The same old story, by … everyone.

You’ve probably seen it.

A post on LinkedIn opens with a question that’s just provocative enough to sound thoughtful. (And since we started The Provocation in 2020, everyone is attempting to provoke, it seems).

It highlights a challenge every school faces. It nudges towards a solution, but it all sounds a little too… polished. A little too templated.

That’s because it probably is.

More and more, school leaders are handing their stories to AI. They’re using ChatGPT or Gemini or the latest virtual kid on the block to do their research and write their vision statements.

But they’re skipping the part where they interrogate the answers. They’re skipping the part where they understand their own tone of voice. Their own essence. And the result? A sea of sameness.

Strategic plans that could belong to any school.

Annual development goals that start lofty, but fall apart under questioning. Keynotes that talk about curiosity and courage but never show where, in their school, that’s actually happening.

Everyone’s asking the right big questions but very few are showing how they’re prototyping the answers.

It’s not a technology problem. It’s not a storytelling problem. It’s a storyfinding problem.

If you don’t know your school’s “secret sauce,” it’s almost impossible to find the stories that prove your strategy is working. Or worth it.

And when one person’s idea of the secret sauce doesn’t match their colleague down the corridor, the result is even messier: a fragmented voice, no clear narrative, no shared sense of what matters most.

Here’s a quick fix: ask a question you genuinely don’t know the answer to. Then go looking for a story inside your school that shows a glimpse of the answer. One moment. One person. One clue.

Do that enough, and you’ll find the essence you’ve been missing. You’ll stop writing what sounds good, and start writing what feels true.

It takes some time. But you can go quicker. You need to know the right frameworks for your thinking, and you need quick feedback to get them nailed. And you need the world’s best structures to create your own GPTs, if you want to make use of the tech that’s out there.