That’s a Feature, Not a Bug: The Hidden Value of Adaptability

What looks like “fine” may actually be a carefully engineered workaround.

In this episode, Vanessa explores the hidden value of adaptability through a misbehaving knee, a broken keyboard, and one spectacularly orange 1974 Lincoln Continental.

Teachers are experts at adapting. They anticipate problems, build missing systems, create backup plans, translate confusing information, and keep people moving—even when the systems around them are not working. When those adaptations succeed, however, they can conceal both the original problem and the cost of compensating for it.

You’ll hear:

• Why functioning is not the same as being fine
 • How teacher workarounds can hide institutional problems
 • The Adaptation Audit: Rebuild, Revise, or Refuse
 • How adaptability translates into marketable career skills
 • Two paths to explore: finding a job or creating one
 • Why teacher adaptability may also be entrepreneurship

Before rebuilding an old workaround for the new school year, ask what it was doing—and what it was doing to you.

Vanessa also shares some big news: she is writing a book!

The working title is Invisible Excellence: The Hidden Value of Teachers Beyond the Classroom, with publication planned for spring 2027. The book will explore how teachers’ leadership, communication, strategic thinking, training, relationship-building, adaptability, and problem-solving abilities become hidden - and how educators can make that value visible beyond the classroom.

Vanessa is looking to speak with former educators who have transitioned into new careers and teachers who are beginning to wonder what else might be possible.

If that describes you- or someone you know - reach out using the contact information below.

Links and resources:

• See the spectacular orange Lincoln: 
• Contact Vanessa about the book: Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com
(You can contact Vanessa about anything related to Teachers in Transition also at that email. 

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Connect with Vanessa Jackson

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
• 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
• 🧭 LinkedIn: 
• 🔗 Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
• 📸 Instagram & Threads: @teachers.in.transition
• 👍 Facebook: Teachers in Transition
• 🐦 X (Twitter): @EduExitStrategy

The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage at Buzzsprout

Transcript

Hi! Welcome back to Teachers in Transition, the podcast where we talk about the teacher experience, career transitions, and how to recognize the value you built in education—even when that value has been hiding in plain sight.

I’m Vanessa Jackson, a former teacher, career transition coach, and someone whose knee has recently decided that it needs ALL of my attention right now.

Today, we’re talking about adaptation: the workarounds we build, the problems they conceal, and what those adaptations may reveal about the work we are capable of doing next.

Along the way, we have a spectacularly orange Lincoln, a broken keyboard, and a reminder that functioning is not necessarily the same thing as being fine.

Let’s get started.

So I have a knee that is acting up (also, get off my lawn!).  I thought it was one of those unpleasant hallmarks of aging.  After a couple months of physical therapy, I finally went to go see an orthopedist. That was encouraging.  I like this Doc!  But there was a sentence in my orthopedic notes that has been bothering me.

The doctor noted that I was not limping. And that is true. I wasn’t limping.  I am working very hard NOT to limp.  And even while I am not limping, I wasn’t walking normally, either.

I had shortened my stride. I am avoiding fully extending my knee because full extension hurts. I had changed the way I moved because an obvious limp made the other side of my body start hurting, too.  Aging is not for the weak!!

So, no. I wasn’t limping.

But the absence of a limp was not evidence that nothing was wrong. It was evidence that my body had found another way to manage what was wrong.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

And it has had me thinking about the ways people adapt—and how often successful adaptation gets mistaken for evidence that a person is fine.

I think it is probably safe to tell this story now. Both of my parents are gone, the story is about 40 years old, and I feel reasonably certain that all applicable statutes of limitations have expired.

My family did not take a lot of vacations when I was growing up. So when we took one, it was a Very Big Deal. Please imagine all three of those words in capital letters.

We were driving from Texas to the center to Pennsylvania - York, Pennsylvania, where my aunt and uncle had a beautiful old farmhouse that had been built before America. There was some money there. They had other places to live, too. This was not how the MY side of the family ordinarily vacationed.

