The Bets You Place Before School Starts
How input goals turn fall planning into measurable progress
It is a Tuesday in the middle of July. The building is quiet, half your staff is somewhere with their families, and your desk holds one spreadsheet: fall enrollment. The target says 210. The number says 187.
Then the email arrives from your board chair. Friendly, brief. “Looking forward to the fall. Could you walk us through where enrollment stands at the August meeting?”
And that question lands on a strange season. The board is warming up for the year while the machine of your administration is barely running. It is still summer. The start of school is looming. And the number on that spreadsheet will not move because you stared at it longer.
Two kinds of goals, and only one you control
Enrollment is an output goal, a target of sorts. So are retention, test scores, and annual donations. Outputs are the results that show your effectiveness, and you cannot fully control any of them. A family gets transferred. A donor’s business has a hard year. The scoreboard moves for a hundred reasons, and only some of them are you.
Input goals are different. An input is an action you choose and complete: the conversation you schedule, the call you make, the block you protect. You control inputs completely. Nothing outside your office decides whether they happened.
Principals commonly lead by staring at outputs, and that is why July feels the way it feels. You are watching a scoreboard you cannot touch, and the anxiety grows in the gap between what you want and what you can actually do today.
Outputs still matter, but only as the scoreboard. The scoreboard tells you whether your game plan is working. And no team ever won by staring at the score. Games are won by running the plan, reading the reaction, and adjusting the plan until the score moves.
Inputs are testable bets
When it comes to creating a game plan, you do not have to be right on your first try. You do have to make measurable progress toward your target. So treat every input goal as a testable bet: an action you believe will move the output, run consistently for long enough to find out whether you were right.
A school I coach needed referrals to climb. The output was daunting enough that for a while, everyone just stared at it. So we stopped staring and placed a bet: reach out to ten current families every week and ask one question. “Who do you know that you wish was at our school? Would you be willing to make an introduction?”
Now imagine that at your school. Ten conversations like that every week, starting Monday. Would you see movement in your referral pipeline by October? There is only one way to find out, and every bit of it is within your control. If the pipeline fills, you found an input that works. If it stays flat, that is worth knowing too, because a bet that fails tells you where to place the next one. Either way, you are making measurable progress instead of standing under a number, hoping.
What input goals look like for fall
Every school’s bets are different, but for a principal planning fall, they tend to look like this:
Ten family reach-outs a week, each asking for one introduction
Three classroom walkthroughs a day once the doors open
One intentional staff one-on-one every week
One donor or supporter thank-you a week
A protected two-hour block for working ON the school, not IN it
Look at what those have in common. You could complete every item on that list next week, no matter what enrollment does. That is the point.
Take your inputs to the board
This is where the August meeting changes. When you bring your board outputs alone, every meeting becomes a verdict. The number went up or the number went down, and you sit underneath it either way.
Bring your inputs too. Show the target, name the bets you are running this fall, and tell them when you will know whether each one is working. “We are testing ten family reach-outs a week against our referral target. By October we will know if it is moving the number. If it is not, this is what we try next.”
Now the board is watching a plan work instead of auditing a result. The questions that start coming in August stop feeling like a threat, because you are carrying something better than a defense. You have measures they can follow and a date when everyone will know more. Boards rarely lose confidence because a number dipped. They lose confidence when a number dips and no one can say what is being done about it.
Go home when the inputs are done
One more thing inputs give you, and it may matter most. A principal chasing outputs never gets to be finished, because the number is never finished. A principal working a set of inputs can look at the week, see every bet placed, and go home at 5:00 with a clear conscience. The results are still coming. Spring’s numbers will not move tonight.
Paul told the Corinthians that he planted and Apollos watered, but God gave the growth, and that division of labor still stands: the planting and the watering are yours, and the growth never was.
So this week, before the machine starts running: pick the one output that has been keeping you at your desk. Write down the two or three inputs you believe will move it. Put them on your calendar, and draft the one page you will hand your board in August.
It is still summer. Good. That is your runway.
