"Intentional Futures helped our team better understand the different perspectives in our community and make sense of the data they and we had collected. With their partnership, we went from feeling overwhelmed by all the potential paths we could pursue, to having clarity around our purpose and direction."
In the Fall of 2023, with the fresh energy of newly appointed Head of School, Dr. Kai Bynum, Lakeside School was gearing up to build on their strong tradition while exploring an ambitious new vision. They sought to assess the current state of the school and explore pathways to achieve high-level plans and priorities. With this in mind, they engaged our team to design a stakeholder-centered, responsive strategic planning process.
In our first phase of this project, we dove headfirst into research to fully understand Lakeside’s rich context and surface some of the school’s strengths and opportunities in the form of a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. During this phase, we engaged a full suite of stakeholders: students; their parents/guardians; the Lakeside board; and school faculty and staff, allowing us to synthesize valuable, honest insights into Lakeside’s current state.
We leveraged a variety of research methods throughout this initial engagement in order to help school leadership understand the full experience of the wider Lakeside community. iF strategists from our Education, Social Impact, Design, and Racial Equity teams took to the Lakeside campus to observe regular school days in order to have a strong contextual foundation to inform our work. To provide data-backed context to our observations, we deployed a comprehensive survey of over 1,000 responses from students, parents/guardians, and school employees. We also conducted focus group sessions with students that spanned a variety of grade levels. Throughout these discussions, we sought to understand data points like:
After full engagement with stakeholders, we assembled a thoughtful, detailed picture of life at Lakeside, inclusive of student experience, belonging, safety, and overall environment and culture. We built on our foundation of new findings by crafting an ambitious roadmap of potential future pathways for the consideration by the advisory board. These pathways illustrated the takeaways from our research and a plan for starting work to create a future of Lakeside that incorporates direct feedback from parents/guardians, employees, and, most importantly, students.
As a result of our work, the Lakeside stakeholders were equipped to work with their board and community to create a detailed plan based on qualitative and quantitative data from their own school community. With a wealth of research findings and future-forward pathways at their fingertips, Lakeside was well-positioned to envision a future where students, their parents/guardians, and faculty are driving real, lasting change.
