Conversations that are shaping the future of international education

Our friends in the corporate world woke up to this idea a few years ago.  Communication, they told us, is all about a new kind of ‘conversation’ in which everyone is talking to one another in language that is open, natural, open, honest, direct, funny, and often shocking.’[i]  Hardly could they have imagined how far we would have come.  Hardly could they have imagined a world, not even ten years later, in which almost every aspect of what we do is caught up in conversations mediated by the growing authority of Social Media.

David Perkins summed it up perfectly: ‘Organizations,’ he says, ‘are made of conversations.’[ii]  Today, it seems, there is simply no doubting the truth and relevance of this statement.

So surely, at some point, we have to ask ourselves about the quality of the conversations we are having, who we are having them with and where on earth they are leading us.  We also have to think about a key aspect of any truly authentic conversation, namely, who we are listening to. 

Schools are complex organizations.  It is hardly surprising that they tend to be dominated by numerous overlapping conversations. 

So if you want to eavesdrop, here are a number of conversations that we are having right now.

Listening to our students: we are talking with students about their learning; inviting them to rate this learning against commonly agreed standards. 

Listening to our parents: we are leveraging the power of web 2.0 technology to listen-in to what people are saying about us. We are also spending a lot of time in more traditional face-to-face meetings with parents.  We want to better understand the hopes, fears, expectations and concerns of families arriving from every corner of the world. 

Listening to companies: we are preparing our students for life beyond school, recognizing that many of them will pursue careers in the world of business and enterprise.  We cannot afford simply to assume that our programmes of learning are adequate in their preparation of these students; so we are talking to companies, listening to their present challenges and future predictions. Only in this way, it seems, do we stand any chance of equipping our students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions they will need in the future. 

Listening to other schools: no school knows it all! Not surprisingly, then, by some distance, the most utilized forms of learning for school leaders are the well-established global networks of ‘schools talking to schools’.  On any given day, schools leaders from across the globe are talking to one another, gathering best practice and finding new solutions on any number of practical or pedagogical issues.  Social Media is undoubtedly making these conversations more effective and more immediate. 

So where is it all going?
How we finally engage people, listen for understanding, problem-solve and reach collaborative solutions will vary. In some cases, we will focus on the promise of Social Media.  In others, we will do better to stick to traditional face-to-face meetings.  In the end, however, it is clear that the emerging future of international schools will never depend on smart business plans or even the most promising educational manuals.  On the contrary, we will discover a future for ourselves by engaging in better, more collaborative, more thoughtful, more honest conversations with the people who really matter.   

This article was co-authored with Kevin Bartlett, ISB Director.  It is due for publication in Newsweek (Europe and Asia) on 28 September 2009.  The ISB Let's Talk Campaign will also begin on this date.  Click here for details.

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[i] Levine et al, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual.  Pearson Education, 2000.

[ii] Perkins, King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations. John Wiley, 2003.

Ten lines on the horizon: future trends in school communications

There may be lines on the horizon, but everything is still quite vague.

Looking back, on the other hand, I can see clearly how far we’ve come.  Ten years ago, many of us read The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual and it quickly brought about a revolution in our thinking; changing forever the way we understand the communications task.  It was a groundbreaking, radical thesis:  

Stop using jargon, tell it as it is; listen; have conversations and, once and for all, stop seeing customers as the enemy.

Today, though, this seems nothing more than plain common sense.  The thesis has become the new business as usual.

So where next?  What is the ‘next now’ for those of us who work as communications professionals in the field of education?

Here are 10 initial thoughts to get the conversation going.

1. Losing control vs losing the plot: As social media inevitably and relentlessly pushes us to become better listeners, have better conversations and become more flexible in relation to our ‘customers’, I believe that we will have to give up, once and for all, the myth that we can control what people are saying about us, our companies or our educational institutions.  They always did talk about us, in fact.  The only difference now, with the advent of social media, is that we can listen in more easily and, in some cases, measure what people are saying out there. 

At the same time, the more conversations we have, the more air-time we give to our ‘customers’, the more we will feel the pressure to confirm.  Some of our values, mission statements and guiding principles will be challenged and we will be forced to find new ways of ‘envisioning’ the conversations out there.  If we don’t, we will find ourselves blown around by the winds of common opinion.     

In short, our task will be to act as guides; providing a language and a perspective that will ensure that don’t lose the pedagogical plot completely.

2. Telling the story to understand the story: It’s a simple point really.  We don’t ever understand human experience until we tie it into a story.  Until that point, our lives are nothing more than a random, dislocated set of sensory experiences devoid of meaning or relevance.  And the same is true of organizations.  They don’t have a vision until they have a story.  So when it comes to narrating the future of our educational organizations, we simply can’t afford to leave the storyteller outside the Board Room.  It will be her job to find the simplicity in the complexity, bring coherence, offer perspective and a common language.

