While you were arguing

My dear children, this one is for you.

Stop what you are doing for just a moment. Don't worry about who said what, who did what and whose turn it is to sit in the middle. If your brother touches you, let it go. If your sister winds you up, respond with a touch of humour and generosity.

No, we're not there yet.  In fact, the journey is only just beginning.  And anyway, its not about what we do when we 'get there' - its about the 'getting there'. 

So wind down the window and enjoy the view.

When I was about your age, I always imagined that one day I would have the chance to visit this land of adventure and opportunity. And as strange as it may seem to you now, it was my dream growing up to see 'Jaws' at Universal, visit the rockets that stand outside the Kennedy Space Center, and experience the magic of Disney first hand.  Night after night, I remember reading about this stuff in the encyclopaedia next to my bed and wondering how anyone could have turned an entire country into such a wonderful playground for teenage boys.

So, if I'm honest, we're doing this for me as much as for you.  I know that Jaws is not so realistic when you're up close.  I know that Mickey's world is a rip off - where people pay to queue - and that the whole business of space travel today has nothing of the noble romance of yesteryear.  That said, I'd still like you guys to stop telling me that you are bored and let me enjoy my moment.

No, that came out wrong.  I don't want you to think for one moment that I want to do this thing alone.  Quite the opposite.  It's so much more fun with you guys next to me.

Maybe you don't realise it now, but this trip is about all of us creating and laying down stories together - fleeting moments in time that for the rest of our lives - no matter what the future holds, whether together or apart - promise to remind us and define us as a family.

Some might say, perhaps, that I'm just an experience junkie, pretending to be an 'experience architect', passing on to you (my kids) a dangerous habit. And, perhaps, that is true.  But let me tell you this.

When I saw your face as you swam up close to that dolphin; when I recall our conversation after surviving that roller-coaster; and when I think about you drawing breath in awe as you watched the sun set over Manhattan, I cannot help but feel that these moments together are ours to treasure, forever.

For what they are worth, then, this is my gift.

And before I go, there is just one more thing.

While you were arguing in the back seat, you remember that I asked the taxi driver to drop us off at the front entrance of the swanky hotel and not the side. This was frustrating for your guys, as it meant we sat several minutes longer in the Manhattan traffic. 

You were tired, I know. Believe me, though, I did it for a reason.

I wanted you to have your moment.  I wanted you to be the stars.  I wanted you to live the so-called american dream.

I was hoping that you would stop worrying about who was in the middle and who said what.  I wanted you to wind down the window and simply enjoy being the centre of the world - just for a moment.

Not just the centre of mine.

One day, if not now, you'll understand and want the same for your own kids.

Your Dad.

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.

The future of school communications

I’ve said it before, but everything’s changing... fast.

And, apparently, if you believe what you read about latest trends, we are all becoming more angry, less rational, more emotional in the ways we communicate with another.

I guess that figures. Damn it!

Here’s some other things I notice about the way in which things are changing:

· The conversations we have with one another no longer have boundaries. We say what we want, to whoever we want (we can speak directly to everyone from the Queen of England to President Obama if we so choose) and anyone can ‘write on our wall’ or ‘become our friend’;

· We expect more. We want to communicate when we want, in the format we want, and look for an immediate response. We feel mild to moderate frustration when there is no phone coverage, available Wifi, or the person across the other side of the world just happens to be asleep;

· A new breed of ‘choice’ or ‘experience architects’ have been born. These are the guys who understand how communication works and conjure up an experience that goes well beyond simple words on a page. These are the guys who understand that, in a world that is becoming more emotional, you have simply got to learn to speak to the heart in order to get your point across.

So how do we respond, keep up, and stay up-to-date? Here’s 3 questions I will often bring to the table:

· What is the past I need to let go of?

· What is the future I need to embrace?

· What are the pieces that never change over time?

Personally, I am ready to let go of ‘snail mail’. Anyway, the magic of the letter was always over-rated in my opinion (perhaps because, for me, they were almost always people wanting to take my money).

But before I rush headlong into this exciting future, I feel the need to go back to some ancient principles of communication that, arguably, never change; principles that we might conceivably sum up as: story, trust, listen, experience.

I have always said that my current job is that of storyteller: I tell the story of my school and help others find their place in that story.

Simple, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. Communicating an exciting vision of learning in a way that engages people in a meaningful way, enables them to trust the tale that is being told, makes them feel listened to and understood, and communicates the experience of life in our school .... call that simple? The challenge is always to find the simplicity in the complexity.

