How Creativity Blooms – the Hidden Power of Everyday Environments

Once again, my terrace plants appear to be dying. I look to my green friends to restore my spirit and my mind. In return, I do my best to care for them. But for a plant lover with good intentions, I have a decidedly brown thumb.

My neighbor’s plumbago is flourishing … why isn’t mine?

Thankfully, I have better luck tending my creative garden. I place a high value on my creative practice. I do my best to get myself into creative flow. But most importantly, I leverage my environment to help my creativity flourish.

I’m not talking about the occasional creativity boost like a one-off artist date. That can certainly be helpful, but it is more like giving your plant a dose of fertilizer. It can provide a welcome boost that encourages precious blooms, but in the long run it can’t make up for an environment that doesn’t match the plant’s needs.

I’m more interested in the help I can get from my everyday environment – the physical places in which I spend time but also the people around me, the structures and processes that guide my actions, the way I schedule my time, and the information with which I interact.

In any kind of caregiving – whether for plants, children, or our own creative selves – it is the cumulative effects of the environments experienced day in and out that impact us most. The extent to which these environments meet our needs over the long run largely determines how we grow, if we wilt or thrive, if we keep our creative power caged or let it blossom.

What does creativity need to flourish?

Creativity was described by Einstein as “combinatorial play” and I love that imagery. It is the process by which we combine the bits of pieces of our knowledge, memories, dreams, and whatever inputs we’re getting from our environment to create something new and wonderful –an idea, a work of art, a solution to a problem, or a fresh perspective.

Whether it is the “Big C” creativity of artistic design and scientific discovery or the “little c” creativity of everyday acts of ingenuity and insight, the combinatorial play of creativity is a complex process involving the whole brain and a back-and-forth dialogue between mind and world.

At a big picture level, the creative process depends on some basic fundamentals:

1. Creativity depends on having a well-stocked brain.

2. Creativity is expanded when you move beyond what you already know.

3. Creativity flows when you are able to let your mind go.

4. Creativity is powered by having sufficient mental bandwidth.

5. Creativity is turned on when you feel that it matters.

How can our environments help?

Stocking your brain with the building blocks of creativity

Despite popular belief, creativity is not all about “getting out of your head.”  On the contrary, the stuff inside your head – specifically knowledge and the richly interconnected neural structures that store it – is what underlies creativity.

How do we build these rich knowledge structures?

Mostly, as it turns out, through our interactions with our environment. Experiments back in the 1970s found that rats living in enriched environments with other rats, toys, and things to explore developed brains that were bigger, more interconnected, and more active than the brains of rats living in cages without much going on. Not surprisingly, the enriched rats were also better problem solvers.

Humans are not that different from those rats in terms of the effects of the environment on our brains. But what constitutes our cage isn’t just the physical space. Arguably more important is the environment of information, ideas, and experiences in which we live. The more we explore by trying new things, going down interesting information rabbit holes, embracing different experiences, and giving ourselves time to digest rather than gobble information, the richer our knowledge structures become. This translates to an extensive and diverse set of building blocks for our brains’ creative combinatorial play.

If you happen to be a contributing designer of a larger cage – a leader or engaged member of an organization, say – you can support creativity by building an organizational structure that provide opportunities for team members to experience a richness of ideas and perspectives. Onboarding and orientation processes could allow for exploration of and interaction with different parts of the organization. Opportunities for sharing information and interacting with diverse stakeholders could be regular occurrences rather than occasional orchestrated events.

Stretching your brain beyond what you already know

Paradoxically, the strong knowledge networks that provide the foundation for creativity can also squash creativity by pulling one toward the familiar and “obvious to you.”

One way to counteract the pull of familiar ruts is to look to the environment to help you get out of your head and move beyond what you already know.

Environments that foster human connection and put you in front of a diversity of people can help stretch you beyond your own area of expertise. You gain access to fresh ideas and perspectives – extending the idea of combinatorial play from your own neutral networks to the greater network of groups and communities.

Running small experiments can help you move beyond the limits of ideation by testing things out and getting feedback from the environment. I build quite a lot of experimentation into my art studio time. Organizations can make small experiments part of their “business as usual” by specifically asking for, modeling, rewarding, and sharing the results of small experiments aimed at solving problems and improving organizational structures and processes.

