“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you”- Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Kerrin Mitchell

Automatic Summary

Building Social Movements and Leading with Influence: Learning from Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In today's post, we are taking a leaf from the life of the late Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who skillfully led with influence. In her illustrious career, she demonstrated notable strategies for leading social movements and inspiring change. The focus of this post addresses the importance of building attunement, resolving conflicts, paying attention to language, timing and sequencing, and more. So let's dive in.

The Art of Building Relevance in Social Movements

When you're striving to make a significant change, building relevance is crucial. Ginsburg was a master at making ideas relevant and important to people on all sides. She was frequently successful in bridging gaps and facilitating understanding, to foster agreement and acceptance.

Part of her strategy involved illustrating situations where both men and women were affected by gender inequality. By demonstrating that inequitable outcomes were detrimental to everyone, she created relatability and spurred commitment to change.

With relevance and responsiveness, you can gain quicker traction and deal with fewer conflicts.

Resolving Gaps and Conflicts

A social movement is bound to encounter conflicts and gaps. Therefore, it is crucial to have a system in place to address such disputes. This requires a robust structure wherein relationships and outcomes are prioritized.

Ginsburg's approach capitalized on resolving conflict and fostering collaboration. She recognized that each dispute presented an opportunity for improvement and built structures aimed at perpetuating cooperation. These aspects contribute heavily to a successful movement.

Language, Timing, and Sequencing: Key Ingredients for Influence

Truth Bader Ginsburg understood the power of language. She maintained meticulous control over her words to ensure radical clarity whether she was writing for a majority or dissent opinion. Not just language, Ginsburg emphasized timing and sequencing. She knew the importance of building a case over time and choosing the right moment to push forward.

For instance, during the Roe vs. Wade legislation, she rooted for patience knowing that rushing might polarize the supporter base. Ginsburg's foresight was a testament to her brilliant leadership.

The Human Element and Building a Legacy

One crucial aspect of leading a movement is being able to connect with people on a personal level. Ginsburg's strategic approach involved placing importance on the human endeavor and addressing common problems that affected her audience. Technology particularly plays a role in amplifying stories and resounding with the audience on a personal level.

In Ginsburg's words, the fight for change is a sequential journey marked by intentional steps. She encouraged the culture of working towards tomorrow, stating that “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

At the end of the day, leading a social movement and inspiring change is about showing up for the world. The fight often involves taking one tactical step at a time and sometimes being just a part of the sequence. But these small steps make a big difference. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's life and work are a testament to that belief.


Video Transcription

Well, let's go ahead and get started. Um I'm Corinne Mitchell. It's so nice to meet you all. Um I am uh one of the founders of Flux, I run a company that works with the nonprofit.The way I like to kind of um pitch it is the, the idea of, you know, there's structures and technologies in the back end of um making sure that monies get to the right place to the right people and understanding the impact of where those monies go. So we've been doing that for about 10 years and my presentation day isn't as much on the technology side even though I know this is women in tech, but it's about influence and it's about leading people how to enroll essentially groups of individuals, um movements, things of that nature and really bring forward something powerful at the end of it.

And I do that um through my girl Ruth because Ruth Bader Ginsburg to me was just a hero and I know she is for many people. So I don't stand alone there, but I did want to sort of bring a lens in because I think in some fun ways you know, there are elements of her that I've brought through my 12 year career at flux and my, you know, 25 year career overall. Um So I thought it'd be kind of fun to sort of place that structure in a way um position to sort of lead us through a series of maybe ideas that might help you. Um So, uh yeah, so let's kind of get started. Um I think you guys can see my screen. Um So I'm just gonna go ahead and ask that if there's ever any places where you have uh challenges with technical stuff, just put it in the chat. I'll keep my eye on that, but we'll go ahead and just dive right on it. And so little bit en route. So in 2015, our late great Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave a talk at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard um where she was being honored um for her leading contributions, obviously in gender equality, women's rights, the movement and such.

And she stated simply and clearly fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you. And I think what's really compelling is obviously true leaders. You know, they draw people in, with their passion, they, they draw people in their authenticity. You can't keep your eyes off of them. They come in all forms and sizes. Ruth was not a, not a large lady and not, and, and and in her stature, quite small, she held, she was actually very quiet, very withdrawn, but in that she held presence for who she was, what she did and she moved us to action. So the cool part about leadership that I've always thought was interesting. And I've learned that over the years that less is kind of more sometimes is that, you know, she can uh sorry, people can provide as leaders, insights and lessons that you don't expect. Um RBG for me provided a series of lessons that I thought were really interesting, that kind of invited me to understand my deeper purpose, what I was doing. Um And of course, there, there is a uh vacuum going on right outside of my door. I hope it to go away in a moment, apologies if you can hear that.

