Mind the Gap: Looking for Friction Before Adding Solutions
“What should we add?”
When leaders see strain in a system, the instinct is usually to search for a solution. If outcomes are uneven, morale feels lower, or implementation appears inconsistent, the natural question becomes: “What should we add?” Schools are filled with improvement efforts born from this instinct because adding something feels active. It feels like movement.
This instinct makes sense. Schools operate under constant pressure to improve outcomes and respond to visible needs. Movement and forward progress is necessary. The key is to direct that movement in a way that will lead to real improvement instead of adding additional burden to leaders and teachers.
When good leaders see strain, they want to fix it. They don’t want their staff to be stressed out or test scores to drop. They take action because that’s what a leader is expected to do. If you run out of milk at home, you buy more. You add milk to the fridge. We’re used to adding something when we see a deficit, but addition is not always the answer.
Before deciding on an action, examine the questions you ask around the problem. The questions are crucial because they determine focus. They are also a signal to people about what kind of information is welcome and what kind of information matters. Questions are the start of a feedback loop that you may not even realize is happening.
Asking “Who supports this initiative?” creates one kind of conversation. Asking “Who understands where work breaks down?” creates a very different one. Questions tell people where to look and what to notice. They change the emotions around an issue from “us vs them” to “us vs the problem”.
When I think about problem-solving in schools, I picture a dandelion. You can cut the dandelion to the ground as many times as you want but it’s going to keep growing back. You’re probably going to get even more dandelions. You can poison the environment and kill it, but you’ll also harm other living things around it. The best way to get rid of the dandelion is to pull it out by the taproot.
This is what you do when you ask the right questions. You’re finding the taproot. If you focus on questions related to the symptoms of the problem, your solutions are temporary and the work will return. More problems will pop up. As Senge said, “Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.”
With symptom-level questions and reactions, more communication gets sent. Clarifications happen. Meetings get adjusted. Support gets added. Individual responses may temporarily reduce pressure, but they rarely change the conditions producing the pressure in the first place. The leader keeps dealing with the same problem again and again. The dandelions keep popping up.
Structural thinking starts with a different question entirely. Instead of asking what should be added, structural leaders ask: “What keeps getting harder than it should be?” This shift seems small, but it changes where attention goes. Rather than searching immediately for answers, leaders begin searching for friction.
Friction shows us where the system isn’t functioning well. Organizational strain shows up similarly as recurring pressure points. Something starts requiring more effort than expected. A process becomes harder to sustain than it should be. The same frustrations begin resurfacing across meetings, teams, and conversations.
What initially looks like a collection of isolated problems often turns out to be a pattern:
- Repeated confusion.
- Work that requires excessive reminders.
- Teachers creating their own workarounds.
- Frequent last-minute requests.
- Recurring emotional hotspots.
- High-performing teachers quietly compensating in places where the system does not fully hold.
Patterns reveal design needs. That idea sits at the center of structural leadership. Patterns are not simply frustrations to manage or behaviors to correct. They are feedback from the system itself.
Once leaders begin looking for patterns, the next step is learning where those patterns tend to live. Friction often does not appear inside individual tasks or initiatives themselves. It appears in the spaces between them. The places where one part of the system is supposed to connect to another are often where strain quietly accumulates.
Look for gaps between:
- Expectations → Implentation
- Communication → Understanding
- Initiatives → Support
- Decisions → Follow-Through
- Feedback → Action
These gaps don’t have to be big to be felt. In fact, in some ways, a lot of small gaps are more damaging than one or two big ones. Every little gap in your school creates a point where people must improvise, compensate, or carry uncertainty forward themselves.
When bridges don’t exist, someone has to build them. Without purpose-built structures, individual staff members create their own pathways across the gap. Work continues moving forward, but it moves through extra effort, personal workarounds, and invisible labor. Over time, inconsistency grows, strain accumulates, and the system begins asking people to carry more than it was designed to hold.
This is why the most dangerous improvement question leaders ask is often: “What should we add?” That question pulls attention toward solutions before leaders understand the conditions creating the strain in the first place. Schools don’t always struggle because they added the wrong thing. Sometimes they struggle because they didn’t pause long enough to understand the system they already had.
The people closest to these gaps usually already know where they are. Your teachers are often experiencing the friction directly. They’re the people repeatedly encountering the same gaps day in and day out.
Ask them: Where is work breaking down?
They’ll lead you right to that taproot so you can figure out how to pull it out.
