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.

Why Don’t People See the Obvious?

It can be extraordinarily frustrating when people fail to see the obvious. Why can’t they perceive what’s right in front of them? Why can’t they see what’s real and true?

Photo by Anne Kearney

When people don’t see what’s so obvious to you, it’s tempting to think that they are actively and selectively closing their eyes to reality or are, in fact, seeing the obvious but pretending not to. Sometimes these things are true. There are people who have psychological disorders that give them a particularly warped view of the world and of themselves. There are others who intentionally distort the truth or just make things up in an attempt to wield more power, influence people, or simply to make money.

But outside of these extremes there is a more pervasive reason for failing to see what’s obvious – the obvious exists not in the world but in the brain. Our perceptions are not direct imprints. They are models that our brains build to represent things in the world. The complexities of how our brains take in and process information means that my “obvious” and your “obvious” may be completely different.

Do You See What I See?

I recently went hiking with my husband and daughter in Spain’s Picos de Europa. On the second day, after a nearly 1000-meter elevation gain, we were rewarded with a stunning view, including a large craggy rock formation typical of the region’s landscape. My daughter pointed and said, “Look at that, it’s a sheep head!” just as I was about to say, “Look at that, it’s an elephant!”

My husband also saw a sheep. I couldn’t see it until after careful explanation about ear and mouth placement. Even then, I had to really focus to keep it in my mind and the moment I relaxed, the elephant took over – after all, it was so much more obvious.

A craggy rock formation, a sheep, an elephant … what do you see? (Photos by Anne Kearney)

We didn’t continue on our hike until I had seen the sheep and I had made sure the others could see the elephant. In retrospect, it seemed oddly vital to us that everyone else could see what we saw. Why was this so important?

Being effective in the world depends on having a useful understanding of how it works. We not only want a coherent world view, but we want that world view to be shared – particularly by people in our tribe. This shared perspective validates our own view and also provides common and predictable ground upon which to interact with others.

But the experience in the mountains is a reminder that our world view – and in fact all perception – is a cognitive construction.

The Legoland of Perception

Our world view is a collection of models and stories, usually somewhat grounded in reality, that we continually build and refine. Although perception feels like we are directly experiencing what is objectively true about the world, our brains are actually collecting sensations, filtering them through a cognitive sieve created from past experience and expectation, and then constructing a model from a conceptual Lego set that includes the incoming sensations but also the collection of our experiences, knowledge, beliefs, emotions, and values.

In fact, the set of things that even have a chance of making it to our perceptual processing system is only a small fraction of what is out in the world. We pay attention to what we’re interested in, what we’ve learned is important, what the people we trust tell us is important, and what we expect to see. Our brains have learned to ignore much of the rest. It may be that my husband and daughter were primed to see something like a sheep in the rock formation because we had seen several herds of Cantabrian chamois (a type of mountain goat) on the hike up. I can’t even hazard a guess for why my brain constructed an elephant instead.

When it comes to perceiving things that are more abstract than animals – the causes of and solutions to a problem at work, for example – the number of cognitive interpretations increases manyfold. The perception of these more abstract concepts takes place much higher up the cognitive processing chain than visual perception. The greater number of processing stages means that there are more opportunities for variability in the way that the brain combines elements to arrive at a unified understanding – an understanding that despite all this processing can feel obvious after the fact.

Construction, Misalignment, and Fracture

Most of our brain’s processing happens beneath the surface so that we’re often unaware of the hard work that goes into building perception and understanding. Our perception can feel so effortless and obvious that we are thrown for a loop when another seemingly sane person sees things differently.

When it comes to rock formations, the ramifications of these differences are trivial. But when it comes to perceptions that carry more weight in terms of how we view the world, these differences can cause friendships, families, and cultures to fracture. They can also provide a leverage point for those who would further divide people through fear and hate.

What’s the solution for dealing with problems of the obvious? Strategies for sharing one’s understanding and for consensus building are important. But these strategies are most effective when we first acknowledge that people’s perceptions may legitimately differ. Everyone is blinded, to some extent, by their own sense of the obvious.

The Elephant In the Room

The next time you are interacting with others and asking yourself how they could possibly be missing the elephant in the room (or in the rocks), consider the following: Perhaps they are seeing a sheep instead.

Before you try to make people see what you see or dismiss them altogether, think about what you can do to set aside your own biases and preconceptions and try to see what others see.

How can you work to un-see your own obvious? What can you do to help other people un-see?

Taking the time to set aside the obvious and explore the rocks together may, in the long run, be the most productive way to build common ground.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are 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 M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Using SEE as a Building Block for a Culture of Belonging

Here at HandsOn NWNC, we’ve been on an equity journey since our early founding in the fall of 2007. Just a few years later, we launched our first specifically equity-focused program, Women’s Emerging Leaders, whose cohorts over the past decade have included women of color at relatively high percentages. But since 2019—before COVID, before the killing of George Floyd—we started being more explicit and intentional about not only where we are on our own organizational equity journey, but about what we could do to help others along on theirs as well. When I first learned about the SEE framework, it struck me as being the next logical step on that equity journey for HandsOn: how could this framework help us create a “culture of belonging” within our own organization?