Um So anyway, so RBG insights, lessons, what she brought to us was really um an opportunity to sort of rethink some of the ways that maybe we come forward and enroll people in what we do, how to bring people in from various different sides that may be conflicting and may have to compromise, that may all have varying sort of structures but found common denominators to really ground themselves in the work that she was moving forward in her vision.

So when we talk about sort of this idea of, you know, really, how do people in movement, social movement specifically is where I tend to focus really pull forward and, and roll folks. I like to look at the past and in that, I mean, there are a number of events that come forward in 19, you know, 39 we had the Red Cross show up in the middle of World War Two and they started doing, uh emergency message services. Um, throughout, I think something like 27 million packages were sent through a volunteer army. The civilians stepped up, they enrolled folks who were previously not engaged in some of those aspects and said, how do you step up? How do you get called into action? In 1962 Rachel Carlson wrote and published The Silent Spring. This best seller became the basis of, of the alarm bells that went off around the, the potential dangers, the consequences of widespread, you know, pesticide use. Um and it became environmental consciousness that eventually started to create things like Earth Day. Um In obviously 2001, we have 911, we have Deepwater Horizon. I mean, we have COVID um clearly and even today, to be honest, we have 13 mass shootings that occurred over the past weekend.

And these are all places where we have an event or something that causes us to move to action that we need to become the person we wanted to be to step into a role where we're calling forward action. We look at these things in a lens to say, well, in each one of these events or perhaps for your company, for what you do for what you believe in the momentum you're building, you know, the, the activism you're proving, you know, you have to think through questions of, of what moves you to action.

Um Why did we stand up in the cases of many of these things on the right and protest to what end, what woke us up, what caused the change? These are all questions when I think about it's not just informing us on what made us authentic to what we cared about, but really how do we do it better next time or how do we continue a movement to make it real and continue to lead? So a lot of these triggered new ways of thinking again, Earth Day coming out of the Silent Spring papers, things of that nature and these are the very types of human problems that have been created that we want to build and champion. And in the case of technology, oftentimes technology is a thing that can help solve a lot of human problems, but you have to do it in a way that is compelling back to our girl Ruth. You have to do it in a way that if you're starting something from scratch, how can we bring forward an activation so that we're doing it in a way that really compels people to understand what we're trying to accomplish. And we're not just pushing things at them into deaf ears or into a place where they're not ready to hear it.

So, what I want to do is kind of give three different little um opportunities for us to come forward and maybe talk about how to kick off building structure for these types of movements. Again, I come from it with a philanthropic lens, feel free to rebrand it in whatever way is best for you. But when we talk about this idea of building relevance to create change, um Let me give you of course an example of what Ruth did. So Ruth worked to make ideas relevant um and important to the very people that she needed to have, accept them. People needed to know of course how those changes that she was projecting, of course, on gender equality were going to affect them. But what was important is is that they had to make the change. So what she did was actually build attunement to her ecosystem. She harmonized both sides of the equation and in the case of gender equality for her around a common understanding. So here's some examples of how she did that and then we'll talk a bit about a structure that I think could be helpful. She did this by showing places where men and women alike were receiving inequitable outcomes and gender equality. So for example, as a means to demonstrate that they're similar and should be treated as such, she did things like um come into um the uh paternity leave or paternal leave structure and say, look, a man who is a caretaker at home, can should and can receive the same treatment that a woman has.

And by doing that, she was diffusing some of the structures that had oftentimes been female based, but doing so and creating equality in ways of showing again a two in of a system around a common belief. So in my experience, how to build a tune and how to build relevancy can come sort of looking at the entire ecosystem and there's a document or rather a structure that I once was um taught um at Stanford. And it was actually this really interesting, very basic, almost like, like, like funny art, like it looked like goofy to me, but it stuck with me all through flux and it gave me an ability to say, how do I build and bolster, you know, an equation equation of, of work that ranges from, you know, things like, you know, being able to say if my purpose is X, how do I align the culture, the structure, the portfolio, all of those around this harmonious idea of here's what I'm trying to do.

