This week, with Thanksgiving in the air, I’ve found myself genuinely grateful.
Grateful that our teams in Edinburgh and Melbourne came together to win a global competition to redesign a 2,500-student school in Singapore, a vision shaped across continents and grounded in bold design drivers.
Grateful for the thousands of educators we met in Dubai, where we were proud silver sponsors of an event that crackled with curiosity and courage.
And grateful for the schools around the world who’ve trusted us to rethink their brand strategy from the inside out, as we finished up our second sprint of work with them last week.
And all of that brings me back to a brand hero’s reminder, shared with me last week by our long-time collaborator, Gerry Farrell. Leo Burnett told his teams:
“When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”
Too often, school leaders talk about ambition as if naming the star - the vision - is the hard bit. It isn’t.
The hard bit is the reaching: the messy, communal, iterative reach that requires disagreement, curiosity, prototyping, and occasionally admitting that the old language or the old plan wasn’t serving anyone.
The schools doing the most exciting work right now with us are the ones willing to reach high together.
Student and Parent Design Teams challenging assumptions.
Strategy teams shaping language that actually means something.
Leaders inviting students, staff, and parents into the thinking early, not on launch day.
Communities choosing movement over perfection.
So here’s a provocation for the week:
Pick one star worth reaching for.
Make it clear. Make it shared.
Then take the smallest possible step toward it, right now, today, not “next term”.
You might not touch the star yet, but you’ll feel the shift. You’ll start to create momentum. Most importantly, you’ll avoid the only real failure: ending up exactly where you began.