The team at HandsOn Northwest North Carolina.

After all, creating an environment for effectiveness means creating a place where everyone can be their best selves, and bring their full, lived experience to their work. The core SEE aspects of meaningful action (which is baked into our mission), as well as model-building (e.g., can all of our team members see themselves in our work?) and being capable (e.g., do we value the skills and lived experiences of all? Do we help individuals to embrace this lived experience in their work?) seemed to flow directly towards this idea of “belonging.”

Since starting to work with SEE in mid-2021, we have been thinking about how we could apply these concepts to our own culture of belonging. As we geared up to onboard both new board and staff members in late 2021 and early 2022, this became a pressing question for us. Before SEE, we tended to focus way more on the technical skills and knowledge we thought people would need to be “effective” in their respective roles on our team, rather than focusing on the model building and recognition of pre-existing capability that people were bringing with them to HandsOn. In essence, we weren’t starting where they were at, or considering that everyone’s existing mental models might already provide a framework for us to build upon, as opposed to overwhelming them with information.

Over the past decade, we’ve been successful at building a board that is primarily composed of leaders of color, and have done so in a relatively organic fashion. Our board members have said time and time again that our ability to create a diverse, dynamic, and engaged board is because of how much our individual members enjoy being on this board, how much they appreciate their time with us—in a word, it’s because each member feels like they belong on our board. So, how do we translate this knowledge of what makes our board successful, both collectively and individually, to how we bring on new board members, and how could SEE help us with that? Rather than overwhelming our newbies with tons of details—ten years’ worth of financials? A strategic plan no one has looked at since COVID?—we chose to focus on making sure they felt they belonged at HandsOn. What would that look like for them? How could we communicate that to them?

We started, first, with our current board members, by redesigning our every-other-year board self-assessment. We asked three simple but more reflective questions designed to ensure that all of our board members felt capable in their role going forward. One of the responses to that assessment included an idea to prepare a simple overview of the top things that we think the board needs to keep in mind as we dive into 2022–-a tool that would be helpful to both new and current members. Such a tool would allow all board members to see themselves in our work—to help them figure out where they belonged in our organization, and how they could apply their own skills, talents, and lived experiences to those challenges and opportunities. This piece became a two-part Canva image, so it was visually-based and not overly word-y (unlike this blog post!). It served as the basis for our board’s annual “strategic thinking/planning” session in February, which is the first full board meeting of the year for our new members. This piece, and the substantive discussion which flowed from it, would never have been created without our work to marry SEE to our “culture of belonging” goal.

In addition, we also used SEE to scrap our traditional paper-and-too-many-facts board orientation and replaced it with a 45-minute conversation. We focused the discussion on the question of “What does the experience of serving on our board feel like?” We felt if we focused more on the model-building goal of board orientation—the belonging aspect–then the being capable and meaningful action pieces would follow. We did provide access to all of the same boring background material electronically, but rather than being focused on this, we delved into how we build relationships on the board, how new members can get their questions answered, current issues/context likely to inform that February board meeting, how our board meetings flow, etc. This led to all four new members attending a special January board meeting, allowing for full participation at the February board meeting.

We also used the same kind of key questions in redesigning the onboarding of a new staff member—“What does it mean to be a member of our team? How can you contribute to our success?”—and we worked intentionally to create in-person touch points so that we could foster appropriate model building activities for them. With our team still entirely remote—due to both COVID and pre-existing office space issues—being able to successfully onboard a new staff member virtually, clearly worked better when intentionally applying SEE principles than the process we had used earlier in the year to onboard a team member. Of course, supporting this new staff member is an ongoing process, but we feel that we’ve given them the essentials of what they need to feel capable, and bring their best self to their work—because they hopefully feel they belong on our team.

When organizations ask us about what they can do to build equitable environments within their own structure, we now feel as though we can confidently share our own experiences using SEE as a tool to help create what can often be an elusive culture of belonging for both board and staff members. We’ve learned that focusing on making sure people feel confident in what they can bring to the team, understand the model in which we operate, and have the opportunity to directly impact our mission and services (basically, the three key SEE concepts), helps people feel like they belong. And that has made all the difference!

Amy Lytle is the Executive Director of HandsOn Northwest North Carolina, a member of our Points of Light Affiliate grantee cohort. HandsOn NWNC works with more than 500 different nonprofits in a six county area, providing a wide variety of training, technical assistance, leadership and professional development opportunities that help nonprofits become more effective and efficient in their work.

Helping Yourself

Helping yourself, staff, volunteers, and colleagues have more resiliency during this time might be the most important thing you can do. In a single day as I am pinballing between Zoom meetings (national, state, and local), I am hearing people that are overwhelmed and exhausted. This year, I have the privilege of joining reDirect’s Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) Learning Circle to explore how we can build supportive environments for our staff, colleagues, and ourselves, to be effective and thrive in our roles. SEE has served as a beacon of light for me during a time when nonprofit staff and volunteers are unanimously tired of pivoting to meet the changing demands of their organizations, as well as the dynamic community health situation presented by COVID-19.