Obvious, perhaps, but take a look at the Senior Management organizational charts of many schools and colleges.  The Communications Director is simply nowhere to be seen.

3. Finding the new in old media.  It’s all about new media right now, isn’t it?  Shiny new tools that promise an online, anytime, boundary-less future.  And to think, only a few years ago, most of us were content with a brochure and a website that worked!

Propelled towards this future, we will do well to reflect on whether traditional print media can still play a role.  Is print production dead?  To be sure, today it is simply irresponsible to think that we will continue to use paper where there is a credible, preferred alternative.  But perhaps we should not move too quickly away from print production and its allies.  A positive future will be one in which we use paper wisely, creatively and with clear focused objectives.

4. Driven by data vs driven mad by it.  We will need to be more target driven and focus our assessment and evaluative efforts on more than coverage and content.  Measuring inputs, outputs and impact upon the organization will be required at all levels.  And as most of us will not have the luxury of a ‘data officer’, we are all going to have to learn to improve our analytical skills in this area; learn to ask better, more insightful questions of the work we do; learn how to tell stories through the language of number.

5. The old internal vs external chestnut.  We will find that internal communications will be far more important to us than marketing.  This is a bold statement.  But think about it.  Many of us are working in organizations where our market take up is dominated by word of mouth.  So it stands to reason that if we keep our current customers happy, we will have an army of marketeers out there telling the story of our schools and colleges.

Now, of course, I am defining ‘internal’ communications to mean everyone who is currently part of the school-college community.  It is interesting to look across the fence, though, at the Corporations, where a similar trend is being noticed.  (Unless that is similarly because communications traditionally has it in for their marketing colleagues!)

6. Communications as experience architecture.  According to Tom Kelley, the ‘experience architect’ is one of the ten ‘faces’ of innovation.  We know the guys at Starbucks don’t simply want to serve you a coffee; they want you to pay for and receive an experience that just happens to include coffee.

In the future, our customers are going to be far more demanding in this area.  They will be easily bored, distracted and prefer those who communicate more than information on a page.  We are going to have to put on our thinking caps and work out how to communicate the experience of learning, without necessary having access to the big-budget resources of the corporations.

7. Business vs Education.   We are finally going to have to give up this antipathy.  Let’s face it, it’s our own fault.  It was our educational colleagues, back in the middle ages, who built colleges and universities as castles, keeping the pursuit of learning pure and ensuring that all ‘corrupting’ influences remain firmly on the outside.  In the twentieth century, in particular, anything that resembled ‘business’ was considered anathema and only recently have we seen a shift in thinking about the idea that business can sponsor and begin to determine what the learning experience. 

Our future is going to be tough, it we don’t work hard at breaking down this myth and bringing these two communities together.  And no better place to start than by actually sitting around the table and talking to businesses about the ways in which our curricula are preparing kids for future employment.  It really is all about preparing young people for life beyond school.

As communicators we are going to have to tell stories that bring reconciliation to these once warring worlds.

8. Value added.  It seems a simple thing, but I believe that for most of us, it is not.  Most of us are creative enough to enjoy new challenges and to adopt new ideas.  But where does this all stop?  Is new always better?  In the future, I believe we will have to ask far more and far often those difficult questions about the value of many of our traditional, taken for granted activities.                

We are also going to have to be prepared to act upon the answers we bring to these questions.

9. Capture the student voice.  I truly believe that schools and colleges have not yet even begun to tap into the well of student resources they have at their finger tips.  For many of us, however, working with our own students will become commonplace.  We will look to our students to bring us closer to the experience of learning; closer to new ways of telling the story; closer to new technologies and their communications potential.  And we will need to develop the necessary rewards, structures, protocols by which students receive authentic, mentored work experience before they leave us.  Do this and you will discover a win-win situation for everyone involved!

10. Where did all the vocation go?  Perhaps every generation asks this question, but one of the repercussions of a more professionalized industry seems to be the absence of the word vocation – that sense that we don’t mind not having a BMW in the car park, because our rewards are tied up in the fact that we can truly make a difference to the lives of our students.  In the future, I believe that one of two things will happen.  We will either have to rest content with young professionals joining our teams, being more demanding and consistently being tempted across the street by the corporate world; or we are going to have to think of ways to re-introduce the concept of vocation into the work that we do.

10 briefly stated ideas.  And who knows whether they will last the test of time or whether other lines will appear on the horizon.  Time will tell, I guess.

