A Call For Rational Inattention

You may have heard that our attention spans are shrinking. That we now have roughly the attentional focus of a goldfish. But I’ve looked at the research underlying the news hype, and I see no evidence that this is true. Attention spans are not shrinking. And goldfish are smarter than we think.

In their Own Box, oil and cold wax on board. Anne Kearney

So why does it feel like your attention span is shrinking?

Many of us suffer from information overload and a low tolerance for being bored. The result is fuzzy thinking and distractibility. We struggle to start what needs doing. And we struggle to stay on task when what we’re doing isn’t inherently interesting.

It is tempting to diagnose our inability to focus as a permanent condition – as though we have lost some ancestral skill.

But the problem is not that our attention spans are shrinking. The problem is that they are drowning.

The number of things our brains can pay attention to at any given moment is limited and always has been. What’s more, when we deliberately decide to use this limited attention capacity to focus on some things and tune out others, we use up mental energy leaving us with less for whatever comes next.

These cognitive limitations probably weren’t big problems for our ancestors. But we now live in a world where our brains are being force fed information at every turn. And far too much of that information is both low quality and almost impossible to ignore.

We are drowning in information and our limited capacity to pay attention cannot keep up.

The good news is that once we understand that frayed attention has more to do with our environments than with ourselves, we set the stage for doing something about it. We can stop consuming every bit of information in our path. We can take on the responsibility of deciding how to spend our attention.

Rational inattention – a life preserver for a drowning brain

Rational inattention – a term I’m borrowing from economics – is a way to liberate ourselves from informational excess.

The rational inattention approach to information consumption accounts for the fact that people have limited time and attention capacity. It encourages decision makers to stop pursuing perfect information and instead to consider the costs and benefits of acquiring and processing information. They can then decide what information to focus on and what information to ignore. One can debate how this plays out in reality – decision making is rarely that rational and the value of information is hard to know before you have it. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting idea.

I suggest we borrow the concept of rational inattention and use it more broadly, as a way to embrace the idea that it is okay – a necessity really – to thoughtfully ignore information.

We cannot pay attention to everything. We cannot know everything. We cannot get to the bottom of our social media feeds. What we can do is be more thoughtful about where to spend our limited attention.

Why practice rational inattention?

The gifts of rational inattention

Economists talk about rational inattention as a strategy for increasing efficiency and productivity, but that is not all life is about. The real benefits of rational inattention, as I see it, extend far beyond efficiency.

Freedom. There is a sense of freedom to be had from abandoning the impossible ideal that we must keep up to date on everything, respond to everything, and have opinions about everything.

Creativity. When we are not constantly processing information, we make room for the mind to wander, to connect disparate thoughts, and to stumble upon insights that we would never find through a deliberate search.

Impact. By choosing where not to spend our attention, we create the conditions for deeper immersion with what remains. The conversation that is unbroken by glances at the screen builds a stronger social connection. The activist who focuses on one or two key issues is more likely to make a difference.

Resilience. By protecting ourselves from information that drains without enriching, we preserve our mental capacity to deal with unexpected challenges and to engage with what matters most.

What might rational inattention look like in practice?

Start with an attention audit

Try spending several days tracking how and where you spend your attention. Keep a journal at hand and make a note of what you are doing and what might be distracting you. You can set a timer to do this every hour or two. If that proves too disruptive, you can take a moment to reflect during natural breaks or as you switch from one task to the next.  Ask yourself the following:

• How am I spending my attention?

• What distractions are pulling my attention away from where I want it?

• What is making it difficult for me to focus or do what I’m trying to do?

• Do the mental energy costs seem unnecessarily high for the task at hand?

• Am I getting a good return on my attentional investment?

Once you have an idea of how and where you are spending your attention, you can start putting some strategies in place to help you focus on what’s actually important and ignore what is not.

Five strategies for rational inattention

Eliminate or reduce distractions. This is not rocket science. We know what we need to do. Based on my attention audit, my list includes putting my phone out of sight, dropping some chat groups, and organizing my studio.

Be more intentional. There are many situations in which we want or need to pay some attention, but we find we are paying too much. Structuring your tasks, time, environments, or workflow can help make your information consumption more intentional.

I am trying to strike a balance between staying informed and doom scrolling by limiting my newsfeed consumption to twice a day. I’m trying to be more efficient in how I do research for these blog posts in order to keep myself from going down too many rabbit holes. And I’m trying to shorten some of my zoom meetings by keeping them more focused.  

Limit task-switching. Each time we switch our attention back and forth there is a cognitive cost. Sometimes the cost is worth it – for example when we need a break or when we are losing steam and need to switch it up. But when we are task-switching because we are distracted or because we are under the illusion that we are multi-tasking, we get nothing in return for the price that we pay. One way that I’m limiting task-switching is by batching tasks like responding to email. If I do them all once at a particular time of day, I give myself permission to ignore them at other times.

Make a conscious decision to let some things go. We all have worries about which we can do nothing. We all have “should dos” that we are actually never going to do. To get these internal distractions out of the way, Konmari your mental space.

Build in periods of inattention. Maintain and restore your attention by doing things where you can relax your focus – a walk in the park is a perfect example. Allowing yourselves these periods of intentional inattention not only helps top up your mental reserves, it also gives your brain time and space to process what it has been doing and to engage in creative mind-wandering. Think about building in both longer periods of inattention and micro inattention breaks throughout the day.

How will you spend your attention?

If we don’t decide how to spend our attention, it will be decided for us. And in a world designed to capture our attention through ever more sophisticated means, perhaps the most revolutionary thing we can do is to decide, with intention and care, not to pay attention.

In doing so, we may end up discovering all that we have been missing by trying so hard to miss nothing.

A Curious Animal, We Are

Curious has two meanings; we (humans) exemplify both: (1) We are inquisitive and eagerly chase after whims. (2) We are also, at times, peculiar—acting in ways that are difficult to understand, or unexpected. Our devotion to information represents some of each meaning: we dread being swamped by information yet can’t resist seeking more. 

That isn’t surprising (or unique to humans) given that uncertainty is ever-present and inevitable. Nor is it surprising that we devote so much attention to searching for ways to increase predictability. We routinely take steps to try things out, pondering possibilities all the time: “Let’s see,” “What if,” “I wonder what would…,” “I doubt it’ll be like that,” “We can give it a try”. In other words, prediction is built into our approaches to reducing uncertainty and achieving understanding.

We test the water, dip in a toe, check to see, put out feelers, and rarely realize how much we rely on such explorations.

While these efforts are commonplace and don’t qualify as “experiments” (in our conventional understanding of them) they share core characteristics of a Small Experiment Mindset: curiosity, seeking answers, and resisting overwhelm. Small experiments are intended to be manageable rather than comprehensive and useful rather than sophisticated. They inspire new questions and achievable next steps. Living in a world of inevitable uncertainty and craving to make it more predictable, we frequently resort to experimenting with possibilities.  Often “go small” makes more sense than what “go big or go home” advocates. 

Cautionary Notes 

Small experiments are created to answer a challenge, to learn something! If the outcome isn’t what we expected, the small experiment is not a failure; it provides useful information and ideas for a step forward. 

Failures, however, are possible! Minimizing them begins before doing the small experiment. That’s the time to anticipate hindsight. What will we be sorry we hadn’t considered ahead of time? What do we expect to learn? Does it matter?  Why might we decide to abandon the project midstream? Anticipating what we can learn is at the heart of designing a useful small experiment. 

Asking these kinds of questions is a good step, at the same time, chasing all the “what ifs” is a fast path to overwhelm! A small experiment (well, any experiment!) cannot answer everything or rule out all, or even most, of the alternative explanations for the outcome. First, consider whether the likely outcome is so obvious that it would be a poor use of time and other resources to proceed. Solution: “If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well!” Then, consider the likelihood of buy-in. If it’s unlikely any outcome will be put to any use, reconsider! There is no need for yet another well-intended effort that is instantly forgotten.

Greater Applicability 

Many “what ifs” relate to the applicability of the small experiment in related contexts. Would a similar organization have similar outcomes if they adopted our study’s findings? Would our findings apply to a different group within our organization?  

Since there are no definitive answers to such questions, the best approach is probably to accept such limitations. Sometimes, however, an additional question in the study design allows us to examine whether it makes a difference. For example, while how long someone has been with the organization may not be the central concern, it may be useful to understand if it plays an important role in the outcome of the small experiment. If it’s easy to collect that information, the results can be compared for relatively new vs. old timers. While this might be a useful strategy, additional questions can also undermine ‘manageability’, the primary tenet of small experiments. It’s one of those “less is more” moments, a time to resist temptations. 

There are many such moments, including these common temptations: asking too much from participants, burdening personnel tasked with doing the study, and collecting so much data that making sense of it is too challenging. Keeping the small experiment small has the dual benefits of gaining answers that will be used and inspiring the next small experiment to explore a newly emerging question. 

SEE-faring 

Where does the SEE framework fit with any of this? A simple answer is that SEE is integral to small experiments.  

Small experiments start from a curiosity, an exploration—not just for their own sake, but to address an existing challenge. Such meaningful engagement enhances understanding, enriches mental models, and often leads to greater clarity and effectiveness.

Alas, greater understanding can also raise more questions, and these temptations can tangle with our bandwidth and capability. The answer to that predicament is to keep the small experiment small; manageability is key! 

The ”answer” to the underlying challenge – the reason for the small experiment – is to consider ways the environment could be changed. How can the virtual or temporal environment be modified to increase a sense of competence? What tweak to the social situation might reduce employees’ feeling overwhelmed? Could addressing cultural workplace dynamics increase participation and feedback, so that teams can identify common goals? How can we get answers to such questions in a manageable way that provides useful and usable information?  

Manageability is key! Baby steps are much bigger and more impactful than no steps! Resisting temptations to take on too much or overcomplicate the experiment is a challenge, but doing so can make the difference between learning something as opposed to causing frustration and wasting goodwill. Even a small step forward is a gain; it may provide useful input.  

If all goes well, a Small Experiment Mindset will become standard operating procedure when future challenges arise. 

Three Small Experiments in Getting Unstuck

I have been facing a creative block for months. The popular adage is that the only way to get past a creative block is to blast through it. You just have to keep showing up and writing, painting, drawing, or whatever it is you do. The work itself will eventually cut through the block and your creative juices will once again flow freely.

But what if this strategy isn’t working? That’s where I find myself. After spending several months showing up to my studio, staring at some works in progress, staring out the window, tidying up a bit, and maybe finally haltingly putting pigment to paper, I am still stuck. Giving my brain a tidying up has helped, but only incrementally.

What more can I do?

My default when I have a problem is to gather information and try and think my way out of it. But with complicated problems, thinking only gets you so far.  At some point, you have to act.

Taking action doesn’t mean that the action has to be big or even that you have to be particularly sure about it. In fact, sometimes the best actions are small experimental ones. This small experiment approach is what I’ve been using to try and get unstuck.

I’ve tried three small experiments so far, and here are the results:

Gather inspiration. Gathering inspiration – or as artists like to say, “filling the well” – is an important part of the creative process. In the long term, gathering inspiration fosters creativity by feeding our brains ideas and imagery that fuel creative exploration. In the short term, it can give you something to react to which may end up sparking an idea.

What did I do? I spent two weeks going down the Pinterest rabbit hole, leafing through my art books, and going to a few art exhibitions. I also spent some time thinking about how to convert my research into inspiration for my work.

How did it go? It was certainly less frustrating exploring other work than being blocked on my own work. Unfortunately, the ease of consuming potential inspiration did not translate to ease of creating. My block did not budge. It was time for another experiment.

Take a class. My next idea was to take an online workshop. I reasoned that this would get me out of information gathering mode – which was not working – and put me in creating mode. Once I was in the rhythm of creating, I hoped this would carry over to my own work.

What did I do? I signed up for a three-day online color exploration workshop. As a bonus, I did it with an art friend. The additional structure of having scheduled check-ins was an extra motivator.

How did it go? The workshop was successful in getting me into the studio and out of my “paint scarcity” mindset. It also gave me some different ways to think about working with color, which will undoubtedly be useful in the long run. In the short-term, however, I didn’t feel creatively energized at the end of the workshop but rather a bit let down – the way it sometimes feels to get home after a great vacation. On to the next experiment.

Explore within structure. When all else fails, go back to first principles. For me, I know that I work best when I give myself freedom to explore within some sort of structure. So, for my latest small experiment, which is still in progress, I have devised a series of semi-structured studio assignments.

What am I doing?  I am going to the studio at least twice a week and doing exercises that use limited materials and techniques. The idea is to get myself working without overthinking. Yesterday, for example, I spent a day painting abstracts in layers with translucent paint. I spent an earlier studio session playing with patterned fabric and paint. This week, I’m planning to do some loosening up exercises with charcoal. At the end of each studio session, I spend some time reflecting on whether I learned anything from my experimentation that I could bring into my work.

How is it going? I am two weeks into this small experiment and although the jury is still out, I might be slowly getting somewhere. I will re-up for another two weeks and remind myself to check in and evaluate how it’s going.

Small experiments – beyond the studio

Small experiments are not just a good way to get around creative blocks. They are also a useful approach for discovering solutions to all kinds of problems and pain points both in one’s personal and professional life.

In a way, small experiments are nothing new – we are doing them all the time. The human brain is wired for experimentation – it is continuously trying out things, making predictions, and soaking in feedback from the environment to determine how things went. This often happens so quickly that we’re not even aware of it.