Nonprofits and many industries need their personnel to continue doing more and we are not seeing a reprieve soon. As I was preparing and polishing things to share during my SEE Learning Circle, I reviewed the principles of Supportive Environments for Effectiveness. It reminded me to “hang the mirror”. In other words, it is not enough as managers to just encourage and support our staff to take care of themselves, but we also need to practice self-care and model what that looks like. When people take care of themselves, they are better able to step up, lean in, and help the community. If you lead staff, volunteers, programs, or a friend group, empower those you lead to give themselves permission for self-care, demonstrate self-care, and celebrate when people take care of themselves.

I am proud that I am part of teams and collaborations that are brave enough to be honest and vulnerable to say, own, and acknowledge individual feelings and an emotional state of being. All feelings are valid; it is okay to feel overwhelmed, tired, stressed, etc. Whether your feeling is negative or positive: own it, acknowledge it, and reflect on it. If it is negative, through self-care, and resiliency, I hope you can let it go (at least for a little bit). As winter thaws here in Iowa you may increase your ability to be capable and clear your head by taking a brisk walk on a sunny 55-degree day or basking in the sunshine and peering out your window at the green grass starting to peek through the melting snow.

As managers of humans, I hope that taking care of ourself is seen as an expectation, not a suggestion. The belief of always needing to do everything and be “on” all the time slowly wears on us and can deplete our drive to achieve goals that we’re passionate about. Self-care is not something that we only do at the last hour when our passion is a tiny lingering flame about to be burnt out; we need to dedicate time for resiliency in team meetings, have self-checks and report-outs, and create team trust to allow for vulnerability.

For our organization, considering our individual needs takes shape in several ways. For example, during supervision check-ins, we ask people about their capacity and what they are doing to recharge and reset. We provide permission to pause activities/projects to allow people to refocus and be more capable of executing a higher priority item. We also ask people what drains them the most, and to assess if continuing that task is necessary or whether in the long-term, it could be a better fit for another team member. I would recommend considering taking your supervision check-in outside or having part of it as a strolling meeting to encourage self-care, while also restoring your ability to focus in the hours ahead.

There is little in life that you are alone for; always ask yourself, how can you engage others? I challenge you to rethink asking for help instead as a means to invite others to grow with you and deliver the mission of your organization. By leveraging volunteers and empowering staff, you are a stronger employee; often skilled volunteers can do things better and faster because it is what they do best. We need to leverage the talents of our network to work smarter, not harder. In our own team, when one of us needs help, we lean in and help each other. The key is having a team culture of transparency and vulnerability so that everyone feels comfortable about sharing how the team can rally to support each other. I hope that others are able to recreate a similarly supportive environment in their own jobs.

Ironically, in addition to the SEE framework helping me to hold myself accountable for self-care, I will also be using it as we continue to invite others to grow with us and deliver United Way’s mission. No matter if it is staff, or a volunteer, we need to make sure that we are empowering them with enough information to be capable, and yet not overwhelm them. You wouldn’t want a project-based volunteer to feel like they need to take a semester-long course to help. So often we provide more information than is necessary for the volunteer to perform their duties, and potentially make it seem that years of expertise are needed to create an impact. Many of the volunteers that I leverage bring skills, talents, and perspectives to the table that we can start with and build upon. If we build on their familiarity and passion, they will more quickly make an impact. We know that volunteers will continue to lean in, delivering more support and services for our organization when they feel that they can do what we ask of them. Making sure to acknowledge and thank those that help also helps them realize the extent of their impact.

If you need a little beacon of light to help those that you lead, I encourage you to check out the full SEE framework. However, if three quick bullet points are all that you have the capacity for at the current moment, I would encourage you to ask yourself:

• How are you giving people the information they need to succeed and be excited about the work without overwhelming them?

• How are you creating space and the expectation for people to take care of themselves while they bring their skills and interest to work?

• How are you ensuring that people know they are making an impact and see the results of their efforts?

I would also challenge you to engage in a little self-care too:

• Reflect on what excites you about your work.

• What can help you create resiliency and restore your passion? Build two or three self-care moments into your day.

• End your day by reflecting on three ways you made an impact.

Remember that to best care for others you first need to care for yourself.

Kayla Paulson is a Senior Manager at United Way of East Central Iowa (UWECI) working in Community Resources and Volunteer Engagement. UWECI connects community members, nonprofits, companies, and more to address community needs through asset-based approaches, sharing time, talents, and treasures to create sustainable and lasting solutions for systemic change.

If You Don’t Feed the Horses They Die

People thrive on opportunities to do things that matter. Having a sense of purpose makes people more motivated and increases their overall physical and mental health. How could you help meet someone else’s need to make a difference? How might this improve their world and yours?

Photo by Kyriacos Georgiou on Unsplash.