Ideas are always borne of conversations.  So I am extremely happy to acknowledge those members of the workshop at Case Europe Annual Conference on 27 August 2009 (sponsored by Council for Advancement and Support of Education and European Association of Commuication Directors who so readily engaged with this subject and provided some helpful direction and critical thinking to my own.

All Aboard the Cluetrain

The world has change in the last 12 months.  The rules of branding have also changed.

Following up from last year's article, here is a presentation prepared for an International Schools Conference next week in the Hague on admissions and marketing. 

All Aboard The Cluetrain: 10 Rules of Branding You Can't Afford to Ignore

View more presentations from David Willows.

Branding your school (Part 1)

Like it or not, we are all branded.

Regardless of our age, where in the world we come from or what we believe, all of us carry the marks (some would say scars) of a relentless culture of global enterprise. The everyday objects that surround us are no longer valuable simply because of what they do, but because of what they symbolize. From the cup of coffee in your hand, to the watch on your wrist, to the pen in your pocket – everything is carefully designed to set you apart (or so the makers promise). They are icons of status, power, wealth or simply plain ‘cool’.

We live in a branded universe.

As well as being branded by external objects, we each have a personal brand: Me^®. We carefully construct our identity by choosing to dress in a certain way, buy certain accessories and live a certain kind of lifestyle, albeit chosen or forced upon us. And most of us, over the years, become quite expert in managing Me^®. Standing in front of the mirror each morning, we are chief executives of a truly unique product.

So what about My School^® or My Network^® (ECIS perhaps)? Charged as guardians of the brands that define the present and future of international schools around the world, how are we doing at managing these more complex brand identities?

The purpose of this article is simply to catch a glimpse across the fence at what others are saying about brand management in other industries and to think about what this might mean for the future of international schools.

Now whatever you think about branding, marketing and all those off-the-shelf business books, I urge you to read on because here are 10 lessons that you and your school really can’t afford to ignore. Read them in any order, one at a time or all at once. They are all connected and all point to a very different and exciting future.

Lesson 1: All aboard the ‘Cluetrain’

I once applied for a job with Sony. I didn’t get the job. But I did come away with a book recommendation that changed my view on communications forever: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Locke et al., 2000).

Four statements will capture the essence of the key ideas: 

• ‘Markets are nothing more than conversations... Our only hope is to talk.’
• ‘Conversations are a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.’
• ‘The only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global.’
• Further, these voices are telling one another the truth based on their real experiences.’

Reading this book again, I find myself believing more than ever that it is time for international schools to get aboard the Cluetrain and join the market revolution that has already changed the way many companies construct their brand and do business. In a world now accustomed to Web 2.0 and the power of social networking, it is time to ‘cut the crap’ and start communicating in ways that people understanding. Forget the jargon and educational clichés. Starting talking to your customers as people, friends, partners. Listen to their ideas. Tell them stories that ring true. Most of all, stop seeing your customers as ‘the enemy’ when, in fact, they are your most important advocates.

Lesson 2: Funky hedgehogs

Most of us have read and been influenced by Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (Collins, 2001). Personally, I have always been intrigued, if not a little confused by what he calls ‘the hedgehog concept’. In his follow-up essay, Good to Great and the Social Sectors (Collins, 2006), Collins explores what this might look like for organizations such as schools. Greatness, he explains, is all about being best in the world at something, being passionate about it and having an effective resource engine comprising of time, money and brand.

There is the ‘B’ word again.

Brand is clearly important to Collins. It is a component of ‘greatness’. Unfortunately, though, Collins is not particularly helpful when it comes to understanding what the word actually means. For that, I have to turn to another one of the titles that almost every airport bookshop in the world seems to be selling these days in their popular business section: Funky Business Forever: How to Enjoy Capitalism (Ridderstrǻle and Nordström, 2007).

The point about brands, Ridderstǻle and Nordström suggest, is that they are always more than the sum of their parts. Think of The Coca-Cola Company. When we think of Coca-Cola, we associate various things with it – a logo, perhaps an advert, a certain packaging, a price-value proposition, its history, reputation or simply a recent advertising campaign. All of these components are part of what makes Coca-Cola a powerful brand. But in other sense the brand is always more than the sum of these parts. According to the authors of Funky Business, brand is actually more to do with a ‘promise’ or ‘contract’ with every customer. Another way of putting it might be to say that a brand is all about a relationship of trust that is built between the Company and its customer.

When prospective families choose our schools, they are literally ‘entrusting’ their children to our care. So what kind of value propositions are we offering to these families? If we are going to be great schools, we need to spend more time thinking about the promise and contract we are building with our current and future markets.