So the idea here is that each leader, as we look at things um inside of their organization, their movement would be or even if I'm Ruth, it's the idea that we have to have all aspects of the organization working together. So if there's something that does not have relevance to. For example, if your um metrics or um your messaging or your organization structure are set up differently than your vision is talking about, then that's going to be something that comes up in an incongruent way and minimizes your ability to influence because it will seem like a break to other people.

An example of how I've seen this play out in my industry is that flux. We are a um you know, we have this benefit of being a uh working in an industry that is cooper, a cooper game economy. The value of that is that everyone works together. All boats rise together in philanthropy. If one person is better better, there's no, there's no competitive nature. What we do have though is is that is something that intrinsically calls to everyone who's a part of the industry. So when we were building the company, when we are building the platform, we were building our, our R and D and our road map, this diagram, the structure of a tuning to our ecosystem was incredibly important. And we had to pull through that cooper economy, that collaborative and collective lens to make sure that when we built our road map that it's something that if we built it for one person, we built it for everyone. So there was really interesting ways that when I thought through how to make sure that you're coming across as a trusted resource who understands authentically what's going on and is taken into account all aspects of the ecosystem that you're doing that across the entire structure, building relevance and responsiveness means that it will go quicker and you'll find less conflict and compromise being made because everyone's working on the same understanding.

And I think that's something that was very authentic to me that I thought, well, this is great because then we can just be authentic to our, our culture. And for me personally, the reason I got into this was to be able to move cooperatively forward. Again, all boats rise together. So this idea of being able to reflect back who I was in the process and create a structure that then had that perm. Um So rather than the, it permeated all aspects of who we were was really important to me. So when you reflect back and I I offer this to you as something that might be, you know, something worth considering when you're trying to fight for something and enroll people in leadership. Look at all these aspects, ideation, environment, vision, execution, performance. These are all places where again, you have to be able to attune it to the same structure to the same approach. Ruth did that brilliantly and what she also did that was very brilliant because Ruth is incredible, but she also identified places where there were gaps and there is always going to be a gap and structurally again, when we're talking about leading that gap structure has to have a, has to have a way for you to be able to collaborate and resolve conflict, resolve a way to be able to move through those gaps.

So again, this is a second sort of structure that I've oftentimes felt incredibly important. A lot of lawyers use this by the way. Um And it's a way to really understand when you have gaps. How do you bring that through part of it is in understanding again, where you fight, where you don't, where you collaborate, where you avoid is understanding all those gaps that you just saw in the previous diagram and being able to get to a point where you can say here are the things that I need to resolve to build congruity across my structure.

And I think the other thing to note is that as you're looking at things from the perspective of of course, resolving conflict or collaborating, whichever lens you want to bring it into the idea about where your outcomes are and knowing what to fight for is probably the most important thing.

And then deciding secondarily, does that relationship matter or not, this will basically give you a good structure to work with that. Now, when you're going in and trying to build a relationship, language matters and ruth of all people, of course, knows that her whole, she's a beautiful writer, obviously, but she knew that words carry different meanings for every reader and she needed to ensure radical clarity.

So whether she was writing for a majority opinion or a dissent opinion, she was relentless in her change in language and it was a change in consciousness that she was trying to push. So being aware that how you show up for one thing in language or notes or how you do this is how you show up for everything. It all has to be meticulously managed. That's my personal belief, but obviously, um informed by people like Ruth who I think were masters at that. And so she was very focused in her path of what um you know, impossibly deliberate language she was using. So things like this, for example, come up because when we start to look at places where um again, going back to the idea of how to attune ourselves, you know, she knew she was up against. Honestly, I'm, I'm gonna bring up Roe versus Wade because it's very real right now. But she was very aware that Roe versus Wade at the time that was brought forward the language and the kind of structures and the polarization that people felt was so strong. And she was aware that not only was the language important that she was choosing, but the timing and the sequence of it was also important, the power of patients to realize you have to build your case over time to be able to get to a point where you're able to compromise or able to push through a structure that may be really um uh you know, intrusive to other people.

So I think it's not just a combination of language, it's a combination of timing and sequencing that oftentimes brings an ability to resolve conflict and you have to respect both. Um And I think that's a really important thing because I remember at the time that Roe versus Wade passed, she said it's too soon, it's too soon. And very far left, Democrats were very concerned that she was, you know, not forwarding the legislation that she wanted. But her point was if you do it too soon, it will polarize people even more and to some degree, we're kind of seeing that today, but to the same degree, it is amazing that what she did and what she put together, build the basis for this big transformation that I think is really an important movement that she built over time with the sequence of events that all built over the course of her career to legislation like that.

