If It’s Fuzzy, It Won’t Fly

Welcome to our 62nd edition, Educational Leaders, and hello, October!

Here is a little calendar trivia to start the month: October 1 falls on a Thursday this year, which just happens to be the day we send out our Educentric newsletters. In fact, this is only the second time in 2026 that the first day of a month has landed on a Thursday, with the first being January 1. We will take the coincidence as a good way to start a new month together!

In today's edition, we want to talk about something that can create problems long before we realize it: fuzziness.

There is something interesting about that word. We usually associate fuzzy with a bad thing. Fuzzy directions, fuzzy expectations, and fuzzy numbers do not exactly inspire much confidence.

On the contrary, recent research on short-term memory offers a different perspective. Researchers found that even memories that seem imprecise or “fuzzy” can still contain useful information. In one study, participants were sometimes able to correctly recognize information later even when their initial recollection appeared to be little more than a guess. In other words, our memories do not always have to be perfectly precise to give us something useful to work with.

That may work surprisingly well for the human brain, but we are not so sure it works for a school improvement plan.

When it comes to leading people toward an important outcome, there comes a point when being somewhere in the right direction simply isn't precise enough. And that brings us to today's conversation.

Some of the language we regularly use in education sounds perfectly clear at first. We talk about improving student achievement, strengthening Tier 1 instruction, increasing student engagement, building a stronger school culture, or using data more effectively.

None of those goals is wrong. The challenge is that people can agree with the same words without necessarily having the same understanding of what those words mean.

Take “increase student engagement.” Are we talking about attendance, classroom participation, assignment completion, student belonging, or something else? A principal, instructional coach, and teacher could hear the same priority and walk away with different ideas about what needs to happen next.

Vague language now becomes more than a communication issue. Once people have to act, the details that were left undefined still have to be decided by someone. Staff members will naturally use their own knowledge and professional judgment to fill in those blanks, and what began as one shared priority can gradually become several different versions of the work.

Vague Is Easy Until You Have to Act on It

Consider a statement we have probably all heard in one form or another: “Somebody needs to do something about that.”

It may express a legitimate concern, but it does not give us much to work with. Who is somebody? What exactly is something? And which part of that are we trying to change?

An article from Thinking Directions uses this type of statement to illustrate what happens when vague ideas become concrete. Once we identify the person, the action, the problem, and the timing, we can begin thinking about the real implications. Is this actually a priority? Who has the time and responsibility to address it? What will the work require? What might happen as a result?

The same principle applies to school improvement. “We need to improve student engagement” is easy to support. Once a team identifies the students involved, the outcome it wants to change, the evidence it will use, who owns the work, and what people will actually do, the conversation becomes much more useful.

Getting specific forces us to make decisions that vague language allows us to postpone. It also gives the team something concrete enough to question, adjust, and eventually act upon.

Specificity Also Brings Accountability

Another change happens when we move from a broad intention to something specific: we can eventually determine whether we accomplished it.

“We want to improve reading” communicates an important aspiration, but it leaves plenty unanswered. Once a school identifies the particular outcome, baseline, target, measure, and timeframe, everyone has a clearer understanding of what success will mean.

Of course, not everything that matters in education can or should be reduced to a number. Professional judgment, context, and the individual needs of students will always matter. But when an outcome is important enough to become a schoolwide priority, people should have a shared understanding of what progress and success look like.

Educentric’s School Breakthrough Flight Plan

When central office staff and School Breakthrough Teams leave an Educentric training, they leave with more than an introduction to the Flight Plan. They spend time learning how the different components work together and, importantly, how to begin building a Flight Plan around their school's specific needs and priorities.

Developing the Flight Plan requires the team to make the decisions that broad language leaves unanswered. What is our Priority Objective? What North Star Metric represents the ultimate outcome we want to achieve? Which Key Progress Indicators will help us determine whether our strategies and tactics are producing the movement we expect? What Key Results will tell us what we ultimately accomplished?

There is a reason the Flight Plan is built this way. We designed it to bring greater specificity to the work, one decision at a time.

Each part removes another layer of ambiguity. By the time a team begins putting its Flight Plan into action, the goal is for people to understand not only where they are going, but what they are measuring, what they are doing to get there, and what success will look like.

This does not mean the Flight Plan will never change. In fact, teams should continue learning from their data and adjusting their strategies and tactics when needed. But those adjustments are much easier to make when everyone is working from the same clearly defined plan. You can adjust the route along the way, but you first need to know where you are trying to go.

Is It Clear Enough to Act On?

As you look at your plans and priorities, pay attention to words such as improve, strengthen, increase, support, and engage. They are useful words, but they often need another question behind them: What exactly do we mean?

Stay with that question long enough to define what you are trying to change, what success will look like, how progress will be measured, and what people will actually need to do.

There will always be unknowns in school improvement, and there should always be room for professional judgment and adjustment. But your people should not have to guess where they are going or what success means when they get there.

Make the destination clear enough to guide the work, and make the plan specific enough to move it forward. Because if it’s fuzzy, it won’t fly.