What makes a small experiment different from the way the brain habitually works is intentionality. A small experiment doesn’t have to be run like a rigid scientific experiment for a set period of time, but it should be intentional and thoughtful. There should be some clarity on what the problem is, brainstorming on ways to solve it, and an assessment to understand whether a potential solution is working. It is also important to make a note of what works. It is surprisingly easy to forget you even had a problem once it is solved , putting you back to the beginning when something similar comes up.

What I like about a small experiment mindset is that it has an inherent bias towards learning through action. Small experiments are a way forward when you can’t think yourself out of a problem. They focus on learning and adapting rather than failure and success. And they are the perfect response to complex problems with many moving parts – whether that’s how to design urban spaces that meet people’s needs or how to overcome a creative block.

What small experiments could you try?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

KonMari Your Mental Space

Like everyone else, I have a lot on my mind these days. News streaming from the firehose of politics and world events, my kids, and whether we have anything in the house for dinner. Added to that, the past year that I have spent playing around and doing experiments in my art studio has filled my brain with competing half-baked ideas for where to go next with my artwork. My brain has become so overloaded that my daytime thoughts are running rampant in my dreams and are paradoxically slowing me down during the day.

I’m especially struggling with my creative work. I am spending way more time in the studio staring into space than putting paint to canvas. And while contemplation is an important part of my creative process, this feels more like paralysis.

It is time to spring clean my mental space.

The KonMari Method

The last time we did a major spring cleaning we were living in a big house in Dublin. As often happens in our age of consumerism and with growing kids, our possessions had gotten a little bit out of control. To address the problem, we turned to what so many people at the time were reading – Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Following Kondo’s KonMari method involved three key steps:

Gather. We got everything out in the open, category by category, so that we could see what we had.

Decide and let go. We held up each item and asked, “Does this spark joy?” We kept the things that did – or that we just really needed – and got rid of the things that did not.

Organize and store. We organized and stored the things we wanted to keep.

This process worked so well that I have recently been applying it to my mental space. 

 My goal for mental spring cleaning is not necessarily a tidier mind. In fact, creative minds are often messy. But there is messy good and messy bad. A brain full of interesting tidbits, memories, and imagery can provide fertile ground for creative mind-wandering and exploration. A brain full of distracting information, unfinished projects, and general worries, on the other hand, can lead to mental fatigue and inaction.

It’s the difference between Francis Bacon’s infamously messy painting studio – a seemingly unorganized space full of materials that he relied on to spark inspiration – and the basement shop where I grew up – an almost impossible to work in underground space choc-a-block full of expired materials where if anything was going to be sparked it would be a fire.

Mental clutter can trip you up

What does clutter look like in our brains? Unfinished tasks, unresolved problems, and nagging worries reside in our brains in the form of persistent cognitive activity – sometimes called cognitive loops. These cognitive loops take up space in the precious cognitive real estate of working memory. Unlike the seemingly unlimited space of long-term storage, our working memory can only hold so much activity at a time. When some of this space is taken up by open cognitive loops, there is less for doing other things that require attention and conscious thought.

Distracting cognitive loops can be ignored with effort, but they are sticky – they continually try to catch and hold our attention. And so, we must continually spend mental energy pulling our attention back to the task at hand.  As time goes on, our mental reserves are depleted, it becomes harder and harder to suppress these mental distractions and get things done, and we are left feeling anxious and mentally fatigued. My husband calls these sticky loops “mind-fields” – they are always there ready to blow up your train of thought.

Mind-fields aren’t just a problem when you are trying to work. They can also hijack mind-wandering by grabbing the attentional spotlight and stopping the loose associative type of thinking that is an essential part of the creative process. Instead of letting the ideas flow we end up getting caught in the quicksand of our problems and worries. Creative paralysis often ensues.

What can we do about these distracting open cognitive loops?

Inside the creative messiness of Francis Bacon’s studio

The life-changing magic of tidying up cognitive loops

In the language of the KonMari method, we can think about mental tidying in terms of gathering, letting go, and organizing.

Gather. The problem with open cognitive loops is that they often hide just below our conscious thought where they can run around unsupervised. We need to gather these thoughts in order to deal with them. For me, writing is the best way to do this. When I am feeling stuck or overwhelmed, I free-write on all the things I have to do, the things that are worrying me, the things that I would like to be doing, the things I want to try out in my studio, and my artwork ideas. The simple act of externalizing all the things that are on my mind can provide some immediate cognitive relief.

Decide and let go. Once you’ve identified what’s on your mind, you might realize that there are some things you can simply get rid of. Years ago, friends of ours were considering remodeling their bungalow kitchen. Their current kitchen was fine but all their friends were doing remodels and they had the nagging sense that their kitchen could be better. At some point, they realized that the open cognitive kitchen loop was siphoning off their mental energy. They brought the idea out in the open, talked about it, and made the conscious decision that they were not going to do a remodel. This decision effectively closed the loop, saving them both mental space and quite a lot of money.

When I take the time to write down all the things I feel that I could or should do, there are almost always some that I can let go of. There are worries about which I can do nothing and sometimes simply writing about them releases them. There are upcoming deadlines for exhibition calls that I can decide I am not going to meet. There are artwork ideas churning around in the back of my mind that I realize no longer interest me.

And then there are the things you decide are important. Some of these you might be able to close out with little effort. I am always amazed how little time it actually takes to respond to emails, make calls, and complete little errands that have been stressing me out. It is usually far less than the time I’ve already spent worrying about them.

Finishing a task or making a conscious decision to let it go are both excellent ways to close cognitive loops. For those things that can’t be quickly closed out, it’s time to organize and store.

Organize and store.  One way to reduce your cognitive load is to lean more heavily on your environment by storing your ideas and to-dos some place other than your brain. Transferring tasks to a to-do list provides immediate relief for an overwhelmed mind. Storing ideas in my “art techniques to try” or “future blog post” files takes the pressure off my brain to remember those things and helps me focus on one thing at a time.

Larger ventures can be organized by breaking the project down into concrete steps and then creating a plan and timeline for completing those steps. This both brings peace to a chaotic mind and ensures that the project gets done.

Why wait until Spring?

Just like in your home, you can’t solely rely on sporadic big cleanups. Regular maintenance and cleaning are also important. 

For our minds, regular maintenance means doing our best to reduce the distractions that eat up mental energy, taking breaks to let our attention rest, and topping up our mental resources through restorative activities like meditation or spending time in nature.

Regular mental tidying is something both productivity gurus and researchers recommend. For some people, this might take the form of daily morning pages or weekly reviews to reveal and help close cognitive loops. I find monthly reviews and resets helpful.

But there are times, like the present for me, where incremental maintenance and tidying are not enough. When my art studio starts veering too much towards chaos, it is time to do a physical deep clean and reset. And when my mental space gets too full of things that detract from my clarity of mind, it is time to do a mental deep clean and reset.

Whether in your physical or mental home, the ultimate goal of tidying up is not just a tidier space, but a greater sense of peace and a clearer sense of what truly matters to you.

Do you need a mental tidy up?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Jello, Cement, and Mindsets

I have a handwritten sign on my studio wall reminding me that, “It takes paint to make a painting!” I tacked it up well over a year ago in an effort to overcome my paint skimping tendencies. My default is to squeeze out and mix small dollops of paint and then run my brush through these dollops over and over again as if I can extract more pigment by the sheer force of my brush and my will. Despite the many tubes of paint stashed in my studio and the art supply store down the street, I behave as if there is a scarcity of paint.

As artists, we are warned of the perils of a scarcity mindset. Believing that the things we need to succeed in our art practice are in limited supply – whether those things are collectors, accolades, followers, or paint – can limit our creativity and blind us to opportunity. An abundance mindset, on the other hand, can free up mental energy, allow our creative juices to flow more freely, open up collaborative opportunities, and make the art world an altogether better place.  I would settle for a thicker and more vibrant coat of paint.

I have been trying to adopt an abundance mindset. I have at least been trying to behave as if I have an abundance mindset. And yet despite my best intentions, I continue to skimp.

Why is change so hard?

Like Jello and cement, once our minds are set they are hard to change

The operative word in mindset is “set.” We’re not talking about flights of fancy, isolated ideas, or transient attitudes. We are talking about the deeply embedded often unconscious beliefs through which we interpret the world and from which much of our behavior stems.    

Mindsets are a distillation of input we’ve received from our environment over our lifetime – everything we’ve learned from the family and culture into which we are born, the experiences we have, the company we keep, and the places we live. Once formed, our mindsets can be extraordinarily useful. They help us to interpret new situations, make predictions, and decide what to do.

I grew up as an avid art maker with small-town babysitter pocket money. I bought pompoms and pipe cleaners individually at Fonks, the local five and dime. I scavenged and horded all kinds of found objects and fabric scraps that might come in handy. I made my paint last. My “art supply scarcity” mindset helped me get the most out of my money and my supplies.

But mindsets that served us well in the past, or that were logical extensions of our particular culture or environment, can become outdated and end up doing more harm than good.

Someone who grew up being told they are smart (or not) and praised for their achievements (or not) may logically view their personal characteristics as something they have rather than something they develop. Yet numerous studies by Carol Dweck and others have shown that people who view ability through this “fixed mindset” are less likely to take on challenges and achieve their goals than are people with a “growth mindset” – those who view abilities like muscles that can be strengthened with effort.

Unhelpful mindsets can affect not just our behavior but our physical health. Researchers at Yale and Miami University have found that people with negative mindsets about aging live an average of seven and a half years less that their more optimistic counterparts. This difference was not related to their overall health, age, or gender.

I long ago reached a point in my life where I can afford to apply my paint more generously. And yet even though I rationally know that my paint scarcity mindset is limiting my creative output, it still drives my behavior.

What is an artist to do?

Change doesn’t always come from within

According to much of the popular advice out there, the cure for a scarcity mindset, or a fixed mindset, or an aging-is-all-downhill mindset is to simply adopt a more helpful mindset. One article I recently read encouraged artists to “choose an abundance mindset” and “train your mind to focus on abundance over scarcity.” I suspect that these vague strategies would be less effective than even the sign in my studio.

Mindsets mostly operate behind the scene. This means that although we might be able to spend mental effort consciously examining and shifting our mindset in a given moment, the old mindset is likely to return as soon as we stop paying attention.

I remember participating in a graduate seminar where we discussed a wide range of ideas related to the brain, the environment, and our behavior. At one point, we were talking about a book on practicing gratitude. One seminar member described how she had spent a week following the book’s advice and had noticed many good outcomes including a better state of mind and more positive interactions with others. “What happened after the week?” our professor asked. “Oh,” she said, “I went back to my old ways. It was just so hard to maintain.”

Change your environment and change your mind

What’s the alternative to trying to think ourselves into a new mindset? Mindsets generally develop organically through the many interactions between ourselves and our environments. It follows that if we want to change our mindsets, we should look not only inside ourselves but also outside ourselves. Indeed, the most profound changes in our perspectives often come not through our own mental effort, but by having our eyes opened by new experiences, new conversations, and new places.

This is what researchers looking for ways to encourage a growth mindset in students have found. Although some teachers have tried to change students’ mindsets by simply giving a lecture or putting up encouraging posters on growth mindset, this turns out to be about as effective as my sign. Real change requires shifting the classroom environment so that it supports a growth mindset – for instance by modifying how the teacher interacts with the students on a day-to-day basis.

When we look to the environment for support, rather than limiting ourselves to a “change come from within” perspective, it opens up opportunities. We can take some of the burden off our overloaded and sometimes unreliable brains. We can change our physical environment. We can change who we spend time with. We can change our input – what we read and what we watch. We can collaborate with professionals to help us identify unhealthy mindsets and map out a strategy for change.

What does this have to do with paint?

A mini experiment in changing my mindset

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been taking my own advice. Instead of trying to think myself into using paint more generously, I have made small changes to my studio environment. Following the advice of an artist who does not hold back on paint, I switched out my small palette for a table-sized palette and started using chunky paintbrushes instead of my usual smaller ones.

I gave myself the literal tools to change my scarcity mindset. The large palette demanded large puddles of paint. The big brushes demanded that I pick up big gobs of paint. Giving into these demands was surprisingly hard but the paint police didn’t come for me. That made it easier to do the next day. And the day after that.

The micro-environment of abundance that I have created is slowly shifting my perceptions and my behavior. It is starting to feel normal rather than wasteful to use more paint. I am painting more freely.

With all the things happening in your world, paint might seem pretty trivial. But mindsets are anything but. Our mindsets shape how we relate to the world and each other and changing those relationships often starts with changing minds. As Albert Einstein said, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

We might not be able to instantly transform mindsets, but we can work to change the environments that feed some of those mindsets.

Can you identify a mindset, big or small, that doesn’t support who you want to be or how you want to act? Could changing some aspect of your environment help shift that mindset to something more supportive?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

It’s Not Me, It’s Barcelona

Shortly after moving to Barcelona, I met an English woman at a book exchange who confessed that even after living here three years, she was still taking beginning Spanish. A woman listening in said that her goal, after living here two years, was to master one past tense. She felt that was all she could manage.

I went home and pronounced them pathetic. How lazy they were, locked away in their expat bubble! I, on the other hand, would surely be fluent within a couple of years.

