Developing and Refining Strategy: A DS4E Case Study
At The Starfish Institute, we support visionary organizations to develop and refine strategy. We partner with you to build a strategic framework for decision-making and prioritizing where to focus resources and action. Based on your particular challenge, we may do this by unearthing and working through big strategic questions, conducting customized research, or building your capacity for system change.
Case Study: Positioning an Early-Stage Coalition for Nimble Growth and Catalytic Leadership
Data Science 4 Everyone (DS4E) is a coalition working to ensure all students have access to data science education. Since launching in 2019 within the University of Chicago Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change (RISC), DS4E has gained national visibility for cultivating a rapidly-growing coalition, amplifying the need for data science (including through a popular Freakonomics podcast), convening experts across the field to advance research and practice-based change, and partnering with local, state, and national policymakers to initiate policy reform. With this early success, DS4E was ready to spin out into its own independent entity at the University of Chicago in 2022.
The Challenge: There is much to celebrate in DS4E’s early success, but to Executive Director Zarek Drozda, it also presented an opportunity to make even greater impact. When Drozda stepped up to lead, he knew strategic prioritization would be critical to building the next phase of the work, especially because there seemed to be endless ways to advance data science education as an organization seeking to build and coalesce the emerging field of data science learning. How to focus was less apparent. DS4E partnered with the Starfish Institute to help tighten their organization's vision, articulate a strategy, prioritize workstreams, and support with leadership coaching.
The Result: The Starfish Institute designed a bespoke engagement with DS4E that focused their “how” by starting with streamlining and recentering on their “why.” We created a list of key questions to guide a series of strategic conversations that resulted in a ready-to-implement strategic roadmap.
We started by revising DS4E’s vision statement to clarify their core purpose and articulate their desired impact:
Data Science 4 Everyone’s vision is that all students have the confidence and skills to access, collect, understand, interpret, utilize, and communicate data in decision-making in their day-to-day lives and careers.
We then guided DS4E through unearthing their own big strategic questions and how to prioritize answering them. This process identified six key outcomes DS4E believes is necessary to achieve their vision:
Growing the field: There is more demand for data science education, and more organizations and individuals work on data science education in collaborative, coordinated, and/or complementary ways
Shared Understanding: There is increased agreement on what students should learn about data science
High-Quality Instructional Materials: There are quality and sufficient materials and support for teachers to teach data skills and knowledge
Qualified and Diverse Educators: There are more teachers who qualified to deliver data science education
Student Pathways: There are robust student pathways accessible based on student access, school, and learning
Continuous Improvement: The field has and continues to grow a robust knowledge base for how to teach data science, and has the ability to learn and adapt more quickly
Through this strategic process, DS4E articulated that, while these six outcomes are important, it alone is not responsible for achieving them. Instead, they play a key role in contributing to outcomes, in particular by building and coalescing a field that is capable of realizing them all. Starfish supported DS4E to identify its unique place as initiating upstream actions that can lead to or unlock much broader change across the field, which pointed the organization to initially focus on two of the outcomes: building demand, supply, and coordination, and increasing agreement on what to teach (e.g. data science standards or competencies).
Realizing the interdependence between strategy and leadership, we integrated leadership coaching into the strategy sessions. The coaching sessions prepared Drozda to implement the new strategy and build a dynamic team culture.
The strategic roadmap has been instrumental in guiding DS4E’s actions in the months following the project. As a result, the organization has significantly expanded their national reach, in both media and policy. DS4E has also managed to catalyze action in multiple U.S. states, support local leaders in creating teacher training summits coast-to-coast, and garnered high-profile media attention, from the New York Times to EdWeek to cable television.
The Experience: “The Starfish Institute’s strategic planning methodology was invaluable during this pivotal phase of DS4E’s journey. The Starfish team brought both intellectual insight that helped recenter and sharpen our vision and on-the-ground experience that enabled us to get tactical about implementing strategy. Throughout our engagement, I was grateful for how the Starfish team was attuned to our needs and willing to adjust plans mid-course accordingly. What resulted is something that is uniquely and passionately DS4E, building our identity and priorities as we look to broaden our impact.”
Zarek Drozda, Executive Director, Data Science 4 Everyone