Because this was before cell phones, My mom’s mom insisted that we leave her a complete itinerary so that she would know where we were at all times.

My dad found this hilarious.

He said he fully expected that somewhere in Alabama, a state patrolman would pull over our enormous orange Lincoln, walk up to the window in mirrored aviator sunglasses, stare at my father, and say, “Boy, your Memaw wants to talk to you.”

And this wasn’t just any orange Lincoln. This was a customized floor model. This was a Lincoln Continental that had originally been customized for a University of Texas graduate. But it wasn’t the more restrained burnt orange associated with the University of Texas. It was closer to that neon University of Tennessee orange. Which we didn’t know back then because my family didn’t follow college football. 

It had portholes. It had a white top. It had a moonroof. And I believe it could comfortably have seated an entire football team.

My dad **loved** that car.

We drove to Pennsylvania as quickly as we could, and by “quickly,” I mean almost nonstop. Dad would drive, and then Mom would drive while Dad slept. Because Mom was a night owl and there wasn’t a lot of traffic on the highways.  We had a wonderful vacation in Pennsylvania, and the plan was to make the trip home more leisurely.

Mom had scheduled stops. Remember: Memaw had the itinerary.

We stopped in Washington, D.C., where Mom had reserved an entire day for the Smithsonian. (A whole DAY!  Imagine that!) We walked through all but one of the buildings. By the end, we were exhausted. At one point, we stopped by a fountain to see how long it would take mom to notice we weren’t there anymore ( It was two blocks).  And we were begging to pause for pictures.  I looked for the picture of us posing by the fountain, but I can’t find it.  I am putting a picture of that Lincoln in the show notes with my brother at a very young age popping his head out through the moonroof. Yeah,  that color was definitely a one-off!)

That night, we stayed at a Best Western that the family referred to forever afterward as the Worst Eastern. The next morning, my father woke up looking drunk  My dad did not drink. By that point in his life, he was quite the teetotaler. But he could not walk in a straight line. If he looked left or right, the world spun.

Now, we know that he had an inner-ear infection. At the time, we didn’t know what was happening. We wondered whether it might be food poisoning.  Whatever it was, Dad was in no condition to drive.

Unfortunately, Dad did not want to ruin anyone’s fun, and Mom had the heart of a drill sergeant who something had been Planned.

Monticello was next on the itinerary. Therefore, we were going to Monticello.

Mom drove Dad’s precious Lincoln through traffic in Washington D.C. Mom also talked to the cars around her and did not generally drive the way Dad believed his Lincoln ought to be driven. This was driving him bonkers and he couldn’t even look.

He had his hat pulled down over his face, and there was a black cloud of frustration swirling around the passenger seat. Even my brother and I were quiet in the back seat because we knew things were Not Okay in the front seat.

We arrived at Monticello and asked, “Are we sure Daddy is going to stay in the car?”  Yes. Daddy was staying in the car.  So Mom, my brother, and I toured Monticello in a rather unhurried fashion, might I add.

Sidebar: What I remember most about Monticello were the beds built into alcoves because Thomas Jefferson did not like beds sitting in the middle of rooms. Because he thought it was a waste of space. This was presented as a clever use of space. I thought he was just walling up air.

But Anyway…

When we returned to the parking lot, my father was sitting in the driver’s seat. Mom asked in a very cheery voice, “Oh, are you feeling better?”

Dad said, “I’m fine. Get in the car.”

It was that tone of voice that brooked no discussion. My brother and I were climbing into the back seat because we were too young - or perhaps too naïve - to know any better. Mom got into the passenger seat.

And off we went.

Years later, Dad told us his side of the story.  While we were touring Monticello (in that unhurried fashion), he had spent a couple of hours inching his way around the car. Then he sat in the driver’s seat and adjusted the seat and every mirror precisely so that he would not have to turn his head.