Fast forward seven years and although I have managed to claw myself to a fairly high level of Spanish, I am far from fluent. It’s embarrassing. What happened to my grand plan of quickly tipping to fluency?

Barcelona, it turns out, had other plans.

Environment matters

Although I didn’t know it when we moved, Barcelona is a notoriously bad place to learn Spanish. The large expat community here means that you are as likely to hear English, Italian, or Chinese on the street as you are Spanish. Locals switch to English at your first linguistic stumble. And because Barcelona is in Catalunya, everything from billboards to the programs at the concert hall are in Catalan – a language that more closely resembles French and Italian than Spanish.

Barcelona doesn’t exactly thwart Spanish learning, it’s just that it doesn't particularly help.

Environment matters. It’s easier to get daily exercise in a city that is designed for walking than one that is designed for driving. It’s easier to eat a healthy diet if that is what’s on the menu. It’s easier to do the right thing when everyone else is doing it.

Even when we think that we are in the driver’s seat and making conscious decisions about how to behave, it is actually a complex series of largely hidden interactions between mind and environment that determines where we go. As James Clear sums up in his book Atomic Habits, “Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”

The role of the environment in influencing mind and behavior is especially easy to see when we look at babies. Babies are a bundle of ready-made cognitive systems including an innate capacity for learning language. They also come with built-in psychological drivers, including a strong desire to communicate and socially connect. But language acquisition doesn’t happen on its own. It is fueled by the environment.

Luckily, the immersive language environment into which babies are born is a match made in heaven – and the richer the better. Babies get all the information, structure, and feedback they need to learn how to communicate and connect. In the process, their brains are forever changed as a primary language — or occasionally two or three — takes hold, shaping not only their language center but also the way they perceive the world.

A supportive language-learning environment doesn't necessarily make things easy for these little humans. If you have ever watched a baby learn to do anything — including finding their own feet — you know that learning can be hard. But a rich language environment does make language learning easier.

Adult language learners rarely have such an ideal mind-environment alignment as your average baby. But for the expats I know who have become truly fluent in Spanish, there are some similarities. Most of them came to Spain alone instead of arriving with their English-speaking families. Many of them moved initially to parts of Spain where English was not widely spoken and thus had no option but to use Spanish to figure things out. Many have Spanish speaking partners, giving them entry to Spanish speaking community.

Their environment didn’t make learning Spanish easy, but it did make it easier.

Barcelona doesn’t make it easy

I know that some of my fluent friends not so secretly think that non-fluent expats are lazy. After all, they didn’t have too much trouble learning Spanish. I have also felt that I must be lazy, or that I don’t have a head for languages, or that I’m just not disciplined enough. And while there may be some truth to that, it is only part of the story.

Not only is Spanish immersion near impossible to achieve in Barcelona for reasons I’ve already mentioned, but the city offers up a wide array of ways for me to meet my needs without speaking Spanish. Navigating health care, renting an apartment, getting a haircut? I could try and stumble through those things in Spanish, but in Barcelona I can easily do them in English. Finding a school for my child who is two years away from college? It made sense to optimize academics over language acquisition by putting him in an English-speaking school. Building community? The locals speak Catalan and aren’t necessarily looking to expand their social group. The expat community, on the other hand, is welcoming and easy to access.

Choosing the easy English way out in these contexts is not lazy, it is cognitively efficient. Why risk medical miscommunication? Why feel socially out of place when community is readily available? Why not avoid the cognitive pain that comes from feeling like an idiot?

But taking the easy way out in terms of meeting one’s needs means having to go the hard road in terms of learning Spanish. Without help from our environment, we put a heavier burden on ourselves. We must make do with the artificial structure of grammar rules, vocabulary lists, and flashcards. We need to consciously and continually choose to sustain the work of language learning.

It’s no wonder our motivation flags and we end up in what my former Spanish teacher called, “intermediate hell.” It’s no surprise we find ourselves thinking that one past tense really is enough. 

Riding the environmental wave

If we understand language learning – or whatever else we are trying to do – as an integrated effort between mind and environment, it gives us another way to think about change.

And this is why, when faced with the verb conjugation app that was recently recommended to me, I find myself wondering if I could make my environment work harder for me instead of placing the learning burden entirely on my own waning willpower.

Big changes aren’t always possible. I’m not about to leave my partner in order to immerse myself for several months somewhere in non-Catalunya Spain. I’m not going to drop my English-speaking friends or quit my English-speaking work.

But there are some small tweaks that might make my environment more supportive of my efforts. For the next couple months, I’ve decided to put the flashcards aside and focus on making small decisions that open up immersive opportunities. I want to see how far I can get by consciously deciding to jump and then letting the current pull me along.

Today I began my conversation with my dentist in Spanish even though his English is excellent. Last week I started reading a new murder mystery in Spanish. Mysteries are not necessarily my favorite genre but they are inherently cognitively engaging — I want to know what happens next and so the story drags me along. I am going to try and get over my aversion to watching TV during the day and regularly schedule in some Spanish Netflix — maybe something slightly trashy that appeals to my base interests.

None of these strategies will make bumping up my Spanish easy. But I am hoping that they will make it easier.

Environment matters.

What are you trying to learn, or do, or change? How could you tweak your environment to make it easier?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Digesting Art and Other Information

Some Assembly Required. Oil, acrylic, cold wax, collage on wood. Anne Kearney

I was recently working on an abstract collage in paint and fabric and was stumped about what to do next. What else does it need? What should I add? Do I go for the glue gun or the paint brush? In a moment of inspiration I went, instead, for the utility knife. Slicing off a sizable chunk of the piece seemed dramatic but was just what was needed to create a unified whole.

Looking around at my other collages in progress lying on the studio floor, I sought further composition inspiration by thinking back to the two-hour lecture I’d taken a couple years ago from an artist of note. What were those actionable guidelines and strategies? What were those juicy bits of advice? My mind was a blank. Perhaps delusionally, I chose to believe that the absence of useful knowledge was a function not of my aging brain but of the presentation itself.

The lecture felt informative at the time. It was chock-a-block full of compositional rules and guidelines. It ran through long lists of things to keep in mind, like rhythm and balance, contrast and repetition, line and pattern. And it included image after image. Paintings marked up in grids of thirds. Paintings overlaid with the golden ratio. Paintings crisscrossed with webs of lines showing relationships.

There was so much information, in fact, that apparently none of it stuck.

As artists we communicate not just through art but also about art. We talk about our work. We write. We teach. We care about helping people understand. And yet in our excitement to share everything we know, it is all too easy to share too much. This is a tendency that I have to regularly fight against when writing these blog posts.

Just as it is easy to lose sight of the big picture when putting paint to surface, it is easy to lose sight of the big questions when putting words to paper. Am I imparting something with sticking power? Am I helping people understand?

As with painting, guidelines can be useful in the composition of information—not just for artists but for anyone engaged in the creative act of communication.

What are some of those guidelines? Read on – and I will try not to make you cross-eyed with the verbal equivalent of crisscrossed lines.

Organization Aids Digestion

Painters might not care about the neuroscience behind information processing, but effective composition in painting works because it resonates with the way the brain works.

Artists learn that paintings are often strongest if they have one main focal point. They learn to organize the painting along a visual hierarchy by using, for example, color intensity and value, so that viewers aren’t overwhelmed. They organize the elements of the painting to help lead the eye. And they ruthlessly edit, cutting away elements that distract from the whole. Often this editing involves getting rid of the artist’s favorite marks in a process that can be so wrought we call it “killing our darlings.”

There is a parallel here with communication. A good TED Talk, for example, gives the brain a focal point in the form of a central theme. It explains that theme by exploring a hierarchy of related concepts. It guides the listener by effectively leading them from point to point. And it gives enough detail and imagery to be interesting along the way.

Breaking information down into bite-sized pieces and then weaving those pieces together resonates with the brain’s natural system of organizing knowledge. This resonance makes the information easier to digest. If the lecturer on painting composition had given his talk a clearer unifying principle, and then organized his main points into bite-sized concepts with accessible examples, my brain might have something to show for the time I spent.

Don’t Overfeed Me

In my attempt to learn about composition, I would have been much better off learning three useful things rather than forgetting the twenty or so that were presented. Our brains can only handle so much at a time. And if we are asked to simultaneously take in more than we can handle, we get overloaded and often tune out as a protective response.  

How many things are we capable of thinking about at once? The magic number, based on a whole lot of research in psychology, is five plus or minus two. 

Great, you might be thinking, I can talk about seven things in my next presentation. Not so fast.  For complex things or for people who have competing demands on their attention — which is most of us, most of the time — that number is at the lower end.

As the ubiquitous “menu del dia” in Spain attests, a three-course lunch with small portions is digestible on a normal workday. Five courses might be reserved for a special dinner when you have more time. And seven courses comprise an event to which you must be committed.

It is no coincidence that painters often break the canvas into three main areas by value or pictorial space, that major concertos have three movements, and that June Cohen, former executive producer of Ted Media, says that a great talk should clearly articulate a single main idea and have no more than three supporting subpoints. Sometimes three really is the magic number.

Cheating by Chunking

While going broader with the amount of information you try and share comes with risks, you can sometimes go deeper. It is possible to effectively get around the brain’s limited capacity by grouping information into categories and subcategories — or as psychologists like to say, “chunking.” With chunking you are packaging bits of information inside conceptual containers so that they are easy to carry around. It’s a little bit like opening a bento box and finding three or four mini-trays nestled inside.

Painters chunk in a variety of ways, for example by starting with a small number of large shapes and then dividing those shapes into smaller shapes to add more detail. Writers chunk by nesting sub-themes under themes.

How many levels of chunking can you effectively include? That will depend on what you are trying to say, the timing and format you are using, and on your audience. Are you a presenter with limited time to present? Do you have an audience of beginners or people with many demands on their attention? You can probably really only cover three concepts related to your main theme before you start to overwhelm or lose people. Do you have your audience for a longer period of time? Are you sharing information via a long-form essay with people who are interested in what you’re saying? You can probably go deeper. But even then, you need good structure and compelling content.

The painting composition teacher had a group of interested artists for two hours. He could have effectively covered a fair amount of information – though not nearly as much as he tried to pack in – if it had been better organized. Concepts like dynamic symmetry, diagonals, dominance and rhythm, for example, could have been organized under a limited number of compelling themes like how to keep the eye moving or how to achieve visual balance.

Please Don’t Feed Me Bonbons

Often the importance of structure is summed up as “less is more.” And this is not a bad place to start. Keeping to one main theme is important. Sharing a limited number of concepts related to that theme is much more likely to be effective than trying to cram in too much information.

And yet I have noticed a trend toward oversimplification in much of the information that is shared these days. Important concepts are presented as lists – Stephen King’s 20 rules for writers, Diebenkorn’s 10 rules for artists. Politicians stop trying to communicate real information in their efforts to oversimplify and provoke emotion at the expense of understanding. News feeds give us sound bites that grab our attention but often fail to deliver anything of substance.

In our information diet we are increasingly being fed the equivalent of ultra-processed food. Like these foods, this kind of information is hard to resist, goes down easily, but ultimately does not nourish us. 

We are warned of waning attention spans and told to keep it simple. Yet it is the dense informational packages of stories, imagery, and examples that provide the conceptual vitamins, minerals, and flavors that make food for thought worth eating. Detail in information, as long as it sits within a structure and isn’t the equivalent of an overwhelming number of crisscrossed lines, gives us something to cognitively latch onto and explore. It sparks emotions, memories, and associated ideas making the information more likely to stick.

As communicators ourselves, let’s not add to empty informational calories and the collective sugar crash that ensues. Give me information that is easy to digest but please don’t feed me bonbons.

Beyond and Back to Rules

Good composition doesn’t necessarily ensure a good outcome. Many other ingredients go into successful communication. Many examples of communication follow all the rules but still fall flat.

Some works of art ignore compositional rules altogether yet are still captivating. Jackson Pollack’s drip paintings lack structure at first glance. Edgard Varèse’s avant-garde music compositions were sometimes written to deliberately challenge the audience. And the great Russian novels where everyone has at least three different names now need guides to help the modern reader keep everything straight.

One can argue that these works are successful not because they lack structure but because their audiences – typically people with expertise or inherent interest in the genre – are willing to put the mental effort into creating structure. For some people, the challenge of discovering or creating structure from information is immensely satisfying.

A reviewer of a book I recently read — and had trouble navigating — noted that this was a “difficult” book but that pulling out the themes was ultimately worthwhile. An artist I admire deliberately spends time with paintings that aren’t immediately engaging or likable in an attempt to understand what the artist is saying.

You can learn a lot this way. You can also get a headache.

I applaud experimentation. But with everyday kinds of communication most of us simply don’t have enough time, mental energy, or interest to put effort into extracting structure from information in order to more fully digest it.

So please, if you want to reach us, help us. Organize your thoughts. Tell us something rather than everything. Make it interesting.

Paying attention to how you communicate and not just what you communicate will help your information stick.

What do I do I hope sticks with you from this post? Three general guidelines for effective communication:

Share bite-sized ideas – they are easier to chew
Is there a clear main idea? Are the supporting concepts and themes coherent? Would cutting things out bring clarity to the whole even if you – like I have done many times while creating this post – have to kill your darlings?

Respect limited digestive capacity
Are you overwhelming your audience by asking them to think about too many things at once? What information can you cut or chunk to make it more manageable?

