When more choice makes you less attractive
Too many choices overwhelm parents; a school's brand strategy must clarify its specific purpose, making it easy for families to identify its value.
- Branding
- Strategy
Writing & ideas
A growing archive of writing. Approximate original publication dates are marked “around”; unknown dates are not inferred.
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124 articles available.
Six weeks is a long time. That’s the point.
Effective leadership requires the traveller's mindset: becoming a curious observer in one's own organisation to ensure one keeps changing one's mind.
- Learning
- Leadership
Don’t outsource all the hard work
Writing is thinking; by outsourcing the process to AI, professionals risk losing their taste, discernment, and the capacity to lead with clarity.
- Learning
- Focus
If you want middle leaders to take ownership, stop giving them things to “own”.
True ownership requires solving meaningful questions rather than delivering tasks; leaders should provide clear destinations while allowing tactical freedom.
- Leadership
- Strategy
The problem isn’t the small stuff. It’s small stuff without a horizon.
The small issues of daily life are manageable, but they become overwhelming and distracting if they lack a clear, overarching strategic horizon.
- Focus
- Strategy
How do you create a 100-year organisation?
Organisational durability requires products that evolve with time while remaining anchored to values that are strong enough to traverse generations.
- Strategy
- Leadership
Why don’t more Boards visit school like this?
Board immersion days allow governors to move beyond pruned reports and experience the lived, human reality of a school's daily operational life.
- Leadership
- Learning
Listen at scale. Lead from the signal.
Data synthesis is not strategy; after using AI to scale listening, leaders must use human judgement to identify signals that only they can act upon.
- Strategy
- Leadership
The ROI of a Tablecloth
Small gestures of dignity are not soft extras; they are vital infrastructure that reduces the compounding costs of an unseen and disregarded workforce.
- Leadership
- Strategy
The World Cup, Scotland, and Soft Power
Soft power is built on attraction rather than force, relying on the amplification of community strengths through light and democratic organisation.
- Branding
- Leadership
Don’t trust your vision. Trust your habits.
Habits are a more honest indicator of strategy than any written document; ensure your daily routines actually match your stated ambitions.
- Focus
- Leadership
Lessons from kangaroo ragú: hospitality is a Super Teacher
Service is technical, but hospitality is a deeply human feeling of being on someone's side, which builds the trust essential for a school's brand.
- Branding
- Leadership
Don’t Waste “Tired You”
Fatigue is not always a sign to stop; it can be a productive state for generating the raw, imperfect material needed for future brilliant work.
- Focus
- Learning
What are you letting disappear in plain sight?
Leadership involves cleaning away the soot of daily operation to reveal and protect the beautiful, enduring elements of a community's heritage.
- Leadership
- Creativity
The speech that could have been given anywhere
End-of-year speeches become memorable only when they prove why specific successes were uniquely possible because of the community's own character.
- Branding
- Leadership
The best bit of fish pie isn’t the fish pie
Valuable innovations often emerge as unintended consequences of core work; leaders should nurture a 'store cupboard' of curiosity to capture them.
- Creativity
- Strategy
Stop repeating yourself - start building signal
Avoid the trap of robotic repetition; focus on one clear signal and wrap it in distinct, purposeful stories to build a consistent culture.
- Branding
- Leadership
🚨 Success is easy to waste.
Reflection is a critical sense-making practice that allows leaders to pause, extract lessons from success, and decide what truly warrants repetition.
- Leadership
- Focus
The big picture can wait
Detailed, small-scale work is not a distraction from strategy; it is the essential process through which a coherent big picture eventually emerges.
- Focus
- Strategy
The power of taking things away
Strategic creativity is an act of subtraction, stripping away non-essential priorities so that the core mission has the space to gain momentum.
- Strategy
- Focus
Are you listening to the people closest to the problem?
True listening is a deliberate discipline, not a courtesy; leaders must seek out the candid insights of those closest to the daily problems.
- Leadership
- Learning
The tiny routines that stop big failures
Significant organisational failure is best prevented not by complex systems, but by the disciplined repetition of small, observable human routines.
- Focus
- Leadership
It’s time to test your vision
A robust vision statement should force difficult trade-offs; if the reverse of your vision seems unthinkable, your statement is likely too generic.
- Strategy
- Focus
Are you making the most of your soft power?
A school's soft power is the measurable influence generated when daily actions consistently align with genuine, clearly stated community values.
