Tatachilla Lutheran College: Defining Strategic Directions
Tatachilla Lutheran College has embarked on a game-changing process to inspire an innovative, agile and future-focussed strategic vision. The process not only sets the college on an exciting trajectory for students to live, learn and lead through the love of Christ, but is also resulting in less obvious but strikingly powerful outcomes such as: meaningful collaboration between the board, exec team and staff; empowered staff; deeply authentic community engagement; the clarification of big picture concepts; a recognition of the complementary roles of governance and management; and the showcasing of the unity of the chair and the principal.
We asked Chair, Cain McDonald, and Principal, Ali Thacker, to write a reflection on the journey travelled thus far.
Tatachilla Lutheran College has had an exciting start to 2025 with a two-day intensive workshop with our amazing College Board members and Executive Team working with Gwen Pinnington Consulting and Change to envision a 2030 flourishing, passionate and thriving future for our college community.
Process:
This involved pre-emptive introductory and contextual work with the College Board, Executive Team and all staff. This was developed and delivered by Alison ‘in house’ in the middle of 2024, focusing on a global VUCA context, local Onkaparinga Council 2030 strategic plan, OECD visioning, and plausible future models of schooling. We both then, as Chair and Principal, liaised with several potential consultants to find who would best be able to partner with who we are and how we are as a college, and we found a brilliant match with Gwen Pinnington (Consulting and Change.) After several introductory emails and Teams meetings, the purpose, desired outcomes and Terms of Reference for the 2-day intensive workshop were cocreated, using Gwen’s Strategic Visioning Architecture.
Purpose:
To harness the experience and expertise across our Board and Executive Team to define our Strategic Directions and create unity and alignment on an inspiring future-focussed strategic vision that will enable the absolute key strategic purposes for all students to live, learn and lead through the love of Christ.
Outcomes:
- Confirm our Mission, Vision, Identity & Values for the future
- Clarity about our points of difference and key purposes for our future
- Clarify and agree on who we need to be to lead this work well
- Agree on next steps to continue our strategic visioning work into agile, innovative and living strategic directions
As a highly collaborative and interactive team, we achieved the first three intended outcomes of the workshop and are currently developing the fourth. We have cohesively cocreated the key elements of who and whose we are, affirmed our values and mission, reimagined our vision and identity, and captured these in a conceptual model. We are both working together, along with Gwen, in a remote support partnership, to engage our broader community with the structure of our strategic directions, including the behaviours (how we work together), environment (the conditions in which we operate) and success enablers (our tangible actions and effectiveness).
While the Board continues to own the development of the plan, the work has now moved to the next stage of involving staff, students and community members. Together, we recently led a whole staff meeting to garner their ideas, input and wisdom into this important work. The value of the Chair and Principal being seen together, leading this important work, has been invaluable for our community, while also ensuring that the project is cocreated, and owned by all sections of the college.
While we acknowledge we have more collaborative work to be done with the structural aspects of the strategic directions and implementation planning, the partnering of our College Board and Executive Team has provided a blueprint for an exciting shared vision and mission, supported by encompassing and enabling strategic directions. The process itself, and the subsequent agile, innovative and future-focused strategic visioning architecture, have provided a vehicle from which future possibilities can emerge and be supported. The value of our governing and operational bodies working together in this space cannot be underestimated and we are the better for it.