Kids often speak their minds from the backseat of the car. When my daughter was six, she piped up, “I wish I lived in the olden times.” She was deep into the Little House on the Prairie book series at the time so I understood “olden times” to be the era when Laura Ingalls Wilder was a girl and I guessed that the allure of that period had something to do with horses. It did, but not in the way I thought.

“Kids in those days got to do things that mattered,” she explained. “Their jobs weren’t just things like making the bed. If you don’t make your bed nothing happens, but if you don’t feed the horses they die.” And just like that, she had both explained my uphill battle to introduce chores like making the bed and summed up a powerful universal psychological need. People – adults and kids alike –want to know that what they are doing matters and is valued.

It’s hard to feel motivated when you have the sense that what you’re doing doesn’t make a difference. It’s easy to become demoralized when what you’re doing isn’t appreciated. On the flip side, people thrive on opportunities to do things that matter. Having a sense of purpose not only makes people more motivated in the short run but it also increases their overall physical and mental health.

The current war in Ukraine and the outpouring of help from around the world shows what people can do when they feel they are making a difference. In Barcelona, where I live, the Ukrainian consulate is overflowing with donations of everything from coats to medicines. People across Europe are opening up their homes to Ukrainian refugees. Many others are opening up their pocketbooks or holding fundraising events to aid victims of the war. People are acting because their action is needed to save lives. Not only is aid getting to the victims of this awful war, but the people helping are also meeting their own need to make a difference.

Sometimes it’s harder to see the differences that we are making. The teacher who struggles with dwindling resources and uninvolved parents in a failing school may start to think that what they do doesn’t matter. The team member who feels that their work is undervalued and unappreciated may feel no motivation to excel in their job. This is where feedback comes in.

The Importance of Feedback

Expressing appreciation, acknowledging value, and helping people see how their work fits into the big picture is an important part of bringing out people’s best. I recently wrote about some common reasons for feeling unmotivated and what you can do about them. That list includes some effective things that you can do for yourself, but sometimes you need a little help from those around you.

A friend of mine had a manager who never went out of his way to praise the people on his team or even acknowledge a job well done. “Why should I praise people for doing their job?” he once asked. Was it any wonder that team morale languished?

It’s true that an overabundance of praise quickly loses its value – I’m thinking about the cry of “great job!” that has become a parental reflex or the ubiquitous “amazing” that people mindlessly post in response to artwork shared on Instagram. But meaningful feedback, praise, and appreciation can be hugely rewarding and motivating. In fact, appreciation and positive feedback can have such a powerful impact on worker satisfaction that it would be a shame to confine them to once-a-year Employee Appreciation Day.

People are at their best when they are doing things that matter. How could you – as an employer, a supervisor of volunteers, a patient, a parent, a friend – help meet someone else’s need to make a difference? To let them know their work is appreciated? To show how their actions matter?

As for my daughter, we eventually stopped worrying about whether her bed was made and set her to work in the kitchen. Unlike the horses, we weren’t going to starve if she didn’t make cookies. But it did mean that our lunchbox contents would be much less interesting. Thankfully – for our tastebuds if not our waistlines – the sense of purpose and the positive feedback she got from providing the family with baked goods meant that was rarely a problem.

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

Motivation is Not a Thing to Get

What if we think about motivation as a feeling to be developed rather than an elusive thing to get? There are at least five common causes for feeling unmotivated. Identifying the root cause, or causes, is a first step in creating a path toward motivation and getting the job done.

Recently, my husband told me he just couldn’t get motivated to put his talk together for an upcoming seminar – something he both enjoys and does well. Procrastinating in the hopes of getting motivated didn’t seem to help. This got me thinking: Is motivation a thing waiting to be gotten?

Just like happiness, motivation is a feeling – feeling excited to do something or, if not exactly excited, then at least feeling fine about it. But feelings aren’t really something to be “got” – we don’t usually sit around waiting to get happy.

So why are we often passive when it comes to motivation? We wait for motivation to strike and, if it doesn’t, we try to power through the task without it. But what if we treated motivation like the feeling that it is and figured out how to more actively develop it in ourselves?

If you go to a therapist because you are unhappy, you expect more than a list of ways to get happy. Your therapist will start by helping you explore why you are unhappy and then move on to offering suggestions for dealing with those root causes. The same should be true when it comes to motivation. Feeling unmotivated can have many causes, each suggesting a different route toward change.

Five Reasons for Feeling Unmotivated – And What to Do About Them

With my husband, I suspected that the underlying cause of his lack of motivation was mental fatigue. He had been working hard, we were skimping on restorative activities, and I guessed that he just didn’t have the mental bandwidth for working on his talk.

Sure enough, after a couple days of prescribed mental restoration – in this case, morning walks in the nearby park – he was working with his usual enthusiasm.

But a walk in the park is not a universal prescription for developing motivation. Mental fatigue is one of multiple causes of feeling unmotivated, each of which suggests a different strategy.

Mental fatigue. As was the case with my husband, one symptom of mental fatigue can be a lack of motivation for things that require mental effort. We spend mental energy doing all kinds of tasks that require focus. And if we aren’t refueling the tank at the same rate that we are depleting it, it becomes hard to focus on anything.

