From Compliance to Curiosity

Will we be conditioned by a culture of compliance and status quo, or will we create the conditions for a culture of curiosity and possibility?

Policy and the law are often written to articulate what is either required, allowable, or prohibited. It's on us, in practice, to go beyond that and ask, "What's possible?" A piece of paper cannot do that for us-only our collective truth-telling, imagination, and willingness to try can.

The New York Times published an article a few weeks ago that to me seems a great case study in the need for?#curiosity?to effectively support people in the workplace and beyond.

This article, titled "What a ‘Human-Centered’ Approach Can Do for Workers With Disabilities," details the painful and often humiliating experiences of people with disabilities to get "reasonable accommodations" for their work, as required under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Too often, employers settle only for bare-minimum compliance of the law versus a curiosity-driven approach to better understand each worker's needs, challenges, and aspirations to do their current and future work most effectively. As someone who has spent most of my career working in policy, this resonated with me as I have seen high expectations of a new education law fall short when people approach implementation from a compliance mindset instead of a curiosity mindset to continuously ask, "How can we do this better?"

As Beth Macfarlane, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and faced several obstacles to get reasonable accommodations, said, “There’s a huge gap between what the law was intended to do and what the experience of employees with disabilities really are."

Whether it's in effectively supporting workers with disabilities, helping all students be engaged in learning, or any complex challenge we face, let's approach the challenge from a mindset of "what could we do" instead of just "what must we do," and involve people in that process to learn from one another. Who knows what kind of new or better approaches and ideas we can create and then make the new standard of practice.