Play, which usually involves manipulating and reacting to your environment, can help provide new inspiration and ideas that may just end up being the missing link when working on a problem in the future. Playing with art materials feeds my own creative process. Participating in something like a Lego Serious Play session may help feed the creative process within an organization.

Letting your mind go

Creative thought depends both on having a rich collection of cognitive building blocks and on giving the brain time to frolic among them with little conscious oversight. In this way, the mind can venture down the paths less traveled and make unexpected connections and discoveries. The right environment can help wrest control from directed thought and give the brain an opportunity to wander.

Brainstorming processes in all their variations are time-tested ways to help remove the constraints and inhibitions of top-down thinking. Brainstorming is a kind of purposeful mind-wandering.

Nature – from office plants to forest bathing – encourages a less purposeful kind of mind-wandering. Nature environments allow you to relax your mind while drawing your attention just enough to keep yourself from getting sucked into the cognitive sink-holes of negative rumination. It is no wonder studies have shown that nature promotes creativity.

Scheduling in breaks – particularly after you’ve been focusing on a problem – can be an excellent way to harness the power of your subconscious, allowing your mind to incubate ideas without direction or pressure. Go get coffee. Take a shower. Go for a walk.

Maintaining mental bandwidth

Creativity is a whole-brain energy intensive activity. It requires moving between directed and undirected thought processes, recognizing and capturing eureka moments, building on initial ideas, and following through. All of these things require a tremendous amount of mental energy – energy that while renewable, can get depleted.

We can help maintain our mental bandwidth by designing or choosing environments that minimize unnecessary distractions and that provide opportunities for mental restoration. This is as true in the workplace as in our personal lives.

Nature in all its forms is a big winner in terms of mental restoration.

A good organizational structure – an organized space, a good scheduling and tracking system, an organized workflow – can help tremendously in maintaining mental bandwidth because it means you don’t have to keep everything in your head.

Setting constraints, when appropriate, can also help keep one’s limited bandwidth from getting overwhelmed. There is a misconception that creativity flows most freely in a place of infinite possibility, but infinite choice can also lead to paralysis. Sometimes less is more.

Good management can help by keeping bandwidth limitations in mind when providing information, running meetings, or scheduling work. Managers can also play a key role in helping their team focus on what’s important while shielding them from being overwhelmed by less important asks.

Cultivating caring

At some level, the combinatorial processing that drives creativity is always happening – it is simply part of what our minds do. But if we’re not invested in the process, we’re unlikely to purposefully put energy into creative thinking. Why waste limited mental resources on something that we don’t care that much about?

As individuals, we can work to cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning in what we do, but our environment is our biggest source of feedback on what matters. We look for signs that we are needed and valued. We look for feedback that we are understood, that our efforts have a purpose, that we are contributing something useful.

We can nurture our sense of mattering by getting involved and by looking for connections that go beyond the “likes” of social media. Organizations and social groups can communicate mattering through acknowledgement, meaningful feedback, and creating structures and processes that offer regular opportunities for listening, meaningful engagement, and contribution.

A good environment is worth a thousand good intentions

People often say they wish they were more creative but they don’t structure their everyday environment to help make that happen. Organizations may say they value creativity and innovation yet their “business-as-usual” environments don’t support the creative process.

One of the reasons for this mismatch is that creativity is often defined in terms of outcomes – a finished painting, an innovative product, a new idea. But creativity is not the eureka moment, it is the non-linear, cumulative, often slow, murky process underneath that precedes the eureka moment.

We can’t fully control the creative process, but we can encourage it by creating environments that support it. The concept of creating environments is key. You don’t create a supportive environment by coming up with an optimistic value statement, by talking about the importance of a culture of creativity, or by setting good intentions for a creative practice.

You create a supportive environment through the way you design your physical space, the actions you take, the social interactions you participate in, the structures and processes you put in place, and the information you consume.

Could you start your day with a walk in a nearby park or install a small nature oasis in your workspace to help restore your bandwidth and encourage moments of mind-wandering? Could you host a discussion group or learn more about what an adjacent team at work is doing? Could you schedule in regular time for play and new experiences? Could you make small experiments an intentional part of how you solve problems?

I’m off to more thoroughly research the needs of my plumbago and figure out what actions I can take to tweak its environment in order to help it be its best self.

What might you do to change or tweak your environment in order to be your best creative self?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.