5 Ways to Stop "Initiative Overload" and Design a Cohesive Vision

David Lee
Dec 23, 2025
3 min read

Is Your School Strategy Starting to Look Like an Ugly Holiday Sweater?

It’s the last week before winter break. The hallways are buzzing, the coffee consumption is at an all-time high, and the "Ugly Holiday Sweaters" are out in full force.

You know the ones: tacky, garish, and covered in random festive elements that seem to have been thrown together with a glue gun and a prayer. I never quite understood the appeal until my favorite sports teams started making them—then I was all in.

But I realized that many schools are starting to look exactly like these sweaters.

Just like a sweater bombarded with too many decorations, schools are often bombarded with new initiatives, new curriculum programs, and "must-do" recommendations from consultants every single year.

The result isn't festive; it’s chaotic.

The Cost of "Initiative Overload"

According to Dr. Lynell Powell, when a school suffers from initiative overload, three things happen:

Frustration builds among the community.
Mass confusion spreads regarding what is actually important.
Enthusiasm dies, leading to a lack of buy-in.

We see this most often with the "Curriculum-in-a-Box" phenomenon. Schools adopt rigid, scripted manuals that undermine teacher agency and ignore the unique cultural needs of the students. As my colleague Shaun Kirkwood shared (quoting Paul France): "Curriculum manuals were designed by flawed individuals with biases... Teachers must use manuals mindfully."

So, how do we take the "Ugly Sweater" school—overloaded, chaotic, and itchy—and turn it into a sleek, cohesive learning environment?

Here are 5 design-based strategies to declutter your school’s vision.

1. Cohesion Over Compliance

Initiatives shouldn't live in silos. When we treat Social Studies, SEL, and Literacy as separate islands, we create clutter. We need a shared vision where every initiative connects to an instructional goal. Use human-centered storytelling to show your staff how these pieces fit together. Don't just show them the "what"—show them the future ecosystem of your school.

2. Strategy vs. Planning (They Are Not the Same)

Roger Martin, a global leader on strategy, argues that most "strategic planning" is just planning.

Planning is a comforting checklist of things we control (budgets, timelines).
Strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you to "win"—or in our case, to create actual impact. Don't just make a checklist. Make hard choices about where you want to play and how you will win.

3. Adopt Design Mindsets

To fix the system, we have to think like designers, not just administrators.

Embrace Ambiguity: Accept that you can't control every outcome.
Bias Toward Action: Stop meeting about it and start prototyping it.
Radical Collaboration: Bring diverse voices into the room to solve the problem.

4. Human-Centered Systems Thinking (eduPermaculture)

In my work, I use an approach I call eduPermaculture. It’s about viewing the school as a natural ecosystem. In nature, nothing is wasted; everything is interconnected. When we look at our schools this way, we stop adding random "decorations" (initiatives) and start nurturing the roots. We look for the relationships between the people and the systems.

5. The Subtraction Mindset

This is the most powerful tool a leader has. As Justin Reich from MIT suggests, if we can't fix a system by adding to it, we must fix it by subtracting. Ask yourself: How can we cut the fat? Instead of adding a new 30-minute writing program that squeezes the schedule, can we subtract the manual and instead integrate writing best practices directly into the Science or Social Studies units we already have?

Final Thoughts

We all understand why schools do this. In a competitive climate, we want to shout, "Look at us! Look at all the things we are doing!"

But more isn't better. Better is better.

Let’s retire the ugly sweater approach. Let’s strip away the chaos, subtract the non-essentials, and design a learning experience that is lean, purposeful, and impactful.