- Branding
- Leadership
Being average is incredibly dangerous
To avoid the blandness of the AI-driven average, schools must boldly choose a distinct vision and commit to meaningful, emotional storytelling.
- Branding
- Strategy
Your culture isn’t what you say it is
School culture is defined by operational rituals, not glossy mission statements; consistent actions serve as the true proof of stated values.
- Leadership
- Branding
The secret work that makes everything else feel easy
Exceptional organisations succeed by choosing a few invisible, precise rules that build trust and provide a solid foundation for all other activities.
- Strategy
- Leadership
The most important thing you can’t yet see
Like a lighthouse on an imperceptible reef, effective leadership provides a steady reference point that helps communities navigate their own future.
- Strategy
- Leadership
What are you tolerating right now?
Leaders must distinguish between harmful stagnation and constructive friction, ensuring they do not inadvertently wash away a culture's valuable history.
- Leadership
- Focus
The smallest leadership move with the biggest ripple effect
In times of complexity and negativity, a deliberate choice of relentless positivity and a simple smile can restore clarity and effective team action.
- Leadership
- Focus
Swimming on the living-room floor and other lessons we might avoid
Banning social media for young people is like swimming on dry land; true resilience is built through engagement, not avoidance of real-world contexts.
- Learning
- Focus
Boring. Bad. Brave. When too many voices make your strategy mean nothing.
Meaningless mission statements often result from designing by consensus; courage lies in using strategy to steer intentionally in one specific direction.
- Branding
- Strategy
Stop assuming someone else has it covered
Effective leadership requires taking absolute responsibility for every detail that influences outcomes, instead of relying on others to manage them.
- Leadership
- Strategy
When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
True ambition in schools demands a communal, iterative effort that prioritises meaningful progress over the safe pursuit of unattainable perfection.
- Strategy
- Leadership
Some ideas don’t arrive with a fanfare
The best ideas are often slow hunches that require leaders to create space for reflection so that shared clarity can surface organically.
- Learning
- Strategy
Three weeks. Three cities. A lesson on speed.
Pace is a personal perception; schools should plan for rhythm and reflection rather than equating rapid movement with actual progress.
- Focus
- Strategy
The beauty of a mistake, now legendary.
Instead of reacting to failures with panic, leaders should pause to notice the new possibilities and stories that emerge from unexpected moments.
- Leadership
- Creativity
This one thing is ruining your communication (and it’s not AI).
Educational jargon creates distance and obscures meaning; schools should prioritise clarity to foster trust and genuine community engagement.
- Branding
- Leadership
The Five Day Rule to lighten your load
Deferral is a decision; using a five-day rule to either execute or delete commitments helps leaders stop pretending that the future will add capacity.
- Focus
- Leadership
“The builders may have decided our pedagogy…”
Default architectural plans often institutionalise outdated teaching; deep consultation before design ensures spaces support actual student needs.
- Learning
- Strategy
101 days left.
Late September offers a superior opportunity to reset focus through small, repeatable habits compared to the artificial pressure of January.
- Focus
Your Classroom Is Speaking… But What Is It Saying?
Classroom layouts communicate powerful messages; teachers can experiment with small, intentional changes to align their space with their pedagogy.
- Learning
- Strategy
What jazz legend Thelonius Monk can teach us about improvisation
Improvisation in leadership is about being well-prepared enough to listen to the room and find the right path in service of others.
- Leadership
- Learning
The hidden psychology of People, Place and Pedagogy
Successful transformation requires designing for human nature, using rules to create new habits and relying on trust to enable change.
- Learning
- Strategy
Through the Dip: How Strategy Survives Contact with Reality
The dip of frustration in any project is where the real work happens; perseverance and purpose allow strategy to survive reality.
- Strategy
- Focus
Fred Smith's vision myth: debunked for schools.
Educational vision requires a thoughtful interplay between personal clarity and collaborative community insight, avoiding purely isolated decisions.
- Leadership
- Strategy
Whose voice is really speaking at the start of your school year?
School leaders should avoid generic AI-generated metaphors in their speeches and instead define their own unique voice to deepen genuine meaning.
- Branding
- Leadership
What if your best decisions begin with doing nothing at all?
Clarity for difficult decisions is often found in the gaps of silence and rest, not in the frenzy of an always-on work culture.
- Focus
- Learning
There is a background noise that boosts thinking. The other kind kills it.
