Turning Community Engagement into a Strategic Planning Superpower with Drew Howick & Dr. Jeffrey Axelbank

📕 The Ruckus Report

Quick take: Most strategic plans fail for one simple reason — leaders try to sell a vision the community didn’t help create. Drew Howick and Dr. Jeffrey Axelbank reveal how the Future Search process flips that script by putting the whole community in the room to design the future together.

🫂 Meet Your Fellow Ruckus Maker

Drew Howick is the founder of Howick Associates, a highly regarded consulting firm based in Madison Wis, and is well regarded as a trusted advisor and collaborative partner to hundreds of schools districts, most of which are in Wisconsin.

He is the author of the book, The New Compleat Facilitator: A Handbook for Facilitators.

Dr. Jeffrey Axelbank is a psychologist and consultant based in Highland Park, NJ.  His consulting work focuses on strategic engagement - getting everyone pulling in the same direction.

He is particularly passionate about whole-system interventions such as Future Search, to help diverse stakeholders in organizations and communities discover common ground in their vision of their shared future.

In this episode, Drew Howick and Dr. Jeffrey Axelbank challenge traditional education paradigms:

🧰 Key Insight #1: Stop “Selling” Strategic Plans

• What’s broken: District leaders build a strategic plan internally, then try to convince the community to support it.
• The shift: Bring 60–160 diverse stakeholders together to co-create the vision.
• Impact: When people help build the future, they defend it, support it, and help implement it.

🎯 Key Insight #2: Replace Hub-and-Spoke Engagement

• What's broken: Schools collect feedback separately through surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder meetings.
• The shift: Put parents, teachers, students, business leaders, clergy, nonprofits, and civic leaders in the same room so they talk to each other.
• Impact: Silos disappear, polarization drops, and the community discovers real common ground.

🧨 Key Insight #3: Make Strategic Planning an Event, Not a Process

• What's broken: Two years of scattered meetings that lead to a plan nobody owns.
• The shift: A 12-hour Future Search event across three sessions where stakeholders explore the past, analyze the present, and design the future together.
• Impact: Stronger trust, better ideas, unexpected partnerships, and a plan the community actually wants to execute.

🧗‍♂️ Your Do School Different Challenge

Ready to implement these ideas? Start here:

1. Tomorrow: Ask three stakeholder groups (students, teachers, and parents) one simple question: What are you glad, sad, and mad about in our school system?
2. This Month: Map the full ecosystem of your school community — businesses, nonprofits, faith groups, civic leaders — and identify who’s missing from your conversations.
3. This Semester: Host a community vision event that brings diverse voices together to define what success for students actually looks like.

📌 Ruckus Makers Don't Just Listen — They Act

If education ain’t a bit disruptive, then what are your students really learning?

This show isn’t about doing school better.

It’s about Doing School Different — and joining a growing movement of bold, creative school leaders who reject legacy models and reimagine what’s possible.

🧠 Here are four ways we can help you on your Do School Different journey

Apply to the Mastermind — Weekly coaching, peer mentorship, and our proven leadership system (The Ruckus Maker Flywheel) to help you transform your campus: https://betterleadersbetterschools.com/mastermind

📌 Ruckus Makers Don't Just Listen — They Act

If you’re waiting for more resources, more clarity, or more permission… you’ll be waiting forever.

The leaders changing schools right now aren’t waiting.

They’re redistributing power, building leaders, and creating campuses worth showing up for.

• ODP Business Solutions®

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• IXL

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• Frontline Education:

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🔍 Learn more: https://frontlineeducation.com/leaders

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