Make it nutritious
Is the information nutritionally dense? Are there enough interesting details to engage your audience? Are you giving them meaty things to think about?

If you can do these things, you are well on your way to making the information that you share understandable and impactful. As the French painter Pierre Bonnard said, “A well-composed painting is half done.”

Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Retrospecting My Future

Last week in my dreams, I was visited by the ghost of my future self. In a mist straight out of The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, which my family and I had watched the week before, my ghost proceeded to tell me how badly I had failed to meet my 2025 art practice goals. I railed against my Ghost of Art Practice Future while scrambling through the studio debris thinking surely I could find at least one finished painting. Alas, I could not.

Digital collage from original photo and charcoal drawing. Anne Kearney

When I awoke I found myself, just like Scrooge, thinking that surely this future could be averted. But how?

Enter the premortem.

We all know what a postmortem is. The image that comes to my mind is of a wry and slightly jaded TV murder-series coroner throwing around terms like “trace evidence” and “blunt force trauma” while piecing together the probable cause of death for an unlucky victim. A postmortem is about creating a narrative – a mental model – to help explain what happened and ideally shed some light on how to keep the rest of us safer. This is good information but it doesn’t do much for the victim.

What if, in a recursive reality where time paradoxes were possible, the postmortem could be performed before the person died in order to provide timely information that would avert their death?

That is, in essence, what a premortem tries to do.

Gary Klein, who coined the term premortem in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, says that, "Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the 'patient' has died, and so asks what did go wrong.”

What’s wrong with regular planning?

Why does a premortem work better than just planning the regular way?

One of the reasons is that people tend to be charmingly optimistic. And this optimism can lead to some pretty big planning mistakes. Of course, not everyone is optimistic all the time — depressed people tend to be more pessimistic in general, for example — but being overly optimistic when thinking about the future is a common enough phenomenon that psychologists have coined the term “optimism bias” to describe this human tendency.

Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who spent decades studying human thought and decision making, sums up this tendency in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.”

This bias toward optimism appears to transcend gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, and even species — starlings, for example, have also shown a tendency toward unwarranted optimism. In fact, even if we know about the optimism bias, we have difficulty escaping its pull. Case in point: as I write these words, I am thinking that surely I am less susceptible than others to the optimism bias and thus more capable of realistic planning and eventual success. My future ghost does not agree.

On the surface, a built-in cognitive bias toward optimism seems strange. Why on earth would our brains be wired for optimism? Wouldn’t a healthy dose of fear and pessimism keep us safer?

It turns out that optimism has some distinct advantages. An optimistic outlook keeps us from the paralysis of worrying about things over which we have little or no control. It encourages forward thinking and action. And it can smooth over our interactions with other people. Not surprisingly then, optimism is associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress — all of which can adversely impact quality and quantity of life. Optimists also tend to work harder and longer which, one can imagine, leads to a range of good outcomes.

A slightly delusional optimism is what allows people to pursue a career in the arts, to say “I do,” and to decide to become parents. Perpetually believing that a painting is almost done is what enables me to keep at it for the twenty hours – or days or months – that it actually takes to finish.

Ignorance, it turns out, really can be bliss.

The problem with optimism

Given the benefits of optimism, I certainly wouldn’t wish this bias away.

And yet while optimism is important, it can be problematic if it comes at the expense of realistic forecasting and planning. One consequence of overconfidence is something psychologists call the “planning fallacy.” This phenomenon describes the very human tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks associated with a task. Even worse, studies have shown that these planning errors are not just a characteristic of the inexperienced — on the contrary, the planning fallacy is hard to shake even when we should know better.

College students reliably pull all-nighters and turn in half-baked arguments because they have underestimated — yet again — how long their term paper will actually take to complete. Managers routinely promise more than their team can realistically deliver. Building renovations famously end up taking longer and costing more than even seasoned contractors estimate. And artists are perpetually scrambling to pull together their exhibition even when past experience has told them that it will take longer and cost more than they think. This last example illustrates the recursive Hofstadter’s Law — a corollary of the planning fallacy — which states that things always take longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

If the ghost of my future self had spoken in my dream it likely would have warned me of the dangers of being overly optimistic, of falling prey to the planning fallacy, and of ignoring Hofstadter’s Law.

To make matters worse

Our problems with planning extend beyond simple optimism. It appears that the mental models that we rely on to understand the world, make decisions, and envision the future are themselves susceptible to optimism bias. Although it’s true that our brains are drawn to vividly bad things in the world — fires, accidents, and other catastrophes, for example — studies have shown that people are more likely to gloss over the abstractly bad and problematic in favor of the positive. This means that positive things are more likely to become solidified in our mental models than negative things. And this, in turn, makes those positive things both easier to remember and more likely to influence our predictions about the future.

And so we happily say, “Let’s go for a second baby! Labor wasn’t too bad and I don’t remember the infant years being all that hard, those adorable moments were many, and I’m sure we’ll be able to afford college somehow.” This is an excellent mindset for ensuring the survival of the species. But it is not so great for ensuring the success of your next project.

Re-enter the premortem.

The premortem sidesteps our problems with overoptimism and skewed mental models by asking not what might go wrong but what did go wrong. It doesn't ask us to make predictions and assess risk — things at which people are infamously bad — but deals instead with absolutes. The project has failed. You can now turn your mind to identifying all the things that led to failure. And then start thinking about what you could have done to keep those things from happening.

The prospective hindsight of a premortem helps one build a useful mental model of a failure without having to actually experience that failure. This model, in turn, can be used to anticipate and mitigate problems for next time which, in the circular world of the premortem, is actually this time.

My premortem

When I started exploring all the causes for my failure to achieve my 2025 art practice goals, I had no problem coming up with scenarios that were dramatic and arguably far-fetched. I suffered a venomous snake bite on the way to the studio — this scenario is vivid in my brain after having just read a New York Times article about the hazards of venomous snakes, albeit mostly in rural India and Africa. I was hit in the head by falling debris while walking under an apartment balcony and ended up in a coma — the getting hit in the head part actually did happen to me recently and that recency makes my brain consider it highly likely to happen again.

I had to dig deeper before I unearthed more realistic scenarios from my murky cognitive depths – things like lack of planning, absence of accountability, and simple procrastination.

Now that I have a better handle on the causes of my own future failure, I get to go back in time, to the present, and correct those things. The future is now.

Why did I fail and what could I have done to prevent it?

I failed because I had no deadlines or accountability to push me. If only I had formed an artist-in-residence relationship with reDirect to make me accountable for getting things done!

I failed because I didn’t schedule and protect studio time. If only I had blocked out studio time in my calendar and defended that time against things that seemed more pressing or interesting but that, in retrospect, were less important!

I failed because my studio space was unwelcoming and that made it hard to get into a creative mindset. If only I had spent a bit of time at the beginning of the year making my space nicer! But note: although it’s true that one’s workspace can have a tremendous impact on well-being and productivity, the promise of effortless workflow and creative bliss that the ubiquitous studio-porn dangles in front of artists is an empty one. I do want my space to be more inviting – curtains, for example, and a bit more storage would help – but I know from past experience that the siren call of design and organization can end up shipwrecking my creative voyage.

I failed because every time I picked up a paintbrush I was paralyzed by overthinking and indecision. If only I had reminded myself of the tricks I already know for encouraging creative flow! It’s not that I necessarily want to make things easy – in fact I do some of my best work when the process is hard and fraught – but I do want to keep myself moving.

I failed because for every hour I spent on my own work, I spent five hours scrolling social media and getting caught up in cute baby videos. If only I had taken my own advice on limiting these sink holes of time!

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Putting my premortem where everyone can see it is a bit daunting. It shines a public spotlight on my intentions. But as I’ve just identified, the accountability that this spotlight brings is one of the things that will increase my chances of following through on those intentions.

This year, instead of succumbing to optimistic ignorance and hoping for the best, I’m looking 2025 squarely in the eye. I reject Rizzo the Rat’s aversion to thinking about the future, manifested in his cry upon seeing the Muppet’s Ghost of Christmas Future: “Oh, this is too scary. I don't think I wanna see any more!”

Instead, I’m following the path of Ebenezer Scrooge who, according to Charles Dickens, said: “Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But, as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart.”

Anne Kearney is the 2025 ReDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Introducing reDirect’s 2025 Artist in Residence

I am delighted to be the reDirect Artist-in-Residence for 2025!

I have long been interested in both art and people. My earliest memories are of “making things” — playing with pipe cleaners, cardboard, glue, and whatever else I could get my hands on. As the years have passed the materials have changed, but the common root of what drives my art is a love of exploration and discovery. How do these materials work? What can I do with them? What can I learn?

My interest in people — particularly in human psychology and behavior — blooms from this same root of curiosity. How do people function? How can we influence them for the better? What experiments can we do to learn more? These interests eventually led to a degree in cognitive science from Stanford and a PhD in environmental psychology from the University of Michigan where I had the great fortune to meet many of the people currently on the reDirect board.

My environmental psychology career has taken me from academia to consulting to working with NASA where, as my daughter once explained to a friend, I “helped design spaceships so that people don’t go crazy.” Art was often relegated to the backseat during those years but it was always along for the ride.

When I embarked on my adventure as a full-time artist about seven years ago, I assumed that the choice to embrace art was a de facto choice to leave the world of psychology behind. But as I developed my art practice and artistic voice, I realized that my background in cognitive science and environmental psychology was the primary driver of my artwork — not only pointing me towards particular ideas and themes to explore but also helping me see how to keep working at my best. Like many epiphanies, this one seemed obvious in hindsight.

My years studying human cognition and psychology have shaped the way I look at the world. And as I create and struggle as an artist, I have become increasingly aware of the focus and insights that this particular lens brings to the creative process. When I started a blog that explores these connections and insights, it felt like coming full circle.

As a reDirect Artist-in-Residence, part of what I will be doing is continuing my written explorations of art, life, and environmental psychology as a way to help bring reDirect’s SEE Framework to life. This writing will take the form of blog posts — personal essays flavored with science — that I hope will resonate with readers not only because we are all creative (and we are) but because we are all human.

I welcome the structure that this Artist-in-Residence will bring and I look forward to the opportunity to dive deeper into the ideas embedded in SEE!

            - Anne

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer who currently lives in the vibrant city of Barcelona. Anne’s artwork is inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She is energized by the struggle of finding ways to communicate the essence of abstract ideas through simple art materials. Her writing explores what cognitive science and psychology have to tell us about creativity, making art, and functioning at our best in this complex world. Anne has a BA in Psychology/Cognitive Science from Stanford University, a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan, and has studied art throughout her life.

Relying on Technology Alone to Sharpen Your Focus? You Might Be in For a Wait.

If we pause and look at the people around us in almost any public space, we’re likely to find someone with a wearable device. "Wearables" have become widespread consumer products over the past several years, extending the capabilities of our phones and computers (think: FitBits, Apple Watches, and Oura Rings). The devices promise to improve your sleep, physical fitness, nutrition, and even your productivity.  When paired with other sensors and phone applications, they provide us with more information about ourselves than we ever thought possible. But this begs an important set of questions: what are we supposed to do with this information? Can this mountain of data change how generally healthy individuals eat, sleep, exercise, and work? In essence, are wearables worth our attention and the other resources we spend on them?

Maybe, but when it comes to establishing healthy habits and behaviors, wearables can’t do the job alone. reDirect’s Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) framework suggests that it’s our own knowledge of how our environments are either helping or hindering us that can unlock the success of wearable technology.

What Information Can a “Wearable” Provide?

An essential piece of how we navigate our everyday environments, and change behaviors,  requires having the right information—the right amount, the right type, and at the right time. When it comes to the type of information that wearables provide, this consists of:

• The “what,” or an overview of our current behaviors or states; and, occasionally,

• The "why," or the importance of changing our behaviors or states.

Together, this is called declarative knowledge, and wearables share plenty of it. It's often what we feel overwhelmed with when we check into our devices. For example, a single application paired with an Apple Watch can tell us when we cycled into and out of a deep sleep stage over the past week, when we last stood up and walked away from our desks, and the last time we engaged in intensive exercise. On the surface, this seems like useful information! But we’re often left feeling lost about what we should do with that endless stream of facts.

This is where a second type of information comes into play (or, in the case of wearables, often gets left behind). Most of these devices fail to provide informed, timely recommendations for how to act on the information they’re recording. Feeling equipped to respond —or having the procedural knowledge about next steps—is crucial to helping us build the competence and awareness needed to change behavior.

Tuning Into Our Environments

For health behavior categories where setting measurable goals is challenging, such as “I want to feel more productive throughout the week,” it’s understandably difficult for technology to assist us. Most of us can recall a time when we were asked to help our team or colleagues achieve a broad, somewhat ambiguous, goal at work, but we lacked a clear roadmap for how to do so. In the case of wearables, we’re experiencing the same challenge. Wearables fall short of leading us down the right path if our initial goal is unclear, or if we lack clarity about what is happening in our environment that might hinder that goal. This is where our own awareness of our environments becomes important.

Over time, wearable technologies have certainly improved in terms of the prompts they provide us. They’re slowly adapting to reflect the understanding that simply telling someone to do something (“it’s time to stand up from your desk!”) doesn’t actually create long-term behavior change. Discovering the appropriate “how” requires our own input! We are the only ones with a full sense of what our environments are like and with the capacity to observe when they are and are not in alignment with our goals. Our physical, social, and digital environments can either prevent or aid in shaping the behaviors we want to see.

