The following is not a blogpost, but rather a direct copy of the text from a post I made on Linkedin today. I have an uneasy relationship with Linkedin at the best of times. I regularly wonder if it is worth being there for a scientist. But then I think about the young people and the people seeking entry points into careers who make their way onto that place to try to find a community of practice. At any rate I am trying to save my own words more thoughtfully to spaces that feel like mine. As long as I'm somewhere, this is what I stand for.
It can feel foolish to be on a platform like this right now. But yesterday I was talking to a friend who is a devoted educator about the office hours he held, the way they filled up with students seeking safety and support this week. It made me remember that people look for connection everywhere. My very first substantial research — my dissertation — was about the choice to disclose scary things about ourselves to others. But it was less about who we are and more about the situations that let us be someone new, someone who shares. Disclosure is critical because it lets us access vital needs: help, support, belonging. I thought about the students, junior colleagues, and anyone who might be out there looking to leadership in tech right now and wondering what "we" think.
Let me say then, to whoever needs to hear it, what I hope is already obvious based on my words out here, my published work, my joy in my own many treasured complex identities and my position in the world as a psychologist who studies human needs. I will always and forever keep fighting for a world of psychological safety, for diversity and progress towards equity in tech, for the future. In my research I measure things like sense of belonging on software teams, and equity gaps in access to rapidly-emerging technology, and the direct causal connection that our psychological needs and safer, more affirming environments have to our innovation and problem-solving.
These are perennial topics, and perennial struggles, and nothing about getting to that version of the world is easy. You’re not wrong if you often feel overwhelmed and exhausted. Our industry has been barreling with sometimes horrifying enthusiasm into what scientists who study cultures have called a “chilly climate” for people who care about things like this, and the chill can feel bone-deep, the contraction against the evidence and stories of human needs and against our human hearts. But you're not alone. These needs always matter, and they will continue to matter, and no backlash, noise or hostility in tech toward these topics and towards human thriving and diversity will ever change that reality. Human community is what truly creates societal innovation on a planet-wide scale, not vicious competition.
I also study agency and change. Change is often a bad word around here in the context of workplaces, but I don’t mean the change that is “change management” and you (us) just gripping on to the rollercoaster as best you can. I mean change in the way that psychologists understand change: mighty. Courageous. Against the odds. Ferocious. Taking the small slivers that we glimpse of a different future and building adaptive, recursively nurturing, brilliant strategies around them until we are that future. That is intervention science, and intervention science is forever about hope. I have that hope. I want to affirm that hope for you right now. Maybe someday you will be the person affirming hope for me.