Matt BernhardI was talking to a friend the other day who is involved in an advocacy space. They were lamenting the fact that their community has a hard time celebrating its wins, I.e. when they advance their policy goal forward in a big way.
I think this has a lot to do with purism. Many members of this community have specialties, and if a policy related to their specialty gets implemented, often times (okay, pretty much always), it’s never good enough.
Whether that’s because the policy is actually imperfect, or because they disagree with the people actually implementing it, or whatever, they can’t accept that the ball got pushed a little bit closer to the goal. Maybe not in a straight line, but you get my point.
The thing is: that’s the only way the ball ever gets pushed forward. You have to accept that maybe you aren’t going to get every thing you want, or maybe you will but later you’ll realize that the thing you wanted has flaws. This stuff is hard! Institutional change is slow and takes a ton of effort and focus. And it’s a quintessentially human process. In reality, it’s a miracle the ball goes forward at all!
I think in my (admittedly limited) experience getting things done, building cool tech that advances policy goals that I have (and I think are shared by many folks whom I’m talking about here), was made 1000x easier as soon as I realized I had to compromise the thing I wanted to move the ball.
And most importantly, compromising on my goal is not the same thing as compromising my integrity or my beliefs about what I want the world to look like. I still want those things! But I also want to build a community of people who want those things too, and no community is ever unanimous (and if they are, that’s called a cult).
*Maybe* it’s possible to get what you want done without this, but at best it will take a lot longer and you won’t win many friends to your cause. And also, diversity of perspectives is crucial to understanding the problems you’re working on. You want to advance a policy goal without feeling like there was something you missed and would have done differently had you known about it? Get more eyes on the problem!
But you cannot do that if there is only “one true way” to do what you’re trying to do. So yeah, celebrate the wins, even when they’re imperfect, and realize everything is imperfect. Progress is a miracle made by lots of people applying a net force. They don’t all have to push in the same direction to go somewhere.