Flexibility is really hard to design for.
I was in Toronto this week at the AAIE international schools’ conference, listening to some of the team behind the new flexible pathway for high schoolers, the Global Impact Diploma.
They explained how it works in practice, at one point showing a picture of a galleon ship.
Everything above the ship’s waterline, they said, is where schools and curriculum designers have freedom: to personalise, contextualise, and respond to local culture, students, and community.
Everything below the waterline is fixed. Designed once. Untouchable, unless they enter a fairly painful review journey.
It’s a simple metaphor. And like all simple metaphors, it hides a harder question.
I asked whether the picture was to scale.
Because there didn’t seem to be much below the waterline. And yet, the ambition is huge: a curriculum robust enough to travel the world, across wildly different contexts, expertise levels, and interpretations of quality.
To their credit, the answer was honest: We’re still working it out.
Every serious piece of work - strategy, curriculum, culture, even a simple idea for next week - lives or dies on the same tension:
What do you hold tight?
And what do you let go loose?
This weekend, I rewatched the Netflix documentary about The New Yorker and its hundred-year history.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the short version.
If you want to write for The New Yorker, you must care deeply about things most people wouldn’t notice if you pointed them out.
For example:
You must write reëlection and coöperate, with two dots, a diaeresis, over the second vowel.
You generally avoid the Oxford comma. Unless not using it would cause confusion, in which case you must use it.
You spell out numbers from one to nine. Ten becomes 10. Unless it starts a sentence. Or unless consistency matters more.
You don’t use titles like Mr., Mrs., Dr., or Professor. Status is earned in the sentence.
You introduce someone by their full name once. After that, surname only.
You use American quotation marks. Double first. Single only inside double.
You treat adverbs with suspicion. If the verb isn’t doing enough work, fix the verb.
Your article may be edited for weeks or months.
Your facts will be checked. All of them. Even the ones you’re sure about.
Most people watching the documentary chuckle at this.
The pedantry.
The seriousness.
The obsessive attention to detail.
But that’s the secret.
Those rules aren’t about control.
They’re about trust.
Readers don’t consciously notice these things. They just feel the coherence. They relax into the writing because the container is solid.
That’s good design. The things nobody notices are doing almost all the work.
Which brings us back to the galleon.
Above the waterline, freedom matters. Context matters. Local expertise matters.
But below the waterline?
That’s where you decide the few things you will be almost annoyingly precise about. Not because they’re exciting, or because they’re appealing, but because without them, the whole thing starts to drift.
When you’re designing curriculum, when you’re shaping strategy, when you’re rewriting values, redesigning learning, or planning the next iteration of your work, what are your diaereses?
What are the tiny, invisible decisions you’ll hold ridiculously tight -
even if others roll their eyes - because they quietly make everything else possible?
Most organisations spend their time polishing what’s above the waterline.
The real craft is choosing the stuff below that line that nobody is allowed to touch.