So again, these are things where I think you have, you know, tools available to you, to really think that through, for me, I felt that the, this sort of idea of taking this into the philanthropic industry, you know, we have this desire right now to really build a collective, a collective way to say as a nonprofit, I should be able to go to one place.

I should be able to put in my information. I should be able to do this once, not 25 times for every grant I'm applying to and every funder I have, but be able to start to change the way that we look at sharing information, who owns it. Um How do you, how do you manage impact? What does that mean? So it's really interesting is what we have to do right now in philanthropy is create common denominators, common applications, words, logics benefit things like that, that educate not just the nonprofits on how to speak about themselves, but get the funders to understand that they don't need to have necessarily that unique snowflake for every one of the things they're doing, but they get an opportunity to be able to actually come in and say as a collective, let's all meet each other in a place where we are honoring the ecosystem that cooper game that we are all in.

So when I think through ways to build collaboration and build and resolve com sorry, build collaboration, resolve conflict. You know, it comes through a couple of things like I said, common denominators, but also the other thing to also to consider is also stories, you know, when we talk about the stories that we are a part of, you know, don't get me wrong like I love data. Um And I love all those things where um you know, we can just look at data and say this is making progress. But when we talk about stories, you know, we get this alignment of people around that human problem. And I think that's the thing that when the power of storytelling carries that critical context that improves alignment um between in my case, foundations and nonprofits. But it also gives scale because to be honest stories, they go places stories become opportunities for us to take one story and make it 10,000. And technology's role in that is to actually amplify the stories that are being defined in this case, my case by the nonprofits. And that's also where you get people like RBG who I obviously did not know, wish I did. But I tell the oral stories, like nobody's, I mean, like everyone in my life knows that I tell RBG stories constantly. I just do. But they, they resonate.

And I think that's saying when we talk about all these things in technology that, that can exist and should exist. Like this is something where I think technology helps to create common denominator. It helps to tell the human story, it helps to resolve human problems. And I think we have to remember that because our solutions that we put forward have to get back to that commitment to the human endeavor. And I, I guess I say that and it's so oofy but like it is something that matters and it's something that when you're enrolling people, they're people at the end of the day. So you have to, you have to call into their humanity. So as you build technology, as you build a company, as you build a movement, remind yourself how to do that. By basically speaking to the common denominator, locate the gaps and really look at the places to say, how do I resolve those again, to be able to bring those parties together? And again, Ruth freaking that woman, she did it. She always built something that was so her legacy exists because she was able to take a look at the convictions and the values that were important and what needed to persist. Um She looked at saying, we need to look forward and create that next round of leaders.

Um You know, in the form of, I mean, her granddaughter is incredible too. I mean, it's just that who is going to lead next? That's the big question. So when we talk about RBG and again, you know, she has great quotes all over the internet, you can go pull them up, they're on mugs everywhere. But this, this idea that RBG said, how do we create a legacy? She said, dissent, speak to a future age, the greatest dissents issues as she said, come from court opinions that gradually become the dominant view. And so that's the dissenter's hope. She said this is that we are writing for today. We are ready, not for today but for tomorrow.

So remember that and I think over time, we shift from those interventions to innovations. The entry points become more diverse that oral tradition picks up attitudes, become more humble and inclusive and all of those tactics become more sophisticated as we go on. So I think that's something we talk about the relationships of social leaders from coordinations to peers, to collaboration. These are all things that we have to be able to, um you know, we, we have to be able to understand that it is again a sequence of events that we're putting in emotion and it actually has the humbleness to assume that we are taking just one of those many roles. So that's the other thing to notice. You might just be one of the parts of the sequence, but it is an important part. So real change and during change happens one step at a time, that's our girl Ruth Mantra. We're looking to the leaders to tomorrow, obviously to do that. And we're surprised, of course, by always break out people like, you know, the Amanda Gorman's and all these amazing people that are coming to the surface um to change the world. But I think here, obviously you guys today are a huge part of that. So I just, I commend you all for being here in the big and small ways that you show up for the world. The ones you know about the ones you don't know about.

These are always that, you know, you can take your fight or your, you know, your influences really build something. So I, I give these to you today and just say, you know, I hope they're helpful. I hope it's interesting. Um I found use in them in the way that I run our company. But um I'm always open to hearing, you know, people's stories. So please reach out to me if there's anything that I can do. Um my uh email is Karin K er Rim at Flux fluxx dot IO. So I look forward to hearing from you all. Thank you so much and um good luck.