I’ve been to hundreds of brand sessions in my professional life, but you guys really hit it out of the park!
By shifting from “different learners” to “every learner has a profile,” Sterne School transformed its strategic plan into a vision that is reshaping curriculum, culture, and community.
The Sterne School board wanted a strategic plan to help them evaluate what they could do with a newly acquired building. Serving students at the time who they described as having “mild to moderate learning disabilities” they were keen to expand programming to their students in a meaningful way. They hired Mission Minded to facilitate the strategic planning process with the hope of developing an operational to-do list on how to use the new building to expand their program.
Our discovery revealed a challenge holding Sterne back, and it was greater than needing a transitional plan for their new space. Sterne’s inadvertent reinforcement that their students were “different,” was stigmatizing students and families. And no one at Sterne believed there should be a stigma.
Yet from their mission statement to their classroom and social practices the message of deficiency, and how to correct it, held them back from operationalizing what they really believe: Every one of us learns differently, and normalizing that fact will benefit everyone inside and outside the Sterne community.
I’ve been to hundreds of brand sessions in my professional life, but you guys really hit it out of the park!
John Kunze
So our strategic planning process inspired the Sterne community to imagine what the world would look like if they could really be successful in creating that new norm. We kept asking, “What if?”
What if Sterne could help the rest of the world see that everyone learns differently? We coached and supported the Sterne leadership as they built enthusiasm for a new way of thinking about what “neuro-diversity” could really mean. Not a positive, not a negative, just a norm; we are all neuro-diverse. The result was a strategic plan and brand positioning strategy built from the foundation of the gutsy and powerful new vision statement we created together: “We envision a world where everyone has a learning profile.”
No longer would Sterne be a place that called kids “different” and where families would make a transactional stop to fix an issue so they could get back to “normal.” Sterne would work to become a place where academic excellence is built on the individual strengths of students, and families engage with an extraordinary holistic experience.
Far from being an operational strategic plan about a building, this work changed the way the Sterne community sees itself and approaches everything—from curriculum to communications. Yes, it helped Sterne make use of a new building, but it also accomplished something far more impactful. Mission Minded opened the door to a new way of thinking about Sterne’s role, and what the school makes possible, not just for Bay Area families— but also for how our culture thinks and talks about personalized learning profiles.
