The Affinity News has been on hiatus the past few months. This issue is a reintroduction of the newsletter. My plan going forward is to share stories of how specific tools have helped me to make meaning of the experiences I have shared over the years. My goal is to continue to provide an entertaining story and include technical references for further exploration.

thoughts, comments and sharing are always welcome.

In this post:

Story: Affinity News 2.0

I started a newsletter in 2004 after transitioning from working as a project manager in information technology. My roles included being a part of teams that developed and implemented enterprise wide systems in health care, law enforcement, and educational settings. The work had changed in the 18 years since I started in the field and I was ready to move on.

I started my newsletter as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends. My early stories included tales of general observations of my life and surroundings. The structure of story, lessons learned, applying the lessons and food for thought came at the advice of a reporter friend.

I enjoyed using the newsletter as both a creative outlet and as a way of sharing some of the techniques and concepts I learned along the way. The practice of preparing regular newsletters also kept me alert to learning opportunities. One of the most enjoyable parts of being out of information technology was the opportunity to think with people. The common thread was (and is) meaning making.

Experiences with three individuals from the same, large, organization speak to the variety of situations I have been a witness to:

When I was starting out in my exploration of the inclusion of persons with disabilities (PWD) in professional settings, I met with the regional head (I’ill call her Joann) of an organization that supported the employment of PWD. Joann was running late because she was interviewing candidates for a position she needed to fill. In the course of our conversation, I posed the following scenario: There are two candidates for a position that will be vacant in a matter of weeks. Both candidates rate equally on objective evaluation measures. Both can start the position within two weeks of the job offer. One of the candidates will require accommodations for a disability, the other does not. It it is not known how long it will take to provide the accommodations to allow the individual with a disability to be fully productive. Can you reasonably consider both candidates equally in light of the fact that the start date for the person with a disability is unclear?

Years later I had the opportunity to have a confidential conversation about a supervisor’s decision to not offer a job to a person with a disability. The individual had participated in a competitive hiring process which included bonus points to support the inclusion of veterans and persons with disabilities (PWD). The supervisor considered the candidate to be qualified to do the job. The reason a job offer was not made was the fact that providing accommodations to this (qualified) candidate would require modifications to the job description for the position. The supervisor concluded that the changes to the job description would require the position to remain vacant for too long: it was technically infeasible to offer the position to this qualified candidate.

More years later, I had the opportunity to talk with the enterprise?’s Director of the Bureau of Equity and Inclusion. In our conversation, the director shared the structural challenge of inclusion in a large enterprise. The organization is divided into semi-autonomous divisions. Providing accommodations to an individual in one division may set a precedent that could have unintended consequences in other divisions within the enterprise.

Each of these conversations was unique and unrelated to one another. The commonality among the conversations was my interest in the inclusion of persons with disabilities (PWD) in professional settings. When I reflect on these conversations, I am able to dip into my toolbox and see how these conversations can be characterized through the lens of various conceptual frameworks: the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), technical vs. adaptive challenges, systemic disenfranchisement, etc. I don’t generally include the names of these tools in my conversations with people.

I have found that even the best of theoretical tools are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. As I relaunch this newsletter, I will be highlighting some of the tools I have come across in my travels and relate them to situations I have had the honor of being a part of. My hope is that you will find meaning in the tools and stories. I’ll consider it a good day if you say, “That’s an interesting way of looking at a situation I have experienced.” or maybe, “That’s an idea I’ll keep in my back pocket for future reference.:

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Dan Lococo, PhD Barrier Knocker Downer Contact me: (Message danlococo) LinkedIn profile

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