Optimal creative thinking requires specific background environments, while fragmented, inconsistent noise disrupts focus and mental clarity.
- Learning
- Focus
Are you fishing where everyone else is fishing?
Real competitive advantage comes from making bold, early moves based on experience rather than staying in the pack following standard formulas.
- Strategy
- Branding
The boiling frog doesn’t leap.
To avoid being overwhelmed by incremental change, schools must adopt resilient strategies that proactively address long-term challenges.
- Strategy
- Leadership
You don’t need more data. You need this.
Data only informs rational decisions if it is high quality; leaders must prioritise the time to listen and notice over superficial metrics.
- Strategy
- Leadership
The problem with feedback? You might be starting in the wrong place.
Feedback often fails because it lacks a shared vision; schools must define what excellence looks like before attempting to measure performance.
- Leadership
- Learning
I interrupted myself. Do you do the same?
True focus is about knowing the right thing to prioritise at the right time, rather than attempting to do one thing at the expense of all else.
- Focus
The problem with words.
Communication should be treated as a strategic asset, built on deep work and clear narrative rather than generic, outsourced language.
- Branding
- Leadership
Do you know how to outsell expectations?
Schools must stop generalising to appeal to everyone and instead embrace specificity to energise their community and articulate true difference.
- Branding
- Strategy
The same old story, by … everyone.
Leaders must avoid generic, AI-generated messaging and instead unearth specific stories that define their school's unique secret sauce.
- Branding
- Focus
You don’t need a plan. You need a pause.
Breathless school teams often need a pause to surface core strengths and decide what to ignore, rather than starting new, distracting initiatives.
- Focus
- Strategy
Why schools ride dead horses (and how to stop)
Institutional focus is regained by identifying and stopping habitual projects that lack purpose, allowing space for genuine innovation.
- Focus
- Strategy
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
Deadlines often create ripples of unfinished work when underlying priorities are blurred; moving past the fog requires clarity and purpose.
- Focus
- Leadership
The photo that reminds me of everything that matters in school.
Brand strategy is about designing a culture that fosters everyday, pivotal human moments rather than just reporting on performative events.
- Branding
- Leadership
How to stop being a copycat school: do reverse benchmarking
Schools should reject aimless benchmarking and instead define their unique essence to create a distinctive category and market position.
- Strategy
- Branding
Want better learning? Design for this first.
Beyond content and competences, schools must prioritise designing spaces that foster deep human connection and the ability to relate to others.
- Learning
- Strategy
Design isn’t decoration: it’s decision-making.
Successful school architecture requires bridging the gap between institutional ambition and design through prototyping and meaningful language.
- Strategy
- Learning
Boeing says its core values are safety, quality, integrity and sustainability. You’d hope so.
Genuine strategy requires making hard choices and sacrifices rather than relying on generic truisms that fail during real decision-making moments.
- Strategy
- Focus
Comfort Is a Terrible Compass
When facing institutional crises, schools must ignore the comfort of tradition and return to their core purpose to guide effective decision-making.
- Strategy
- Focus
Collaboration or cooking: which matters more?
Schools should reconsider their definition of basic education to prioritise practical life skills that foster student confidence and independence.
- Learning
- Strategy
The secret to happiness and wellbeing.
True happiness is found at the intersection of meaningful work, personal growth, and helping others, rather than in policies or shallow perks.
- Leadership
- Focus
Complexity kills autonomy.
Complexity breeds helplessness; stripping away unnecessary policies and clarifying responsibilities empowers teams to do their best work.
- Leadership
- Focus
The secret of leading from a high school band.
Leadership is not dictation; it is creating conditions where others can contribute their unique talents to build something extraordinary together.
- Leadership
- Creativity
So they don’t like your idea: just bring them closer.
To overcome apathy, communicate ideas effectively and maintain curiosity, knowing that busy people often miss potential innovations.
- Leadership
- Focus
26 years ago I nearly became a spy.
Create a vision for today, not generations away; focus on achievable goals and distinct choices that make an immediate impact.
- Strategy
- Branding
10 Essential Leadership Steps to Get Out of a Crisis
Leaders must employ a structured approach to crisis management, focusing on clear strategy, expert use, empathy, and providing honest hope.
- Leadership
- Strategy
Bikeshedding: you probably do it every week.
Teams often obsess over trivial decisions because big strategic choices feel too intimidating, a pattern that prevents real progress.
