Couples Therapy for Nonprofit Data & Technology
I’m a person who has been in therapy since I was a kid. Sometimes it is just nice to have someone to talk to. Sometimes it has saved my life. I view therapy like medication - I need to take it for my mental health, even on the days I’m feeling good. On the latest Death, Sex and Money episode, Anna Sale speaks with Dr. Orna Guralnik, the amazing therapist from the docu-series Couples Therapy. I absolutely adore this woman and her psychoanalytic approach. In the interview, Orna said something that hit me right in my heart. Anna Sale asks her “is it ever useful to tell a couple….to make plain and explicit your process?” to which Orna replies “Yes, I think it’s very useful, yes. I often narrate my technique out loud to people to understand why I’m doing something. I think it’s respectful to explain to people what I’m doing rather than appear like this omniscient clinician that is delivering from Oz.”
This is exactly how I feel about working with people at nonprofits on their data & technology. There is a myth about data & tech folx being these all-knowing, all-powerful magicians who can make magic happen with technology, and have some sort of powers that set them apart from the non-tech people with whom they are working. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, separating from the program team or the development team or whatever team at a nonprofit detrimentally weakens the ability of anyone to be able to support and provide any kind of data & technology for a person or an organization.
When my team and I partner with nonprofits, we do so in deep relationship with each other and with the work. And in some ways this can look like therapy - asking ourselves and our partners to trust each other, to work together, and to go beyond our barriers and defenses to learn about ourselves and our data & tech from each other. This is also the work of culture-building at an organization. Culture of learning, culture of collaboration, culture of sharing, culture of mistakes, culture of risk taking, culture of innovation, culture of pushing boundaries, and so many more. This is the real work, the work that matters. As Orna says on her show, everything else is nonsense.
