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.
Strategy
Strategy means making choices. Essays on setting direction, choosing what matters and turning ambition into changes that people can put into practice.
63 articles. The highlighted label is each article’s primary category; other labels are secondary tags.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“The builders may have decided our pedagogy…”
Default architectural plans often institutionalise outdated teaching; deep consultation before design ensures spaces support actual student needs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The boiling frog doesn’t leap.
To avoid being overwhelmed by incremental change, schools must adopt resilient strategies that proactively address long-term challenges.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keep building an all-weather organisation
All-weather organisations deliver the goods, even when the conditions are tough.
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.
What’s your manifesto for 2025?
Writing your own manifesto should be an uplifting, optimistic exercise, particularly as we approach the new year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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’.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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