Lesson 3: The next now

Imagining the school of the future is something I have been interested in for a while now, but not in the sense of 2001: Space Odyssey or fantasy-filled images of children being taught by robots. I am much more concerned with what today’s best business minds are saying about the future of commerce and how this will shape and impact the business model of tomorrow’s schools.

Today’s reality is simple: like it or not, families, companies and organizations purchase international school education in just the same way as they buy a new BMW, Apple iPod or pair of Chanel sunglasses. International schools are symbols of status and the purchasers of our services demand the same standards of service, after-care support and ‘packaging’ as any other luxury item they might choose to spend their money on.

And if we are to believe Salzman and Matathia (2007), only those brands with a combination of ‘global relevance’ and ‘hyperlocal desirability’ will survive. Our task is therefore to discover the educational equivalent of HSBC, which recently reinvented itself around the ‘promise’ of being ‘the world’s local bank’. Our customers, in other words, are becoming much more demanding. They want the best of both worlds. They want to be reassured that our brand is truly global in scope, ambition and relevance. Yet, at the same time, they want to be reassured that each school is deeply rooted in the local context.

Likewise, Dean Crutchfield, marketing guru from Google, recently explained, today’s customers want more and more precision, reciprocity and flexibility: ‘We live in a world flooded by spam, so you had better know me as a customer; you had also better let me speak as well and please listen to my feedback and ideas; and then lets discuss exactly how we might do business together.’

Once again, the Cluetrain has left the station: a global conversation has begun. The old rules of the game are changing. But are you on-board?

Lesson 4: Fancy a coffee break?

It certainly might be a good time to take a break and reflect on the impact of these ideas for your school communications and marketing strategies. For those brave enough to read on, however, there is another question to consider that has bugged me for a while now: what are we actually selling? I know that the grass is always greener on the other side, but honestly, it does seem easier for the guys over there in Coca-Cola, Nike or Apple. They sell ‘stuff’. We sell... well, education. But what exactly is it? How does one package it, describe it, let alone guarantee it?

The more we thought about this question at the International School of Brussels, the more we kept coming back to one simple concept: the ISB experience. That, it seems, is what families are purchasing for their children – a transforming experience that promises to shape the present and leave an indelible mark on the future.

That’s the idea anyway. And it is encouraging to see how other companies are picking up big time on this notion of selling an ‘experience’. Take Starbucks for example, driven by the dream of becoming the ‘third place’. In his book entitled The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary (2006), Joseph Michelli makes constant reference to the fact that much of Howard Schultz’s success in building this global brand can be attributed to the fact that Starbucks is not, in the end, about coffee, but about serving up an ‘experience’ that becomes a key component to people’s lives. Home, work, Starbucks: it really is the ‘third place’.

Now the problem with ‘experiences’ of any kind – but particularly the good ones – is that they are notoriously difficult to bottle and keep. Words are too mundane. Pictures fade. Sound is susceptible to different styles and taste. At ISB, we are therefore constantly wrestling with what it means to be an international school. Dare we believe we can become, for many expatriate families arriving in Brussels, the ‘third place’? Home, work... ISB.

Lesson 5: Coherence, coherence, coherence

If building a brand is all about holding ‘conversations’ and selling an ‘experience’, you had better make sure that it is coherent. Incoherence offers only a mortal blow to any brand or value proposition you may want to establish with you customer. Of course, there are some things you cannot control. If word of mouth, as was already suggested, is key to successful brand development in the new marketplace, you can’t expect and, in fact, don’t want everyone parroting the same lousy script. At the same time, though, you cannot simply assume that key messages will be heard loud and clear without some kind of management.

Looking at the issue in another way, international schools are extremely complex types of organizations. Each school offers one promise to the market, but this is applied and takes form in multiple contexts to multiple audiences, often in multiple languages. You therefore have to wrestle with the whole ‘loose-tight’ thing and try to ensure that the same story is being told – even if from different vantage points.

A simple example (really, a work-in-progress) will suffice. ISB had been involved in ‘environmental action’ for a number of years. However, if you asked people what exactly was being done and why, you could expect a range of wildly different responses. It was for this reason that ISBEarth was launched as a banner to capture and communicate the schools work in this area. By managing the brand and developing an organizational model, the school immediately had a frame of reference by which it could look at what the students were learning, how we organized ourselves, the partners we were developing, as well as the actions that parents, students and faculty were taking – discovering both areas of great coherence and, crucially, areas were there remained huge inconsistency that needed immediate attention.

The lesson from brands all across the world is simple. Make sure that if you stand for something, you practice what you preach at all levels of your organisation. The customers of today are extremely savvy and will see straight through and often expose, mercilessly, any inconsistencies.

This article was first published in The International Schools Journal (ECIS), November 2008.

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