Telling a story that pulls your community forward

In my last piece I argued that the story a community tells about a school can be tested three ways. Is it accurate? Is it honouring? Is it empowering? I want to push that one step further and ask a fourth question: Where is it taking you?

In a note to a good friend and colleague earlier this year, I wondered, perhaps pessimistically, whether a lot of vision-setting in schools is more about making leadership, boards and other stakeholders feel safe and oriented than about the people the vision is supposedly for. I still think that’s often true.

But I am hopeful that the lens of story might provide us with a better shaped tool for vision-setting in schools.

Engaging with the why

A school and its community can be telling stories that are accurate, honouring, and empowering, and still leave people without anything to orient themselves around. The sort of storytelling we’ve established so far does a good job of the what, the who and the when. It doesn’t necessarily do the why quite so naturally.

I strongly believe we need to work harder in education to tell a compelling story about why. Why are we here? Why is this worth valuing, worth investing in, worth the hard work?

Right-sizing the why

Let me right-size this before we proceed. I don’t want to overstate or mythologise the ‘why’. I don’t want you to think that the ‘why’ must be grandiose or revolutionary.

In fact, I think grandiose and bold is often unhelpful for schools. A school can be incredibly healthy without a grandiose vision. Schools are complex places. They’re full of complex people, complex families – in many ways, they are the melting pot of a community.

The why must line up with what people want out of the thing they’re investing in. It can’t just be a target or beautiful utopia that someone dreamt up over the summer holidays.

I think what most families want is fairly simple – at least in my experience of Australian school culture.

I want my kid to have some friends, to make it through, to be generally well, and to leave having had a good experience, with mostly good moments and not too many pits. As a family, I want the school not to have asked too much of us or too little, to have involved us in the moments that matter, and to have been proactive. I want school to support the values and virtues I’m teaching at home.

If that’s what families want, then our visionary storytelling should tap into that desire.

Dread, default, irresistible

Tavangar and Richardson have a useful way of sorting the different visionary stories a community tends to ingest:

• the dreaded future it’s fearful of
• the default future it’s nostalgic for
• the irresistible one it yearns for

Good visionary storytelling quietens the dreaded future, connects with the default future, and makes the irresistible future seem achievable. Which means talking about the now and the not yet.

The now and not yet

Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, describes what he calls creative tension: the gap between a vision and current reality generates the energy for change, and the discipline is holding both clearly at once, without lowering the vision and without lying about reality. His picture for it is a rubber band stretched between the two.

I’ve found the same image useful, but I’ve reimagined it a little to embrace the rhythm of visionary storytelling.

Story sits at the leading edge of the band. There are seasons where it pushes forward and stretches the band, pulling people into a way of seeing the school they couldn’t previously take hold of.

Elena Vasileva calls imagination “the ability to perceive that things could be otherwise,” and says every transformation begins with a fracture in inevitability. That fracture is the stretch. It’s where the energy is.

But a band held stretched for too long loses its elasticity. It goes weak.

So my encouragement to schools is to think of visionary storytelling in phases. Stretch, then release. Let the community catch up. Celebrate. Rest in the now. Then stretch again.

Getting that rhythm right is not an exact science.

When the band goes slack

The vision sits on the wall and the story stops pulling. When that happens people lose their guardrails and are free to wander in ways that fragment purpose. Everyone heads in a slightly different direction.

Edwin Friedman, whose work on anxious systems I really love, had a name for what a group does in that state. He called it herding: togetherness wins over direction, and the system quietly adapts to its least mature members. It can look like a lot of people being agreeable about nothing in particular.

No community is truly ‘static’ – a sense of keeping something in a community ‘the same’ is an illusion. It’s always evolving, re-imagining. So when the band goes slack, it’s not a pause button. It’s closer to a dilution. David Willows calls this experience entropy: even an excellent experience degrades while the school keeps doing what it always did.

When the band breaks

On the other hand, a community might experience the visionary band stretched too far for too long. It breaks, and what breaks with it is the connection between the visionary story and the current reality.

We see this all the time. A parent says: the tagline sounded great, the onboarding was excellent, I was so excited, and then I got here and the reality didn’t match the description. I was sold something that wasn’t true to my lived experience. Another way of seeing this might be the end of the honeymoon period – reality sets in.

Simon Lightman has a phrase for the state a school is in just before that happens. He calls it fragile coherence: an institution has taken on the language of the change, the learner profile and the strategic plan, without reconfiguring the deeper arrangements of time, authority and assessment that shape a student’s actual day. From the outside it looks coherent. It isn’t, yet. Institutions, he writes, “can name the kind of learner they wish to form more easily than they can redesign the conditions that make such formation possible.” Stretch the story past that point for long enough, and the band doesn’t stretch further. It snaps.

The rhythm

Story influences everything. Its health can be read through three questions: is it accurate, is it honouring, is it empowering. And then there’s the fourth, forward-looking piece, which is the one I find leaders most want and find hardest: giving people, teams and a whole community a direction that fits what they actually came for, without breaking the connection to the present, and without letting the band go slack.

Sources

• Homa Tavangar and Will Richardson, 12 Big Questions to Save Education (2025) — on dreaded, default and irresistible futures
• Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (1990) — creative tension
• Elena Vasileva, on narrative inheritance and imagination (2026)
• Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve (1999) — herding and chronic anxiety in systems
• David Willows, Yellow Car — on experience entropy (2023)
• Simon Lightman, Designing with and for Life (2026) — fragile coherence