Taking Notice: Through the Lens of Productivity

At reDirect, many of the organizations we work with experience challenges related to bandwidth and lack the staff capacity and time to get everything done. So let’s explore the goal of boosting productivity as an example. Recently, I began working on a draft of this very blog when, only 30 minutes in, I received a prompt from my Apple Watch to stand up and take a break. It tracked my movements, observed that I had been sedentary for an extended period, and issued the prompt to take a movement break. Helpful, right?

Well, considering I had already been in a sort of creative “flow” state when writing, the only thing the prompt achieved was distracting me from the task at hand. Fortunately for me, I also have a desk space with views of nature just outside my window, so I can more easily restore my attention when I begin feeling fatigued. But, my watch had no way of knowing what my current work environment looked like!  How, then, could it prompt me toward a more productive day and overall workflow?

As was the case before wearable technology, the research behind SEE would suggest that action or progress toward our desired outcomes still requires our awareness of how our environments are supporting us. 

Small Experiments and Recognizing Patterns

An oft-repeated recommendation we make at reDirect is to try out a series of “small experiments.” In the case of wearable technology, that suggestion holds true once again. SEE encourages us to take the information from our devices and begin to recognize the patterns of our day. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What types of work activities are you engaging in when you receive notifications about being unfocused?  

• Does this happen during particular times in the day? Or, are there distractions coming from your laptop, phone, or physical surroundings that correspond with lapses in focus? 

• Make some small adjustments (e.g., dedicating time for focus work when you notice you feel more alert, or eliminating the source of noise nearby) and track  any changes you experience. 

• Did your changes have the intended effect? If not, are there other adjustments you can make?

Engaging in the small experiment process helps to close an information “feedback loop” that would otherwise remain open. To truly change how we sleep, eat, exercise, and work, SEE reinforces the need to tune in to our environments and build an effective mental model of the challenges we’re facing and how to approach them. With just a little bit of tracking on our part, we can further improve the utility of wearable technology and help our devices live up to their intended potential.

Crafting a Visual Environment for Sharing Information

In the modern era of technology, humans are constantly inundated with visual information. Advertisements line our morning commutes, emails continually stream into our laptops, and our pockets hold a virtual world begging for our attention. At the end of the day, many of us curl up on the couch with our favorite Netflix series dancing across the screen in front of us. In a world where visual information is so pervasive, how can we share our knowledge in a way that increases clarity and understanding instead of adding to the deluge?

Humans As Visual Learners

To answer this question, it’s important to remember how humans process information. First, we rely heavily on visual information. For example, we can remember where things are supposed to be on a shelf and locate them in our “mind’s eye.” This is because each of us carries a map of knowledge (or a mental model) in our heads, that is built from our experiences. Each new experience becomes a “data point” on the map, so to speak. These maps are especially attuned to cues like distance and landmarks, both remnants of our evolutionary history that help us find our way when navigating new and uncertain environments. Because of this, visual representation can be an especially useful tool for communicating information.

But the amount of information we can process each day is limited. Every task that requires effort draws on our limited attention store, as do the many distractions around us. We can find it hard to focus and, without breaks, we can become irritable with even mildly effortful tasks. Given this limitation, it's important for us to consider how we share information to support understanding and mitigate mental fatigue. 

Crafting Supportive Visual Environments

Sharing information through visual environments can have a powerful impact when calling others to action. Visual presentations, for example, can capitalize on the way humans process information. While user-experience and graphic designers are experts at doing this, anyone can learn to make more effective visual presentations if they follow these three guidelines: keep it organized, keep it concise, and make it count.

1. Keep It Organized

   It is best to organize the information on a page in a way that mimics how we mentally organize concepts. Titles and subheadings can create structure and indicate priority. Visuals, such as charts and graphics, can also help organize information into distinct categories which can improve clarity and understanding. Similarly, section titles and navigation bars can support wayfinding within a multi-page document or presentation. These cues for navigating help us understand where we are at and how to move through the material without getting lost. This is especially important when dealing with complex concepts; our minds can deal with incredibly intricate information if we understand how pieces fit together and how to get from one step to the next.
   
   A great example of visual organization can be seen in the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness graphic below. The center of the graphic holds the basic premise that the framework is built around—information needs—and the three main elements of the framework encircle it. The swirling shape of the visual informs readers that, though the elements are distinct, there is continuous interplay as each one supports the others. Finally, the outer circle describes the main topic of the visual.

The visual organization of this version of the SEE icon assists viewers in drawing a simple, initial cognitive map of a complex concept.

2. Keep It Concise

Keeping information concise on the page can increase clarity and prevent confusion for the viewer. The term white space describes the empty space surrounding text or images, and it can be an underutilized tool in graphic design. White space can emphasize information while reducing crowding and giving the eye a place to rest.

It is also helpful to try and reduce or “chunk” lists into only a handful of items (think 5 plus or minus 2 concepts at a time). It may take more time and effort to simplify information rather than to keep it complex and detailed, but it will help the audience identify what they need to know and help them retain and remember the information.  

3. Make It Count

Visuals can help information have a stronger and longer-lasting impact by telling a story and helping the audience build a vivid mental map of complex ideas. A high-quality visual presentation will invite the reader/audience in as a key participant in the model-building process. They should feel like they have an important role to play in exploring and engaging with the material that will allow them to act based on what they have learned. Here are some questions to consider:  

• Are the visuals reinforcing the main goal of the slide/presentation? 

• Are they acting as wayfinding icons to scaffold learning? 

• Are they connecting concepts to real-world examples?  

• Are they helping to build off of the audience’s pre-existing mental models? 

Or, are they distracting, cluttering, or confusing? Think about how an audience will view a visual presentation; sometimes, one large photo makes a stronger impression than three small ones that compete for attention or that are displayed too small to appreciate.

Each of us has unique knowledge to share with each other, and using visual tools can be an excellent way to meaningfully communicate that knowledge. Within our visual stories, the above guidelines can help us craft supportive visual environments for learning. Instead of adding to the digital chaos that surrounds us, our work can provide meaningful clarity and understanding for others. 

Other Helpful Resources

For more resources on navigating online environments for meetings, check out this short video. Similarly, this video provides some great suggestions if you are searching for tips on finding focus within a world of distractions.

The inspiration for this piece stems from the work I undertook to reformat how critical information was being presented for a solar adoption program in Ann Arbor. You can find more information on this program at Solar in Ann Arbor. Information on my approach to program analysis using Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) can also be found here. 

Tara-Sky Woodward was a reDirect fellow during the summers of 2022-2024, working with the city of Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovation to help study the success of their A2Zero Solarize program.

The Science of Restorative Breaks

Dear reader, your brain is working hard right now as you read this. Let’s make sure it’s worth your attention.

Notice I said "attention" and not "time"? Have you ever considered that your attention is as valuable a resource as your time? And just like the number of hours in a day, your capacity to pay attention is limited. In this article, we’ll explore why our brains get tired and how we can reboot them effectively. 

Bent Run waterfall in Warren, PA. Photo by Rachel Schad.

Caveman Brains in a Modern World

Our brains are incredibly sophisticated, but they haven’t changed much since early human history.

Imagine living as an early human. The stimuli competing for your attention were limited. But, today, in our interconnected world, researchers speculate that we absorb and process as much data in a week as prehistoric people did in their entire lifetimes. No wonder our brains get tired! 

Why Our Brains Get Tired

Our brains have two systems for paying attention, but only one of them gets tired. That’s our top-down attention. We use this system to complete tasks that require effort like reading, solving problems, or designing something. When this type of attention is pushed to its limit, we feel mentally fatigued.

Mental fatigue can look like feeling distracted, stressed, overwhelmed, irritable, or unmotivated. Conventional wisdom tells us that we should push through this exhaustion, but research on attention shows that when we do, our effectiveness declines, and we’re more prone to make mistakes and use poor judgment. In addition, living with depleted attention can negatively impact our relationships, because mood, stress, and attention are interconnected and affect every aspect of our lives. 

Sunflowers brighten up a tree-lawn in Cleveland, OH. Photo by Rachel Schad.

The Best Breaks to Recharge

Taking a break is the best way to restore mental focus, but some types of breaks are more beneficial than others. Interestingly, the best way to restore our top-down attention is by using our other attention mode.

We call the second type bottom-up attention. Our brains use it when we admire a scenic view, listen to music, or savor the smell of fresh-baked bread. It’s an automatic, effortless form of attention.  

Attention Restoration Theory

reDirect has a special connection to the topic of attention. Our founders, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, were environmental psychologists at the University of Michigan where they developed Attention Restoration Theory (ART) after years of research. The theory proposes that spending time in nature or engaging in activities that offer “soft fascination” is the best way to restore our attention.

When we talk about "soft fascination," we refer to the gentle, engaging qualities of nature that draw our attention without overwhelming us—like a calm stream, rustling leaves, or birds chirping. These sights and sounds capture our interest but don’t require intense concentration, allowing our minds to wander and relax.

Amazingly, this type of break seems to do more than recharge our focus. When our brains have space to wander, they can make connections in the background without us even trying. That’s why people often have great ideas in the shower or suddenly find a solution to a problem after taking a walk outside. 

Step Away from Your Phone

Science continues to reveal the mechanics of how attention restoration works in the brain, including one recent study which discovered that using screens in green spaces cancels out any restorative benefit they have for our brains.

In a recent study, scientists tested how well people could focus before and after short breaks in two different urban environments: lush green spaces and urban spaces without any plants. Participants were asked to either use their electronic devices as they usually would or to take a break without screens.

The results were stunning. Participants who enjoyed screen-free breaks in a green setting performed significantly better on tests of attention. In contrast, participants who used devices in nature were indistinguishable from the two groups who took breaks in barren spaces —in terms of their ability to pay attention, it looked like they hadn’t taken a break at all. 

Balcony herb garden. Photo by Rachel Schad.

When to Take a Break

So how often do we need to recharge our focus? On average, humans can maintain concentrated focus on a task for about 20 minutes, but each person is unique. It’s best to take a break before you start feeling mentally fatigued, as your circumstances allow.

On the other hand, we don’t need to take a break when we are “in the zone,” meaning when our focus is naturally sustained because we are captivated by whatever we are doing. We can enjoy the flow state and take time to rest and reset when our attention fades. 

Prevent Mental Fatigue

We should also be proactive and avoid spending our limited top-down attention on the wrong thing at the wrong time. One way we can do this is by limiting distractions.

Our electronic devices can be major sources of distraction, whether breaking our focus with notifications or tempting our focus away from the task at hand. Try silencing your phone and moving it out of sight when you don’t need it.

Perhaps interruptions from coworkers or family are using up a lot of your attention. Try scheduling some uninterrupted time for deep focus.  

Figure Out What Works for You  

Breaks are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Experiment with different types to discover what works well for you. Use the questions below to get you started, or get inspired by ideas in this downloadable “Menu of Breaks” resource. Remember to take notes! Keep track of what you did and how it turned out (or in other words, try some small experiments).

Questions to consider:  

1. Can you recognize when your brain needs a break? What do you notice?

2. What types of breaks work well for you? 

3. How do you feel after a quality (screen-free) break? 

4. What is one small action you could take to better support your mental bandwidth?

5. What are the main distractions in your workspace? What’s one change you can test out to reduce their impact?

More On Breaks

If you’d like to learn more about creating workplaces that support breaks, check out our companion posts below!

Supporting Mental Bandwidth: Break Culture in Workplaces

Micro-Breaks for the Busiest of Times 

Learn More About ART

To learn more about Attention Restoration Theory, check out these references. If you have any trouble accessing the journal articles, just email us and we can share the pdf with you directly.

YouTube

Addressing Mental Fatigue

Your Brain on Birdsongs with Avik Basu

Journal Articles

The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework

How to Waste a Break: Using Portable Electronic Devices Substantially Counteracts Attention Enhancement Effects of Green Spaces 

Views to nature: Effects on attention

Micro-Breaks for the Busiest of Times

We need to take breaks to restore our mental bandwidth. It’s a universal human need, not a reflection of your willpower or ability. Think of your brain as a complex machine—one that needs routine maintenance.  One crucial function that needs regular recharging is our ability to focus on tasks, like reading this post! 

While the best way to restore your attention is to spend time in nature (and avoid looking at screens), we know that isn’t always possible. Below are some simple micro-break ideas that may give your mind some relief throughout the day. 

Photo by Rachel Schad

Micro-Break Ideas

1. Engage with Nature (or Nature Analogues)

• Look out a window at a natural setting. 

• Keep some plants or flowers on your desk to naturally engage your attention. 

• Display a nature photo in your workspace or use one as your video call background.

• Listen to nature sounds in headphones.

2. Physical Outlets

• Use fidget toys or a stress ball to engage your hands and relieve stress. 

• Try out a standing desk! Move or sway in-place to engage your body. 

• Reduce eye strain. Look away from your screen every 20 or so minutes. Look in different directions, far away and up close. 

• Take a quick stroll around your workspace. 

• Stretch. Slowly roll your shoulders, wrists, and neck to relieve tension.  

3. Practice Mindfulness

• Focus on your breathing. Take a couple of deep breaths with your eyes closed. 

• During restroom breaks, take a moment to notice the sensation of water on your skin while washing your hands. 

• Try activating other senses. It can be refreshing and calming to take a moment to enjoy natural scents, for example, from nearby plants. 