When we’re suffering from mental fatigue, it’s time for some mental restoration in the form of good sleep, walks in the park, or other activities that allow the brain to quietly rest and unwind.

Lack of clarity or confidence. Sometimes we shy away from a task because we don’t understand what to do or we feel that we lack the skills to do a good job. This was certainly the case for me with many tasks when we first moved to Barcelona. I had trouble motivating myself to do things like make medical appointments because I didn’t understand the system. And I procrastinated phone calls because I knew it would be uncomfortable muddling through in my fledgling Spanish.

When the problem is a lack of understanding, you can work on building appropriate mental models. I finally cracked the Spanish health system by doing my research and talking to other expats. Making phone calls was easier if I imagined how the conversation might go and wrote out some phrases to keep myself on track – I still might not like making them, but that’s a problem that I can solve through discipline (more on that below).

Feeling overwhelmed. You might have a pretty good idea of what a job will entail, but sometimes it just seems so overwhelming that it’s hard to start. If this is the problem, it can help to break the project down into small concrete tasks.

For me, the hardest thing is usually starting – whether it’s starting a new painting or writing a blog post. If I can identify a first small step and just do that, the rest often starts to flow and I become more motivated to get the job done.

Disliking the task. Feeling unmotivated can just be a reflection of not liking to do the thing that needs doing. Cleaning the bathroom, filling out time sheets, filing taxes – there are some things you many never feel motivated to do. That’s where discipline comes in.

Many people think that discipline is all about willpower and that some people have it and others don’t. But studies have shown that discipline is not an inherent trait – it’s something that you do, not something that you are. Making a plan, setting a schedule, and removing distractions can help create discipline. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel motivated to make calls in Spanish, but I find that if I put them in my calendar and do them in the morning, I can get them done.

A judicial use of treats can also help make a disliked task more palatable. Some people save their favorite podcasts for doing things they don’t enjoy, like working out or cleaning the house. And although using food as a motivator can be a slippery slope, we got our kids up the last bit of many mountain hikes when they were little with well-timed chocolate.

Depression. Depression can make people feel unmotivated and uninterested even in things that normally excite them. Just as with motivation, there are many underlying causes of depression and seeking the help of a mental health professional may be the best way to get at the root causes and identify strategies for addressing them.

Creating Motivation Through Small Experiments

When it comes to motivation, why not be proactive rather than passively waiting for a feeling – one that may never come on its own – to strike?

If you’re not sure what’s causing your lack of motivation, try some small experiments. Refresh your mind by getting out in nature. Brainstorm on all the steps to getting the project done and then start with a small one. Journal about what might help give you more clarity or confidence. See what happens.

I’m sure there are more causes for feeling unmotivated and more good solutions for addressing them. What causes you to feel unmotivated? How do you “get” motivated?

Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE): Model Building and Being Capable. As the SEE framework points out, we rely on our mental models to effectively interact with the world. When we lack the appropriate mental models – for example, if we don’t understand what a project entails or don’t have the skills to carry it out – we may decide that avoidance is the best strategy. In this case, the route to motivation lies in building the appropriate mental models. But even if we have an adequate mental model of a particular project, it can be hard to feel motivated if we’re mentally fatigued. When we’re lacking adequate mental energy, developing motivation requires recharging our mental capability through restorative activities.

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

The Unexpected Benefits of Covering My TV

Fighting distractions and temptations has a hidden cost. Although you might win the fight, you will have to spend mental energy to do so. This leaves less energy for doing other things, like resisting future temptations or getting work done. How can you minimize this drain on your mental energy? As I was recently reminded, sometimes the best strategy for fighting distractions is simply to avoid them.

Covering the news … and everything else lurking in our TV.

Up until about eight or nine months, babies don’t have object permanence. Even if you hide an object while they are watching, once it disappears from sight, they assume that it has disappeared altogether. If it’s a beloved toy, they might become upset and if it’s something less interesting, they might just forget about it and move on.

Adults, of course, do have object permanence. When you put the cookies in the cupboard you know that they still exist behind the closed door. Even so, putting something out of sight can send it to the back burner of your mind. This phenomenon has its negative side – it’s easy to ignore a humanitarian crisis, for example, if it’s happening somewhere else. But reducing the mental pull of something is often to one’s advantage.

Out of Sight Out of Mind

During our recent home organization and beautification spree, my husband and I realized that the television was a problem. I personally don’t like the look of big black reflective screens and I also dislike how they so often become the focus of a room. It was time to hide the TV.

A quick look on Pinterest shows many creative solutions for hiding TVs. Ours was simple and decorative. We put the TV in a wide storage cabinet and hung a weaving – made by my mother – across the opening.

As expected, I’m much happier overall with the living room. I am no longer annoyed by the big black box and I get a little zing of pleasure from seeing the weaving.

What I wasn’t expecting was the significant drop in our TV viewing. Now that the screen no longer beckons, watching things in the evenings – a habit that was solidified during Covid lockdown – is no longer our default.

