Letter From the CEO: Q4

Dear Colleagues and Friends, 

As we all prepare for winter break, this season brings a natural pause...a short moment to take a step back from the urgency of the semester and reflect on how your institutions are engaging in change. Over the past quarter, our team at Student-Ready Strategies has worked closely with partners and institutions navigating a familiar challenge: how to move meaningful work forward without losing community along the way.

One theme surfaces consistently in these conversations: the risks we take when we rely on assumptions. It can be tempting to guess how constituents will react to new ideas or initiatives when time and capacity are limited. But those assumptions can quietly derail our best work even if we have the strongest strategy. When we assume we know what people think, we miss opportunities for clarity, partnership, and trust. Sometimes we might even introduce new resistance where none existed.

We’ve seen across the country that genuine engagement is not about talking people into change. It's about listening first, adjusting with intention, and then showing people how their perspectives informed the final approach. This is where change efforts build momentum, and it's also where teams become further invested because they begin to feel ownership...instead of obligation.

As you look ahead to the new year, I encourage you to enter upcoming projects with an assumption-free mindset:

• Identify all constituents who will be touched by the change...not just those with decisionmaker titles, but those who will implement new processes and those who will be affected by them.

• Gather perspectives through the right mix of surveys, conversations, and working sessions.

• Incorporate what you learn, whether that means modifying your proposal or simply refining how you communicate it.

• Close the loop by showing people where their fingerprints appear in the final decision.

This is more than a process. It's a commitment to fairness, clarity, and transparency. And when institutions approach change in this way, we see not only smoother adoption, but stronger student-centered outcomes.

Even as the national landscape continues to shift, the work of creating Student-Ready institutions presses forward. This quarter, we’ve supported new engagement efforts, completed key phases of statewide initiatives, and partnered with institutions preparing to launch equity-driven policy reforms in the coming year. The momentum is real, and your dedication to thoughtful, inclusive practice is a large reason why.

In this season, we are thankful. We thank you all for the work you've done this year and for the way you show up for your students, your colleagues, and your communities. I hope the winter break offers you rest, clarity, and renewed purpose for the months ahead. Let's hit the ground running in January!

With gratitude,

Sarah Ancel

Founder + CEO