- Focus
- Strategy
They don’t like your idea: so bring them closer.
Watering the rocks—harnessing the feedback and stabilising influence of critics—is essential for avoiding fuzzy compromises and achieving success.
- Leadership
- Strategy
The biggest mistake I ever made.
Major failures are often the result of accumulated small errors; pick up the phone daily to address issues before they become disasters.
- Leadership
- Focus
Pretty much everything about leadership training is wrong.
Generic, event-based leadership training fails because it lacks relational depth and does not address the systemic barriers within schools.
- Leadership
- Learning
Lessons from the unique move in every game of cards
Like a unique card shuffle, strategy requires expert analysis to find the outlier gem that defines success, rather than following generic plans.
- Strategy
- Focus
How to stop worrying about the things outside your control
If we want to change the system, we can start by changing something in our small corner of the world, with the people who are with us in that small corner.
- Focus
- Leadership
Keep building an all-weather organisation
All-weather organisations deliver the goods, even when the conditions are tough.
- Strategy
- Leadership
Don’t push your planning if the time isn’t right.
So put one foot in front of the other, and get consistently better at what you already do well.
- Strategy
- Focus
What’s your manifesto for 2025?
Writing your own manifesto should be an uplifting, optimistic exercise, particularly as we approach the new year.
- Strategy
- Learning
The perfect balance between autonomy and accountability.
Most senior leaders want their teams activated. They want them productive and generating ideas that move the needle of the school’s strategy.
- Leadership
Are you the saboteur in your projects? The CIA think so.
The tragedy is that most people are completely unaware of the sabotage they introduce to their projects.
- Leadership
- Strategy
What’s your philosophy? It defines more than you think…
Once you know the answers to those questions for yourself, only then you can set about finding a shared philosophy - or purpose - for your team.
- Learning
- Strategy
When confident is too confident… and when it’s not.
No matter how thought-through you think your ideas might be, in general, humans are over-confident, emotional and irrational.
- Leadership
- Creativity
Writing is thinking. Thank you for being part of our thinking.
Nothing is too sacred when it comes to being the best community you can be, for today. But whatever you do, write it down together, regularly.
- Leadership
- Creativity
How to be boring and succeed, according to Aretha Franklin.
You see, the key to great leadership and team success is to communicate repeatedly about the same, single idea.
- Leadership
- Branding
- Focus
The purpose of a system is what it does.
It’s for this reason that, if you want to understand what the purpose of an organisation is, all you have to do is look at its behaviour.
- Strategy
- Leadership
Efficient Process vs Happy Accidents
Community conversations might not change your decision - but they will change the way you go about realising it, for the better.
- Leadership
- Creativity
We know it’s bad. But we keep doing it.
But grades don't just hurt the kid - they actually harm learning itself.
- Learning
Flying lessons focus on one thing: how not to stop flying.
When you start to worry that you’re sinking closer to the farm, it’s time to learn.
- Learning
- Focus
- Leadership
You could always do with more data. Sometimes you just need to do it.
You're not asking people to imagine your idea (which they never can). You're asking them to use a real thing.
- Creativity
- Strategy
Why over-explaining your mission destroys it
A good purpose should be unique, and clearly so. Something to stand up for, that helps people do even better than they’d have done without it.
- Branding
- Strategy
Improvisation beats planning, hands down.
Improvisation is hard work. It takes hours - years - of invisible-to-the-crowd practice, and sometimes it doesn’t quite work out as planned.
- Creativity
- Leadership
Assume all new ideas are bad. Then work on them.
If you hold onto your ideas too tightly for too long then you end up blind to new ideas and opportunities around you.
- Creativity
- Leadership
Sometimes we don’t need the Board’s opinion.
Too often, we see Boards operate in a vacuum of quality information, or on the basis of extremely high quality but narrow anecdotal evidence.
- Leadership
- Branding
What are your dirty words?
Sometimes those ‘dirty words’ that we have avoided for so long in education are precisely the words that we need.
- Branding
- Strategy
Seek out some strategic tension: it gives us better ideas.
Doing real strategy is hard, though, because you're going to annoy someone on the way.
- Strategy
- Creativity
Find the perfect goal and get out of their way.
You can’t tell people what to do if you want the best from them.
- Leadership
- Strategy
You only need one policy: don’t make more work than you have to.
We feel that pressure to create lots of content, too, when we write core values or mission statements.
