COPE in practice
When the obvious answer isn’t necessarily the useful one.
COPE gives you a structured way to look at what’s happening from four different perspectives before deciding what might help.
Because the first explanation is rarely the whole picture.
COPE – Four ways of looking before you decide what to do.
Cultural
What is normal here?
The assumptions and unwritten rules shaping how people communicate, participate and behave.
Culture can make it easier to ask for what helps, or make silence feel safer.
Organisational
What does the organisation make easy, difficult or inevitable?
Policies matter, but so do systems, workloads, management decisions and the gap between what is written down and what happens on Tuesday morning.
Consultation matters. You have to be prepared to hear the answer.
Personal
What is happening for this human?
People bring strengths, experience, responsibilities, capacity and changing circumstances to work.
A diagnosis may tell you something. It never tells you everything. People may not know what would help until they experience another option.
Environmental
What around the work is helping or getting in the way?
Space, noise, light, technology, furniture, information and how people meet can all affect how usable work feels.
Small environmental choices can change how much energy someone has left for the work itself.
You don’t know best.
Neither may they.
Neither do I.
But we can work it out.
Using COPE well takes curiosity, compassion and the courage to hear answers you weren’t expecting.
Good idea. Different human.
Inclusion gets interesting when two good answers conflict.
A distraction-free booth can be exactly what one person needs and leave someone else anxious or claustrophobic.
A fiddle toy can help one person regulate while the clicking makes it impossible for somebody nearby to concentrate.
Neither idea is wrong.
The mistake is assuming something is simply ‘accessible’.
It depends on the person, the situation and what they are trying to do.
One size fits no-one.
When people spend less energy navigating work, more of their capacity is available for the work itself.
Whether it’s a policy, a workspace, a process, a benefit or a practical adjustment, run it through three simple tests.
Useful
Does it solve a real problem or create an option people genuinely value?
Useable
Can people actually access it and use it in their working day?
Used
Do people know about it, trust it and feel able to use it?
You can have an excellent policy nobody understands, a quiet room nobody wants to enter or a flexible-working arrangement managers quietly discourage.
What matters is what happens in practice.
COPE can include looking at the workplace itself, not just talking about it. We can look at routes, furniture, sensory conditions, technology, meeting spaces and how supposedly inclusive facilities are actually being used.
Because having the thing is not the same as the thing working.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
Not everybody will tell you what they need.
People may choose not to disclose, may not feel safe enough to ask, or may not yet know what would help. Others have adapted for so long that they assume work is simply supposed to feel this difficult.
People with no diagnosis or disability can still benefit enormously from work being designed with real humans in mind.
You don’t need a diagnosis to benefit from accessible choice.
Clearer information. More ways to participate. Better communication. More predictability. Less pointless friction.
People may never know why work feels easier to navigate.
The point is that it does.
COPE isn’t only for inclusion
It’s useful anywhere humans and work collide.
Managing people
Being excellent at your job does not automatically make managing humans intuitive.
COPE gives managers a framework for looking beyond the first explanation and making more thoughtful decisions.
They don’t need to become amateur diagnosticians. They need a way to think when people and work get complicated.
Looking at the workplace
COPE can examine the physical, sensory and practical environment, including whether an accessible feature is useful, useable and used.
Working for yourself or in a tiny business
COPE doesn’t require an HR department.
It can help individuals and small teams work in ways that fit the humans actually doing the work, rather than generic advice about how they should work.
Whether there are two people or twenty thousand, humans remain inconveniently (and brilliantly) individual.
COPE can also sit alongside what you already use. HR processes, reasonable adjustments, occupational health, benefits and training can all have a role.
COPE helps you look at the wider picture around them.
And yes, it matters to the business.
When people spend less energy working around unnecessary friction, more of their capacity is available for the work itself.
That can affect:
Retention · Participation · Performance · Management time · Absence · Recruitment · Profitability
(you know that though, don’t you?)
Good working conditions don’t remove expectations. They can make it easier for people to meet them.
Better support doesn’t mean saying yes to everything.
COPE keeps the needs of the person, the team and the organisation in the same conversation.
Better for humans. Better for work.
You don’t need to know where to start.
COPE can begin with a question, a team, a workplace, a group of managers or a wider piece of organisational work.
Bring us in
We can facilitate the thinking with you, including conversations, workplace assessment and practical recommendations where useful.
Learn to use COPE
We can train your people to understand and apply the framework in their own work.
Where it helps, that can sit alongside wider management development, training or group coaching from the Those Interesting People team.
Use COPE yourself
The book and guided resources are in development.
The long-term aim is simple: COPE should be useful enough to travel.
COPE® was created by Jen Smith
Founder of Those Interesting People Ltd
I created COPE because I kept seeing the same challenge from different directions: people trying hard to do the right thing, but working with incomplete information, generic solutions and very individual humans.
I won’t arrive knowing exactly what your answer is. That would rather defeat the point.
I bring the framework, the questions, the experience and enough commercial pragmatism to help you work out what makes sense here.