So here are some questions I find myself wrestling with, almost on a daily basis right now:

· How do I capture the spirit of my school? Should I use words, or use paper in other, less traditional ways? And, anyway, what is the story of my school that provides the thread for everything I communicate?

· How do I have good conversations? What conversations am I starting? With whom? Using what media? How can I embrace new technology to spread the message in ways that previously were not possible?

· Am I a good listener? What are people out there saying about their own needs? What stories are they telling about me or my school? Again, how can new technology help me listen-in to what the ‘market’ is saying, thinking, feeling.

In answering these questions, we are now dipping our toe into the water, using paper differently and trying to capture the potential of social media applications – from Twitter to Facebook – as well as regularly monitoring what our online users are saying about us and the service we provide. We are also beginning to consider the potential impact of all this technology for crisis communications.

I don’t think any of us know where this will take us. But one thing is absolutely clear: this stuff is here to stay, so we had better cling hold of some guiding principles if we are going to navigate a proper path and ensure our schools are better at the end of it.

This post is based on a presentation given at the European Council of International Schools (ECIS) Administrators Conference, Lisbon, April 2009.

The problem with innovation

What comes into your mind when you think of innovation?

Most people, when asked this question, will give examples of cutting edge scientific breakthrough, state of the art product design or previously un-thought-of ideas. 

And they are right. Innovation is about the successful implementation of new ideas, new patterns or new ways of seeing the world.

The problem is that, these days, everyone has suddenly become ‘innovative’ and our relentless pursuit of the new has not necessarily added as much value as we first thought.

The huge cost of all this adding, using and moving-on is only now becoming clear; so much so that some companies have stopped asking ‘Can we?’ innovate to improve our products and started asking the far more difficult question: ‘Should we?’

So let’s take another approach and think about the possibility of innovation as consolidation: the relentless, disciplined focus to simply keep doing what we do, only better – more efficiently, more responsibly, more truthfully.

Perhaps you remember the series of Accenture ads that featured Tiger Woods? With the strapline ‘We know what it takes to be a Tiger’, one of these infamous ads made a simple statement:

50% relentless consistency – 50% willingness to change.

For me, it is this 50% of relentless consistency that makes Tiger the great golfer that he is today. And, again, the key is discipline.

So the question is, surely: how do we innovate in a way that enables us, not so much to do new things, but become better, more consistent, at the things we already do?

In his book The Ten Faces of Innovation, Tom Kelley seems to suggest that it is all about the person or ‘face’ that we bring to the jobs that we do. Again, it is not about doing more stuff, but being a certain kind of person; bringing a certain kind of perspective, pattern or meaning to the work that we do.

Essentially, Kelley suggests, there are 10 faces, which themselves can be divided into 3 broad categories:

The Learning Personas who constantly gather new sources of information to expand their knowledge and grow.

1. The Anthropologist observes human behaviour and develops a deep understanding of how people interact with products, services, spaces, tasks.

2. The Experimenter prototypes new ideas continuously, learning by trial and error. She loves to take calculated risks!

3. The Cross-Pollinator looks over the fences and translates what is going on in other industries and cultures to fit with the unique needs of their own enterprise.

The Organising Personas spend their time trying to understand how organisations work.

4. The Hurdler has a knack of overcoming or outsmarting roadblocks. He has huge perseverance.

5. The Collaborator helps brings people and groups together, often leading from the middle of the pack and establishing new forms of cooperation.

6. The Director gathers together a great team and sparks their creative talents.

The Building Personas, meanwhile, apply all of the above to make innovation happen.

7. The Experience Architect designs compelling experiences that go beyond mere functionality to connect at a deeper level with customers’ latent or expressed needs.

8. The Set Designer creates a stage on which innovation team members can do their best work.

9. The Caregiver delivers outstanding customer care, anticipating customer needs and look after them.

10. The Storyteller builds both internal morale and external awareness through compelling narratives.

The problem with innovation is that it has tended to become associated with the new gimmick that, in fact, we did not actually need; that added no value to our lives.

Truly innovative thinkers, on the other hand, help us find meaning in what we already do by bringing new connections, recycling olds ideas and bringing sustainable solutions to new problems, or simply telling the story in a different way.

Again, it is not so much about what we do as the ‘face’ we are that really counts.

So which face of innovation are you?

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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