I spent much of this week in Recife, Brazil, listening.

I listened to students, teachers, parents, leaders and Board members talk about their school. They shared what they love and value most, what they notice and what gets in the way of their best work.

And, as always, I was struck by how much of what people notice is small.

The timetable.

A communication that didn't get read.

Something that happened in a classroom.

A decision that didn't make sense.

The thing everyone apparently knows about, but nobody has quite managed to fix.

This isn't a criticism: it’s quite the opposite.

The small stuff is where people experience a school.

In our strategy work, we spend about 50 hours listening to students, teachers and leaders. And then we help children, parents and teachers conduct around 300 more interviews across their community.

Every time we do it, my conclusion is the same: much of what emerged probably wouldn't have surprised the Board or leadership team. But that isn't the point of listening to it.

The listening gave the Board and Leadership team greater confidence about where to put their effort, time and money… and where not to.

That's the difference.

Listening gives you evidence, but it doesn't give you strategy. But I see schools sometimes confusing the two.

If you listen to enough people in any school, you will acquire an enormous collection of things that could be better.

All of them will feel real, urgent, and, if you’re lucky, you’ll find some will be incredibly easy to fix.

That is precisely why they can become so seductive.

But while you're fixing what is immediately in front of you, who's looking five or ten years ahead? That's where governance matters.

A Board should know absolutely what's being talked about in the cafeteria, be curious about it. It should probably spend more time listening to the people having those conversations and seeing for itself what goes on in classrooms.

But the Board mustn't become the cafeteria.

Its job is not to take every concern it hears and add it to the agenda.

Its job is to notice the patterns in what it hears, and analyse those patterns against a much bigger question that they, and the Leadership team, are privileged to own:

Where are we trying to take this school?

That's why a shared vision between the Board and the leadership team matters so much. Without one, everything can look equally important.

A complaint about lunch sits alongside a decision about the future shape of learning. A frustrating process competes with a looming demographic shift.

Next Tuesday competes with 2035.

Because the small stuff is concrete, immediate and fixable, guess which one wins?

The problem isn't the small stuff in and of itself.

The problem is small stuff without a horizon.

A clear, shared vision gives everyone somewhere to stand when they're deciding what deserves attention.

That's what those hundreds of conversations in Recife (and in countless cities around the world this year) will help to achieve.

The cafeteria conversation tells you what school feels like today.

The Board has to make sure somebody is thinking about what it could become tomorrow.