He could move only his eyes and still see the road, the mirrors, and the traffic around him. Let me be clear: I am not presenting this as an inspirational story about grit and human ingenuity.

It was insanely dangerous. We are all fortunate that we lived to tell the tale of our family vacation and that we did not end somewhere along a Virginia highway in a bright orange,1974 Lincoln with portholes as a cautionary tale

But it illustrates something important.

When we saw Dad sitting in the driver’s seat, we assumed he felt better.  He wasn’t better. He had adapted.  He had arranged his environment so carefully that he could function without triggering the problem. And because the adaptation allowed him to do the thing, it would have been easy to conclude that the problem itself was gone.

We do that to people all the time.  We see what someone is still capable of doing, and we use that as evidence that they must be fine.

We don’t see the calculations, accommodations, workarounds, and compensations operating behind the scenes. We see the result without seeing what it costs to produce it.

According to Memaw’s itinerary, the family vacation was proceeding exactly as planned. Monticello had been visited. (check) The orange Lincoln was moving toward Texas. Only the people inside the car knew how much adaptation was required to keep the plan intact.  And really, at the time – only my Dad knew. 

And, in a much less dangerous example, (which is oddly timed as I have been writing a book) the number eight stopped working on my laptop keyboard.

Not the whole keyboard. Just the eight key.  Followed quickly by the plus/equal sign and the Right Bracket key.  You do not realize how often you need a particular number (or it’s asterisk above it!) until your keyboard refuses to produce it. It’s especially annoying when you get those little, um, multi-factor authentication codes with an eight in them!  For a while, I adapted by finding an eight somewhere else, copying it, and pasting it whenever I needed one.  Then I used the online keyboard that lurks in all our laptops. 

 And did that work?  Umm, yeah, Technically.

Was it a sensible long-term system for producing the number eight?  No. No it is not. 

Now I have a new external keyboard. It is rainbow-colored back lighting. It is a typewriter style which is delightfully clacky and hopefully more sturdy than the laptop. *I* think that decades of playing piano make me type a little too hard.  This new keyboard feels enough larger than my laptop keyboard that I am temporarily learning how to type all over again.

But adding the keyboard created another problem. My desk was already crowded. There just isn’t room for all things. So I adapted again. I am using the laptop trackpad - which sits a little higher - while typing on the external keyboard below it. I am a two-handed trackpadder, so this arrangement requires its own small choreography.  It’s still not a great set-up.  It almost reminiscent of that “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” book.  

The next adaptation may involve a keyboard tray that slides under the desk. Or cleaning off the four-foot table to my left and turning the whole setup into an L-shaped workspace. Or both. I don’t know yet.  

None of these adaptations means the original setup was working beautifully. They mean I kept changing the environment so that I could continue working.

Some adaptations are ingenious. Some are temporary. Some are mildly ridiculous. Did I mentioned that my laptop is currently sitting on two Tupperware containers.  Hmmm… Some solve one problem by creating another one six inches to the left.

The point is not that adapting is bad. Adaptability is one of the ways humans keep moving when circumstances change. It is what has allowed humanity to evolve throughout the millennia. 

The point is that we should not confuse the success of the workaround with the absence of the problem.

And teachers may be some of the most highly adapted people on the planet.

Teachers build systems around broken systems. They develop routines to prevent predictable disasters. They seem to be the only ones who see the disaster coming, right? They learn which student needs to sit near the door, which parent communication needs meticulous documentation, which administrator needs an idea presented in a very particular way, and exactly how many minutes they can go without using the restroom.

From the outside, it can look as though they are simply organized, calm, flexible, patient, or naturally good with people.

But those qualities are not often personality quirks.  They are adaptations. They are sophisticated capabilities developed in response to recurring demands.

And right now, we have teachers in some states who are ALREADY beginning to return to their classrooms. Before the first student walks through the door, teachers are already adapting.