Reclaiming Mental Energy

We spend a good deal of mental effort ignoring and resisting distractions and temptations. Just like we have to resist the siren call of a naked TV screen, we must willfully resist the offered dessert when we’re trying to cut back and fight to keep our eyes on the road when confronted by video billboards. These things are hard enough to do on a good day, but when we’re mentally fatigued, like I often am by evening, resisting distractions can be almost impossible.

Dealing with distractions is a mental double blow. They not only create problems in the moment but they also reduce our ability to stay on task in the future. Distractions get their hooks into our attention and do their best to pull our focus away from whatever else we’re trying to do.

There are numerous studies demonstrating how our effectiveness can tank in the presence of distractions. Worker productivity in open-plan offices suffers in the presence of distracting side conversations. A moving goalkeeper distracts even expert penalty kickers, making them less likely to score. And cell phone use, even if it’s hands-free, siphons attention and worsens driving performance.

Even if we ultimately win our fight with distractions and finish that report, make the goal, and arrive at our destination safe and sound, the battle itself requires mental energy. This drain on our mental resources – and the mental fatigue that can follow – makes it difficult to focus and meet the next attentional challenge. Although mental energy is renewable, topping up the tank takes time. Wouldn’t it be more effective to conserve what we have?

Simple Solutions

One of the best strategies for conserving mental energy is to tweak our environment so that distractions and temptations are avoided. Granted, this isn’t always easy – the ubiquitous eye-level candy shelves at grocery store check-outs come to mind. But dealing with some distractions might be as simple as covering the TV.

Years ago, my husband finally dealt with the problem of a distracting candy bowl at the office by asking the admin to put it in a cupboard – a simple act that significantly cut his sugar consumption. More recently, my brother’s solution for fostering effective family co-working while confined to the house during the pandemic was to buy everyone noise cancelling headphones. This not only made it easier for everyone to do their own thing, but it saved the collective family sanity in the process.

What temptations or distractions are draining your mental energy?

What simple things could you do to put these distractions out of sight or out of mind?

What would you do with the mental energy you save?

Connection to the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) Model: Being Capable. An environment filled with distraction and unwanted temptation is the very opposite of supportive. Resisting distractions takes mental energy, leaving us with fewer mental resources for dealing with other things. Although there are ways to help restore our mental resources once they have been depleted, it’s even more effective to change our environment in order to eliminate or reduce unnecessary demands on our attention.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are 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 M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Aging Four Months With One Phone Call

The way that we understand the world is based, in part, on cultural norms. These norms are often so deeply ingrained that we don’t stop to think that they might be arbitrary – they just feel objectively right. In fact, they are so obviously right that we tend to assume everyone else, if they are reasonable and rational, must understand things the same way. But what happens when they don’t?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

Did anyone else grow up thinking that Do-Re-Mi was something invented for The Sound of Music? That was what I had always assumed until we moved to Ireland and I happened to be chatting with my Italian friend while waiting to pick up the kids at school. Our conversation veered toward music lessons and went something like this:

Roberta: “The way they teach music in Ireland is so confusing. I don’t know why they use letters for the notes instead of teaching it the normal way.”

Me: “Umm, what do you mean?”

Roberta: “You know, how they use letters like A-B-C instead of the actual names of the notes, like Do-Re-Mi.”

Me: “A-B-C are the actual names of the notes. It’s the system of semibreves and crotchets instead of whole notes and quarter notes that I find weird.”

Roberta: “What’s a quarter note?”

Me: Sound of brain exploding.

It turns out that what I’d always thought was the way to communicate about mainstream western music is just one way.

The difficulty with communicating across cultures was apparent again this week when I found out that my medical claim for an eye problem that was treated while vacationing in the US could not be processed by the US-affiliate of my Spanish health insurance. The problem was a discrepancy in my birthdate. But the real problem is that Europeans write dates as day-month-year while Americans write dates as month-day-year. You can probably guess what happened.

Remember how your science and math teachers were always reminding you to include the units with your answers? It turns out there was good reason. To anyone in the US, 6/10 is clearly June 10th, but to anyone in Spain, it is just as clearly October 6th. My insurance problem still has not been resolved, but it’s looking like the easiest thing to do is ask the clinic to age me four months so that everyone’s numbers match even if the actual dates the numbers represent do not.

The problems that arise from different systems of describing music and dates can make for cute stories partly because they are relatively easy to see and remedy (fingers crossed). But a lack of shared understanding often flies under the radar, causing problems and prejudices that are hard to pinpoint and remedy. When someone doesn’t behave in what is (for us) an acceptable way, or understand what is (for us) obvious, or do things in a way that is (for us) logical it’s very easy to blame the person – they are unreasonable or rude or just plain stupid. It’s much harder to accept that “right” and “obvious” are sometimes arbitrary.

It took me almost six months of living in Ireland before I realized that stopping the car to let pedestrians cross the street was not the cultural norm. In fact, people I knew would regularly wave at me while driving right in front of me as I waited with one foot in the road. It finally dawned on me that what I had assumed was rude behavior was actually the “right” way to drive according to Dublin cultural norms and I had to try and revise my assumptions about people who routinely failed to stop for me and the kids as I walked them to school. This was no easy feat – the speed with which we tend to form opinions and the strength with which we hold on to them can make them very resistant to change.

