Sustainable growth comes from user centred digital ecosystem design that removes friction.

(Originally published at The Fix.)

More than any other theme, sustainable development dominates K-12 classrooms. We teach students about collaboration, conservation and protecting finite resources.

At the same time, has there ever been greater pressure on school departments to meet relentless “growth goals”?

Grow test scores. Grow enrollment. More EdTech, more data, more systems, more engagement.

If you work to support a school in IT, HR, or Operations, you know this tension. Leadership wants growth or cost reduction or both. Teachers need support. You’re in the middle, implementing systems designed to help but somehow creating more friction.

You’re working harder than ever. Your team is firefighting daily. Every department is overloaded, yet still siloed, working against each other when everyone needs to work together.

The problem isn’t effort, so what is it?

Consider This Scenario

A new IT system saves HR tons of data entry and costs two thousand dollars less per year. 

Sounds efficient. But the system offloads that work to sixty teachers who never had a say in designing it. 

Teachers now spend 20 minutes navigating unfamiliar interfaces for what used to take them 10.

What would you call that? Efficiency? Digital transformation? Robbing Peter to pay Paul?

All this added complexity, offloading administrative debt and paying for it with staff brain cycles. When does constant “growth” become the problem, not a solution?

Consider This Shift

What if you stopped asking “How do we grow, get faster, more efficient within the department?”

What if you asked instead: “What factors are limiting growth and how do we remove them for the people we’re here to serve?”

The latter changes what you build.

When workflows are designed with user input up front, your support processes reclaim brain cycles instead of burning them. When departments solve problems together, you multiply teacher impact without multiplying effort.

You create the conditions for collective efficacy – the number one driver of student learning gains.

It starts with changing the question. 

Process Behavior Jams

Behavior jams are the moments when accountability falls between departments and nobody knows who owns the problem.

Where does feedback about your team’s work consistently bottleneck?

Why are other departments using workarounds instead of your process?

When teachers avoid your systems, what’s your first assumption? That they’re resistant to change? Or that something in the design isn’t working for them?

Here’s the shift: Move from “tool-first” to “workflow-first.”

The question becomes: How do we design process X so we get the work done without imposing shadow work on our colleagues?

Offloaded Invisible Labor

When was the last time a teacher was in the room when you designed a new process?

If the answer is “never” or “rarely,” what does that tell you about who the system is optimized for?

• What cognitive overhead are you forcing onto end-users?
• Is your department constantly solving problems or finding them upfront before they occur?
• How many disjointed, prerequisite tasks are needed before someone completes the work you’re asking them to do?
• Does your system anticipate problems because you took steps to understand user behavior first?
• Was support built directly into the workflow at the most likely point of need?

Consider these questions:

If you don’t know the answers, that’s actually the most important data point because it means the feedback loop is broken.

Stop Celebrating Firefighting

When was the last time your department celebrated someone for being a hero? For staying late, for saving the day, for making the impossible work?  Probably today.

Here’s what that hero narrative might actually be signaling: unsustainable infrastructure.

What if you celebrated something different?

What systems could you build that don’t require heroism to survive?

What if the highest form of contribution was friction removal – when a team identifies and removes a factor limiting growth?

When you throw a parade for that, you signal what actually matters. When you explicitly credit the cross-functional collaboration that made it possible, you generate curiosity. Others start asking: “How did they do that? Could we do that with our problem?”

That’s how the real mechanism that drives innovation – the way things come together and connect – becomes permanently operationalized, not a fluke requiring superhuman effort.

Look to nature

We teach students that healthy forests require biodiversity, interconnection, and careful stewardship. That every organism affects every other. Our brain forests work the same way. The paradox about improving collaboration? It only takes one person.

This week, pick one process your department owns. Ask a teacher: “Where does this create friction for you?”

Listen without defending. What you build together? That’s the fix.