The org chart and the hallway

Every technology rollout I have watched in a school has two plans. One is written down. It has a kickoff date, a training day in August, a login target for October, and a name next to every task. The other is never written down. It is the educator who figures the tool out first and shows the person in the next room during a free period. The first plan gets the budget. The second one decides whether anything changes.

I first had language for that in the fall of 2023, in a course called Understanding the Organization. The main text described three ways of looking at any organization. The rational view sees goals, structure, and a clear chain of who does what. The natural view sees people, with their own needs, loyalties, and informal groups that never show up on the org chart. The open view sees an organization constantly trading with the world outside it. None of the three is the right one. They are three lenses on the same building.

One case from that course stuck with me. A manufacturer trying to fix a productivity problem put its plant workers on a strict schedule for bathroom breaks. On paper the policy was rational. It was based on observation and even reviewed by a doctor. In practice it collided with basic human needs, the union fought it, and regulators cited the company. My paper argued that the trouble came from the clash between the rational system and the natural one. The plan was logical. It just wasn’t written for the people living inside it.

Two kinds of lines

In another assignment I wrote about the boundaries inside an organization. Some are official. Departments, grade levels, who reports to whom. Others are unofficial, built on shared experience, personal values, and how different groups get along. I wrote that the unofficial lines are more flexible than the official ones but harder to manage. I would say it more strongly now. For adoption, the unofficial lines are usually the ones that matter.

Think about how an educator decides whether to give a new platform a real try. The training session helps a little. What helps more is watching a colleague they trust use it on a Tuesday without losing a class period to it. That colleague might teach two grade levels away. They might not be on any committee. The rollout plan has no line for them, because the rollout plan was drawn on the official map.

This is why so many rollouts look fine in the spreadsheet and stall in the building. The rational plan did its job. Accounts were created, the training happened, the login numbers came in. But the change has to travel through the natural system, and nobody planned for that part. When it stalls, the plan usually reads it as resistance. Most of the time the people who would have carried it just never got the room or the reason to.

Where AI is already moving

AI tools are the clearest example I have seen of adoption running ahead of the official map. In a lot of districts, educators were trading prompts and quietly using AI to draft rubrics and parent emails well before there was a policy or an approved tool. The rational system is now catching up to something the natural system already did. That isn’t a failure. It’s information. One of the fastest ways to see where a district’s real adoption network runs is to ask who people went to the first time they tried AI.

AI helps with the other half of the problem too. Much of what fills a coach’s week is rational-system work. Building the schedule, pulling usage reports, tracking who finished which module. That is run-rate work, the routine tasks that keep things going and crowd out everything new, and it is exactly what AI can now take on. The time it frees is time a coach can spend in the hallway, finding the people the change will actually travel through.

In 2023 I wrote that I believed in a mix of all three views, structure plus people plus the world outside. I still do. But if I had to name the one a rollout plan forgets most often, it’s the hallway.

Next week: Risk Management Process and Practice, the course that made me ask what a rollout is actually afraid of.