This Isn't About Milk
What Future Are We Preparing For Anyway?
First, a Letter from the Lab
A few years ago I wrote a book called Get Weird. The message was simple: conformity is costing you something.
And while that message still holds up, pretty much everything else in the world has changed.
Attention is harder than ever to earn. POVs are more polarized than ever. AI is doing its AI thing all over the place.
A few weeks ago I told you my work is increasingly centering around this question:
“What makes some stories endure and others fade?”
I still think that’s true. But I think the reason it’s so hard for most stories to endure is because of a simple fact: the world changes faster than stories do. That’s the thing we’re all instinctively feeling. That’s where the anxiety lives, where the complexity lurks, “the rub,” to get all Hamlety for a moment.
So if I draw an even BIGGER circle around it all…one that includes the message of Get Weird, the stories I’ve spent years collecting, and the organizations I’ve helped navigate moments of transition…the question underneath it all might be even simpler:
“How do we change without losing ourselves?”
Change.
And no, I’m not treating “change” as a business buzzword. (I don’t know if you can “manage” change as much as hope to learn to sail alongside it like it’s wind.)
I mean it more as a human reality. The reality that people change. Organizations change. Markets change. Technology changes. Cultures change.
Inescapably, it would seem, we are always in the process of becoming.
And when that happens, every leader, every brand, every family, every culture faces the same question: What gets carried forward?
A.K.A.
What do we preserve?
What do we leave behind?
What still fits reality?
What myth needs to morph in order for it to keep making sense?
Which brings me to milk…
One of the more surprising moments from this week’s podcast episode—which features two of the smartest educational leaders I know—had nothing to do with curriculum, AI, test scores, or the future of learning.
It was milk.
As they explained it, public schools have inherited decades of policies, regulations, and industry partnerships tied to the dairy industry. Which means debates about milk, chocolate milk, and lunch programs can consume enormous amounts of attention.
Meanwhile, bigger questions just sit there waiting. You know…unimportant questions like:
What should students actually learn?
What skills matter now?
What assumptions no longer fit reality?
I completely understand your instinct reading this might be to laugh at “Big Dairy,” shrug your shoulders, and conclude that institutions are inherently broken. Mine was. You can actually hear me kind of do that in the interview.
But I think you and I are mistaking the symptom for the story.
As my friend, writer David Dark, often says, “We become what we normalize.”
Myths are always trying to protect something. The milk debate isn’t really about milk at all. It’s about a system continuing to protect priorities that once made sense but now don’t.
That’s not really an education problem. It’s a leadership problem. It’s a brand problem. It’s a culture problem.
Every culture carries forward stories from an earlier chapter.
Some deserve to survive. Others don’t. The challenge is knowing the difference.
In my experience, the most expensive mistakes usually come from either changing too quickly without protecting what matters or protecting something long after it stopped serving the people it was meant to help.
Either way, they create the same outcome: two stories…the one leadership thinks they’re creating. And the one people are actually experiencing.
The work is to recognize that gap before it starts to become expensive.