Companion to a series on primitives for higher education. See my earlier post for the broader frame.

Thanks to commenter GT for the connection to atomic habits that shows up below.

Two dominant strategic postures in education, and in plenty of adjacent fields, land at extremes. One is the comprehensive solution for the existing system: the framework that addresses every priority, the platform that integrates every workflow, the policy package that finally gets the system working coherently. The other is the systemic indictment and call for teardown: the whole structure is broken, and incremental work amounts to rearranging deck chairs. I briefly wrote about this recently after my first ASU+GSV Summit.

Both postures share a hidden assumption. They assume that someone can see far enough to evaluate the whole system and plan from there. The comprehensive solution presupposes a planner who can specify the destination along with steps to get there. The systemic indictment presupposes a critic who can compare the current state against a coherent alternative state and find it wanting. In each case, the legitimacy of the move depends on a claim about visibility.

I'm skeptical the visibility is there, and I think a different posture is needed. The argument I made in my earlier post was about trust: institutions earn the right to act by delivering. This piece sketches a parallel argument from a different, more pragmatic angle. Even setting trust aside, most institutions can't see far enough from where they are now or have a complete enough picture of the world to reasonably plot a comprehensive plan in the first place and so need a different approach. Same conclusion, different reason.

The "two steps out" frame

Steph Smith has a piece called "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably" that includes a useful framing. Imagine a person at Tier 57 of some hierarchy of capability or accomplishment. They can see Tier 58 and 59. They can probably make a reasonable plan to get there. They cannot meaningfully see Tier 89. Tier 89 view requires capabilities, relationships, and frames of reference that only become available after living and passing through many intermediate tiers. Strategic planning to Tier 89 from Tier 57 is mostly fantasy. The path runs through the next two steps, and then through the next two, and then the next.

Smith pairs this with a second observation, drawing on James Clear's Atomic Habits: the discipline that gets you up the tiers requires both consistent inputs (sustained repetition to make progress despite challenges and setbacks) and intentional inputs (repetition that adjusts in response to feedback, so the inputs are course correcting and leading somewhere). Repetition alone doesn't make progress. Repetition with honest assessment of whether the inputs are working does.

Smith writes for individuals. The frame applies to organizations too.

The institutional version

The epistemic limit applies to institutions, in ways that make distant planning harder rather than easier than the individual case.

First, within institutions, no single person holds the whole picture. An institution's "two steps out" is composed of capabilities, relationships, knowledge, and credibility, and the relevant observations about what is next-possible are distributed across many people. The leader has one perspective; program staff see another set of moves; the policy lead sees another; the infrastructure builder sees a fourth. The institution's two-steps-out has to be assembled across people who each see a partial view, and the assembly itself is a capability that has to be built and maintained.

Second, what gets repeated inside an institution is not a function of one person's will. It depends on the incentives, attention, coordination, and the friction of moving anything through more than a few people. Smith's individual can decide to wake up at 6 AM. An institution that wants to ship a particular kind of work weekly has to make that delivery cheap enough, well-incentivized enough, and structurally easy enough for it to actually happen, week after week, in a way that survives turnover, distraction, and the ordinary entropy of organizational life. Anyone who's ever convinced a CEO or system leader of a plan and then wondered why the rest of the organization didn't follow along has lived this reality.

The strategic implications matter. Plans that depend on long-horizon visibility are usually wrong, because the relevant moves are not visible from the starting position. And even when a plan happens to be right, the likelihood of carrying it out as written is low. Plans built on short-horizon iteration with disciplined direction are more durable, because they are doing the only thing the actor can actually do: take the next move, and let the next move after that come into view.

This is what my earlier post was trying to name, in a different vocabulary. Quick wins compound when each one is on a consistent path. The reason they compound is the one Smith is articulating: each delivered move reshapes what becomes visible next. The institution that ships a working tool sees its users in a way the institution writing a strategy memo doesn't. The agency that fixes the small thing develops the relationships that make the contested thing legible. The team that completes a project builds capacity that planning, however careful, doesn't produce.

Two pieces of evidence

Two cases from the education sector were in my mind as I thought about this frame. They're not perfect examples, but together they illustrate the frame.