- Leadership
- Focus
Personalisation isn’t the strategy you’re looking for.
But we rarely ask, what are the types of relationships schools should model and encourage for everyone, adults and young people alike?
- Learning
- Strategy
Show, don’t tell; listen, don’t preach.
All too often, we tell young people what to do because it’s so much easier than showing them. Septuagenarian rocker Alice Cooper has rewritten his perennia
- Learning
- Creativity
A new device that will open up conversations you’ve never had before.
I spent four days in the Japanese Alps one summer, away from distractions. The irony of stepping away from work is that my brain seems to make more connections and gain far more clarity.
- Focus
- Creativity
Who are you talking to? Really?
How did a 140-year stalwart of the British high street nearly get obliterated? What if it was because it talked to the wrong people without even realising
- Branding
- Strategy
Don’t let fear write the script.
Some of the schools we’re spending time with this past few months have struggled. They’re in a balancing act that nearly every school plays out nearly ever
- Learning
- Leadership
How you can never run out of time.
I tend to write our weekly newsletter, the Provocation, on a Friday afternoon. This time last week I was struggling to write Monday’s newsletter.
- Focus
- Creativity
Last orders… and a secret to happiness.
I’m going to ask you to stop ‘giving it your all’. Give it 70% instead.
- Focus
- Leadership
If you say ‘excellence’ once more time…
Every couple of months I find myself in the same discussion with a school leadership team or Board who insist, at all costs, on naming their ‘excellence’.
- Branding
- Strategy
How to unlock the magic of undivided attention.
When I worked in the television industry in 2008, we were at the dawn of cell phones actually being able to do things, and we were experimenting how to inv
- Focus
- Learning
Would you use a teaspoon to dig a hole?
A mentor asked me this question over coffee a couple of weeks ago. Would you use a teaspoon to dig a hole?, they asked. Of course not!, I replied.
- Focus
- Leadership
The most beautiful school in the world
Over the past 50 years Danish beer firm Carlsberg has infamously sold its beer under the advertising tagline Carlsberg. The best lager in the world. Probab
- Branding
- Strategy
Design for trickiest customer on the worst day
At the turn of the 1800s, London’s population doubled, making it the biggest city in the world. But it was designed for a population half its size. People
- Creativity
- Strategy
If you can’t start small you can’t end big.
On a crisp spring weekend coming out of the pandemic, I played with the Edinburgh University Jazz Orchestra again for the first time in 27 years.
- Strategy
- Creativity
How to waste €200m by trying to please everyone
The Stadio Delle Alpi was built in Turin for the Italia ‘90 World Cup. You can imagine what the brief should’ve been: create a soccer stadium that a billio
- Strategy
- Creativity
You’re a millionaire investor without even realising it.
Imagine your local school offers you a stake in it for an incredibly low price. All you need to do is spend less than the price of a textbook and you get a
- Learning
- Leadership
Your urgent isn’t my urgent. Or hers. Or his.
Your urgent isn’t my urgent. Or hers. Or his. Four years ago, the pandemic created a productivity hustle. And it's not gone away.
- Focus
Stopping advertising is like cutting off your hand
Henry Ford said: "Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time." When the financial crisis was at its height in 2009, I star
- Strategy
- Branding
Avoid launching your next big idea. At all costs.
Avoid launching your next big idea. At all costs. After months of devising a fresh idea, and months more planning and researching, it’s tempting to reward
- Strategy
- Creativity
Save yourself some pain and know what league you play in.
Why do people compete knowing they’ll never win a medal? There is some excitement and trepidation in Paris at the moment with the approaching Olympics. But
- Strategy
- Branding
Where do you want to be?
Establish where you want to be, not what you want. Professor Norman Drummond is a stalwart of quality leadership in the Scottish business world. He believe
- Strategy
- Leadership
Everythingitis - Focus helps you achieve everything you need to. Eventually.
Matt Mullenweg founded WordPress. Today, the company’s software drives around 40% of the world’s websites. But it nearly failed. WordPress Version 2.0 was
- Focus
- Strategy
A lack of focus leads to terrible decision-making.
A lack of focus is a symptom of and contributor to poor decision-making. When you don’t have focus you might find yourself avoiding taking quick decisions.
- Focus
- Leadership
How to find laser sharp focus
Has anyone in your leadership team taken up their post in the last two years? Up to half of them will be deemed to have failed within the first two years o
- Focus
- Leadership