They are arranging desks to manage traffic patterns. Creating systems for missing pencils. Building forms nobody asked them to build because last year’s communication system didn’t work. Buying supplies the school didn’t provide. Developing backup plans for the technology that will inevitably fail. Mentally preparing for students whose names they may not even know yet. 
 
  Some of that is simply the expertise of teaching. Experienced teachers anticipate problems and design environments that help people succeed.

But some of it is compensation.

The school has a problem, and the teacher quietly builds a workaround. The workaround succeeds, so the problem becomes less visible. Because the problem is less visible, the teacher is expected to keep providing the workaround. Often they have the teacher share with other teachers so that THEY can use that workaround!

Eventually, an emergency adaptation becomes part of the job—even though nobody names it, funds it, or accounts for what it costs.

An adaptation can work without being healthy, reasonable, or sustainable.

My dad’s mirror arrangement worked, if we define “worked” very narrowly. It allowed him to drive without moving his head. That did not make it a good adaptation.

“It works” is not the same as “I should keep doing it.”
 
 Y’all, I have already read about a teacher who arrived for the first day of professional development believing she would teach tenth grade in one subject area. She found out—in the bathroom, as an aside—that she would actually be teaching eleventh and twelfth grades with three separate preps.

This is why there is a teacher shortage. Teachers are not beans to be moved around like that.

We wouldn’t do that in healthcare! “I’m sorry, Doctor Podiatrist. We need you in pediatrics this year.”

Now it’s time for out teacher hack – our teacher hacks are designed to help save you in one of the three coins in which we pay: time, money, or stress. Ultimately this hack will save you time and stress.

This week’s Teacher Hack is to conduct an  Adaptation Audit

As you prepare for a new school year if you are still teaching, I want you to pause before automatically rebuilding every system you used last year.  And if you’re outside of the classroom, you can still do this because we often adapt in our lives as well outside the classroom. 

I am not asking you to conduct a forensic investigation of your entire teaching career. Choose one recurring workaround – preferably one you hated. 

Maybe it is the elaborate makeup-work system you maintained. Maybe it is the Sunday-night planning marathon for scripted lesson plans or similar nonsense. Maybe it is the daily email you wrote because nobody else communicated important information.

Maybe it is the supplies you continually replaced, the lunchtime tutoring you automatically offered, or the extra spreadsheet that existed because the official system didn’t tell you what you needed to know. How many pencils did you buy last year? Just curious. 

Look at that one adaptation and make one of three decisions:

Rebuild it. It works, it genuinely protects your capacity or improves the learning environment, and the benefit is worth the effort.

Revise it. The underlying idea is useful, but last year’s version required too much time, money, or emotional labor.

Refuse it. It concealed a larger problem by transferring the entire cost of that problem to you.

You are absolutely allowed to keep the adaptations that help you. You are allowed to change the ones that drain you. And you are allowed to stop disguising an institutional problem as your personal responsibility.

Before you rebuild the workaround, understand what it was doing - and what it was doing for you or to you.
 
 

17:51 Career transition and Job Search

 So let’s move over to the career transition and job search segment because here we can talk about how those adaptations that help you survive can also help you thrive.

Adaptations do more than reveal the problems teachers have been managing. They also reveal the kinds of value teachers can bring to work beyond the classroom.

Normally, this is where I might ask you to identify a problem you solved, describe the response you created, extract the transferable skills, and translate everything into employer language.

But you have homework. You are tired. It is still summer. And frankly, I think we have asked teachers to perform enough unpaid  labor.

So today, I am giving you some answers.

Think about the role you repeatedly played when something was not working. That adaptation may point toward jobs that already exist. It may also point toward a service you could offer independently.

If you became the person who prevented chaos…

You anticipated problems, coordinated details, kept track of moving pieces, and created backup plans.

Organizations hire project coordinators, program coordinators, operations coordinators, event coordinators, implementation coordinators, and project administrators to do this kind of work.

