It Takes Innovation to Fill in the Gaps and Be Impactful

BY JULIA GROVER-BARREY OTR/L
FOUNDER OF IN-TUNED®

Rarely are you going to solve a child’s sensory motor skill problem, attention problem, self-regulation problem or mood problem with your box of standardized assessments, participation in meetings or completion of paperwork.

To have impact it’s what we do next that counts.

Spending the time with the child figuring out how to bridge the gap from here (current level of function) to there (where it is possible for them to go) one gap at a time is the magic. Filling in the gaps requires knowledge, groomed intuition, but more importantly a willingness to innovate and break from the norm. The norm being (to quote Seth Godin) “people like us do things like this.”

To fill in the gaps for the child we need to drop narratives like “this is how it’s always been done”, “that’s somebody else’s domain, they will do it”, “I can’t do more in the time I have” and “the system won’t allow that”. Get the picture?

We have impact when we all become innovators. See every encounter with a child as an opportunity to discover a gap and innovate a solution to fill it in.

Don’t leave it to the academics, the scientists and the talking heads alone. Fill in the gaps yourself. Innovate a solution for one difficulty, for one child, share it, scale it so it can be used to meet the needs of more children with like needs.

Innovate, act on it, own it…because, “people like us do things like this.”

Julia