We Keep Rolling Out Good Ideas Without the Story. That’s Why They Stall

The education sector spends billions designing programs, products and policies but spends almost nothing designing the story that helps people understand what they are and what they do. When narrative is an afterthought, the public makes meaning on its own, using their most familiar, vivid and available shortcuts.

Those shortcuts are powerful:

• Top-down control: When reforms arrive without local authors, communities read them as done to them, not with them.
• Data equals danger: Years of breaches and sloppy practice have built a trust deficit with families.
• Tech replaces people: In schools, the default story about technology as substitution — a zero-sum trade against human connection and judgment.

The result is predictable: Good ideas stall not because they’re bad ideas, but because their stories arrive late, or not at all.