When the System Asks You to Adapt But Won't Give You Permission To
by Verena Heinzel
At a recent international education dialogue, a school principal said something that stayed with me long after the event ended.
"Many innovations in schools happen at the edge of legality."
You could hear a pin drop in the room. Not because it sounded radical. Because it sounded familiar.
Across educational systems, deeply committed people are trying to improve learning while working inside structures that often struggle to adapt themselves. Schools today are being asked to do two difficult things at once: provide stability while continuously responding to changing realities. And responsibility is decentralized in ways that permission is not.
So the people who care most find ways to move anyway, quietly absorbing the contradictions their institutions haven't resolved.
When meaningful change depends on individuals stretching rules, navigating grey areas, or absorbing personal risk, the issue is larger than individual courage. It points to a system that increasingly asks for adaptation without creating legitimate room for it.
The problem beneath the problem
That pin-drop moment connected directly to work KONU Germany has been doing with a multi-stakeholder initiative on educational data, bringing together a German foundation, ministries, school principals, administrators, and educators.
At first, it looked like a data project.
But data was not the real story.
Most conversations about educational data become technical quickly: which indicators matter, who gets access, how information should be visualized. These questions matter. But underneath them sat a more human one — how does a system create conditions for people to learn together while still needing to act, coordinate, and remain accountable?
Because data is never only about data. It is also about trust, about fear, about who feels seen and who feels exposed.
Some people experience data as clarity and orientation. Others experience it as surveillance. And in fragmented systems, people often protect their own perspective without fully seeing the pressures others are carrying.
This became visible in the project itself. People from ministries spoke about accountability and political responsibility. School principals described the reality of implementing change while already overloaded. Educators talked about the emotional weight of constant evaluation. Everyone was looking at the same system from very different places inside it.
The challenge was not only creating a better data strategy. It was creating enough shared understanding for people to work through these tensions together rather than managing them in silos.
Staying in the room
In projects like this, KONU’s role is rarely to arrive with “the answer.”
More often, the work is about helping people think together when the situation is complex, emotionally charged, and full of competing realities. That meant resisting the pull toward agreement too quickly.
We focused on creating conversations where different perspectives could actually be heard before being simplified away. In practice, this often looked surprisingly ordinary: slowing discussions down, making disagreements visible rather than smoothing them over, helping people listen across institutional roles.
At times, this was uncomfortable. Some participants wanted faster decisions or clearer solutions. But certain tensions could not simply be resolved — they reflected real contradictions inside the system itself.
Over time, the group moved from parallel monologues to a shared set of principles for how data would and would not be used across the system. Not consensus on everything, but enough common ground to act from. That shift didn't come from a better data framework. It came from people being willing to stay in the room with complexity long enough to find it together.
When systems start learning
One of the most important shifts was not that disagreement disappeared. It was that people became better able to work with disagreement without collapsing into blame or avoidance.
Participants began speaking more openly about tensions rather than staying inside safe, institutional language. Different actors started recognizing that others were not simply resisting change, but operating under genuine constraints.
The conversation around data shifted — less as an instrument of control and more as a possible support for collective learning.
One phrase stayed with me in particular: "No shaming with data." It came from two experts who had visited school systems in Canada and Singapore, where enabling the system to learn from its own data is treated as a design principle, not an afterthought. That comment pointed to something most accountability-heavy systems don't offer — data used not to rank or expose, but to support collective reflection and improvement.
The meaning of data is not fixed. Many educational systems unintentionally create the opposite conditions: high accountability, limited flexibility, and very little protected room for experimentation.
Beyond heroic individuals
Too often, systems keep functioning because individuals quietly compensate for contradictions the institution itself has not resolved.
The exhausted teacher holding things together. The principal creating room where none officially exists. The administrator trying to protect possibility inside rigid structures.
These people matter deeply. But systems cannot rely indefinitely on personal compensation as a strategy for change. If innovation only happens “at the edge of legality,” the burden of adaptation falls on individuals — on personal risk-taking — rather than on building collective capacity. That may produce isolated moments of progress, but it rarely produces resilient, lasting change.
The deeper question is whether institutions themselves can become more capable of learning under uncertainty, and whether the people inside them can stay connected long enough to work through difficult tensions rather than enduring them in isolation.
That question lives well beyond education. It shows up in every organization navigating the gap between what a situation demands and what existing structures currently allow — and where the difference is quietly being absorbed by individuals who keep carrying what the system won't face.
If that tension sounds familiar, we'd be glad to think it through with you.
For German-speaking readers, Judit Teichert and our partners from Bertelsmann Foundation share more about this work here.