“We are a house of exceptional height whose purpose is to keep its inhabitants safe and dry.”

“We will raise this house so that it is impregnable from flood waters.”

“We will utilize beam and tie jacks to increase and enhance the height of this abode and build a more formidable foundation.”

Mission, vision, strategies, tactics, and logistics. These words – these objectives and means – spur a great deal of thought from me. To be most honest, I am working to discern the important differences in these words – these means and objectives. I am convinced that a school must continually strive to ensure that its people have shared understanding and shared values around these words – that when someone talks of a school’s mission, or when someone speaks of strategy and tactics, we are operating from a deep sense of mutual understanding. It’s not just semantics. Shared meaning of this language – mission, vision, strategies, tactics, and logistics – ensures that members of a school community work together more harmoniously as a team, with less negative friction at the points of movement and change.

On many mornings, as Lucy (my dog) and I are walking, we venture past this house that is being raised. The house is in an area of Atlanta that floods fairly often, and I can certainly understand the homeowners investing in a different foundation system. A number of other houses in the neighborhood have done the same.

Because of my work for the past decade (in school innovation and transformation), I feel I am constantly trying to get a better handle, a better grip, on “mission, vision, strategy, tactics, and logistics.” This house – as a metaphor – is helping me do so.

As I walk past this house, I imagine what the mission and vision of the homeowners might be. Perhaps that mission or vision is represented in the quotes that opened this post. Perhaps not. I try to imagine the conversations and planning that certainly occurred among the homeowners and the experts who are lifting that house with those beams and ties. I can hear them talking strategy and tactics and logistics, and I can hear them working out a shared understanding of those means and objectives. I think how critical it must be for the workers on this project to have a shared sense of the strategies, tactics, and logistics!

Then, I begin to wonder if the owner of the lifting company talks of the mission of his/her company. I become curious if the lifting company’s mission and vision is actually more of a strategy or tactic in the view of the homeowner. I ponder how confusion over these things might result in a less than optimal house transformation. Or worse – a house toppling.

If you’re still with me, God bless you! If you’re wondering what in the world I am writing about, then I would challenge you to listen more intentionally to conversations and meetings at your school. Listen as people talk about mission, vision, and strategy. Consider how faculty and admin are approaching the tactics and logistics to achieve the strategies that will ensure success of the mission and vision. Perhaps your school’s mission is only written in aspirational terms, loose and general terms, that make strategic design a significant challenge for teachers, parents, and students. Simply listen for the words “strategy” and “strategic” and note if different people speak of the very same actions being different rungs of the strategy, tactics, and logistics ladder.

Listen as teachers talk of lesson plans and classroom activities. Listen as students respond to questions about what they are learning and why. Listen as parents discuss where the school is headed and how it plans to get to such a destination.

Try to discern when people are talking with clear, shared understanding around mission, vision, strategies, tactics, and logistics. For a school to strive for common language around these means and objectives – such effort could have significant consequences on the trajectory on which a school intends to be. Such effort around common language and shared understanding could be a real difference maker in the “if and when” a school will accomplish its mission and achieve its vision.

What’s your school’s mission? Your vision? Your strategies? Your tactics? Your logistics? In what ways are these ends, means, and objectives aligned and misaligned? When students, parents, alums, faculty, staff, surrounding community members and administrators talk of the change you are undertaking at your school, do they speak with common language and shared understanding?