Even harder was accepting that my own behavior of stopping for pedestrians was probably confusing everyone and was likely more dangerous than kind. My small-town Idaho upbringing still forced me to stop during a driving lesson in order to let an elderly man cross at a minor intersection, but my brief moment of feeling virtuous was squashed when my driving instructor yelled, “What are you doing?! Just don’t do that during your driving exam!”

Since that driving incident, I’ve become ever more aware of cross-cultural differences in how people understand the world. And I’ve experienced how these differences can cause all sorts of problems, from failed communication attempts, to being unable to navigate a country’s system for getting things done, to ingrained negative perceptions of people who you don’t understand.

Looking at my own country with my expat eyes has also made me aware that a lack of shared understanding isn’t just a problem between people from different countries, it can be a problem between people period. There has been a lot of talk lately in the US about “American culture” – and, even more dangerously, about “real American culture.” But the reality is that the US is a country of layered sub-cultures tied to age, religion, race, gender-identity, geography, workplace, family, and more. You can’t assume that the people in your office or at the town park understand the world the way you do any more than I can assume that my Catalan neighbors in Barcelona share my understanding.

I’m not suggesting that problems with communication can all be attributed to culture or even to individual differences in understanding. This is especially true when people have differing opinions that are based, not on a deep understanding, but on something at once more superficial and harder to change. We might have differing opinions on vaccines, for example. If those opinions are based on how we interpret the evidence, or how we understand public health, or the experience of our culture with vaccines in general, then we could likely have a productive discussion. If they are based on anger or political ideology, then we probably cannot. Not every disagreement can have a happy ending.

But there are many times when misunderstandings, miscommunication, and disagreements over the best way to do something are caused – or at least made worse – by the assumption that everyone understands the issue or problem the way that we do.

What would happen if we stopped to consider that what is obvious to us might not be obvious to someone else? That behaviors that we think are normal might be perceived by someone else as rude? That what feels so strongly like the way to do something might just be one way? We might just end up making the world – or at least our small part of it – a better place.

In the meantime, I’m off to unwind by listening to Bach’s Chaconne in, as my friend Roberta would say, Re-menore. I just love Bach’s prolific use of demisemiquavers.

Connection to the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) Model: Model Building and Being Capable. People build and rely on mental models that encode their understanding of how the world works. Culture, with its system of cultural norms, is one way to fast track model building and ensure that a particular group has a shared understanding. Although sometimes cultural norms are arbitrary, they can feel logical, obvious and universal – until you discover that they are not. Problems can arise when our models don’t match the reality of another culture or country, making it difficult for us to feel capable and get things done. Even within our own culture, problems with communication and collaboration can arise when our models are not shared by others with whom we interact.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are 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 M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Banishing Everyday Stressors

Life’s daily hassles can add up in a big way, affecting our health, our stress level, and our ability to get things done. I had stopped noticing many of the little stressors around our house, but I saw them with fresh eyes when we returned home after an extended holiday. We embarked on a campaign against these small annoyances and not only improved our space, but reclaimed some mental energy along the way.

When I return home after a long time away, I often have a new perspective on my life and surroundings. It’s as if my mind has been reset so that – for a short time – I can see things as an outsider and notice the things to which I had become habituated. This was certainly the case when I returned home to my Barcelona apartment after a 5-week trip to the US.

There were many things about my home that I appreciated anew, like the amount of light that comes streaming through our windows. But there were fresh annoyances – the pile of boxes that had taken up permanent residence in the hallway, for example, and the near impossibility of matching lids to containers when putting away leftovers.

Spurred on by our new awareness of little annoyances, along with the autumn clutter-control bug that seems to strike so many, we decided to do some major organizing. Our approach was part analytical, favored by my software engineer husband, and part simple observation. We spent time walking around the apartment and identifying what we found stressful and we also started paying more attention to what we found annoying in the moment. Many of these things were fairly trivial – the cluttered nightstands, the disorganized drawers, having to move seemingly hundreds of body care products in order to clean the kids’ bathroom. But taken together, these small everyday annoyances can really add up.

The Surprisingly Big Impact of Little Annoyances

Most of us are aware of the negative impacts of major chronic stress, but a number of studies have shown that even minor everyday hassles impact health, mood, and cognitive function – not only in the moment, but also in the long term. Back in 1982, for example, Anita DeLongis and her colleagues at UC Berkeley studied 100 people over the course of a year. They recorded the everyday hassles people experienced – things like not liking work duties or misplacing something. They also recorded major negative life events and measured physical health and energy level. The researchers found that although both daily hassles and larger negative life events impacted people’s health, the daily hassles actually had a bigger effect.

