I suspect one of the hardest places for a Principal to find themselves is not watching a strategy fail, but watching it go nowhere.

Failure, while uncomfortable, can at least be obvious. Something was tried, but it didn't work. Lessons were learned, and the school can decide what happens next.

Stagnation feels different.

The strategy hasn't necessarily failed, but it hasn't really succeeded either. And whatever strategic outcome the school has been pursuing looks much the same as it did twelve or eighteen months earlier.

Perhaps the dial has moved slightly. Perhaps it has even gone backwards.

Yet everyone has been working just as hard.

That is the part I find intriguing, because I suspect stagnation can be more draining than outright failure. When people can see progress, effort often creates its own energy. When they are working just as hard and getting very little in return, the same effort can begin to feel exhausting.

When effort isn't producing strategic progress

A stalled strategy rarely means people have stopped working on it.

Often, quite the opposite is true.

Business As Usual (BAU) continues to tread its faithful path, and from the outside, there might be plenty of evidence of activity.

But eventually somebody needs to ask the uncomfortable question:

What has changed because of all this work?

I imagine this is where stagnation starts to feel very different from slow progress.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explored this in their research into what they called the Progress Principle. They analysed around 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people. They found that one of the strongest influences on people's experience of their work was making progress in something they considered meaningful. Conversely, setbacks, or the feeling that ground had been lost, featured prominently on people's worst days.

People can tolerate hard work when they can connect that effort to progress. In fact, progress often provides the energy required to keep going.

But the opposite is much harder.

It is a little like running on a treadmill at your local gym. There is plenty of effort, and there might even be data showing how many kilometres have been travelled, but when you look up, the scenery hasn't changed.

For school Principals, that feeling may sit atop an already enormous workload. The 2025 Australian Principals Health and Wellbeing Survey found that the sheer quantity of work remained the number one source of stress for school leaders, as it has across all fifteen years of the survey.

That makes me wonder whether we underestimate the additional burden of strategic stagnation.

A Principal isn't sitting around waiting for the strategy to work. They are already handling the myriad tasks their role demands while simultaneously trying to move the school towards a different future.

When all that additional strategic effort produces little discernible movement, frustration can understandably turn into something closer to fear.

When a stalled school strategy creates even more activity

The instinctive response to stagnation can be to do more.

Before long, the answer to a strategy that isn't moving becomes another activity.

And then another.

I've increasingly wondered whether this creates its own vicious cycle. We don't see enough progress, so we add more activity. That activity consumes capacity and fragments attention, which makes progress on the things that really matter even harder to achieve, so we respond by adding something else.

I explored a similar problem recently in Strategic Misalignment: When Busy Schools Stop Moving Together, in which I argued that schools can become extraordinarily busy without necessarily moving together in a single strategic direction.

There is research behind the idea of change fatigue. Studies have found that frequent organisational change can contribute to greater exhaustion and burnout, while reducing engagement, satisfaction, and organisational commitment.

Schools aren't immune from this.

Sometimes the answer to stagnation may actually be subtraction.

That doesn't mean abandoning ambition. It might mean giving the strategy enough oxygen to succeed by removing some of the competing activity surrounding it.

I keep coming back to the idea that great strategy should make less happen, not more.

Before changing the school strategy, diagnose the stagnation

There is another danger here.

When progress is disappointing, it can be tempting to conclude that the strategy itself must be wrong.

Sometimes it is.

The assumptions underpinning it may no longer hold, circumstances may have changed, or the strategic choice may not have produced the response the school expected.

This is also where strategic dexterity becomes important, because leaders need to be able to distinguish between a strategy that requires more time and one where the evidence genuinely tells them to rethink their choices.

But that isn't the only explanation.

The strategy might be perfectly reasonable, even as the school lacks the capability, resources, or discipline required to execute it. The Australian Institute of Company Directors has recently argued that organisational capability converts strategy into performance, and that gaps in leadership, skills, culture, or ways of working should therefore be treated as strategy-execution risks rather than simply workforce issues.

Or perhaps execution began strongly but wasn't sustained. McKinsey's research into large-scale organisational transformations found that organisations lose, on average, around 42 per cent of the expected value of a transformation during the later execution and sustaining phases.

And sometimes the problem is simply measurement.

A school might be waiting for a lag measure such as enrolment, retention, academic performance, or reputation to move, even as the changes that will eventually influence that result are still developing beneath the surface.

This is where I think looking for evidence of progress becomes important.

It might be a lead measure slowly moving, or a practice becoming more deeply embedded. It might even be a capability gradually improving. Sometimes progress is simply evident in the decision to stop doing something because something more important now deserves the time, attention, and resources. Even disproving a hypothesis can be progress if it gives the school the confidence to adjust its strategy rather than continue down the same path.

None of those things necessarily make for an exciting annual report.

But they tell us something important: we are learning and we are moving.

How the Board can help when strategy stalls

I also think stagnation is one of those moments where a good Board can add considerable value to a Principal.

Not by taking over the strategy and certainly not by dropping into operational management, but by helping leadership think more clearly about why progress is proving difficult.

The AICD describes strategy, resources, and performance as core Board responsibilities, while maintaining the distinction between Board oversight and management's responsibility for execution. Roger Martin has similarly argued that the Board's involvement in strategy shouldn't sit at either extreme, where directors either devise the strategy themselves or wait for management to present something for approval. Instead, he advocates a more iterative relationship in which the Board helps interrogate the strategic problem and the choices being made.

This seems especially useful when a strategy seems to have halted.

The Board can challenge whether the original assumptions remain sound, ask whether management has the resources and capability required to execute the strategy, and examine whether the measures being reported actually provide useful evidence of progress.

Just as importantly, it can protect the strategy.

If the Principal and Executive are constantly being asked to pursue additional priorities, respond to new ideas, or accommodate every worthy request, the Board needs to recognise the cumulative effect of those choices.

Perhaps one of the most useful questions a Board can ask when strategy has stalled isn't:

What else are you going to do?

It might be:

What is preventing this strategy from moving?

The answers to those two questions could lead a school in very different directions.

Strategic progress doesn't have to be spectacular

I don't think the antidote to stagnation is exponential growth.

In schools, progress is rarely that neat, and occasionally the most significant change takes years to become visible in the measures that matter.

Nor should incremental progress automatically be dismissed. If the strategic ambition is sufficiently difficult, incremental progress might be entirely appropriate.

What matters is whether the school can see some relationship between the effort it is applying and the future it is trying to create.

Because I suspect that is where the real fear of stagnation comes from.

It isn't simply looking at a metric and finding that it hasn't changed.

It is looking at the same metric after twelve months of considerable effort and wondering whether another twelve months will produce exactly the same result.

Leaders don't necessarily need to see the finish line rapidly approaching, but they probably need some evidence that today's effort is changing tomorrow's position.

Progress doesn't always need to be spectacular.

But it does need to be visible.