My purpose: For all mission-driven, social justice-oriented people and organizations to have the confidence and skills to learn, use and love data & technology as part of achieving their missions.
Is there a shortcut to earning trust?
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Earning trust takes time. It takes so much time and so much consistency. There are ways that this trust-earning can get sped up - usually through some extreme circumstances that force people to get down deep and dirty together, to overcome an impossible situation, or to be put through intense experiences together. I love a good conversation about how to ethically and responsibly put people through experiences like this on purpose. But there isn’t always a need to speed up the trust building process. Sometimes it just takes the time it takes. And the consistency. Today I facilitated a conversation at the CT Data Collaborative’s Data Equity Community of Practice. We had about 10 people on the call for the whole time, most of whom I did not know prior to today and who all work at different organizations. The topic of the conversation was how to use Vent Diagrams as a framework for discussion about data & technology, and data equity in particular. But also just how to use Vent Diagrams to talk about any seemingly contradictory things that exist at the same time. There are a lot of resources right now on the Vent Diagram website about how to use the framework to talk about the conflict in the middle east, so you can imagine that this framework is something useful to use when there are seemingly polarizing sides to a topic. I had very little time and space to build trust with the people who joined the call. Afterwards I questioned for myself whether this kind of framework can be used as effectively when it is being used by a group that hasn’t had the chance to build mutual trust. I’m going to keep trying it out in different iterations, because I believe in the power of deep and challenging conversation to build trust, to foster love, and to bring peace. The next one coming up is on January 24th, and it is about the concepts of Time and Urgency in Nonprofit work. Please consider registering for that discussion! For whatever level of trust you may have with me, I would like to lean into it to recommend a new source of news that has what it takes to foster this kind of powerful trust and conversation. It is called Tangle. I first heard about it on an episode of This American Life, which is a great listen as well. Tangle reporting is committed to non-opinionated, non-partisan reporting, but it also showcases the opinions of many partisan-leaning people. I’ve felt a lot of trust build between me and Tangle in just a few days of reading, and that is why I am recommending it to you. If you end up reading it and liking it, please let me know! Or if you end up reading it and having issues with it, I would love to know more about that, too. Peace, Emily |
Emily Hicks-Rotella
My purpose: For all mission-driven, social justice-oriented people and organizations to have the confidence and skills to learn, use and love data & technology as part of achieving their missions.
There are many people who have given voice to the dizzying pace of the “digital age” - specifically about the speed by which technology changes, grows, updates, enhances, is created and destroyed. Similarly, we have a lot of contributions of thoughts and opinions about how this speed infiltrates our lives and the consequences to our mental and physical well-being, which we are instructed to combat with deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, digital detoxing, and dry January (but for social...
Many email newsletters we receive start with “Dear [NAME],” - and “NAME” is magically replaced with your name. Just today, I received an email with the subject line “made me think of you, Emily (offer info inside)”. Now this was very insulting to me. The person (but mostly their automation) who sent this email to me clearly did not think of me. Maybe they had some thought of the collective “me” because they thought about everyone on their email list as a general whole. But I felt that they...
Dear friend, On Friday I’m hosting the first of what I hope to be many conversations for those of us in the social profit (new name for the non-profit) world, dealing with the deep, contradictory, messy, important topics that we face daily in our work. This week’s call is called Venting About Time and Urgency in Social Profit Work. I got into social profit work thinking that before too long, the organization I was working for would solve the issue we were addressing - closing the education...