This week's First Principle is one of the ones I am most passionate about, personally. I cannot think of a time in my life when I have not gained, intellectually, personally and in terms of the work I care about, from working with people whose life experiences are different from mine, and have led them to different perspectives. I am always amazed by how much our own horizons get widened by connecting with someone who has a very different background.
It's a richer experience, to be sure, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Like we talked about with the failure of saviors last week, making those kinds of connections means that we have to be willing to be wrong, willing to be taught, and willing to make mistakes. And in a context where unconscious bias, racism, sexism, colonialism and the like pervade everything we've learned to date, we have to be willing to make a lot of mistakes. I'm Exhibit #1 on that.
But if we can set aside our ego and our insecurities and our urge to be right, deep inclusion is the best way I have ever, ever found to get out of our own blinders and see new opportunites ~and new solutions to the problems that our old systems have failed to solve.
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Try It On
Think about a difficult decision you have had to make. Maybe it was choosing a graduate school, or deciding whether to take a job, or choosing to let an employee go. Ask yourself:
1) Who did I get advice or insight or guidance from?
2) How valuable or useful was their input for me?
3) Imagine a person who is on some dimensions the opposite of the people you talked to. If your input was from people who were older, imagine a person who was a lot younger. If you talked to people who were in one profession, imagine having the same conversation and asking the same questions of people in very different professions.
Do you think your imaginary advisors might have given different recommendations? Would they have focused on something that the people you actually talked to didn't pay attention to? How would your imaginary advisors seen your issue differently?