The Experience Gap: Why What We Build Doesn’t Always Work

Part 1: When Good Design Meets Real Life

It was lunchtime in a rural elementary school in Sierra Leone. The girls sat together and ate—rice, vegetables, and sauce provided through a well-designed program intended to remove barriers to education. Around them, other children watched, hovered, and taunted the girls. They didn’t have their own food.

In these communities, eating is not just functional. It is social. It signals belonging—who is included, who is part of the group. But here, in the middle of the school day, a line had been drawn. Some girls were being fed, while others were not.

The program itself had been designed with care. It addressed multiple, well-documented barriers to attendance: school fees, uniforms, menstrual supplies, and food during the school day. Each element made sense on its own. Each reflected thoughtful intent.

And yet, in practice, it created something else entirely. It introduced tension among students and families and discomfort among teachers. For the girls it was meant to support, it created a new kind of visibility—one that came with social cost. What was intended to increase access was, in some cases, another type of barrier. Teachers told me of girls turning down the food, while others snuck some to their peers.

In that moment, something fundamental became clear. Even well-designed interventions can reshape experience in ways that ultimately determine whether people engage at all.

But there was something else underneath it. The issue was not only how the program was experienced, but whose perspectives had shaped the design in the first place. What counted as a barrier—and what counted as a solution—had been defined without fully accounting for the social meaning of belonging within that community. The result was not simply a mismatch between design and experience, but a deeper gap between intention and lived reality—one shaped by whose knowledge was centered, and whose was not.

That realization stayed with me.

In anthropology, this is a foundational idea: people do not simply respond to what is designed; they interpret it. Understanding human behavior requires “thick description”—attention not only to what people do, but to what those actions mean within a particular context. 

I saw this same pattern in a very different setting while conducting “cognitive labs” in the development of high stake assessments in the early 2000’s. Sitting with students as they worked through assessment items, we listened not just for whether they arrived at the correct answer, but for how they were making sense of the question itself. Again and again, we heard students interpreting prompts in ways we had not anticipated—working through ambiguity, filling in gaps, and constructing meaning as they went.

As Karl Weick argues, people do not respond to an objective reality. They respond to the reality they construct. In a classroom setting, this means that before behavior, there is experience.

Learning is not only cognitive; it is relational. Before a student engages with content, they are often—almost invisibly—answering a different question: whether the environment feels safe enough to take a risk.

When the answer is no, they withdraw or disengage. When the answer is yes, something opens. They persist. They try again.

What determines behavior, in other words, is not simply the presence of an opportunity to learn, but the experience of engaging with it. 

Looking across these different settings—a school food program, an assessment, a classroom interaction—the pattern is consistent. What is designed and what is experienced are not the same. That distinction matters.

This Matters Beyond Education

This dynamic does not only shape classrooms or community programs. It shows up anywhere something is designed for people to use.

In organizations, the same gap determines whether products are adopted, whether strategies take hold, and whether growth happens at all. There is always a distance between what is built and how it is experienced. And it is within that distance tensions arise and outcomes are ultimately determined.

In Part 2, I explore how this gap shows up inside organizations and why it so often determines organizational success.