McKinsey's 2007 study of 25 school systems found that comprehensive structural reforms (decentralization, smaller schools, charter schools, class-size reduction) did not move outcomes across most of those systems, despite a generation of investment. The instructional moves that did work were narrower and more specific: selective teacher recruitment, sustained development of teachers into effective instructors, and targeted intervention to reach every student. A New Zealand policymaker, quoted in the report, summarized the lesson plainly: "It was naive to assume that classroom quality would improve just because we changed our structure." That is the Tier-89 plan failing in real time, in real systems, across real reform cycles.

Mississippi, since 2013, has walked a sequence of the kinds of moves McKinsey identifies in its efforts to improve literacy. The Literacy-Based Promotion Act, signed in April 2013, set the legal frame. The state then deployed embedded literacy coaches in schools with the most struggling readers, two to three days a week for the full school year. It rolled out science-of-reading training (the LETRS program) to roughly thousands of K–3 teachers. It put universal screening in place. It used a third-grade reading-promotion gate to surface students who needed intensive intervention. By 2024, Mississippi had moved from 49th to 9th nationally on fourth-grade NAEP reading; after demographic adjustment, it ranked first in the country in both reading and math. In March 2026, the legislature took up Senate Bill 2294 to extend the framework into upper grades and to apply the same approach to math, and a month later it passed.

There is a fair bit of controversy about Mississippi's results. We can't isolate which Mississippi mechanism did how much of the work; the package was sequenced rather than designed all at once, and the national NAEP average dropped over the same window, so Mississippi's rank rose partly because peers regressed. There is also a live debate about whether the third-grade retention policy is doing some of the work mechanically, by removing weak readers from the test cohort rather than improving reading instruction. McKinsey's positive findings, similarly, don't fully explain causation in any of the systems.

The defensible claim is narrower and plainer, which I think is one of the reasons it's hard to accept. Institutional change of this magnitude proceeds by walking a sequence of locally visible moves over many years, in a direction the institution can articulate but a destination it cannot fully resolve from the starting position. McKinsey establishes the negative result across many systems: comprehensive plans are unreliable. Mississippi illustrates the positive one: a sequence of next-two-tier moves, sustained for more than a decade, with each move reshaping what becomes available next. Neither case feels like a hero's journey except in the willingness to deal with reality as it is and the steadfastness of execution. That seems too simple.

Where this leaves strategy

Strategic planning, then, is the discipline of finding the next two steps in a direction the institution wants to go, and taking them. The destination is downstream of that discipline; it can't be locked in from the starting position. The institutions that get to do consequential work are the ones delivering something this quarter. They understand the long arc as a thing built one move at a time, each move reshaping what becomes possible. The plan is real; the destination, mostly, isn't.

Sources & references

On the "two steps out" frame and disciplined repetition

• Steph Smith, "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably." The Tier 57/89 framing in this piece is hers.

• James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (Avery, 2018). Source for the consistent-and-intentional inputs distinction Smith builds on.

On the adjacent possible

• Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford University Press, 1995). The original biological framing.

• Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead, 2010). My introduction to the concept; covered more fully in The virtue of quick wins.

On the failure of comprehensive school-system reform

• McKinsey & Company, How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top (September 2007). The most useful piece is the negative finding: decentralization, smaller schools, charter schools, and class-size reduction did not move outcomes across most of the 25 systems studied, despite a generation of investment. The three positive drivers (selective teacher recruitment, sustained instructional development, targeted intervention for every student) read better as a reference architecture than as a recipe.

On the Mississippi reading reforms

• Mississippi Literacy-Based Promotion Act, signed April 2013. The legal foundation for the sequence of moves that followed.

• "Mississippi Miracle", Wikipedia. Useful summary of the timeline, NAEP results, and the LETRS / literacy-coach mechanisms.

• "Was there a 'Mississippi miracle' behind its soaring reading scores?," Chalkbeat (July 2023). The careful skeptical read on whether the third-grade retention policy is doing some of the work mechanically.

• "The Mississippi Miracle wasn't a retention-policy mirage," Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Direct response to the Chalkbeat critique.

• "Lawmakers push plan for a math 'miracle'," Mississippi Today (March 2026). The 2026 SB 2294 push to extend the framework into upper grades and into math.