Governance Scenario
Standard 2.1 · Mission and Vision Alignment
The Venture That Drifted
By Synnovate · Published 2026 · Governance Scenario
The Situation
The online learning programme had been launched as a way to extend the school's reach - to serve families in geographies where the school's model was not physically accessible. It was positioned explicitly as a mission initiative: the same pedagogy, the same values, but delivered differently.
Three years later, it enrolled 4,000 students across seventeen countries. It generated a margin that was subsidising two underperforming departments in the main school. The curriculum had been adapted substantially to serve markets where different content was commercially necessary. The head was proud of it.
At a strategy day, a trustee asked a question nobody had asked before: was the online programme part of the school's mission, or was it generating the revenue the school needed to pursue its mission? She said she was not sure those were the same thing.
Provocations
- "A programme that begins as a mission extension can become a revenue imperative without anyone deciding that it should."
- "When a subsidiary operation starts subsidising the core, the governance question is not whether this is useful - it is whether it is intended."
- "A school that adapts its curriculum to serve markets is making a pedagogical decision and a commercial one at the same time. Boards rarely discuss both."
- "The question 'is this still us?' is a governance question that boards are often reluctant to ask about things that are working."
Considerations
Mission drift is rarely the result of a bad decision. It is usually the result of a sequence of individually reasonable decisions that accumulate into a substantial shift in what an institution actually does. The challenge for boards is that by the time the drift is visible, the institution has often become dependent on whatever it has drifted towards.
The trustee's question - is the online programme part of the mission or is it generating the revenue the school needs to pursue its mission - is exactly the kind of question boards should be asking about any significant programme. It is also the kind of question that feels uncomfortable when the answer is commercially inconvenient.
A school that uses revenue from a curriculum that does not reflect its values to fund a curriculum that does is in a position that requires explicit board discussion and a conscious decision about whether to continue. The alternative - treating the commercial arm as simply successful and moving on - is not governance. It is avoidance.
The strategic review process should include a mission alignment test for significant programmes: not just 'is this working?' but 'is this us?' These are different standards, and both matter.
Platforms like Loom can support this by maintaining a clear record of how programmes were originally framed - their mission rationale, the conditions under which they were approved - so boards can assess whether what a programme has become is consistent with why it was created.