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.

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.

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.