Rising and Falling
Inspiration for this blog post:
Life of Kai, Season 1, Episode 2, RedBull TV
The Coach in the Operating Room, by Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
“Not falling back on luck or succumbing to fear. Instead of rising to the occasion, you fall back on your training". - Kai Lenny
Kai Lenny is one of the best surfers of his generation. Atul Gawande is at the top of his medical, research, and writing game. Like many others, these superstars of their specialties eat, breathe, and live their passion and their focus. Each are extremely well-respected as leaders in their fields. They are the best of the best of the best, with honors.
And they both practice the basics and they both have (or advocate for) coaches.
Practice. Repetition. Feedback.
This is not just for the pros, for the best, for the superstars. Practice, repetition, and feedback are the keys to doing well at anything. Not being perfect and not even being the best, but doing well for you, at whatever level you are at and whatever level you are going to.
No one is staying at the same level with data & technology. The work is always changing and so are the tools to work with, and so we who use these tools for our work (which is everyone at this point) need to also be moving on the waves of continuous learning. The stakes for this are high. Kai and Atul face life and death consequences in their work. At nonprofits the stakes can be just as impactful - from the local, individual impact to the systemic change we are working towards. There are tons of resources available for technologists or IT professionals to continue their learning and continue to be amazing at what they do. It is the support for everyone else - particularly the program teams - that can be a bit harder to find. Some ways you can get started:
Make data & technology recurring agenda items on your individual and team check-ins and meetings. This will help raise up questions and roadblocks that team members are having and help surface where professional development may be needed.
Encourage team members to ask how to do the data & tech work. Even if the IT team or a consultant will be doing the actual work of making data & technology answers and solutions, the more team members know and understand about how it all came together will help with confidence and continued learning - plus it is great for building relationships with potential mentors/coaches.
Connect with others doing similar work. There is nothing quite like having a data or tech question and being able to say to yourself “I’m stuck, but I know who I can reach out to.” Professional relationships across nonprofits are key to us all raising each other’s data & tech levels up.
Give and ask for time. Learning takes time. Be gracious with giving staff members extra time to take on new challenges and learn new ways to work with data & technology. Be open to asking for the time - there are so many pressures with deadlines and competing priorities, but having additional time to complete a task because you are simultaneously increasing your data & tech skills is part of building a positive data & tech culture at the organization.
Provide and seek out job-embedded learning. Online courses and YouTube tutorials are great. But learning data & tech in nonprofits is often best done through gaining on-the-job experience. Give and take on tasks and projects that will be part of continuous learning in data & tech. If you need more skills for building a budget spreadsheet, take on another spreadsheet project. If you need to learn how to pull reports from your CRM, take on a data cleaning project in the CRM. If you need to tell stories about your data, take on some data entry tasks for a while. The more practice/experience you have in different parts of your data & technology will only help build the muscles and training that you can “fall back on”.
Don’t fall back on asking someone else to do it. Rise up on the wave of continuous learning and rely on your practice, repetition, and feedback to get you where you need to go.
The framework of the Learn, Use, Love Program is quite similar to Practice, Repetition, and Feedback. If your organization is ready to bring coaching and continuous learning in data & tech to your staff members, then check it out!