But this capability can also lead toward entrepreneurship. Small-business owners, consultants, nonprofits, and event organizers may pay a virtual project manager, online business manager, launch coordinator, professional organizer, or administrative systems consultant to bring order to work that has become too complicated for them to manage alone.

If you became the person who explained everything...

You translated confusing policies, technical information, or complicated concepts into instructions different people could understand.

Organizations hire training specialists, instructional designers, customer education specialists, technical writers, and knowledge management specialists to do this.

Independently, you might develop courses or training materials, write curriculum, facilitate workshops, create standard operating procedures, or help a subject-matter expert turn what they know into something they can actually teach to other people.

If you became the person who got reluctant people on board…

You introduced changes, responded to resistance, adjusted the message, built trust, and helped people adopt new systems and expectations.

That can map to roles in change management, implementation, onboarding, in human resources, customer success, or organizational development.

It could also become independent onboarding support, team training, change communication, workshop facilitation, or client-experience consulting.

There are businesses whose customers purchase a product or service and then never successfully use it. A teacher who understands how to move someone from confusion or resistance into competent action may be able to solve an expensive problem for that business.

If you became the human communication hub…

You kept students, families, colleagues, administrators, service providers, and community members aligned—even when they had different needs, priorities, or levels of information.

That can lead to work in community engagement, client services, partnerships, account coordination, or member services.

It can also become contract work in community management, membership-program support, client care, volunteer coordination, or association management.

If you became the person who noticed what others missed… (Vanessa waves on camera)

You recognized patterns, documented concerns, monitored progress, identified risks, and intervened before small issues became large ones.  

Organizations use those capabilities in quality assurance, compliance, program analysis, risk coordination, case management, and process improvement.

Independently, that same eye might support process audits, accessibility reviews, customer-experience evaluations, program evaluation, proofreading, quality control, or policy and procedure consulting.

If you became the person who built the missing system… (Vanessa again waves on camera)

You created the template, tracker, workflow, documentation, resource library, or repeatable procedure because nothing useful existed.

That can map to business operations, operations analysis, knowledge management, process documentation, or continuous improvement.

It may also become systems consulting, workflow design, digital resource creation, template design, knowledge-base development, or standard operating procedure consulting.

There are small businesses running on memory, sticky notes, and one indispensable employee who knows where everything is buried. The system you built to keep 150 students and their families moving in approximately the same direction may have value well beyond a school.

When teachers begin career transitions, we often focus on how their experience maps to jobs that already exist. And that matters.

But adaptability can lead somewhere else, too.

Sometimes none of the available jobs quite fits the combination of things you do well. Sometimes the opportunities in your area are limited. Sometimes you need greater flexibility than a traditional employer wants to offer. And sometimes the job market is simply terrible.

In those moments, the question may not be only, “Who would hire me?”

It might also be, “What problem have I learned to solve—and who needs that problem solved?”

Entrepreneurship is not the easy alternative to a difficult job market. It requires finding customers, communicating value, setting prices, and delivering the work. You do not have to quit your job, create a logo tonight, and become a six-figure coach by Thursday. In fact, people who promise that probably can’t deliver. 

Entrepreneurship can begin as freelancing, contract work, a small local service, or a side business that grows over time. You may find a job, create a job, assemble several sources of income, or move between those options during different seasons of your life.

The same adaptability that helped you function inside a difficult system may also help you create something outside it that pays you dividends.

Teachers already spot unmet needs. They invent solutions with limited resources. They test those solutions on actual humans. They revise them in real time. They explain their value to skeptical stakeholders.

That is remarkably entrepreneurial—even when nobody has ever called it that.

So here is one practical next step.

Choose the adaptation category that sounds most like the role you repeatedly play at school and start asking yourself the hard questions.  

Behind Door #1 – how do I use this out in the current job market 

Or Behind Door #2 – How can I create a product or service to fill a need? 
 
