Nice Work: Yes!!! And...

This newsletter would have normally gone out on Friday, but I was in no state to write it. A lot of you probably weren’t in any state to read it, either.

But after maybe the most exhausting week ever, I spent Saturday out in the streets. I joined a celebratory march led by labor organizers that took us from Independence Hall, where the Constitution was signed, to City Hall, where the National Guard has been stationed since police killed Walter Wallace and Philadelphians responded with another round of racial justice protests. I stopped by the Convention Center again, where poll workers were still counting ballots, and where two days before I’d spent the afternoon in disbelief that the “count every vote” sign I was holding was, in fact, a necessary political statement.

By the time I got home, I’d cycled through pretty much every emotion possible—hope and disappointment, fear and relief, joy and sorrow.

Wherever you are, maybe you’re feeling some of those conflicting emotions, too. I want you to know that that’s ok.

We can cheer the ousting of an emerging authoritarian and push his successor for more progressive policies. We can celebrate that this era has ended and remember that the white supremacy that defined it has not. We have to. Because if we don’t take time to celebrate wins, we’ll feel miserable and burn out. And if we don’t acknowledge that America’s love affair with white supremacy is still going strong, we’ll get comfortable—and stop looking at our own role in perpetuating it.

That’s the problem with either/or thinking: it protects the status quo. Whichever option you choose, you get stuck right back where you were. In fact, it comes up all the time in my coaching and group work:

• Either I can advocate for myself, or I can care for others.

• Either I have it good and should be grateful, or 2020 is awful and I’m struggling.

And I see it all the time in the way tech and design orgs run, too:

• Either we hire a diverse team, or we hire the best.

• Either we design for inclusion, or we design for ROI.

Pretty much everyone falls into either/or thinking sometimes—after all, we were trained to see the world this way: Hero or villain? Yes or no? Male or female? But every time we get stuck in a binary, we shut down creativity. We create fake scarcity and competition. We dig in our heels and close down our hearts.

And we definitely don't move toward justice.

So as you head into this next workweek, I hope you take a moment to notice where binary thinking comes up in your life and your work. What’s changes when you replace that or with an and? What new space can you create? What else might be possible? 

—Sara 

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