Every year we add another “book” to the school bookshelf. A new initiative, committee, tracking process, awareness raising campaign, spreadsheet, meeting or another program that sounded brilliant at a conference eight years ago and now survives mostly because nobody’s brave enough to put it out of its misery.
The problem is that bookshelves have limits, yet schools rarely behave as though they do. We just keep stacking more and more onto already crowded shelves until the whole structure begins bowing under the weight of competing priorities, divided attention and adult exhaustion. Worse still, the genuinely important work gets hidden beneath layers of well-intentioned noise and busy-ness.
I think many schools are now operating with completely overstacked bookshelves and it’s one of the reasons I’ve made “Ruthless Prioritisation” a key tenet of our Building Better People Project workshop for Principals, Exec Teams and other School Leaders.
We’re drowning in performative wellbeing, mandatory fun, duplicated paperwork, operational trivia disguised as leadership, beautifully formatted documents nobody actually reads and behaviour tracking systems requiring more forensic administration than genuine relational impact.
We absorb every “sounds good” initiative seen in our social reels while simultaneously wondering why staff feel overwhelmed or decreasingly connected from the reasons they entered education in the first place.
And because schools are full of good-hearted people, almost none of this arrives maliciously. Most of it arrives attached to noble intentions, which is precisely why it becomes so difficult to challenge once embedded.
The Human School, as I’m referring to it , understands that every new priority extracts a fee from every existing one. Time, energy, relational capacity, money and professional attention are finite resources. Every hour teachers spend feeding judicial behaviour systems, colour-coding spreadsheets or attending meetings that should have been emails is an hour not spent building relationships, designing powerful learning or helping young people become better humans.
That’s why ruthless prioritisation is not harsh leadership. It’s respectful leadership.
The best principals I work with are becoming increasingly comfortable saying things like, “We’re stopping that now,” or, “That process no longer justifies the time it consumes.” They are recognising that schools do not improve through endless accumulation. They improve when leaders become disciplined enough to protect space for what matters.
Eventually, the real danger of an overstacked bookshelf is not that it looks cluttered.
It’s that the shelf collapses under the weight of too many apparent priorities that nobody was willing to remove.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. If you feel like you’re constantly adding more but making less progress, I’d love you to join me at The Building Better People Project. We’ll explore how to cut through the noise, prioritise what really matters and build a culture that doesn’t depend on doing more. There are still workshops to come across Australia and New Zealand, but places are filling quickly.
Find workshop near you and register here.
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