A more recent 2016 study, done by Nicole Mead at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and her colleagues, showed the shorter-term effects of everyday hassles. They found that the more annoyances people had to deal with during the day – things like traffic on the way to work or a dead cell phone battery – the less progress they tended to make on their daily goals and the more mentally exhausted they were at the end of the day. On the brighter side, the researchers also found that the more pleasures people experienced during the same day – things like looking at the stars or spending time with a friend – the less impact the annoyances had. This is good news for me because it means that my organized closets are a double win. Not only am I no longer annoyed when I open a closet, but I get a little jolt of pleasure when I see the order that has replaced the mess.

Reclaiming Mental Energy

We’re not always aware of stressors and their effects, especially ones to which we’ve become habituated. In some cases, I became aware of my negative response to small annoyances around the house only after those annoyances disappeared. For example, I notice the mental cringing and spike in stress when I open the hallway closet only because the tumble of loose grocery bags that I’m expecting fails to emerge from the recently organized space. It’s a quirk of human cognition that we are more likely to notice when our assumptions are not met than when they are. As I habituate to my new organized normal, even this anticipated stress response is disappearing.

Not only is my organized home a more pleasant place, but the time and mental energy I wasted looking for things and being annoyed can be used for other things – like getting into my art studio or writing this blog post. Now I’m ready to extend my organizational spree to things that are less tangible than my physical space, like being more organized about how I keep track of my to-dos.

What is stressing you out? What small changes could you make to alleviate that stress? What difference might that make to your life?

Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE): Being Capable. It’s hard to feel capable when we’re not at our mental best – like when we’re stressed out or mentally fatigued. Sometimes we’re aware of the things that are depleting our mental energy, like a major project at work or dealing with a difficult client. But there are often smaller things, of which we might not even be aware, that can chip away at our mental resources and make us less effective in both the short and long term. Doing what we can to fix or avoid small everyday hassles is like fixing the drip in a faucet – it may not completely solve the water shortage problem, but it’s a start.

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are 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 M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.

The More You SEE, the More You Know

The Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) framework gives me a way to view the world from the perspective of what people need to be their best selves. As I look through the lens of SEE, I’m noticing new things, understanding people’s behavior at a deeper level, and seeing how I can improve my own life and my interactions with others.

Have you ever taken a course or read a book and started seeing examples of the ideas everywhere? That was my experience with the first environmental psychology class I took with Steve Kaplan the year I began graduate school. The course was called “Neural Models and Psychological Processes” but it was really about the interactions between people and their environments. We covered a wide range of issues, from how people perceive and think, to what types of environments they prefer, to how different environments can help or hinder reasonable behavior.

As the class progressed, I couldn’t help but start looking at everything around me through this lens of environmental psychology, much as a student of Freudian psychology probably can’t help but analyze everyone they meet. Things I’d never really noticed became relevant. I’d never thought, for example, about why being confused is both painful and hard to admit. Things that had mystified me yielded to explanation. I could now understand why my statistics professor, although clearly an expert, was so bad at explaining basic concepts. And solutions to certain problems came into view. Perhaps the antidote to my fatigued brain, I realized, was in my own backyard.

Many years later, environmental psychology still colors how I see the world. And now the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness framework (SEE) provides an even finer-grained lens for understanding people. The framework brings together decades of ideas and research in environmental psychology in a way that spotlights what people need to function effectively and how environments can be created or tweaked to help meet those needs.

The SEE Framework

The needs addressed by the SEE framework are cognitive needs rather than physical needs. People need sufficient food, water, and shelter, but they need so much more. Cognitive needs also have little to do with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – that general model of motivation proposed in 1943 that many psychologists now consider to be of limited use but that has nonetheless proven to be quite cognitively contagious.

What are cognitive needs? They are the needs we have for knowledge and understanding. People’s survival has always depended more on their brains than on their speed or raw strength. Because of that, we have become hard-wired to need information. We are driven to gather information, to make sense of it, and to use it to make decisions and interact with the world. We are at our best in environments and situations that support these needs.

There are three basic cognitive needs addressed in the SEE framework: 1) the need to make sense, 2) the need to feel capable, and 3) the need to make a difference. These needs are deceptively simple. Making sense, for example, has very little to do with how smart you are. It’s more about how your brain represents and understands the world around you. The need to feel capable isn’t just about having the right skills to do the job, it’s also about having the mental bandwidth to focus on the task at hand. And the need to make a difference isn’t necessarily about doing something big, it’s more about feeling that you have the ability to impact your world and that your contributions are valued.

SEE – Bringing the World into Focus

Looking at the world through the lens of SEE gives me a new perspective on my everyday experiences and environments. Once again, I am feeling the excitement and energy of noticing new things, understanding people’s behavior at a deeper level, and seeing how I can improve my own life and my interactions with others. I plan to share some of these observations in future posts, with the hope of helping bring the SEE framework to life. Along the way, I’d love to hear about how your own experiences are explained or guided by SEE and about how you might apply the SEE framework, in ways both big and small, to bring out the best in yourself and others.

What happens when you start looking at the world from the perspective of what people need to be their best selves?

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer living in Barcelona, Spain. Her writing and artwork are 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 M.S. in Resource Policy and Behavior and Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan.