VALUING WAYS OF KNOWING: honoring how and what we know

By Bridget Woodbury

It’s been a theme for me, this year, that my blog posts begin with not knowing how to start or what to say. 

This topic feels so big and expansive and I want to do justice to all of the people who have taught me things in out-of-the-ordinary ways. But, what do all of the people who taught me stuff have in common? Very little. 

Many of them shared my general curiosity. 

Many of them are engaged in creative sectors and aim to use their creativity and curiosity to benefit other people. 

But they’re all totally different. And this line of thinking isn’t actually centering ways of knowing. These are ways of learning. 

What is Knowing?

How do we know? I suppose it’s intuition — your brain working quickly with only what you’ve observed. There are obvious issues with trusting only what you’ve seen with your own eyes, especially in our increasingly siloed world, so how do we do a better job of just knowing stuff? I’d argue through the aforementioned creativity and curiosity. The more perspectives you can take in from people engaging in good faith, the better you get at interpreting what is before you. 

At Creative Generation, I am often afforded the opportunity to share what I know. I recently went to Seattle to work on a project using elements of the Adaptive Impact Planning process, which was borne from my inherent understanding that for-profit strategic planning was not a good fit for nonprofits — something I knew before I could articulate it. 

Read more about the process here.

I also had the opportunity to work with grantees on creating a visual representation of their grant processes using a journey map. This is a technique used in marketing and in user experience design to envision how someone will engage with what you make — and we just sort of knew that this was a valuable tool to let someone show US how they are already engaging with something already. Now my process is to make meaning of the visual data we aggregated - and my process will be derivative of another I wrote about last time on the blog. 

Uncovering More - A List

These processes also allow us to take in what our participants just know, but maybe don’t know they know. 

It can be hard to know which things in our brains have value in which circumstances — in my opinion, these are the best ways to get everyone the information they need or value:

  1. Engage in creativity and curiosity. 

  2. Share what we know, generously, when it seems relevant. 

  3. Listen when others feel called to share what they know. 

  4. Be open to letting other folks’ lived experiences, observations, and inherent knowledge shape our own.