The Pink Boots Club

For over forty years, my favourite colour has been fluorescent pink.

Or, to give it its modern marketing name… electric fuchsia.

Back then, I rather enjoyed the fact that it wasn’t everyone else’s favourite colour. But judging by this year’s World Cup, that appears to have changed.

Which is unfortunate for me, because the thing about favourite colours is that they become a little less special once they’re everybody else’s, too.

So, while I’ve been enjoying this year’s World Cup, I’ve also found myself spending an embarrassing amount of time looking at all the pink boots.

As much as I don’t want to be distracted by anything other than the football, I simply can’t unsee them. Fluorescent pink flashes across my TV screen every few seconds. It doesn’t seem to matter who is playing, which nation they represent or which brand sponsors them. Everywhere I look, there is another pair of pink boots.

At first, I assumed it was a coincidence.

It wasn’t. Nor, the more I’ve thought about it, should it have been a surprise.

It wasn’t always like this.

I remember when David Beckham first appeared wearing those magnificent golden Predators. They became iconic, not because they were gold, but because they belonged to “golden balls” Beckham. But the boots made headlines because of the man wearing them, not the other way around.

A few years later, Cristiano Ronaldo’s Mercurials came out. Again, the boots felt like an extension of the player. They amplified an identity and brand that already existed.

This World Cup feels different because it isn’t the player defining the boots. It’s the boots defining the moment. The pink boots don’t really tell the player’s story. Rather, I think they are telling the market’s story.

Curious, I started reading about how this might have happened, and, unsurprisingly, I am not the first person to notice the pink phenomenon. The explanation has remarkably little to do with footballers themselves. Indeed, for several years, trend forecasters have identified that electric fuchsia would be the colour of the moment. Designers discovered that electric fuchsia offered maximum contrast against green grass and remained highly visible on television and phone screens. Working independently, the world’s largest manufacturers arrived at almost exactly the same conclusion.

Different companies. Different designers. But the same answer.

We like to believe competition produces originality. Sometimes it does. But just as often, it produces convergence. Organisations operating in the same space, responding to the same incentives and market forces, slowly begin to resemble one another. Not because they are copying (although that might also be the case) but because they are responding to the same world.

Perhaps fashion is simply what markets look like from the inside.

I like that thought because from inside the market, I imagine it feels like common sense.

From the outside, though, it looks like everyone is wearing pink boots.

And that’s when I realised this was no longer a post about football boots.

It’s about markets.

About organisations.

About us.

Welcome to the Pink Boots Club.

The first rule of the Pink Boots Club is that everyone stands out.

The second rule of the Pink Boots Club is that everyone stands out in exactly the same way.

Membership is remarkably easy. You don’t join because you’re trying to imitate everyone else. You join because you’re trying to make good decisions in exactly the same environment as everyone else.

Somewhere around this point, I stopped thinking about pink football boots and, as is my way, I started thinking about schools.

Over the years, I have been fortunate to visit many schools. They have never been more impressive. I have seen amazing teachers, inspirational leaders and students whose opportunities would have been unimaginable even ten years ago.

But I also think it’s true that they’ve slowly become increasingly similar over the years.

Not just similar in their architecture, mission statements, or aspirations. But also similar in the language they use to describe themselves, in their strategies, and in the priorities that they elevate. They are all responding to the same research, inspection and evaluation frameworks, attending the same conferences, recruiting from the same professional networks and wrestling with the same complexities.

So perhaps it should not be a surprise that they are all converging. After all, they are all responding to the same market forces. They are all looking for ways to compete, to be distinctive, to be special, to stand out from the crowd.

As a result, it has made one particular paradox difficult to ignore: the pursuit of differentiation has made us increasingly homogeneous.

That’s not a criticism per se. It makes sense that schools learn from one another to evolve and respond to change. But what happens next?

Every school eventually reaches a moment when it must decide whether the next idea belongs to its philosophy or merely to its market. The distinction is easy to miss because, from the outside, such decisions often look identical.

One school might change because its understanding of learning has changed.

Another might change because the educational landscape has changed.

Yet both can arrive in the same place.

I often think about this when reflecting on some of the most significant curriculum decisions we have made at UWCSEA.

Phasing out GCSEs was never an attempt to be different for the sake of being different. If anything, it was the consequence of asking a more difficult question: What’s the best learning experience we can provide (in our context) for young people between the ages of fourteen and sixteen? The answer led us somewhere different, but distinctiveness was never our objective; fidelity to our educational philosophy was.

The same is true of our current work helping to reimagine the IB Diploma through our Systems Transformation pilot. We are incredibly proud of the work, and it will certainly evolve, but the work did not begin with the question, “What are the world’s best schools doing?” It began with a different one…

“Given who we are, what does our UWC mission ask of us now?”

Readers may disagree with either decision. That is entirely reasonable, as we were making the best decision we could for our students in our context, so it would stand to reason that it might not be the best decision in another context.

Actually, the point is not that these choices are right or wrong. I am just pointing out that they were philosophical before they were strategic.

That, I think, is why Kurt Hahn remains so relevant to the UWC movement. Whilst the world has changed over the last century, his educational philosophy (and that of the UWC movement, and by extension the IBO, I think) has endured.

Hahn probably understood something markets often forget. That while programmes are temporary, purpose is not. Perhaps that also explains why the schools we remember are rarely remembered for the initiatives they introduce.

Which brings me back to those pink football boots.

David Beckham wasn’t memorable for wearing golden boots. The golden boots became memorable because they belonged to David Beckham. His identity gave the boots meaning, not the other way around.

Perhaps, then, that’s the real risk of joining the Pink Boots Club?

It’s not that schools deliberately copy one another. I think very few do actually.

It’s that we slowly begin to respond to the same parental anxieties, the same moral outrage amplified by the media, the same conference keynotes, and the same competitor movements, until our next decision feels less like an expression of who we are and more like a sensible response to what everyone else is doing.

That’s how membership happens.

It’s not because a school lacks courage. No, we become members because, from inside the market, wearing pink boots simply feels like common sense.

So the challenge for school leaders is to pause before pulling them on and ask a different question:

Are we wearing these because they’re ours… or because everyone else is wearing them too?

I don’t expect fluorescent pink (or electric fuchsia) to make it to the next World Cup. Another colour will come. It always does.

But I do wonder what colour schools will choose next.