I saw a school send out a PDF to a few consultants, asking for proposals to write their next strategy.

The proposal was written in ChatGPT. They hadn’t even swapped out [insert school name here].

I always see the opportunity in moments like this. What a chance to elevate the thinking, understanding and sheer strategic nous of the Board who wrote prompted for it.

I know the Board pulled it together, rather than the leadership team. Why? Because they asked for benchmarking against ‘the world’s top international schools’. Very few education leaders ask for that. Board members do.

And it is such a fool’s errand.

If you’re creating the brief for your own strategy using ChatGPT, and not even editing it, then you’re nowhere close to finding relevance in benchmarking against ‘the world’s top schools’.

Big Consulting loves benchmarking, because you can hand the task over to keen-as-mustard newly-minted MBAs (or, as they watch their backs, ChatGPT), and charge out some princely consulting fees for the weighty PDF report.

But the results are just as useless.

Instead, you’d be better to do some ‘reverse benchmarking’. What’s everyone else doing? Why the heck do they do it that way? If we were to do the opposite, what would that be?

Granted, many of the ideas you generate in reverse benchmarking are laughably awful. But sometimes, they’re genius. Sometimes these ideas exist already, the secret sauce that’s under your nose, but which today goes unloved and unseen.

Until now.

This isn’t just about ‘doing things differently for the sake of it’.

It isn’t just about ‘trying to stand out’.

This isn’t just about ‘marketing over what really matters.’

When all the schools in an area look the same, sound the same, do the same kind of curriculum, with the same kind of teachers, then there’s little innovation from anyone, little to help parents make better decisions about the school of their kids, little to help families and schools fit better together. They all look the same:

But when one school creates a focus, knows its secret sauce and can show what it means to families and staff, then it stands out.

It creates a new market. It’s unlikely to lose or annoy existing families, because the secret sauce was there all along. We’re just amplifying it. And because it existed there all along, it’s hard for others to copycat too quickly.

Of course, the copycats will come. It seems like we’re built for that. But because the essence of a community comes from within, because the innovation was born in the community and not thrust on it from outside, no other school will quite get there. In fact, they’ll maybe even create a separate, distinctive category of their own. And that’s the point where we don’t just create better choice for families. We also increase the size of the market who really care about schools and making an intentional choice about what kind of school is going to be the best fit for their child.

It’s a win-win-win, even for the one school who doesn’t change at all.

So what do the schools in your neighbourhood do?

What would it look like if you did the opposite?

And do you want to be the school that waits for everyone else to make a move?

Or do you want to be the one that gains momentum?