4. Task Switching

• When you feel yourself losing focus, try changing tasks to something that uses different skills (e.g., moving from a task that requires meticulous attention to detail, to something that requires more creative thinking). 

Work with Your Natural Rhythms 

Restoring your capacity to pay attention also involves working in sync with your natural rhythms. This strategy complements taking breaks rather than replacing them.

If you have the flexibility to plan your workday, try to identify when you feel most alert and focused. Do your most challenging (and attention-demanding) work during those periods.

Additionally, some research suggests that people are more efficient with repetitive (or, let’s be honest, somewhat boring) tasks when they do them before more engaging work. So, consider saving creative tasks for when you’re feeling tired, or use them as a reward for completing less interesting tasks.

Small Experiments

You will need to try different types of breaks to see what works best for you individually. Treat each small adjustment like an experiment. Take notes so you can keep track of what works and what doesn’t work for you.

Be Realistic 

Finally, be realistic about what you can accomplish each day. Consider setting fewer goals and trying to start each workday with clear priorities. Remember, multitasking is a myth—your brain can only effectively handle one task at a time (unless we’re talking about the subconscious processes that keep us alive!). 

Your Brain Needs Real Breaks

These micro-breaks can give your ability to focus a helpful boost, but they aren’t a substitute for truly restorative breaks. To learn more, check out our companion posts.

The Science of Restorative Breaks

Supporting Mental Bandwidth: Break Culture in Workplaces

Supporting Mental Bandwidth: Break Culture in Workplaces

We all start the day with limited resources. When it comes to work, those resources include our time, our energy, and our attention. And, despite what hustle culture tells us, there’s a limit to how much we can accomplish each day.  

We know there are costs to overextending ourselves at work, yet cases of burnout seem to be rising. In fact, the World Health Organization classified it as an “occupational phenomenon” in 2019, and this 2023 report by the American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus found that 57% of respondents reported at least moderate burnout in their current jobs.

How can we prevent burnout? Let’s start by rethinking what it means to “take a break,” and how we can foster work environments that support them. 

Photo by Karolina Grabowska (Source: Pexels)

Why We Need Breaks

We need to take breaks to restore our mental bandwidth. This need is a cognitive one, and universally human. Think of the brain as a complex machine that needs routine maintenance. One function that needs regular recharging is our brain’s capacity to focus on tasks that require effort, like reading this post.

The quality of our work, as well as our mood, can suffer when we deplete this attention store. Mental fatigue can manifest as feeling distracted, stressed, overwhelmed, irritable, or unmotivated. It’s best to take a break before we get too far down that path. When we push our brains to the limit too often or for too long, we experience negative health outcomes, like burnout. It’s an unpleasant wake-up call that affects not only the individual but also those around them.

We all play a role in fostering workplaces that support mental bandwidth, whether we are employers, leaders, or staff members. A big piece of this is creating a positive culture around taking breaks, like establishing social norms and benefits policies. It can also include designing physical spaces that support breaks. 

Culture Shapes Our Attitudes

When we talk about “workplace culture” we mean the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that make up some of the intangible parts of environments. We absorb both explicit and implicit messages within our workplaces that shape our individual perception of the culture, such as expectations about productivity, work ethic, and rest. On a macro scale, in the US and many other places, there is significant pressure to treat work as our highest priority.

Workplaces that measure success by hours logged and output often seem at odds with an environment that encourages taking breaks for mental restoration. It can be hard to break free of the mold of such an environment. Reflecting on my early career as an architect, the mantra “design is never finished,” comes to mind. Through my education and early career, I often convinced myself that I hadn’t accomplished enough to deserve a break. Often I thought: ‘If I take a break now, I won’t meet this deadline.’ Or ‘If I get up from my desk too often or for too long my supervisor will think I’m a slacker.’ Or ‘I’m new: I need to work extra hours and show that I belong here.’

Leaders Shape the Culture

One of the best ways that workplaces can foster a supportive culture toward breaks is for leaders to model them well. In Deloitte’s 2022 workplace wellbeing survey, they identified “leadership behaviors” as one of the three primary factors that impact wellbeing in the workplace.

Tim Allen, CEO of Ask Media Group, illustrates this weIl in a personal story he shared with the Harvard Business Review Later in his career, Tim realized that the way he prioritized work demands above his personal life had contributed to a workplace culture he didn’t actually support. He shares that the day his twins were born was one of the happiest of his life. Yet it coincided with one of his biggest regrets: joining a conference call as he entered the hospital.

It’s taken introspection and experience as both a father and a leader to admit a hard truth: By not taking all my paternity leave — and working while I should have been “off” — I was letting my sons down as their dad and my partner down as a co-parent. And, through my example as a leader, I was letting down the other parents at my company.

...the problem wasn’t my paternity benefits — my company had the right policies in place. The problem was the disconnect between written policy and actual culture. I was contributing to a norm that company comes first and being a dad comes second. When I took that call on the day of my sons’ birth, I was unwittingly sending a message to other dads at my office that they’d be stigmatized if they didn’t do the same. 

Although this example deals more with rest and balancing life priorities, the core idea of modeling acceptable behavior is still there. In my own experience working in the design field, I saw leaders and coworkers model breaks and ‘work-life balance’ both in healthy and unhealthy ways. It was common for people to eat lunch at their desks or regularly work into the evening. Project managers would run out the door for a meeting and squeeze in an extra ‘walk and talk’ on the way, maximizing each minute. On the flip side, others went to lunch together or took group walks for a coffee, rallied the team to join office social gatherings, or went to the gym during lunch.

Individually, we have personal struggles, life goals, and responsibilities outside of our jobs that shape our attitudes and behaviors towards taking breaks. Personally, even when I worked in break-positive environments, I still had my own internal taskmaster nagging me. I would often decline lunch invitations because I worried about finishing projects on time. But, in retrospect, I can see now that instead of draining myself at my desk, accepting more invitations or taking a walk could have had a restorative effect and helped me work more effectively.

Amazon's campus near downtown Seattle. Photo by Rachel Schad.

Modeling Breaks

Some ways that leaders can model taking breaks is by leaving the workplace for lunch and encouraging others to do the same. They could also organize social events during work hours rather than afterhours, helping employees feel that their time is valued.

Additionally, leaders could have open discussions about break habits, encouraging employees to find what types of breaks are most restorative for them. Early-career staff, in particular, may need guidance and reassurance, as they are likely observing their colleagues to form their understanding of cultural norms.

After Tim Allen had his own epiphany and began to change his work habits, he recalls getting on a zoom call and seeing an employee who was meant to be on family vacation. "Instinctively, I told him, “I really appreciate your commitment, but you’re not supposed to be working right now. I’ll catch up with you when you’re back from spending time with your family.’… I wasn’t just talking to him. I was talking to everyone on that call, including myself." 

The Importance of Advocacy

What can we do if we find ourselves in a work setting where breaks are not modeled from the top? Or worse, they are discouraged or looked down upon? That’s a tough place to be in and there isn’t one right way to navigate it.

But one thing we can do is advocate for breaks by helping others build a new mental model about them. We need to help reshape perceptions about breaks and demonstrate how they can benefit the entire organization, from improving productivity to boosting morale and retaining employees.

Another resource we can tap into is our network of coworkers. We can take a “team player” mindset and try to build a mutually supportive network where individuals help one another as their own workload ebbs and flows.

When people change their attitudes toward breaks, work cultures can evolve. Bill Gates gives us an encouraging example of his own perspective shift in his 2023 commencement speech to graduates at Northern Arizona University. 

My last piece of advice is the one I could have used the most. It took me a long time to learn. And it is this: You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack. 

When I was your age, I didn’t believe in vacations. I didn’t believe in weekends. I pushed everyone around me to work very long hours. In the early days of Microsoft, my office overlooked the parking lot—and I would keep track of who was leaving early and staying late.

But as I got older—and especially once I became a father—I realized there is more to life than work.

Don’t wait as long as I did to learn this lesson. Take time to nurture your relationships, to celebrate your successes, and to recover from your losses. Take a break when you need to. Take it easy on the people around you when they need it, too. 

Restorative Breaks

This post focuses on understanding how workplace cultures either support or discourage breaks. Next, I would encourage you to explore our companion posts to learn about the best kinds of breaks to restore your focus!

The Science of Restorative Breaks 

Micro-Breaks for the Busiest of Times 

Breaking Barriers: How to Structure Environments to Support Accessibility Needs

This July marks the 33rd anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This historic law, which prevents discrimination against people with disabilities, is celebrated throughout July as Disability Pride Month. The law addresses multiple environments where discrimination might occur, including in the transportation sector, in communications, in receiving local programming and services, and perhaps most significantly, in the workplace. How can being mindful of disability accommodations in the workplace have positive outcomes for everyone, no matter one’s disability status? 

It’s likely not difficult to recall a time when you had trouble communicating or collaborating at work. This might’ve been a result of the work environment failing to meet your need to 1) understand, 2) feel competent and clear-headed in your work, and 3) meaningfully contribute to your organization’s goals. Now imagine that you identify as having one or more physical, intellectual, or developmental disability. How might it feel to consistently navigate environments in which your needs aren’t being considered? How might these unique challenges intersect and overlap with the existing workplace challenges that we all already experience? The three domains of the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) framework can help us understand the issue of accessibility in the workplace and implement potential solutions. 

Building A Model for Inclusivity

One of the three domains of SEE describes our need to increase our understanding of the world by exploring new environments and ideas. We refer to this as “building a mental model” of the world, or “model building,” for short. This exploration is, at its core, information gathering from other people and the general environment. In order to build a shared mental model of a community that is inclusive of people with disabilities, there must be people with disabilities actively involved in discussions of community structure and function. The inclusion of a diverse group of people in these conversations, all sharing their own stories, not only contributes to building that shared mental model of what our community looks like, but it also contributes to the creation of mental models about a life experience that is different from our own.

“People want to understand and explore the world around them. They resent things that don’t make sense to them.”

Several disabilities, especially those that are invisible or complex, are ones that many people lack familiarity with. In essence, they “don’t make sense” to us, because we don’t have a basis, or a model, for understanding them. By including more individuals with varying disabilities in our conversations about accommodations, we can begin to get a glimpse of a different life experience. This approach fills a critical information gap, allowing people to form a more robust mental model of what life can look like. Looking beyond the workplace, it also creates a more informed community that feels capable of advocating alongside those with disabilities for the essential accommodations they need.

Feel Capable Through Restoration

Another domain of SEE describes our desire to feel competent and clear-headed. As humans, we have attention-related needs that stem from how we’ve evolved, and that are not always supported by our modern environments that constantly bombard us with information. Just like how our body fatigues after physical exercise or exertion, so does our ability to pay attention after focusing for extended periods of time. Everyone needs breaks to restore their attention and feel competent and clear-headed, and often, the necessary frequency of these breaks is not aligned with how we structure a typical workday.

“How are we creating space for people to take care of themselves while they bring their skills and interests to the work?”

Beyond the universal need for mental restoration, some individuals may have additional bandwidth needs to consider. Those with disabilities may experience reduced attention spans or regular periods of physical discomfort. 

Have you ever had a day at work where you had trouble staying on task or being productive because of distractions in your work environment? Maybe a co-worker paid an unplanned visit to your office, or you continued to receive disruptive texts and phone calls from a well-intentioned family member. For individuals who identify as having a disability, these interruptions may feel more pronounced or produce additional stressors that place a greater strain on their time and mental resources.

When we increase our focus on mental restoration and individual well-being by including people with disabilities in the development of supportive structures, we ensure that mental restoration will be more accessible to everyone. Embracing inclusivity will not only benefit individuals with disabilities but also foster a more productive and compassionate work environment for all.

Meaningful Action and the Reinforcing Impact of Accommodations

Another domain of SEE describes the desire to know that your actions are making a difference or having a positive impact, referred to as “meaningful action.” This need is shared by everyone; we all want to contribute to conversations and actions that will positively impact those around us, and be asked to participate in making these changes a reality. To achieve this, we have to consider any barriers to participating in these conversations in order to expand positive impacts through collaboration. In the way our environments are often structured, individuals with disabilities may not always be able to participate in important workplace or local community conversations. We can explore this in the context of a larger team meeting in an office environment:

• Is the meeting location accessible by wheelchair?

• Is there enough seating for all of the attendees? 

• Are there accessible restrooms nearby? 

• Will there be an interpreter available for American Sign Language, or any handouts printed in braille? 

• Are there multiple ways to participate and give feedback, besides having to / needing to speak in front of everyone? 

• How long is the presentation or discussion? And will there be breaks if the meeting is longer than 1 hour?

“People thrive when environments, policies, and projects encourage genuine participation and allow people to do things that matter.”

Making these necessary accommodations for colleagues with disabilities in your workplace and community is not only essential for their ability to contribute toward meaningful actions that are ongoing, but is itself a meaningful action. Considering these accommodations will have a visible and positive impact on the cohesion and connectedness of our shared environments.

Bringing It All Together

Here, we have begun to build a mental model of what our workplaces and communities can become when we consider the needs of others. They can:

• Actively include those with diverse perspectives and experiences when building a shared understanding

• Allow the freedom to take restorative breaks as a tool for feeling capable, and

• Value and encourage everyone's participation so that they know they’re making a difference

Rachel Fink is a 2023 reDirect Fellow collaborating with the City of Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovation. She is a current Master’s student at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Appalachian State University.

