Crises aren’t going anywhere, but you can build up a shared language and toolkit for your team. We want to give you what you need to be resilient for the next shock, while helping you refocus your team to come out of this one even stronger. The team at NoTosh will help you carve out that creative time and space, and teach you tried and tested techniques of crisis leadership:

• Re-envision your school, with your community alongside you.
• Communicate confidently, colourfully and concisely.
• Set up systems to act quickly, and empower middle leaders.
• Clear creative headspace and provide frameworks for innovations in the community.
• Design more agile ways to evaluate progress.

We’ll meet every day over two weeks and share tools and frameworks that work for getting your team refreshed and ready for the next challenge. We’ll give you time to learn from peers and from our own experience managing crises and campaigns for our clients.  

In our sessions, we'll actually do some of the work you need to free up your creative space as a leadership or governance team. You'll actually make changes in real time that stand you and your team in good stead for months to come. 

We'll also open up your eyes to some more in depth processes you might want to dive into later, depending on the type of challenge you face, and the strategy you develop in this course. You'll have access to the material for as long as you need it, so you can always go back and review. 

If you need an invoice or want to use a purchase order, just let us know: [email protected] 

Frequently Asked Questions

This isn’t the best time to be thinking about vision - we’ve got so much to do! 

It’s challenge after challenge at the moment: the current crisis, the potential rebound, and the desire to return to normal once everyone’s confidence has returned. But leaders can’t wait to take on these challenges sequentially. The lead times for developing a long term strategy, and the agile leadership and management capabilities to put it into action, are just too long. 

I don’t have the time to set aside an hour a day to think about this

If you don’t feel you have the time, then you and your team definitely need to take out this time. The long-term future direction of your school is what we’re pushing, challenging and rethinking - for an hour every couple of weeks. As part of this course, we’ll help you work out how to clear the decks and carve out the creative “white space” with your team that you need to do good work. 

Our community is struggling to cope with today, let alone any kind of strategic process

Your community want to know that there’s a plan, and we’re going to help you communicate the longer term plan and vision beyond the current crisis. This is what people want so that they can gain confidence in the plan for tomorrow and trust the decisions being taken today. And the best way to engage your community is to involve them in designing the strategy in the first place - because they’re the ones who have to make it happen, from student to parent to teacher to partner. 

People want to get back to normal - they can’t imagine transforming the school

That’s understandable, but the current crisis, and future crises which inevitably will come along, require different ways of working. They need us to learn lessons from our mistakes in this time, and the silver linings that have emerged. Not every leader is comfortable with transformation management - that’s a fact - but it’s all learnable, and we’ll coach you through the changes you might want to take in your own work, as well as your planning. 

We’ve done scenario planning already

Most schools have worked out what they’ll do in very clear scenarios: no school or some school. The ‘hybrid model’ could be anything, frankly. That’s where we want to play. Working out how to keep your school afloat and happy, whatever the conditions you’re operating in, is an essential part of survival. Only 8% of companies haven’t yet done this, or planned to do it: if you’re in that 8% it’s time to change. 

As a leader I can’t not look after the urgent short-term issues of today

We’re going to work with you to show you how to reallocate and distribute responsibility to those closest to the challenges, and build in mechanisms that keep people accountable. All so that you can free up your head to look ahead. 

We do our change management at a leadership retreat: it can’t work online

Let’s be honest: leadership retreats of a weekend or less never delivered a full strategy, and certainly didn’t get it working quickly, on the ground. By working online, little and often, and with our coaching to get you acting on what you’re learning straightaway, you’ll see a greater impact than if you were to go it alone. 

We’ve got a vision and a strategy already

Having the strategy written down doesn’t mean it’s happening just as you want it to on the ground. And having it on paper doesn’t mean it resonates in everyone’s heads, every day. We’ll help you rethink not just how you communicate strategy, but how you plan it collaboratively with your teams and community. You want everyone to get the strategy - we’ll help you involve them in it. 

Our planning cycle has a couple of years left on it: we don’t need to rethink strategy

In a time of crisis, traditional timescales for strategy make little sense. Even in the world of construction, where timescales can last years, Chinese construction firm CSCEC moved to a 24-hour cadence in order to build two hospitals in ten days. Pharma has been working to develop a vaccine for COVID19 at a cadence several years faster than normal. We’ll work with you to look at how you can adopt more agile leadership and management routines, and increase your cadence of switching ideas, building on successes and halting work that doesn’t make an impact.

Your facilitators

Ewan McIntosh founded consulting firm NoTosh a decade ago from his kitchen table in Edinburgh, growing it to offices in Melbourne, Adelaide, New York and Toronto. He has designed and led award-winning change management and innovation programmes with many top international schools, as well as in 165,000-employee corporations. After coining the phrase “The Problem Finders”, he is gifted at giving people the insights that help them identify and overcome their greatest challenges, to work better together and rethink the environment in which they work and learn. 

Jeremy Weinstein leads key projects in Australia and Asia for NoTosh: multi-million dollar architectural projects, tight-budget design sprints needing impressive outputs, and coaching for executives. He’s a trained mechanical engineer and experienced teacher, with an eye for how we design better services and experiences across education, healthcare and media.

If you require the use of a Purchase Order and/or Invoice, or wish to purchase 5 or more licences, contact us for details: [email protected].