The most important thing I believe about creating social impact
Cultivating trust that there are more possibilities than you know
In the coming year, I’m planning on greatly expanding my executive coaching practice, focusing on leaders who want to make better decisions about social impact. This has inspired me to reflect on the content I offer in this space as well. Since I launched this newsletter, I have mainly shared tactics on the “how” of thinking strategically about social impact. But for a little while, I am going to try shifting focus to the “who” — the types of leaders I have encountered in this work, their most common problems, and how I think they can deal with them. I’d love to know what you think about it.
Last week I wrote about the most common type of leader I’ve worked with over the years, the nonprofit executive seeking to create more effective social change. But now I’d like to say a bit about myself and how I think I change the equation for these leaders and others.
The core is simple: I believe there are always many more possibilities for social change than we can currently imagine.
I don’t mean that in the inspirational “anything you can dream is possible” sense. It’s much weirder than that.
I mean that the ways in which a social problem can evolve in even just a few days are even wilder than we imagine in our most ambitious, far-reaching scenario planning. There are more optimistic outcomes than we had ever hoped, and more perilous possibilities than we had ever feared, all co-existing just over the horizon.
It’s an intimidating truth, but reflecting on it helped me develop the promise at the heart of my coaching process: for anyone facing a significant decision about social impact, I can offer more and better options.
It’s a promise I can make with confidence because experience has taught me those options are always there. After a session I recently facilitated with medical professionals, one of the leaders said to me, “You left open a lot more contingencies in your plan than I expected. I was a little scared, but it worked. How did you know we would fill in the blanks?”
The answer is trust. Trust in the people I work with, but also trust that with a little help, they can tap into many more possibilities than they see now. That trust comes from experience, from sitting in hundreds of rooms where people confronted an uncomfortable silence only to ultimately see something new emerge.
I started out as uncomfortable as anyone. I started doing this work as a principal with Insight Labs, which convened interdisciplinary groups to address intractable social problems on behalf of partner organizations.
When we began, I had to put aside the idea that I could study the problem well enough ahead of time to either the room with an answer. But it took years for me to grow truly comfortable that no one could be that smart, yet every gathering could produce the germ of a brilliant answer — usually as soon as the experts ran out of steam and the more humble invited thinkers started asking “dumb questions.”
I have an array of different tools designed to help leaders get back to those “dumb questions” and imagine new possibilities. And others to help them hone those possibilities down into a manageable reality. But as I’ve grown as a coach and guide for others, I’ve accepted that maybe the most important thing I offer to my clients isn’t any particular tool.
It’s the belief that there are better options out there for every problem we face — not in some imaginary future, but right now. And if we trust ourselves enough to let go of our preconceptions, we can find them together.