Reflections on the Environment as “The Third Teacher”

“In every classroom, there are ‘teachers’ and ‘learners’ and at any given moment these roles can, unexpectedly, shift: the educator who learns from and with a student as they share their passion for dinosaurs and insects, the student who learns a new memory song from a friend. We are familiar with these roles and able to see the meaning in allowing these roles to be reciprocal, but what about the Third Teacher? The Third Teacher is the environment that is cultivated to convey how we are expected and encouraged to exist in a place.”

Photo from a Verdi EcoSchool classroom.

Who We Are

Verdi EcoSchool is a private, not for profit urban farm school in Melbourne, Fl. Established in 2016, Verdi EcoSchool is the only place- and project-based school in the region committed to using the entire community as a campus. The place-based education philosophy envisions the immediate environment as the student's most important classroom. An education that is rooted in what is tangible and what is unique to our own community provides the foundation for all learning to come.

The entire school experience emphasizes the development of self-regulation, self-direction, and self-reflection, as we recognize that these deeper skills will determine lifelong success for each individual. This commitment to practicing skills and utilizing tools that benefit the mental, emotional, and social health of the child is not solely confined to children; it is also essential work for educators and adults who guide and model behavior for the students they work with.

Learning Conscious Discipline

Conscious Discipline is a comprehensive approach which utilizes everyday events to cultivate emotional intelligence. It achieves this through a self-regulation program that integrates social-emotional learning and discipline. This approach acknowledges that adults are the most meaningful models of this inner work for children: if we can show what we do when the world doesn’t go our way, we can help children to practice these skills as well. At EcoSchool, every educator commits to completing an introductory 10-session course in the Conscious Discipline methodology, in addition to ongoing practice of the skills and structures that help to build trust, connection and empathy within a community.

The work of Conscious Discipline is challenging. It requires that adults be willing to examine their own triggers and judgments of why incidents happen and shift toward understanding and solution-finding, instead of blame and anger. As we build a “School Family”, unexpected connections and tensions can arise: how do we respond to them in a way that is helpful to the overall culture of the community? What do hurtful responses look like, sound like, or feel like?

In the past year, we have implemented a series of supports based upon the powers and principles of Conscious Discipline, but one of our fundamental learnings from this framework is that of leveraging the “Third Teacher,” or the environments, that we’re either intentionally (or unintentionally) creating.

What is “The Third Teacher”?

In every classroom, there are “teachers” and “learners” and at any given moment these roles can, unexpectedly, shift: the educator who learns from and with a student as they share their passion for dinosaurs and insects, the student who learns a new memory song from a friend. We are familiar with these roles and able to see the meaning in allowing these roles to be reciprocal, but what about the Third Teacher? The Third Teacher is the environment that is cultivated to convey how we are expected and encouraged to exist in a place.

“An Environment is a living, changing
system. More than a physical space, it
includes the way time is structured and
the roles we are expected to play. It
conditions how we feel, think and
behave; and it dramatically affects the
quality of our lives. ”

— Caring Spaces, Learning Places: Children’s Environments That Work (Jim Greenman, 1987)

The Third Teacher doesn’t just exist in classrooms and schools but is present in the world around us, supporting our everyday actions, reminding us how we should interact with each other and within a space. On a recent trip to a local Panera restaurant, I noticed the shared behavior of the patrons: willingly retrieving their food orders from a countertop, finding an open table, enjoying a meal and then thoughtfully scraping food refuse into a garbage bin and placing reusable utensils and plates in a separate bin for washing. What supported this behavior? How did everyone know that this was an expected part of the Panera experience? Why was I following along?! Panera’s environments did a great job of encouraging each of us to engage in a set of supportive behaviors, encouraging customers to help share the responsibility of keeping the restaurant clean and welcoming for patrons to come.

The Third Teacher led each of us through a series of steps without a sign or a directive but instead via a collection of gentle invitations or cues: an open counter with trays, self-serve coffee and fountain drink stations, open bins for dirty plates at every garbage stand. We are comfortable with these invitations because they are clear, and they make sense to us. But what happens when values and expectations for behavior are not clearly communicated in our environments?

“The Third Teacher” In Our Classrooms

Imagine a classroom. Imagine a windowless classroom with empty library shelves and uncomfortable seating. Imagine children who stare at bare walls, a cluttered teacher’s desk and with garbage strewn about. What values do you think are shared with students who enter this classroom? Do you think they feel inspired to learn? Do they feel valued?

Now, imagine a classroom with sunlight streaming through windows, illuminating shelves full of books and student resources. Imagine a variety of choices for seating: cushions, stools, comfortable chairs and couches. Imagine positive affirmations posted on walls, pictures of friends and family members. Imagine a teacher’s desk that is organized with a posted board that assigns a special job to each child, offering them an opportunity to take part in keeping their classroom clean and beautiful. What values are being shared with the children who enter this classroom?

Photo of a Verdi EcoSchool classroom’s "job board.”

Chaotic environments inspire chaos. A Third Teacher that is unsure of what values to share - or worse, an absent Third Teacher – can work against an educator in the classroom. An educator that has thoughtfully designed the environment to support the shared culture and values of the School Family, on the other hand, will find that the Third Teacher speaks even when they do not.

Challenges, Successes, and the Importance of Feedback

Nurturing the Third Teacher requires purposeful and intentional planning. Thinking deeply about what others see and understand about a place when they enter the classroom is an important part of the process. A willingness to be objective and consider not just how we exist in a space, but who we are designing it for, is paramount.  Taking pictures of your space, sharing them with others, and asking what they see, can be a helpful way to gain objectivity.

Using visual prompts such as a daily schedule with pictures, posted norms and expectations, or recycling bins for used paper, can guide others to how they should interact with and within a space, and develop a shared mental model for the School Family. Designing opportunities for exploration – cues or provocations, invitations to learn or relax – can add a sense of wonder and excitement to a space. Science shelves with nature guides and magnifying glasses set out for use, facing the front covers of books outward and at eye level to entice readers, designing safe spaces to engage in calm and quiet thinking, are all examples of what can help the Third Teacher thrive.

As we design, it is easy to overlook the most important part of cultivating the Third Teacher: gathering and acting on feedback. The most meaningful feedback will come from your users, and becomes a critical part of your reflection and next steps as the designer. We cannot understand how the Third Teacher has guided others if we’re not actively seeking out that information!

Personal Reflections

Every leader manipulates the Third Teacher - the environment - when working to reach those whom we serve. Great leaders facilitate experiences. As I reach toward a greater understanding of my role as a facilitator, I frequently reflect upon what I have indicated as being important in our shared environment:

• What is absent?

• Who is represented?

• How does the Third Teacher support the culture we are building?

Small choices can have a big impact: bright and organized workspaces for educators; quiet, calming spaces to be alone and work in solitude; coffee mugs with funny quotes and positive affirmations in the kitchen (don’t forget the extra coffee/tea!); a new potted plant, or an essential oil diffuser. Big choices can deepen trust and encourage connection. For Verdi EcoSchool, this has included creating collaborative workspaces, resources, and materials that honor a diverse range of lived experiences, beautiful outdoor classrooms, and community boards that encourage School Family members to share moments of kindness and join other classrooms and learning experiences to witness moments of risk taking.

Unexpectedly, cultivating the Third Teacher has offered me a profoundly humbling experience: the realization that the way I exist within, and interact with, a space is not necessarily how everyone else will. My mental model had not yet included the perspectives of others! De-centering myself and deeply reflecting upon the needs of those who I share space with — who I serve — is the most profound step that I can take toward allowing the Third Teacher to do its job!

Ayana Verdi, an educational leader and environmental advocate, co-founded Verdi EcoSchool with her husband, John, in 2016. The duo is committed to cultivating community-based and environmentally aware learning options for children in Melbourne, FL. As a reDirect partner, Ayana Verdi and her team worked to learn and explore the parallels between the Conscious Discipline model and the SEE framework.

From Planning Routes to Planning Cities: SEE Can Help

Moving to a new place can be overwhelming. Our sense of home is so much more than the building we live in; it is a dynamic relationship between person and place. Will I have access to a pharmacy that stocks my medications, a grocery store that offers culturally-appropriate foods to soothe my homesickness, a pet store that caters to my diabetic cat? Are there sidewalks and public transit to connect me to these places, and in a timely fashion? Can I get there easily? Safely? Wherever we move, novelty and uncertainty are our new next-door neighbors.

Now imagine a reality where you have not moved, but a layer of nuance is introduced to your once familiar setting and brings with it the same questions. Your location has not changed, but in some way your environment has, destabilizing your routine and threatening your ability to get your needs met. Our first reaction is often to avoid this disturbance and preserve our sense of place. But changes to our environment will always take place. How can we learn to better adapt to these changes? This is where the work of an urban planner can help.

Photo by Isabella Beshouri

Urban planners propose changes to established communities for a variety of reasons: to expand public transit and improve mass mobility; to rectify a history of racial injustice by remedying entrenched segregation; to mitigate climate risk, and to adapt civic life to be resilient in the face of the unavoidable. The aim of planning should be to foster environments that are supportive of human and environmental health, center equity and justice, protect public safety, and improve physical and socioeconomic mobility, all the while enshrining local character to foster community identity and pride of place.

It’s a lot, so it’s good that we are not doing it alone. This mission is unattainable by any one group or vision, and so requires public participation during the design and implementation of changes. As planners, we can draw on aspects of the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) framework to facilitate community-wide visioning sessions and to support them as their environment shifts. At the nexus of value and practicality, lessons from the SEE framework are worthy additions to the participatory design toolkit:

Model Building

Most of the time, the motivation to attend a community listening session is not to sit and receive the project’s elevator pitch. It may be important for residents to know about plans for new traffic signal coordination, but their motivation to learn about such plans is likely related to concerns for how the changes might be disorienting as they navigate the city.

Photo by Sydney Mark

Many proposed changes to the built environment are requests for permission to disrupt our painstakingly constructed mental models; models built from experience, and heavily relied upon to make sense of the world around us. Mental models are the hidden subject of development no matter the project. It is important to greet public comment with an awareness of these emotional pressure points and what inflames them. With an empathic understanding of what we are asking, we can think more deeply about how to support stakeholders through their model-building process when we propose changes.

Model building support can take many forms, from facilitating Focused Conversations to enlisting virtual reality. Community engagement is a complex and locally tailored process; there is no one-size-fits-all approach that transcends physical and social geographies. But, with an understanding of mental models, we can more effectively facilitate a feedback process by starting from where participants are at with their own understanding, and being mindful of the shared language we use to frame the problem and the proposed solution, making sure to avoid jargon. 

Being Capable

The desire to gain knowledge and explore is ingrained in human nature, but our capacity to absorb knowledge is mediated by the limits of our directed attention, as well as how competent we feel in applying the new knowledge. To support the model-building process, information is best delivered at the intersection of clarity and brevity. Less is more; both to preempt information overload and to leave space for processing emotions and uncertainty. We also want to feel heard and like we are a part of the process. When both are considered, the community engagement process unfolds into a matter of helping our neighbor weatherproof their mental models so that they feel prepared to navigate a slightly different world.

Meaningful Action

Through complementary initiatives and campaigns, urban planners can create the tools and space for citizens to draw connections between urban systems and their personal identities. They can help enliven civic life by infusing meaningful action into such systems; whether by striking a parallel between transit use and sustainability through a summer-long challenge to reduce personal commuting emissions, or by hooking our thrifty impulse with a calculator that compares monthly automobile gas to transit pass budgets; there is a draw to participation in the public space for all of us.

We are always trying to find meaning within our everyday lives. The inlay of meaningful action within our routines helps us feel accomplished and useful; it adds a layer of intentionality that renews elements of civic life that may have lost their luster with time and repetition. With time, strategies that reinforce meaningful action can lead to an enduring pride-of-place; together with efforts to support model building and effectiveness, positive feedback loops of public interest and trust-building can emerge.

Photo by Isabella Beshouri

There is an innovative dialogue between urban planning and the SEE framework, prompted by their orbit around a common inquisitive core: How can we leverage our environments to bring about the best version of our society, our communities, and ourselves?

We use “home” as a noun: it can be a place where we raise our family, get creative in the kitchen, and take refuge after a long day.

We also experience “home” as a verb: finding our identity between the spaces we inhabit and the spaces we don’t; organizing and visioning with our communities to transition spaces from liveable to lived-in; developing our sense of self in parallel with the communities we build. This process is not always organic, straightforward, or comfortable, but when it comes to changing our environments for the better, we’ve got to SEE it to believe it.

Isabella Beshouri was a reDirect fellow during the summer of 2022, working with the city of Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovation to help grow and improve the city’s A2Zero ambassador program.

SEEing our Way to Solar: Using Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) in Program Analysis

Incorporating Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) in program analysis is a great way to understand a program’s success, as well as potential areas for improvement. This past summer, I had the privilege of working with Julie Roth from the City of Ann Arbor to take a closer look at what is making the Solarize program so successful in the Ann Arbor area. We wanted to uncover what elements of SEE were contributing to this success, as well as how SEE might inform the expansion of this program to other regions.

Ann Arbor, Michigan. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. Getty Images

In short, the Solarize program is a group- buy program for solar installations. This means that a local host, organizer, and installer work together with a group of residents to secure bulk-buy discounts on residential solar installations. The program has seen exponential growth since 2019, but similar initiatives throughout the state have struggled to gain the same momentum. By using the SEE framework, we were better able to understand what is contributing to the success of Ann Arbor’s program, as well as what can be improved in future iterations.

