Our Strategic Planning & Research Services

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 Confidential surveys of employees or a subset (e.g. leadership team) yield honest and helpful feedback for leaders. We construct and conduct surveys in consultation with leaders. The results and analysis are quite useful on their own, and especially ahead of a strategic planning session.

  We will work with you to design a strategic planning process that fits, from a soup-to-nuts full retreat with breakouts and an implementation plan, on the one hand, all the way to a half-day quickie retreat done from 10,000 feet to merely establish broad organizational goals, on the other.

We will help you develop team intelligence and unity through fun large- and small-group activities and discussions on topics of your choice, all designed to get folks to know each other better and gel as a team.

There may be other projects on which our involvement could be helpful to you. These could be topic-specific (e.g. the emergence of hospitalists in the health care industry, or water policy in Native American Nations) or methodological. On the latter, we can help you wrestle to the ground and interpret your data in ways that increase understanding of your organization. We are deft with descriptive and explanatory analysis as well as time series and GIS spatial techniques, and we are especially good at helping you sort your data into useful categories.

 When facing headwinds and uncertainty, talking about things privately with someone outside your regular sphere can help a leader get up and out from the stressful minutiae of the day-to-day, and become more strategic and impactful.

We help leaders of community colleges, liberal arts colleges, universities, governing boards, and higher ed systems get their arms around this incredibly important yet complex and jargon-filled area. This enables them to think anew about challenges related to student retention and graduation. Subsequent sub-topics could include admissions and recruitment, student costs and financial aid, GenEd teaching, academic advisement, retention data/analysis, residence life, building cross-cutting retention coalitions, and private fundraising for retention initiatives.