Schools Need ‘Productivity Therapists’ to Unlock AI's Potential
Ethan Mollick recently hit on something crucial in his “One Useful Thing” newsletter edition called Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd.
"AI use that boosts individual performance does not naturally translate to improving organizational performance. To get organizational gains requires organizational innovation, rethinking incentives, processes, and even the nature of work. But the muscles for organizational innovation inside companies have atrophied. For decades, companies have outsourced this to consultants or enterprise software vendors who develop generalized approaches that address the issues of many companies at once. That won't work here, at least for a while. Nobody has special information about how to best use AI at your company, or a playbook for how to integrate it into your organization. Even the major AI companies release models without knowing how they can be best used. They especially don't know your industry, organization, or context."
This insight cuts especially deep in education. Just replace the word “company” with “school” and “enterprise software” with “edtech.” Most schools have teachers and administrators that are experimenting with AI. Individual performance gains? Absolutely. But organizational transformation? Not as likely.
Most schools are missing a critical role. I call it Productivity Therapy, which I first coined in the 2010s and discussed in my 2023 book Wisdom Factories. It's the bridge between AI's potential and organizational transformation, operating one worker at a time. Productivity Therapy combines technology empathy (understanding how AI tools actually work and where they break), psychological awareness (knowing how humans tick and make decisions), task analysis (breaking down what educators actually do and need), and performance measurement (defining what good work output looks like and how to assess it). It's part counseling process, part operations analysis, and part change management.
The mentality matters as much as the skills. The best productivity therapists will be those who have always been tinkerers, who are genuinely curious about both human psychology and technology capabilities, who can see the forest and the trees.
Mining Your Existing Talent Pool
The good news is that most schools and colleges probably already have people with relevant foundation skills. The challenge is recognizing them and giving them the space to grow into this role.
Instructional designers, curriculum coordinators, and center for teaching and learning staff are natural starting points. Whether at K-12 or higher ed levels, they're advisors by training—used to analyzing learning processes, translating goals into practical resources, and working diplomatically with faculty and teachers. Many, especially in higher education, are ahead of the curve on understanding new tools, especially Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) staff who often lead innovation initiatives. Their systematic thinking about learning processes maps well to the operations analysis that productivity therapy requires.
But their blind spot is that most lack training in sizing up adults and how they tick. They're great at curriculum and pedagogy, but productivity therapy requires a different kind of human insight—understanding individual psychology, motivation patterns, and resistance points. You'll be doing a lot of relating and convincing, and that can only work when you deal appropriately with someone's psyche.
School counselors bring exactly that missing piece. They're trained to listen, diagnose human problems, and customize approaches based on individual differences. They understand resistance, motivation, and how to have difficult conversations. What they typically lack is the technical fluency and operations analysis experience.
IT specialists have technical depth but rarely the people skills needed for this role. The exceptions are those rare IT folks who also have genuine curiosity about human factors, have training in educational theory and pedagogy, and can communicate without condescension.
Veteran teachers with a tinkering mindset might be your dark horses, especially those who've informally become the go-to problem solvers in their schools. They understand classroom reality and have credibility, but like the counselors, they'd need significant development in technical understanding, systematic analysis, and organizational change management..
The sweet spot is probably starting with your instructional design/curriculum/CTL folks and pairing them with training in human psychology and change management, or finding those rare individuals who already combine technical curiosity with genuine people skills. Give them dedicated time, resources for learning, and permission to experiment. Build from their strengths rather than trying to retrofit existing roles.
Many schools are hiring someone from the outside into a dedicated role, but they are unlikely to make much progress without internal people who understand the culture and how to move it. Such hires imply that the schools think they can do it alone with a dedicated resource. But those requisitions emphasize an education-oriented background more than a technical, operations, or change management expertise. That’s where external consultants come in.
The Case for External Consultants
Here's where Mollick's warning about generalized approaches becomes crucial. The education world is littered with failed technology initiatives that ignored context, culture, and the emotional reality of change. Cookie-cutter professional development sessions about AI tools are fine as a first step, but they’re not the be all. They can't deal easily with the emotional situation, won’t understand existing expertise thoroughly, and will lack understanding of cultural aspects that determine whether change actually takes hold.
But there are significant advantages to bringing in carefully chosen external expertise. The AI knowledge base simply isn't deep enough within most educational organizations yet. External consultants can bring experience with change management processes, operations analysis frameworks, and technical understanding that would take years for internal staff to develop independently.
The key is finding consultants who inform rather than prescribe. You want someone who can help your internal productivity therapist understand the technical landscape, spot potential pitfalls, and learn from implementations elsewhere—without imposing solutions that ignore your unique context. The best external partners see their job as accelerating your internal capacity, not replacing it.
Look for consultants who ask more questions than they answer in initial conversations. Who want to understand your culture, constraints, and existing strengths before suggesting anything. Who have experience with organizational change beyond just technology adoption. And critically, who understand that lasting change in education requires buy-in from practitioners, not just administrators.
You might be willing to overlook classroom experience if the consultant is clearly there to inform and support rather than persuade or prescribe. The external consultant's role should be temporary and capacity-building—there to transfer knowledge, provide frameworks, and help you avoid common mistakes while your internal productivity therapist remains the key figure who understands your people, mission, and daily reality.
Schools that think they can address AI integration on the margins are fooling themselves. This isn't about adding another tool to the toolkit or running a few workshops. AI's impact on education will be felt when people fundamentally change how they approach their work—how they plan lessons, assess learning, communicate with stakeholders, and solve problems.
That level of change requires dedicated resources and sustained attention. It requires someone whose job it is to understand both the human, pedagogical, and technical sides of the equation, to spot opportunities and obstacles, to customize approaches for different roles and personalities. It requires a productivity therapist.
The organizations that invest in developing this capacity now—whether through internal talent development, strategic external partnerships, or both—will be the ones that actually harness AI's potential rather than just talking about it. The choice isn't whether AI will transform education; it's whether your institution will be driving that transformation or getting dragged along by it.
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