Imagining It All
Inspiration for this blog post:
Brené with Adam Grant on the Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
You can’t know it all. You can’t. Nobody can. Is there someone you know or interact with who seems to know it all? Well, they don’t.
But you can get close to knowing it all - by knowing what you don’t know.
For change-makers in nonprofits using data & technology for their work, the phrase “I don’t know what I don’t know” comes up quite a bit. This is a story that we tell about ourselves, and it leads to a mindset that can put up roadblocks to imagination and learning. And in fact, if you were to interrogate yourself about this mindset, you likely would be able to re-phrase it as “I know that there is a huge amount of information out there about this thing and I feel overwhelmed about it and I don’t know where to start”. We can start by acknowledging that there is in fact a huge amount of information out there - so much so that we can confidently say that no person is going to know everything about something.
After that, we can get to the work of IMAGINING. Sure, you may not know what is built into your tech to make your life easier. You may not know what a software developer could do to customize your system. None of that should stop you from imagining what you need, what it would look and feel like, and what outcomes you would have as a result. Someone with technical expertise can help guide your vision to reality, but first comes the vision of how you want your life to change with the help of technology. How you want the world to change.
Need more structure than just “go imagine something”? No problem, here are 4 steps you can use to make it happen:
Write it out: Do a braindump and write down everything you are thinking about. Write down what your tech does right now, what you want to do with it, how it frustrated you, what you would love, the colors you’d like to see, the feeling you’d like to have when you open your computer, how you’d like to spend your time - anything and everything. Just don’t make the mistake of getting bogged down in “I don’t think my tech can handle that”. Yep, that’s the point. We don’t know what it can handle, so let’s imagine big.
Draw it out: It doesn’t have to be art, it just has to be something. We are imagining here - so let’s draw what our version of the technology would look like. Words, numbers, colors, shapes - and on canvas, google docs, canva, drawing paper, use anything!
Make a list: Go through your writing and drawing and start to pull out the concepts and wants that you have. Use a bullet-pointed list or any other way you can group similar things together and start to categorize your needs. You may also want to highlight what is highest priority from this list.
Translate it: Take all this and translate what it would mean to accomplish it for your technology. Not sure how to translate? Bring in a translator! Someone with technical expertise enough to give you some insights into what it would take to achieve your vision. And if it isn’t clear yet how, then they can help you better understand the pathways and choices towards your vision.
We can’t know it all - but that cannot stop us from imagining it all.
(And honey, you deserve it all!)
