Are Daily Demands Keeping Your School’s Strategy on Hold?
As an independent school leader, you juggle the urgent and the important every day. Students, faculty, and families require your immediate attention, but where does that leave your long-term strategic goals? Too often, strategy gets discussed but stalls in implementation.
The Custom Blueprint Sprint grew out of demand from Blueprint Sprint (bps.sais.org) event participants who wanted to bring the same high-impact experience directly to their schools.
What is the Custom Blueprint Sprint?
Brought directly to your school, this full-day facilitated experience gives your leadership team or multiple teams from your school the structure, tools, and dedicated time to move a strategic priority (e.g., an initiative, project, or challenge with significant potential impact) from idea to actionable plan.
Through a structured facilitated design process, your team will thoroughly analyze your strategic priority, identify root causes of your challenge, and design a prototype solution. You’ll plan for implementation and stakeholder communications and leave with a concrete 90-day blueprint ready to put into practice from day one.
Past participant projects:
- Schedule restructuring and logistics
- Capital campaign planning
- AI integration strategies
- Brand identity and signature program development
- Portrait of a Graduate/Educator frameworks
- Faculty onboarding redesign
What are the benefits of the SAIS Custom Blueprint Sprint?
The schools that move strategy forward aren’t the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones that make the time to act on them. The Custom Blueprint Sprint creates that time, on your campus, for your team.
By the end of this engagement, your school will be able to
- Model the design-driven change process so participants can use the process to design solutions for future/additional challenges.
- Design a structured blueprint using practical tools to bring a strategic priority to life so your team is ready to implement real change.
“Beyond the dedicated and uninterrupted time, which is rare for school leaders, the Blueprint Sprint experience was a thoughtful, guided, and structured way of helping our team cut through the ‘noise’ of our challenge and really understand the underlying issue, which is a kind of clarity we would otherwise not have identified. Ann Marsh and Brett were such thoughtful facilitators, and their model really works.”
Past Participant
Blueprint Sprint
How does a Custom Blueprint Sprint work?
Register for the Custom Blueprint Sprint. (members only)
- $2,000 for one team
- $3,000 for 2-3 teams from your school
- $4,000 for 4-5 teams from your school
Assemble a team or teams of 3-5 members.
- Teams could include the head of school, leadership team members, trustees, division leaders, academic deans or curriculum directors, grade-level leaders, and other school leaders.
- Participant names are not required at registration and will be collected approximately six weeks prior to your session.
Identify a pressing strategic priority from your school. This could be an initiative, project, or challenge with the potential for significant impact that your team will address during the sprint.
- Note: Teams from your school may work on the same strategic priority or different strategic priorities.
Take the first step toward real momentum.
Facilitators
Dr. Brett Jacobsen
Elizabeth Maglio
Ann Marsh Rutledge