Reinventing decision making: A thinking process for school leaders to make tough choices and manage conflict

School Administrator, Feb, 2003 by Robert A. Klempen

If misery loves company, then any school administrator facing tough decisions would enjoy meeting Thomas Downs of La Crosse, Wis., Robert Slotterback of Wauwatosa, Wis., and Dennis Smith of Orange County, Calif. All three are superintendents, and each faced a challenge that would drive lesser mortals to start surfing the Web for greener pastures.

In La Crosse, Downs had barely gotten his feet wet on his new assignment when his school board directed him to develop a new K- 12 enrollment plan for students, In Wauwatosa, Slotterback was faced with the need to cut $1 million from his budget. And in the Placentia-Yorba Linda district, Smith had to wrestle with securing a major new funding source. Mismanagement of any one of these challenges could easily have polarized the community, driven a wedge between the school board and administration, alienated faculty and compromised educational quality.

We use the term "divided decision making" to describe the chaos and division that sometimes occur when a school district faces a hot decision, On the surface, this syndrome can be attributed to a number of factors, from the increased diversity within a school community to participatory decision making to the current financial crunch.

No doubt all these forces contribute to divided decision making. But in our experience a more subtle, largely unnoticed, insidious factor is at work: Educational leaders, as well as school boards, faculty, community groups and unions, simply do not. have a clear, systematic, agreed-upon thinking process for making the tough choices.

Systematic Thinking

A thinking process is a step-by-step approach to organizing the information and making the judgments needed to arrive at a sound conclusion. Consider the job of a school administrator in terms of a repertoire of management tasks, with each task requiring a different thinking process.

Some tasks involve creating a sense of order and coherence, especially in a complex management situation. We use the term "situation appraisal" to describe the systematic thinking process one goes through to identify key issues, separate them so they are clear to everyone with a responsibility for action, and then set priorities.

At other times, the task is to determine why things have gone wrong. Here the required process is "problem analysis," At still other times, the key issue involves selecting the best choice among alternatives, and "decision analysis" is called for. Finally, peering into the future to anticipate dealing with future problems or opportunities involves "potential problem analysis" or "potential opportunity analysis."

In the La Crosse, Wauwatosa and Placentia-Yorba Linda districts, each superintendent and just about everyone on their leadership teams responsible for resolving the day-to-day issues have been trained in all four processes. Given the nature of the issues, they used the processes of situation appraisal and decision analysis.

The results speak for themselves. In the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, the bond issue that the school board recommended was passed with the highest approval rating of any school bond issue on the ballot in Orange County. It added a much-needed $102 million to the coffers. In the Wauwatosa School District, the cuts recommended by its budget committee were approved by the school board and, just as importantly, the board, community groups, faculty and union all supported the decision. And in the La Crosse School District, the plan for balanced enrollment is under consideration for final school board review and approval after the first of the new year.

Results aside, what is truly instructive is how the superintendents and their colleagues tackled their respective issues, using the situation appraisal and decision analysis processes to cut through all the clutter, keep everyone focused on the search for information and solutions and tap the best thinking of stakeholders and the larger community to achieve results.

Onward to Coherence

The La Crosse school district has 8,000 students in 21 schools. Twenty years ago, the district was known nationally as a leader in balancing its school population on the basis of socioeconomic criteria. However, by 1998, when Downs was hired as district superintendent, some schools had again become unbalanced, due to large population shifts.

Late in 1999, the school board asked Downs to do something about elementary enrollment and do it quickly. Eight weeks later, Downs and his team presented a recommendation to the board that ignited sparks in the community. Some complained the plan would "create a ghetto." This was a loaded phrase that prompted a swift rejection of the recommendation by the board. Many reasons for the mess existed, including lack of clear guidance from the board on what it wanted vis-a-vis socioeconomic balance versus neighborhood schools.

In February 2000, the board asked Downs to develop a new recommendation. "The board charged me to develop a K- 12 enrollment management plan, one that considered the cultural and dynamic challenges of declining enrollment, fixed revenues and community demographics," he says. This time, the prospect for success was far greater because Downs and his team had realized that gaining clarity in a situation, becoming rigorous in decision making and securing commitment were next to godliness.