29: Nobody Owns the Seam
Why families slip through the gaps between well-run offices.
A house made of fragments
My mother-in-law used to make collages.
Kirk and I came across the one below after she passed a few years ago. It spoke to us both.
If you look closely at this house, no two pieces of it come from the same place. All of them were lifted from somewhere and pressed into a single frame. And each fragment is lovely on its own, showing her curation, care, and attention to detail.
There is a small figure near the bottom, climbing the steps with his back to us. He looks tiny against the building, and he is about to walk in.
What this collage taught me about schools
Sitting in our living room today, coffee in hand, it dawned on me that this is what it feels like to be a new family arriving at a school.
I want to be careful here, because this is not a story about anyone doing bad work. The opposite, really. Walk into most schools and every individual piece works, often well. Admissions is warm and quick to reply. The teacher is genuinely caring. The business office is precise to the cent. The nurse remembers your kid’s name on day three.
Each department operates in its own beautifully cut fragment.
But families do not live inside any single fragment. They live in the joints between them.
They live in the gap between the welcome email that promised “we can’t wait to meet you” and the reception who missed the note about their arrival; in the form they filled out in careful detail in June, the one the office asks for again, identically, in October; in the handoff from the person who sold them the dream to the person who actually runs the after school program.
A collage is judged by its seams, by how cleanly one piece meets the next. So is a school.
The system has a blind spot
The challenge is that every department owns its own fragment. Nobody owns the seam.
The teacher owns the classroom. Admissions owns the tour. IT owns the logins. The seam between them, the exact place where the family is standing, belongs to no one. Which is precisely why families slip through it. It is not a person problem. The people are competent and do their work.
It is a systems problem, and the system has a blind spot shaped exactly like the space between two well-run offices.
The seam is one of those invisible systems, the “we’ve always done it this way” that nobody ever decided on purpose.
Pick one seam
I am not going to ask you to fix “the house.” You did not build it alone, and you cannot rebuild it alone. But, as you wrap up the year and head into summer, I am going to encourage you to look at one seam and make a plan to fix it early next school year.
Here’s how you could go about it:
Pick the single handoff between your role and the role beside you. The moment you pass a family, a file, a decision, or a piece of information to someone else. Ask what the family actually experiences inside that gap, and what small thing you could change, so the next piece snaps into yours a little more cleanly.
That is the whole assignment: your edge of this collage.
Because, somewhere, a small figure is climbing the steps with their back to us. They are about to walk in. Make their welcome smoother than the one before.
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.
Ooh, this is a great metaphor, a great image to go along with it. This experience resonates so deeply with me-- what's just outside our area of responsibility can be immediately invisible to us... but not to families. Thanks for writing this.