Customer Story

Hobbs Municipal Schools: How One District Used a Proof of Concept to Rethink Leadership Responsiveness

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District: Hobbs Municipal Schools
Leader: Gene Strickland, Superintendent

50% reduction

in leadership analysis time to interpret engagement results

5,000 students

across specialized programs served through evidence-based decision-making

Moving Beyond Assumption-Driven Leadership

When Hobbs Municipal Schools entered a Proof of Concept with ThoughtExchange, Superintendent Gene Strickland was not looking for just another survey tool.

The district already had quantitative systems. What concerned him was something harder to measure. Were district leaders actually understanding the people behind the responses?

We’ve enjoyed the qualitative piece of ThoughtExchange. Before, we were making some best guesses about what we thought, and oftentimes that may have been our own bias that we ran with. That’s not necessarily what’s accurate.
Gene Strickland, Superintendent

That tension extended far beyond surveys.

The pilot with ThoughtExchange gave a broader team the chance to explore both quantitative and qualitative feedback using real district data. By involving multiple leaders across the district, the process became collaborative instead of siloed.

The district began creating engagements around succession planning, workforce readiness, exit interviews, and long-term leadership development.

We didn’t have a leadership pipeline. We’d post a vacancy and then look at applicants and say, ‘Yeah, that feels right.’ We need to get more right than wrong.
Gene Strickland, Superintendent

For Strickland, the issue was not access to information. It was whether leadership systems were unintentionally reinforcing assumptions instead of challenging them.

Using Engagement Inside Real Decisions

Hobbs did not isolate the POC inside a controlled pilot. The district immediately used it inside active decisions.

Instead of announcing finalized topdown decisions, district leaders began inviting staff and families into discussions via ThoughtExchange. This led to community voice being elevated and a foundation of trust being built. One early exchange centered around snow-day makeup planning.

That opportunity to express thought and express sentiment probably allowed people to accept it more. I now have ownership in what’s here rather than, ‘Do I want school on a Saturday because I have to?’
Gene Strickland, Superintendent

That shift mattered. People are more willing to accept difficult decisions when they understand how those decisions were made and believe their perspective had a place in the conversation.

The district began seeing engagement differently. Not as a feedback exercise, but as part of leadership itself.

The conversations quickly expanded into broader district questions around:

leadership development
staff retention
organizational culture
strategic planning
community trust

What ThoughtExchange partners are saying

“It’s night and day from our previous survey provider, which took months to return our results, and by then, the data was no longer useful. ThoughtExchange allows our administrators to focus on actions sooner; rather than having to dig through the data, it’s readily available to them." Dr. Tammy Blakely, Executive Director, Student Support Services, Irvine Unified School District

“When you ask open-ended questions, and you have 300 students or 150 staff members respond, it’s challenging to go through those one by one. Having the AI do that for us instantly was so helpful. I could say, ‘Here's the summary. These are the top three things they said, and these are our students’ top concerns.’ ThoughtExchange neatly packaged them so the data is easy to present. I can show a summary of those open-ended questions, where you get to the heart of those concerns." Caitlyn Kienitz, Communications and Marketing Coordinator, Eastpointe Community Schools, Eastpointe, MI

What the District Began Realizing:
Trust Is Built Through Repetition

As the pilot evolved, Strickland repeatedly returned to the same underlying leadership belief:

Leadership cannot become static.

What got you here in 25–26 will not get you there in 26–27. I should not be the same superintendent I was five years ago when I took this job.’
Gene Strickland, Superintendent

For Hobbs, trust is not built through isolated surveys or communication campaigns. It is built longitudinally through listening, responsiveness, visible action, and a willingness to rethink assumptions in public. That level of candor became one of the defining characteristics of the district’s approach throughout the POC. The goal was never to protect leadership certainty.

The goal was to keep learning fast enough to serve students better.

The Pilot Impact:
A More Responsive Leadership Model

By the end of the pilot with ThoughtExchange, Strickland questioned whether traditional survey systems were oversimplifying complex realities.

“How do you use your Google Form data right now?

It gives you an answer, but what qualitative decisions do you make off that? Quantitative is just a click on a scale. Qualitative feedback is where the true perspective lies.”
Gene Strickland, Superintendent

The district had also started rethinking responsiveness itself. Leadership teams began using collaborative engagement to:

surface tension earlier
understand context more clearly
reduce assumption-based decisions
strengthen transparency and trust

That ultimately led Hobbs Municipal Schools to move forward district-wide. Not only because the pilot “worked” but because ThoughtExchange enabled leaders to leverage the power of better conversations to produce better decisions.

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