30: One Idea, Thirty Times
A year-end letter + personal news
This newsletter started with a stranger.
She was a mother posting on a forum late at night, saying she was drowning in emails from her child’s school. She could never find what she needed when she needed it. Although I never learned her name, I ended up building thirty editions of this newsletter inspired by her one tired sentence.
Underneath every single edition, the same theme kept humming steadily beneath the administrative noise: Not a people problem; a systems problem.
Thirty editions and almost a full school year later, we are still a small but mighty group of school leaders located across more time zones than I can comfortably keep track of.
And if there is one thing I am confident of in this dedicated readership, it is that you’re here because you understand that systems beat scrambling.
So, before I can thank you for your support, and before the summer holidays effectively scatter us all to faraway places and inboxes on pause, I want to do three things:
Name what this year taught me
Point you back to the editions that seemed to resonate with you, and
Share some personal news.
What the Year Kept Saying
Four distinct patterns showed up so often this year that I stopped treating them as coincidences. They are the structural design principles of school life:
Behavior sits downstream of design.
The thing we keep blaming on human error or attitude is almost always a systems problem wearing a disguise. The teacher who will not follow the process is not trying to be difficult; they are simply taking the path of least resistance because the official route is exhausting to find. The parents who do not read your updates are not careless; they simply cannot locate what you sent them. Change the design, and the behavior follows on its own, usually without a single reminder email.The real systems are the ones you did not design.
The systems doing the heaviest lifting in your school are rarely the ones written down in the policy handbook. They are the invisible, unwritten patterns (the “we always do it this way” workarounds) that a veteran teacher hands a new colleague in the corridor on day two. Naming those patterns out loud is the first real act of design. It is hard work because you cannot redesign what you have trained yourself not to see.The family is the true unit of design.
The right unit of school design is not the student, and it is not the individual parent. It is the family. The family is the unit that feels the visibility gap when a student support process goes dark. The family carries the emotional weight home when a school handles a new initiative poorly. Design for the family ecosystem, and a surprising number of smaller, transactional problems dissolve before they ever reach your desk.Endings are design, too.
Schools pour their entire hearts into arrival and onboarding, then treat departure as a transactional stack of exit forms. That lopsidedness carries an invisible cost. It surfaces months later in lost goodwill, in the stories people tell about your school long after they have gone, and in whether they ever choose to recommend you. Leaving well is a craft, not an afterthought.
If you carry only one idea into your summer break, make it that first one. The next time something at your school looks like a people problem, give it ten honest minutes as a systems problem first. You will be right more often than you will be wrong.
The Five You Read Most
If you are newer to this newsletter, or if you simply want something to re-read with a coffee this summer, the issues below captured the most attention. These are ranked entirely by your own opens and clicks:
The Single Source Principle: Where it all began, and still our most-opened edition of the year. One reliable home for every kind of information, so your emails finally stop multiplying.
Use Pathmaps to Make School Systems More Intuitive: How Toronto untangled a fifty-year-old underground maze by fixing the signs, not the commuters. Your school processes can work the same way.
Closing the Visibility Gap to Manage Family Anxiety: Our most-read edition of the whole year. When families cannot see an internal process unfolding, they fill the silence with worry, and then with emails.
The Last 10% Problem: The post that opened our series on departures. The final stretch of any experience is the part people remember most, and it is the part schools most often let slip.
Who Counts as Internal? The truest piece of the year. The internal versus external line in school communication is not really about who knows the school; it is about who gets a say.
The full archive holds the rest, including the work on plain language, the triage tax, administrative bloat, and the org chart as a living thing rather than a static diagram, all waiting whenever you want them.
A Personal Note
Here is the personal part. After nine wonderful years in Romania, Kirk and I are moving to Portugal this summer.
Leaving is incredibly hard. Nine years is long enough to grow deep, meaningful roots. It is long enough to establish favorite weekend rhythms, to find the local shops where they know your name, and to build a collection of irreplaceable memories. This is the strange, beautiful geometry of our international lives: we do not just move between coordinates on a map; we build actual, physical homes in unexpected corners of the world.
Romania will always be one of those sacred places for me. Bucharest will always be a place where we were deeply happy, surrounded by some of the most generous, brilliant friends we have ever known.
I want to be completely honest about what this move does and does not mean, because the feeling of it caught me off guard. Portugal is not home. Home is Brazil, and it will always be Brazil. But Portuguese is the language I grew up in (the one I count in, dream in, and lose my temper in). For the first time in fifteen years, it will be the language on the street, in the bakery, and drifting in through my open office window.
I have spent a decade and a half loving beautiful places that asked me to translate myself before I could be understood. Portugal will be the first place in a long while that does not. The map still points home to Brazil, but the sound of this new place will carry me most of the way there.
I’m excited, and grieving all at the same time. So is the life of an international school educator.
When You Come Back
First, do nothing. Summer is not the season for redesigning systems. It is for sleeping in, for slow lunches, for letting your mind go quiet enough that you forget what a parent email even looks like. The clearest thinking you will ever do about your school starts with a rested brain, so go and unplug. There is no homework here.
Then, in August, when you come back with fresh eyes and the new year hums with possibility, the real design work can begin.
When a school wants to go deep into the bigger machinery, the service blueprints, and the seams between departments that nobody quite owns, that is the work I do alongside leadership teams. I am booking new projects for the year ahead, starting in September. If your team is ready to stop patching the same leaks and start redesigning the systems beneath them, send me a message any time, and we will find a date once you are back on solid ground.
See You in September
Mostly, though, I want to thank you. I want to be specific about it, because you were also specific with me all year long.
You wrote back with your own unwritten rules and “we always” stories. You told me, plainly, what your school got wrong the last time someone left, and you trusted me enough to let me build an entire series out of that raw honesty. You forwarded posts to the colleague down the hall who needed them.
Technically, practice by design has a mailing list. But, to me, this is a staff room that happens to stretch across the entire planet, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to stand in the middle of it.
So, rest this summer. Put your inbox on ice for a few weeks. Then come find me at my desk all the way on the other side of this continent in September.
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.