My daughter is in fifth grade. Driving the carpool home recently, I heard loud shushing noises coming from the back seat. Something about “six seven,” secretly whispered with a tween urgency. If you have an elementary-aged kid you probably already know about this. Apparently, “six seven” is a thing.

She goes to an international school outside the U.S., so at first I figured this was a local thing, but somehow this trend is also going around her friend group in Baltimore. A little more investigation revealed it’s a global trend of two numbers. What is this world coming to? Why do I feel so old?

I don’t get it. This New Yorker article explains it well: “six seven” is a social media trend where you simply say the numbers six and seven in order… and that’s the whole thing. Nothing else. No moral. No dance routine. No deeper meaning.

Sometimes I accidentally say “six seven” in a sentence and my daughter shoots me a dagger glare. She and a contingent of her friends are staunchly anti-67. (I respect the principled stance.)

What amazes me is that this has spread far beyond TikTok — all the way to younger kids who don’t even have accounts, in countless countries across the world. Just word of mouth. The largest low-tech global game of telephone I’ve ever witnessed.

A few things this is teaching me for my work:

1. You never know what will catch people’s attention.You can spend hours polishing the perfect headline. Meanwhile, two random numbers go viral. There's something humbling but also freeing about that.

2. Virality can’t be controlled. We all watched an actual virus reshape the world. And now two integers are doing their own thing. Ideas spread the same way: unpredictably and uncontrollably. However, novelty is a key ingredient.

3. Safe, predictable content rarely spreads. I’m a recovering straight-A student, someone who has spent a lifetime collecting metaphorical gold stars. But when I look at what actually travels, what people repeat, it’s almost always something slightly weird, slightly risky, slightly “wait, can we say that?”

4. Creativity has to be a little alive. If your communications feel like they’ve been edited by committee to remove anything surprising, they’re dead on arrival. Kids are not spreading “adequate annual report copy” to their friends across continents. Neither are adults.

A small list of gentle risks worth trying:

• Use one page in your impact report to talk about a loss, not just wins.
• Try an AI-generated image that actually shows your vision, not just a report of what you’ve done.
• Break your brand palette with one unexpected color.
• Write a headline that is a question even you can’t answer.
• Publish a criticism of your field and respond to it directly.
• Post the video even if it’s not perfect.

None of this guarantees your message will make an impact. But “67” is a reminder that what moves people isn’t predictable, and that the most memorable things are the ones that feel alive and edgy.

If two numbers can circle the globe on the breath of ten-year-olds, maybe our communications can be a little more playful too.