Are you fishing where everyone else is fishing?

On a local community Facebook group, Frank posted a picture of the breakwater. Scores of amateurs lined up for mackerel season: there are so many, they literally jump onto the hook at this time of year.

I’ve walked this breakwater most weeks for 15 years, and I’ve never seen anyone at the point they catch a fish. Even in mackerel season.

If you go fishing where everyone else is fishing, you reduce your chances of a catch. You only catch the most stupid of fish - and most fish are smarter than they look.

Fishing where others don’t is counterintuitive. Yes, you might have fewer fish to catch, but they’re all yours to catch in the first place.

And yes, you might feel like you’re not paying attention to the market intelligence that says the fish are all over at the breakwater.

But if you listen to experience instead of current market intel, you’d also recognise what’s missing from that photo: there isn’t one seagull flying near that breakwater. Where seagulls circle, there are always fish.

That’s experience talking to you, not spreadsheets or ChatGPT or consultants who’ve only got data to rely on.

Serendipitously, Dave Trott also wrote about fish this week and pointed to another example of experience trumping ‘the way it’s always been done’.

In the 2024 Youth Olympics, Yang Jingru stunned the world in the Women’s 1500m Speed Skating final. Everyone expected the usual strategy: conserve energy for nine laps, then sprint on the tenth. That’s how it’s always done.

But Yang Jingru didn’t do that.

On lap one, she took off. She charged ahead while everyone else paced themselves, bewildered. Surely, she’d burn out?

But she wasn’t racing with them. She was racing past them.

She rejoined the pack at the back and stayed there. Until the final lap, when they all sprinted... and she didn’t. She crossed the line last. And she won.

She had already lapped them. Her strategy, a total departure from the norm, earned China its first gold of the Games.

As she put it: "It was my own strategy, a secret weapon nobody saw coming… It worked like a charm."

Most schools approach brand strategy like speed skaters in that pack: they wait, conserve energy, follow the same formula. They redesign logos. Wordsmith mission statements. Maybe hire an agency for a refresh.

But that’s not real strategy. That’s staying in the pack.

If you want to create clarity, cut-through and cohesion in your school’s communications, your decisions, and your direction, it starts with brand strategy, not surface.

Most schools don’t have a brand strategy. They have a bunch of well-meaning statements and no shared language to guide action.

You don’t need to exhaust yourself keeping pace with other schools. You just need to know what makes you distinctly you, and how to act on it.

Like Yang Jingru, the leaders we work with often win by making one bold, early move: thinking differently.