 When considering Door #1 - Search three of the employment titles connected to that adaptation. It is increasingly common for job titles to vary even when they are doing similar things.  Everyone wants to feel differentiated from other companies. Open ten postings and save three that sound interesting. Read the responsibilities before you read the qualifications. Highlight the responsibilities you have performed in some recognizable form, even if the setting and vocabulary are different.

Then investigate Door #2 in more depth: the entrepreneurial door. Find two freelancers, contractors, or small businesses already offering a related service. Look at how they describe the problem, the customer they serve, and the result they provide.

You don’t have to choose our entire future in one day. You are gathering evidence that a capability you developed in education has value in more than one market.  You’re finding clarity. 

Your next opportunity may be listed on a job board. You may discover that it needs to be created. Or you may build a career that combines both.

A Bit of News

And this feels like a particularly appropriate place to tell you: I’m writing a book.

That sentence still feels a little surreal to say out loud.

Earlier this year, I began working on a book with the working title Invisible Excellence: The Hidden Value of Teachers Beyond the Classroom. My goal is to publish it in spring 2027.  

The book grew from something I have seen again and again in my work with Teachers in Transition.

Educators leave the classroom carrying years—sometimes decades—of leadership, communication, crisis management, strategic planning, training, relationship-building, adaptability, and problem-solving experience.

And yet many of them still believe they are only qualified to teach.

They are not lacking value.

Their value has been hidden behind job titles, school-specific language, and a system that has trained them to minimize how much they actually do. This book is all about making that invisible excellence visible and explaining how it got hidden in the first place.

It will explore the capabilities teachers develop, the ways those skills translate beyond education, and what it takes to build meaningful careers on the other side of the classroom.

I have been working with a developmental editor and have almost finished the rough draft, which has made this project feel both thrilling and very, very real.

Over the next several months, I’ll share parts of the journey: lessons I’m learning, research, interviews, writing milestones, behind-the-scenes moments, snippets from the book itself, and—almost certainly—the occasional existential crisis.

And I would love your help.  In fact, I need your help!

I’m looking to speak with former educators who have transitioned into careers beyond the classroom and educators who are beginning to question what else might be possible for them.

If that describes you—or someone you know—please reach out to me. You can find my contact information in the show notes.

Teachers have given enough of themselves to systems that rarely recognize the full value of what they bring.  It is far past time we told the whole story.

Closing:
Ya know, My dad did not recover in the parking lot at Monticello.  He just found a way to keep moving. Again, this was a terrible decision, and I do not recommend using his particular approach as a model for career development, vacation planning, or highway safety.

But I understand the impulse.

Teachers have spent years finding ways to keep moving. They have adjusted their environments, built missing systems, anticipated failures, absorbed costs, and solved problems so effectively that the people around them sometimes forget the problems were ever there.

Functioning is not the same as being fine.  And an adaptation is not evidence that the original problem was insignificant. Sometimes the behavior people point to as proof that nothing is wrong is the very behavior keeping the problem from becoming worse.

But your adaptations reveal something else, too. They reveal how you think. They reveal the problems you notice, the people you understand, and the solutions you know how to build.

Some of those adaptations may deserve to be rebuilt. Some need to be revised. Some need to be left behind. And some may contain the first clue to the work you need to do next.

The workaround you created for free may solve a problem someone else would pay you to solve. Your adaptability is not merely evidence that you survived teaching. It is evidence that you know how to recognize a need, construct a solution, and make that solution work in the real world.

That isn’t just employability. That may be entrepreneurship.

And that, my friends, is a feature—not a bug.

Until next week – 
 
 
 

👋 CONNECT WITH VANESSA

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099 
• 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
• 🔗 Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
• 📸 Instagram & Threads: @teachers.in.transition
• 👍 Facebook: Teachers in Transition
• 🐦 X (Twitter): @EduExitStrategy

That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques.  And I want to hear from you!  Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com  You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099. 

I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!