The story you chose will harden too

In my last article I wrote about the stories schools inherit without even realising it. The work, I argued, is interrupting that inevitability so the story becomes choosable again. Who decided? Would we decide it again?

Suppose with me that you do the work. You gather the right people, ask the hard questions, and choose a new story (deliberately, honestly, together). Then you repeat it for twenty years.

There is every chance it becomes outdated and untrue and unhelpful, exactly like the old one.

Repetition doesn’t check who authored it. The staff who chose it move on. The staff who arrive after them inherit it. A finished story is tomorrow’s inherited story.

Which raises the question for anyone who gets paid to help schools find their story: what exactly should this work leave behind?

The shelf

You may already know the answer schools usually get, because you may have one. The strategy document. 40 pages, beautifully designed, presented to the board with some ceremony, and now resting on a shelf (or shared drive) next to the strategic plan from two principals ago.

The shelf failure is usually told as a discipline problem: the school didn’t embed the brand, didn’t live it. I don’t think that’s right. I think the document fails because of what it is, not how it was treated.

A locked strategy deck is a conclusion. It answers the questions that were live during the engagement, and then it stops. Eighteen months later a new question arrives, and the document has nothing to say, because it was never built to say anything new. So people stop opening it.

Grammar, not text

The alternative is a different kind of deliverable altogether: a grammar the school writes with, rather than a story it recites.

By grammar I mean a small set of orienting principles. How should this place feel to a seven-year-old on her first morning? What is a school tour actually for? What does our language sound like when we’re at our best, and what does it never sound like? Not many of these. A handful. Small enough to hold in your head on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re writing the newsletter.

A locked story gets checked against: does this comply?

A grammar gets written from: given who we are, what does this newsletter, this tour, this hire, this decision want to be?

I’ve become more convinced of this as time has gone on. When I run story and messaging engagements, the school walks away with a story, yes, and a messaging architecture. But the piece I’d defend hardest is a short set of experience principles. Used well, they’re the part that will keep working after I leave, because they’re a starting point rather than a conclusion.

It’s essentially system design, but with language and visuals.

A world with a centre

There’s a bigger frame here. Good brand work doesn’t hand people a script; it builds a world they can write their own story in. Staff, families, students: authors, not audience. The teacher who invents a new welcome ritual, the parent who describes the school in words you never gave them and gets it exactly right. That’s the world working.

But a world is not a pile of parts. Open everything up with no orienting centre and you get disparate, disconnected expression. Hold only the centre and permit no authorship and you’re back at the locked story, just with prettier visuals.

The grammar is what lets you have both. Enough centre that everything recognisably belongs; enough openness that people can keep writing.

What I can’t promise

There’s a limit of course… Principles can be faked too. You can write a handful of fine-sounding lines in a workshop, laminate them, and produce nothing but a smaller document for the same shelf. The form guarantees nothing.

What makes principles real, as far as I can tell, is whether your school recognises itself in them. Whether a teacher reads them and thinks yes, that’s us on our best day, and whether the next thing the school makes actually sounds like they were in the room. It has to keep being true, sentence by sentence, year by year.

Which may be the point. A brand you can finish is a brand already headed for the shelf. The living version is never done being written. Tricky for getting board approval – but infinitely more useful in practice.