly):
I write a full first draft in Word, Grammarly, or a word processor, and then submit it to the ChatBot, asking it to serve as an editor, akin to how I have one or more people edit almost anything that is published in my formal capacity. This is also similar to how editors review my manuscripts when they are submitted to a journal, newspaper, or book publisher. By the way, when I write for any of these partners, I never use AI beyond the basic spellcheck / grammar check available in Microsoft Word—not even to use and then cite it.
I record myself speaking on a topic and then place the recording in a ChatBot to transcribe, remove disfluencies, and provide a draft transcript that I can refine before publishing it. This is where I’ve made the most past mistakes. Because the ChatBot is transcribing, it adds its own grammatical interpretations and even takes liberty with sub-titles, organization, corrections, and adding clarifying language. As such, I’m still learning to use prompts that ensure my words, voice, style, and intent dominate—while also achieving a quality, personal, but streamlined approach to sharing ideas. Because this is an evolving practice for me, and also because it sometimes creates a final draft that can be flagged as AI-generated content, expect that when I use this approach, it will be noted at the beginning or end of the article.
I use ChatBots to conduct background research related to topics that I’m writing about, akin to an interactive and advanced search engine. If there are quotes or unique ideas that I include in the article, you can expect that I will give some sort of citation or in-text credit.