There are three elements of SEE that represent our human need for information: model building, being capable, and meaningful action. These are not distinct elements working in isolation, but rather complimentary and dynamic facets of the framework as each one supports and perpetuates the next. Model building is essential to understanding what action needs to be taken and how to complete that action. Being capable is having the physical and mental resources to carry out that action. Finally, meaningful action is the behavior itself and the purpose that it carries both for the individual and for the broader community.

Program Analysis

Specifically, program analysis can help us pinpoint which program mechanisms contribute to, or detract from each element of the SEE framework. To take a closer look at Solarize, we surveyed participants prior to group-buy presentations to identify perceived barriers to solar installation. Overwhelmingly, the results showed that the primary barrier was not having the necessary information to take action. The need for procedural knowledge is a common theme: humans don’t necessarily want more information about why they should do something, but rather how they can actually achieve it.

What we found is that offering procedural knowledge was one area in which the Solarize program excelled. Following the survey, the organizer at the group-buy event clearly provided the information needed to get solar installed. One clear step was given at the end of the presentation, and the majority of participants took this next step towards solar installation. In doing so, Solarize was creating clarity for participants—building their understanding and increasing their ability to take effective action.

However, when attempting to replicate Solarize in another part of the state, the program did not gain as much traction. It turned out that while a similar presentation was given, final directions for taking the next step weren’t as clear. The success of Solarize in Ann Arbor, brought by helping participants find clarity and feel capable, was lost in translation. Some meetings were purely informational in providing the “why”, with no call to action, while others lacked the organizational direction that characterized the program originally. As a result, participants did not have the clear guidance they needed to move forward, and few were pursuing solar installations through the group-buy events.

Now that we had this information, we had to share it in a way that would be easily assimilated into future programs. To accomplish this, we formed the following outline for group-buy events:

• Provide clear information with specific steps for participants

• Create simple, visually engaging presentations

• Limit the amount of information per page/screens

• Highlight points of success, and the impact from taking action

A design platform, such as Canva, can help display next steps in such a way that enhances clarity by reducing the need for information to be solely presented in text. Simple graphics provide a visual anchor for each point, and examples provide a story of potential application methods. As a result, new information can more easily integrate with the existing mental models of the audience.

Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that less is more; focusing on a few key points in program analysis can make a significant impact. Limiting the amount of information on each page can make what is presented easier to process and retain.

Finally, it is critical to elevate points of success. This encourages program facilitators and fosters a meaningful connection to their work. By emphasizing what is going well, team members feel capable and motivated to tackle areas that may need improvement. Reminding program team members about the bigger picture and the meaning behind their work can have a lasting, positive impact on morale, and do the same to inspire further action from participants.

An approach that reinforces the information needed to act, supports the ability to act, and establishes a meaningful connection to the bigger picture, can help create the type of community environment for solar energy to flourish. While both simple and intuitive, these steps can have a profound impact on the success of a program. By using the SEE framework, we can provide supportive environments for programs to achieve durable, transformative change.

Tara-Sky Woodward was a reDirect fellow during the summer of 2022, working with the city of Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovation to help study the success of their A2Zero Solarize program.

Communicating to Achieve the Shared Mission

Over the past 12 months, I have been part of an amazing group, a first time cohort of Points of Light affiliates who are conducting volunteer engagement and Service Enterprise training across the country, while introducing a new framework called Supportive Environments for Effectiveness, or SEE.

Photo from Volunteer Center of South Jersey

Being a part of this group has provided a number of “ah-ha!” opportunities that continue to strengthen our training programs here at Jersey Cares and the Volunteer Center of South Jersey. It has been an incredible experience to watch how others in the group are successfully, as we say, “building the bike and riding at the same time.”

As a trainer, I know that we cannot effectively communicate a message by simply introducing new content without being mindful of how others receive the information.  It is our job to be sure they are connecting with us and understanding the information that we are sharing. It is equally important that they are responding and are comfortable asking for clarification when needed. With the SEE (Supportive Environments for Effectiveness) Framework, it is what we call helping participants build their mental models. For me personally, it has looked like providing that space for individuals to visualize the concepts as I speak, often by giving context to those concepts from my own experience. This space to build from their own understanding also helps to make them feel capable in their work as they go on to engage others (volunteers, staff and members of the communities that they serve). 

In our organization’s work to increase volunteer involvement, my focus has become to show others how to familiarize volunteers with the work more effectively. These are individuals who are not looking for a reward, but want to feel good, enjoy the experience and more importantly, know the impact of their contribution. If it is a good experience, they’ll come back and look for more opportunities to be involved.

I often hear “how and where do we find ‘good’ volunteers?” from nonprofits who are struggling with recruitment and retention. My response is a suggestion that we take an honest look at how an organization is engaging volunteers to achieve their mission-critical work. Are they taking advantage of this as a capacity-building opportunity or are they just looking for bodies to serve an immediate need? Are they putting the needs of volunteers first? How are they attracting volunteers at the outset? How are they setting them up for success? How are they finding truly meaningful work for volunteers, while making sure that it is aligned with their mission?

The components of SEE are really quite straight-forward and they include: building a mental model, being capable in our work, and making every part of the work feel meaningful. All three are equally important in the volunteer engagement cycle, as the focus becomes more about the person and their informational environment, not just how many people we are bringing in to complete a project. What is less straight-forward, is continuing to be intentional about how we apply the components of SEE. This approach helps change the paradigm of volunteer engagement, in that, we are no longer just posting the numbers and hours of volunteer work, but we are building the necessary relationships to make room for more of the great work to get done.

Photo from Volunteer Center of South Jersey

In addition to the work context, I am also integrating SEE components into other projects and relationships in my personal life, enabling me to communicate more effectively, and in turn, successfully achieving the results that I want and need. Before being a part of this group, and before I was introduced to SEE, I was often focused on the finish line, not spending enough time on the details because checking things from the list seemed more important. I believed that this approach worked for me. But did it really? Looking at my project list, there were programs, processes and training to develop, launch, implement and manage. I realized that I wasn’t asking for help because I wasn’t communicating and crafting a clear message in my ask. Utilizing the tools of the SEE framework helped to redirect the focus to be mindful of the thought process of others; allowed me to make space for others to answer that call.

When we ask for help across a variety of settings, what we sometimes miss is how others are actually processing that information, how they might perceive themselves in doing something, and how this might differ from our own view of the task at hand. We overlook key questions like, “Did we give them enough information to visualize themselves helping us?” or “Did we give them the necessary freedom to come up with their own ideas?”. What works for one person doesn’t always work for another, and this is particularly apparent in how we complete tasks, because we each have our own lived experiences that inform our approach to problem-solving.

Making the time and space to allow people to build their mental models, providing people with the tools to make them feel capable, and showing others how meaningful their contribution is, is now my focus. Re-envisioning our work through this lens can empower us, and allow us to open more doors by supporting others.

Michele Francesconi-Epifani is the Vice President of Capacity Building, Training and Strategic Initiatives at Jersey Cares and the Volunteer Center of South Jersey, and was a member of our Points of Light Affiliate grantee cohort. Jersey Cares works to connect volunteers with meaningful opportunities to serve, while empowering nonprofits by providing resources and education in best-practice volunteer engagement and board development.

The Big Idea of Small Experiments

Small experiments – whether in the design of spaces, programs, or just our own lives – can have big impacts. They can also keep us from making big mistakes. Although the quick, flexible, and impermanent nature of small experiments can make them feel haphazard, they are anything but.

Photo by Anne Kearney

Over the past few years that I’ve been living in Barcelona, I’ve noticed many pockets of urban design that have a very slapdash feel to them – restaurant patios carved out of the street with concrete barriers, pedestrian zones created from traffic lanes using nothing more than paint and a few posts, and small green spaces tentatively claimed by potted plants in areas where parked cars and motorcycles used to sit.

Even the much talked-about Superillas (Superblocks) that were being created in my old neighborhood of Poblenou had a temporary feel. The idea behind the Superblocks is to join nine regular city blocks together into one zone with limited car access in its interior, thus freeing up space for pedestrians, playgrounds, plazas, and plants.

Superblocks sounded like a great design idea to me, but when I went to actually see some, I felt let-down. The playground areas were just painted patterns on newly blocked-off streets. Pedestrian areas were similarly marked with paint and a few round concrete barricades. And the promised greenery consisted of a few forlorn skinny trees in industrial planters. It was an improvement on streets choked with the usual car traffic, but the slapped-together look was far from the ideal I had envisioned.

Now, however, I’m looking at these urban designs with a fresh perspective and I love what I see! I’ve recently learned that many of Barcelona’s new urban spaces, including the Superblocks, feel temporary deliberately. Their skeletal quality isn’t intended as a finished design but as the framework for something more permanent to come.

This approach is part of a broader international movement called Tactical Urbanism. The idea is to mock-up a design quickly and inexpensively so that the city and community can see how it works before committing resources to permanent construction.

Tactical Urbanism in practice. Photos courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona BY/ND/NC (v.4) Creative Commons license.

The Tactics Behind Tactical Urbanism

Tactical Urbanism is all about small experiments. Instead of plunging headlong into a big construction project that looks great on paper or in a city employee’s head, Tactical Urbanism calls for a quick, real-world, and inexpensive design test first. Does the new space meet people’s needs? Is it being used in the way it was intended? Are there unintended consequences of the new design, like poor traffic flow, problems for people with limited mobility, or noise? Is there something missing?

By using paint, concrete blocks, basic urban furniture, minimal yet sturdy planters, and temporary road signs and signals, a wide range of spaces can be carved out of existing roads – bike lanes, wider pedestrian lanes, small public squares, protected areas around urban schools, and outdoor eating spaces. Then, if these spaces are shown to work well, or are tweaked until they do, the design can be made more permanent.

Thinking Small

Small experiments are not only useful in urban design. Many of us, in fact, regularly perform small experiments, although we may not call them that. A couple months ago, in a whirlwind of kitchen organization, I decided we needed a tall narrow shelving unit on which we could offload some clutter. My husband, though, was concerned it would be in the way. Instead of taking a chance on buying something that would be hard to return, we mocked-up the basic shape with an assortment of cardboard boxes and then lived with it for a week. After determining that we weren’t going to bruise our hips when rounding the corner, we went ahead and bought the shelving unit – and it’s been perfect.

This idea of small experiments – of taking a flexible incremental approach towards solving a problem – is a central concept in the SEE Framework. In a world where “go big or go home” is often lauded as the brave and bold approach, we may think that small is somehow less. But in many ways, small experiments are more – more economical, more flexible, and more responsive to feedback.

Small experiments are also often more compatible with human nature than large-scale approaches. People function best when they have a clear understanding – a good mental model – for how things work. But sometimes we don’t know enough about a problem to be confident in a proposed solution. We can’t see clearly enough to predict unintended consequences. We are unsure if what worked for another group or in another place will work in our particular situation. Instead of taking a potentially disastrous leap of faith, small experiments allow us to start from our existing mental models and incrementally grow them as we learn more. By implementing and testing problem solutions, we learn what works and what doesn’t and are able to hone in on appropriate strategies and designs.

In groups, we work best together when our mental models are shared – when we have common ground for thinking about how to approach problems. But although we might assume that everyone sees things the way we do, that is often not the case. People may disagree on the nature of the problem itself let alone the best solution. In these situations, a series of small experiments can offer a way forward. By trying things out and sharing the results along the way, we can develop a deeper and shared understanding of the problem and its possible solutions. We may still disagree about what is best, but at least we will be speaking the same language.

Public participation in urban design. Photo courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona BY/ND/NC (v.4) Creative Commons license.

Small Experiments Want Big Involvement

I would have assumed that my lack of awareness of Barcelona’s Urbanismo Táctico approach was my own fault – a problem of not consuming enough local news. But the fact that my well-informed Spanish teacher was also in the dark until recently makes me think there may be a bigger problem of insufficient communication.

Whether it’s a pilot program, a trial run, or even a less formal cardboard-inspired “try it and see how it works” approach, small experiments are most effective when people understand what’s going on. I’m looking at Barcelona’s urban tweaks in a much more positive light now that I know they are actually small experiments in progress. And I’m more patient with the disruptive construction on Leitana – a major street that I must often cross – because I know that the new design was tested and refined before work went ahead. But how many people are badmouthing the designs simply because they don’t know enough about them?

Even better than just being informed is being part of the informing. With any experiment, there are many things that are useful to track – impacts, cost, unintended consequences. With experiments that involve people, it can be particularly important to track experiences and opinions. How can you truly know what’s working if you don’t ask?

Feedback can alert you to problems that you otherwise wouldn’t see. It is also a way to involve people in the process. Providing feedback – in a way that goes deeper than the ubiquitous generic surveys or star ratings – creates an opportunity for meaningful action, for being heard, and for having an impact. Not only will you get useful information, but people are more likely to feel invested in the project and its outcome.

Go Small or Go Home

Our current culture’s call to “think big” and “take chances” is hard to resist. We want to just get on with it, make a decision already, cut to the chase, avoid time-consuming back and forth.

Big actions can feel bold and brave. They can feel like leadership.

But the power of small experiments shows us that sometimes – perhaps especially when pressured to make a big impact quickly – the bravest step is a small one.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her work is inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She has a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.