Creating The Right Toolkit For The Moment

I continue to think a lot about the moment in history we are living right now. It’s cliche to say, but we are on the precipice of major change. What will the change look like? Will it truly serve the people who need it most? These are among the top questions I’m wrestling with.  

As with most moments like this in history, there is righteous anger and emotional energy emanating from an authentic place, and there are folks who seek to manipulate the moment for their own particular ends. Unfortunately, the latter have some of the most powerful tools in history to amplify their voices even though they constitute a minority of people. It often leaves people like us exasperated, confused, and paralyzed from acting.

So how do we go from here? In times like this, we can take a step back and return to our values and principles for guidance. While I most certainly don’t have all the answers, let me suggest something that may constitute a starting point based on the principles of Our Better Selves.

Values and Evidence: Embracing Our Hearts and Our Heads
The change agents of Our Better Selves are constantly leaning into both of these things. We are comfortable dancing with the “is” of the facts on the ground, the “ought” of where we want to be in the future, and working to close the gap between those two things. What is concerning in this era of information over-saturation (including “fake news” and otherwise manipulative actors) is that it’s hard to step back and channel our values through one of the most powerful tools ever developed: the scientific mindset. We don’t need to run double-blind, randomized control trials in every area of our lives before we take action, but we can leverage better mental models which interpret statistics more precisely - minimizing confirmation bias (among other cognitive biases that we all have). 

Building Relationships at the Speed of Vulnerability
While the scientific mindset alone is incredibly powerful, we can’t forget the everyday experiences and stories that people have. Even the most scientifically-minded ought to acknowledge the limits and caveats of data. One of the most powerful things to improve our scientific-mindset is to form new hypotheses to test based on the learning we glean from vulnerable and meaningful conversations. Isolated thinking is not the pinnacle of a scientific-mindset. However, the most important outcome from deep, reciprocal and vulnerable conversations is how it builds trust and empathy, and allows us to lean into our humanity at a level we couldn’t before. The power of these human connections can’t be underestimated both as a means of facilitating change, and as profound human experience in and of itself.

Humility and Courage
Sometimes the tension of values seemingly at odds is not something to be avoided, but rather something to lean into. For example, embracing the principles above may leave us in a place of overwhelm and analysis paralysis. However, if we maintain this intellectual humility in tension with the courage to do work that serves people who need it (despite the uncertainty), we find the essence of what it means to be a change agent. This is a powerful example of what it means to “live in the grey” that is the world we live in - knowing we don’t have all the answers, but taking action anyways to serve those who need us.

So as we work to shape this new normal as change agents, I hope the above can serve as a starting place for us all.