Trust In Mistakes
mistake
noun
an act or judgement that is misguided or wrong.
something, especially a word, figure, or fact, which is not correct; an inaccuracy.
verb
be wrong about.
wrongly identify someone or something as.
trust
noun
firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.
acceptance of the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation.
the state of being responsible for someone or something.
Trust can be a very hard thing to earn, and even harder to earn back when it has been questioned or broken. We don’t often do Trust by the numbers - it is more of a gut feeling, an intuition. When thinking about nonprofit data & technology, if we actually counted up the number of things that are going right they would far outweigh the number of times that things go wrong. But there is a weighting difference. We apply more meaning and remember more clearly the things that went wrong, the mistakes that caused us trouble, than we even think about the myriad of things going right at any given moment.
Trust in data and technology at nonprofits can be a really tough sell, because in this case it means stepping outside of the belief that technology is magic. You can’t trust magic - it is all optical illusion, sleight of hand, misdirection, and suspending your disbelief to be thrilled by the impossible. Technology is exactly the opposite of this. Technology doesn’t do the impossible - it brings what is possible in the imagination into existence. It makes dreams possible. A rabbit is not programmed to disappear in a hat, but we see it happen with magic, and so you can’t trust the programming of a rabbit in a magic trick. You can ALWAYS trust technology to do what it is programmed to do. Even when things don’t look like you’d expect them to, even if things seem not to work at all, it is because of the programming and data inputs. But technology can be RE-programmed to deliver results that are more closely aligned with our expectations.
Trust is hard to earn, and a computer has no chance of earning anything. People can earn trust, but they should not be expected to be magicians. People make mistakes. This is not only true, but it is meaningful. It is imperative. It is integral to the way we learn and grow and make things better. Positive data & tech culture at nonprofits also means having a culture of mistakes - a culture that doesn’t “forgive” mistakes, but one that accepts mistakes as part of the work and celebrates the learning & growth from them. For data & technology, this means we can try out pilots and betas and make incremental improvements along the way. It also means experiencing doubt and fear and uncertainty about the tools we are working with and learning to manage these feelings through ongoing learning and deeper understanding of how our data & tech is built and works.
Revealing how the magic trick works builds trust - you can reliably know what to expect the magician to be doing and what you will see at the end of the trick. But that can take away from the wonder of it all. We don’t want our technology to be a wonder in this way. We want to reveal all of the inner workings and build trust. And in doing so, we want also to affirm that mistakes and errors are part of the work - that through mistakes we deepen our learning and understanding of our data & technology, which in turn builds more trust.
Magic is a trick, but technology is for real.
