24: The Question You Aren’t Asking
Why schools keep buying answers to questions they never asked.
Here’s a human-recorded audio version with Chief Voice Officer Kirk McDavitt. Hit play, or keep reading below.
Where We Are
I want to start by acknowledging the weight you’re carrying right now. End of April, in a school building, is a high-altitude climb. Between budget finalizations, recruitment cycles, and the sheer emotional velocity of the “end-of-year” rush, the air feels a little thin.
That’s exactly why we tend to grab for quick fixes. When our cognitive load is maxed out, the long-term discipline of building a design practice can feel like an impossible luxury. We aren’t always looking for a transformation. Often, we are just looking for relief.
Over time, I have seen this play out in a few different ways, but perhaps the most costly one is the one I’ll share with you today.
A school I was working with signed a contract for a platform meant to solve a single nagging symptom: login friction. They wanted students to have single sign-on access to every app on their iPads. The vendor was credible. The price was reasonable. The logic was “common sense.”
But halfway through pre-launch, the team paused. The platform did exactly what it promised, but it didn’t answer the questions nobody had bothered to ask.
Was login friction actually the bottleneck for student learning, or was it just an annoyance for the adults?
Did teachers want this, or was IT simply trying to tidy up the digital “closet”?
The tool worked. The implementation was flawless. The system remained broken because the questions were skipped.
The Pattern We Don't See
With the very best intentions, we jump from a perceived problem to a shiny solution without ever pausing on the architecture that connects them.
Someone names a frustration. Someone else names a tool. We agree. We sign. We launch.
Then, six months later, we are genuinely surprised when the solution creates its own category of complexity.
The problem isn’t the tool. It’s that we never defined what success actually looked like.
Product designer Filip Mishevski wrote a piece a while back that names this exactly.
He argues that a designer is only as good as the quality of their questions.
Tools change. Methodologies drift. What separates a junior designer from a senior one isn’t software fluency. It’s the quality of what they ask before they ever touch the drawing board.
Schools are no different.
Three Questions (Before You Sign)
You don’t need a 50-page audit. You need three questions, asked with disciplined silence, before any decision about a system, a platform, or a piece of communication:
1. Whose problem is this, exactly?
Not “the school’s.” Not “the community’s.” Name a specific person in a specific moment. If you can’t visualize the human who is suffering, you don’t have a problem yet, you have a feeling.
2. Are we fixing the system or the symptom?
“Students forget passwords” is a symptom. “Our digital environment is a fragmented maze of disconnected identities” is a system. Tools fix symptoms. Design fixes systems.
3. How will we know it worked?
Pick your signal in advance. If you can't say what would tell you the spend was worth it six months from now, you also can't say what would tell you it wasn't.
This Week’s Move
Trace a Decision
Pick one decision your school made in the last twelve months: a new software, a new duty roster, or a new newsletter format.
Apply the three questions retroactively:
Whose problem was it, specifically?
What were we actually trying to fix? (System vs. Symptom)
How do we know it worked?
If the answers feel hazy, don’t panic. You don’t have to redo the decision. You just have to notice the gap.
The work is about catching the moment a question gets skipped and learning to pause for ten minutes when it matters most.
Your Experience
What’s a decision your school made that you wish someone had asked a question about first? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, and your stories help us design better frameworks for everyone.
Systematically yours,
About the Author:
G (short for Gitane) is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at EKG Collective, helping international schools turn communication complexity into systematic clarity. Learn more at ekgcollective.com.