During AY2021-2022, CAL began its strategic roadmapping process. We hired Spartina, an aptly named consulting firm whose approach to strategic planning centers Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry’s ethos states that people invest in what they helped create and that momentum grows when we focus on our shared strengths and values. This meshes with CAL’s values of openness, equity, and trust and enabled us to come together in ways that felt familiar and authentic to our community.
First, CAL’s central administration cultivated the Appreciative Inquiry Core Team (AICT), a group of faculty, staff, students, and administrators who wanted to be part of the working group developing the strategic roadmap. CAL planned the AICT to be representative of all position categories within the college, bringing together members of our community who rarely interact to form a new team with unified purpose. The AICT met together with Spartina throughout the academic year to fine-tune our approaches to norming expectations and to receive training support for hosting community feedback events.
Across AY2021-2022, multiple events were held to garner ideas and input from CAL’s stakeholders: alumni, students, faculty, staff, and community members. These events included listening sessions, surveys and asynchronous mechanisms, and focus groups. Our goal was to ensure that the roadmap direction felt true to our community’s sense of its own identity, and to make sure that we took on board as many voices, identities, perspectives, and concerns as possible. We asked our stakeholders and ourselves these questions:
Add as a Box on the Side:
What makes a college irresistible?
How can CAL differentiate itself from other arts and letters colleges, domestically and abroad?
How can we remove barriers to success through fostering both accessibility and accountability?
How can we scaffold tangible action items to create intangible, culture-informing results?
How can we develop metrics (and their baselines) to inform our progress?
How can we commit to continuing to engage global learning, language, and cultures?
The result of these conversations and listening sessions helped the AICT identify key focus areas that served as representative intersections of what our community had shared. In AY2022-2023, a smaller group of authors collated and refined the contributions of the AICT, culminating in a Summer 2023 retreat series where department chairs and college staff collaborated to write the strategic plan objectives, strategies, and key performance indicators. Our focus areas are assertions of value; our objectives and strategies attempt to manifest those values and align them with our shared purpose. We believe that focusing on assessment, reflection, and accountability will bring our values to the forefront of our innovation, our pedagogy, and all our research and creative activities.
This commitment to our purpose makes us irresistible.