If you’ve ever had to do the first shop of the two-week holiday in Italy, you know about the paradox of choice. Which olive oil? Which bottle of red?
Most of us think we like having choices. We design our curricula with individual pathways and aim to offer as much choice as possible. When we design strategy, it’s based on 30-40 choices a school could make (and a whole set of choices it will not make - but which would have been interesting, too).
But when does choice tip into olive oil territory? When is choice too much choice?
Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper really understand choice. They ran an experiment that replicates my olive oil dilemma. They confronted supermarket shoppers with a tasting stand offering 24 different varieties of jam.
You get the idea - the usual suspects of strawberry, raspberry, apricot, and alongside them numerous things involving fig, rhubarb and Szechuan pepper that you’re less sure about.
The logic behind offering a choice like this is that there's something for everyone. Brilliant. Except it turns out that giving people more choice isn't always the best way to help them choose.
The enormous selection of jams attracted plenty of interest. Around 60% of passing shoppers stopped to take a look.
But only around 3% of those who stopped actually bought anything.
Then the researchers reduced the choice of jam from 24 to just six varieties.
Something really interesting happened. First of all, far fewer people stopped by - just 40%, compared to 60% when the display offered a more impressive choice.
But instead of 3% buying, a massive 30% bought a jam.
Offering less choice made shoppers ten times more likely to buy.
Schools love giving people more reasons to choose their school over anyone else.
Academic excellence. Student wellbeing. Innovation. Inclusion. Global citizenship. Creativity. Critical thinking. Outstanding facilities. Personalised learning. A supportive community.
All excellent things. All things that parents want to hear. And all things that just about every other school is saying, too.
We keep adding another jar of jam to the stand, hoping that eventually we'll have something for everyone.
Now, a school should provide a rich and varied experience, options that help every child find their thing and do well in it. But it becomes a problem when we're asking people to choose us without helping them understand what matters most.
In a school, what matters most isn’t a laundry list of the options you offer. What does matter is being really clear on what you stand for.
People know you’re a school, that does the stuff great schools do. But beyond that, what else do you do?
Purpose makes choice easier. Imagine you're at that supermarket jam stand again. This time, someone asks you to choose raspberry jam, preferably without seeds. Suddenly, the 24 varieties aren't overwhelming. You're looking for something specific, and most of the jars can be ignored.
That's what purpose should do for an organisation. It gives us criteria for making choices.
If your school believes deeply that children learn through exploration and independence, that belief should change the way you design learning, employ teachers, communicate with parents and even design the campus.
It should also help you decide what not to do.
There's no point declaring that children should become independent learners if every adult decision in the school removes their independence.
Your purpose should make some decisions easier, some decisions harder, and a few opportunities completely inappropriate.
Penny Lee, one of my advisors, puts it this way:
Purpose narrows the decision, not the ambition.
A clear purpose doesn't limit what your school can achieve. It helps you concentrate your energy on achieving something that matters.
And this is where brand strategy comes in. Most schools think about their brand in terms of how they look and sound to the outside world: the logo, website, prospectus, the advertising, the Open Days, and so on.
But those are simply ways people encounter the brand.
The brand itself is the understanding, expectation and feeling people develop about your school. That understanding is shaped by the choices you make every day.
When a school knows its purpose and acts on it consistently, it becomes easier for families to understand what makes it distinctive.
The school's story moves from being a long list of attractive features to a clear explanation of what it believes, the choices it makes as a consequence, and the experience students can expect. You see that belief in every inch of the school when you pay a visit.
Defining what makes your school distinctive means drawing on the experiences and aspirations of your whole community.
Crafting a clear story makes that distinctiveness easy to understand.
Telling that story through the experiences shows people the distinctiveness without having to keep telling them.
In our Brand Strategy for Schools program, we never need to invent something special about your school to have a good story to tell. We just make the things that genuinely matter about your school easier to recognise.
We work one-on-one with schools to get you to the point where your communications, admissions and faculty speak the same language and share the same experiences - the kind of consistency that inspires confidence in prospective families, and binds your community today.
If you’re not sure yet, then try this before your next leadership meeting
Write down the ten things your school most commonly says about itself.
Now imagine you're talking to a prospective family who has just visited three other schools, all of which have made similar promises.
Which three things would you want that family to remember about yours?
More importantly, what would they actually have seen or experienced during their visit that proves those three things are true?
If you struggle to answer, you might have discovered something important about your purpose.
You don't necessarily need another mission statement. You might need to present some clearer choices.
Your school doesn't need another 18 jars of jam. But it does need people to understand why they should love the six you've chosen.