Years ago, early in my time leading technology, I rolled out a help-desk ticket system. I’ve changed enough of the details that nobody from that team should recognize themselves. The lesson I kept.

Our teachers were sending tech requests every way imaginable. Sticky notes on the copier. Emails to whoever they’d seen last. A ticket system would fix that: one place for requests, one person to sort them and keep teachers posted. I gave it to Walt, our lead technician.

Walt could reimage a cart of laptops before lunch and diagnose a dying projector by the sound of its fan. He had been keeping those machines running longer than I’d been there.

Three months in, my inbox was full of teachers asking whether anyone ever saw their ticket.

(I had a few of those tickets sitting in my own inbox, too. I’d forwarded them to Walt and considered them handled.)

The easy verdict

My first read wrote itself. Teachers were frustrated, so Walt wasn’t keeping up.

So I walked the buildings with him to find out what was falling through. Nothing was. Almost every ticket was closed or waiting on a part, and Walt could tell me the status of each one from memory. The replies never went out. One teacher had given up and borrowed a projector from the library. Walt had fixed hers two days after she asked. She never knew.

When I asked why the replies weren’t going out, he said he figured fixing it was the reply.

He was right. That was the job he heard.

A teacher with a dead projector needs two things: the projector working, and someone telling her it will be working by Thursday. The second one takes a person at a desk. Walt was almost never at a desk. That’s a big part of why he was so good at his job.

(Before anyone judges Walt: if you asked me to run a ticket queue from under a teacher’s desk with a flashlight in my teeth, you’d get the same result. Worse, probably.)

The person in my plan

Fixing things and keeping people informed about the fixing are two separate skills. My plan treated them as one.

[Pull quote] The one line worth remembering from this piece.

Walt had told me as much. After the first month, he said he figured his part was the repairs and somebody in the office would keep people posted. My first reaction was that teachers still deserved a reply. That’s still true. It was also a clue I walked right past.

Who drives which stretch

When my husband and I go out with our Land Rover club, he drives the harder sections. That’s a decision about who belongs in the seat for that piece of trail.

That’s the idea behind Read the Terrain. Diagnose before you direct. Look at the conditions before you decide what to do about them. A pile of unanswered tickets could have meant several things. Maybe the system was built wrong, or it was the wrong solution altogether. Maybe Walt never understood what I was asking of him. Each of those calls for a different response, and none of them was visible from my office. If I’d skipped that look, I would have corrected whatever was easiest to see, which was Walt.

Paperback copy of Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions by Laura K Spencer, Ed.D. The navy cover features orange title lettering over a topographic map with a winding blue trail line. An endorsement at the top reads: "Her insight into the danger of 'performed certainty' is sharp, practical, and deeply relevant." Scott Schimmel, President, YouSchool, author of Critical Foundations.

Caption: Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions. Launching November 2.

My solution was sound. A ticket system solves a real problem, and from my office it looked finished the day I rolled it out.

It was built around a person who sits at a desk and answers messages between tasks. I handed it to a man who worked with both hands, usually in somebody’s classroom, out of earshot of his email. The plan and the person never met until three months of unanswered tickets forced the introduction.

That gap is easy to miss because it lives in your head. When you design a solution, you picture someone carrying it out. Usually that someone works the way you work and has the time you assume they have. Then the plan lands on a real person with a real day, and the distance between the two shows up as frustration, often aimed at the wrong person.

Catching it starts before any fix. Before a plan leaves your desk, ask who you pictured doing it, and how closely that picture matches the person who will.

A question for you

Think about the last solution you handed to someone else to carry out. Who did you picture doing it when you designed it, and is that the person doing it now?

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P.S. Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions is out now. If this essay was useful, the book is the long version. Get your copy here.

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Read the Terrain

I Built the Plan for Someone Else