by Ross Peters, Managing Partner.
It has been a busy several weeks here at EXPLO Elevate after Thanksgiving and before the Holidays.
There have been a number of highlights, including a great week of listening sessions with parents at The Willows Community School in LA, faculty listening sessions at The Meadowbrook School in Boston, and, fascinatingly, a day-long EXPLO Elevate retreat with most of our team, plus a couple of fantastically insightful and helpful school heads (and clients) arvind grover from Meadowbrook and Tom Woelper from the New England Innovation Academy. All of this work has been wonderfully engaging and full of deep learning.
From these experiences and from many others, we have been refining our thinking about the unique and vital role we can play for our clients and hope to play even more in 2023. Imagine an extra seat at your leadership team table that you can fill with someone who has extensive knowledge of not only your school (let’s call this initiated knowledge) but also significant knowledge and experience in a range of areas, such as:
- from strategic planning to all areas of change management,
- from professional development for your entire faculty to one on one coaching and advising for your maker space leadership,
- and from support and direction to engage the complexity of designing a new and robust daily schedule to rethinking the school’s approach to work days and department meetings.
Put most simply, imagine having an expert on your team who has initiated knowledge and has exactly the skills and insight you need when you most need them. When your need changes, the expert changes. That is what it is like partnering with EXPLO Elevate.
Hiring a full-time person in any single area would be prohibitively expensive.
Still, the need for experienced thought leadership is undeniable for help in these areas, as is the need for a nuanced understanding of your school’s specific strategy, culture, and history. The problem schools face is that they need specific institutional knowledge in the people who do this work, and they have a need for someone with a breadth of experience and knowledge that transcends a single institution. It has been an often impossible challenge to get one without sacrificing the other. Schools want and should have both. At EXPLO, we are at our best when we are additional bandwidth for your school’s leadership — ready without any additional orientation to be called to your table with exactly the experience and thought leadership you need to up your game. When you work with us, you get a team.
All that said, the way in is the first step:
- a guide for your next strategic plan, or your maker-space curriculum, or a workshop on virtual collaboration,
- a partner for community engagement conversations, or schedule reinvention processes,
- or a co-creator for building the necessary skills for change management and successfully engaging complexity.
And when we are not experts in a particular area, we have friends and colleagues who are.
I am, and all of us at EXPLO Elevate are, grateful for our friends, colleagues, and clients (many of you land in each category!). Call on us early and often in 2023. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!