How Might Social Media Drive Compassion, Curiosity And Courage?

In a week when political discord seems to be as loud as ever, social and mass media are often seen as part of the problem. But billionaire bridge builder Daniel Lubetzky says the opposite can be true. And so he hired Tom Fishman, a media veteran from MTV and Facebook to build Starts With Us, a movement to foster the daily habits of curiosity, compassion and courage.

Nell Derick Debevoise: What is Starts with Us?

Tom Fishman: Starts with Us is a growing movement to facilitate more constructive dialogue across lines of difference. Many of us are tired of the divisiveness in this country - 87% to be specific, according to our recent research. Further, we found that ⅔ of Americans say that this country is headed in the wrong direction in terms of how we treat each other.

We're taking a really unique approach to address those concerns, harnessing media and technology to elevate tips, behavioral nudges to disrupt reactive habits, and the stories of people connecting across divides we don’t really see in media to reach people at scale and catalyze a “me, we, world” theory of change. We believe that by changing individual behavior, we can change teams and communities, and that ripples out to change our society.

We see what we call “the 3Cs” – Curiosity, Compassion, and Courage – as the remedies for habituated divisiveness. And we’re building an engine of content and creating tools to help people build those skills and practice them daily in their personal, professional, and civic lives.

Derick Debevoise: How did you come to this work?

Fishman: My past work directly informs what we’re doing at Starts with Us. I came up in social media, specifically at MTV. I cut my teeth building scaled and engaged audiences. We would develop communities around our shows, and the artists and musicians that everyone cared about. We’d even engage audiences around shows from other networks, to be relevant in pop culture more broadly.

Then, at Facebook, I had a front row seat at a company that's driven by data and analytics to ship and iterate on products that reach billions of people. I was part of creating a new type of content, experimenting with interactive experiences that brought our community members together around video.

Now, I’m applying everything I've learned across media and technology to crystallize a community who wants to shift our culture forward from extreme divisiveness and to scale the daily practice of 3Cs.

Derick Debevoise: How does that background inform your work with Starts with Us?

Fishman: First of all, I know how iterative we have to be to engage and grow our community. We’re constantly learning from our community to design the content and products that entertain and move people while achieving our mission.

Secondly, I don’t think of us as squarely in the non-profit or social impact space – I operate Starts With Us knowing we’re competing with a lot of very high quality content and products for people’s attention! The research I mentioned earlier shows that there’s a market. Again, 87% of us are tired of the level of divisiveness in our country.

And we know there’s a gap between what we want to see in the world and our sense of personal accountability and agency. We polled people about how they see themselves, and how they see other people. While only 8% of us consider ourselves judgmental, our perceptions of others are far more negative than how we see ourselves. But odds are, we’re actually more similar to those other people than we think.

So like at any for-profit company, we see a market, we see an opportunity, and we look to develop products that have product-market fit and scale them. We think about the value proposition of the 3Cs. Not only do they help shift our culture forward and shore up democratic principles, they help us realize our individual potential in our own lives —that “sell” is crucial. Practicing the 3Cs makes us sharper thinkers, more powerful communicators, more effective negotiators, and better problem solvers. That makes us more effective in our relationships, our workplaces, and our communities.

I’m excited to see the early validation of the market for our content and tools, all built around habituating the 3Cs. In less than a year, our community will reach 1 million members (from 900,000 at last count). This includes experts who’ve joined as our Founding Partners, like José Andrés, Barbara Corcoran, will.i.am, Adam Grant, Bobbi Brown, Eboo Patel, Michele Gadsden-Williams and, of course, our founder Daniel Lubetzky.

Derick Debevoise: How exactly do the 3Cs help to reduce divisiveness?

Fishman: We acknowledge the systemic hurdles. From wealth inequality, racial inequity - the intersection of so many crises globally. But we’ll never be able to rectify the causes of those problems if we don’t change the assumptions we make about “the other '' and seek a new level of cooperation across lines of difference. We have to develop our willingness to be personally introspective, and also to be generous and more forgiving with other people.

But it's not just that we are willing to assume the good intentions of the other. Can we see someone with an opinion “on the other side” of ours and still have compassion for them? Get curious about how they formed that opinion? Have the courage to ask more about their position or their lives in general. A lot of us really resist that these days; we are so convinced of our own righteousness, or we apply extreme, blanket judgments and labels to other people.

However you voted in the last election, what are the odds that the seventy to eighty million people who didn’t vote the way you did are all, or even mostly, evil or unintelligent? We are habituated to act and judge as if that’s the case. The 3Cs challenge us to show humility, and give us the tools to argue passionately while maintaining shared humanity. Given the habits so many of us have picked up, it can be extremely uncomfortable and even threaten our identities to practice them. But it’s worth it.

Derick Debevoise: So in the short term, we’ve got midterms among other things. What do you hope to see during this election season and in the months to follow?

Fishman: We want to see the rule of law prevail. See people trusting in the results. We want to see people thinking critically about the news and results, and resisting the impulse to rage and demonize. And we want to see politicians setting an example, not sowing discord or riling up their bases through reckless conjecture or the spread of misinformation.

Our recent "87 Lincolns activation” called attention to all the forces in media and politics that are intentionally divisive, for profit and for power. We are working for more awareness of those forces. And we built an augmented reality filter to help.

We want to help people develop the muscles required to resist our basest impulses. Our evolutionary heritage leads to tribal defensiveness and a focus on the negative and threats. But those approaches aren’t what we need in the world we say we want to live in today. And when we are intentional, we can get over what seem like obvious reactions. Like this mother did, by forgiving her son’s drug dealer.

So we’re excited about the potential for more compassion, curiosity, and courage in these midterms. And not long after that, in the schools, universities, and workplaces who are using our tools to help build the 3Cs.

Derick Debevoise: I hear your evolutionary perspective. But I’ve also studied physics. Inertia says that we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing. Why are you hopeful about the potential for change now?

Fishman: Because like many paradigm shifts, practicing the 3Cs is the path to success today. Managers who are compassionate, curious, and courageous will thrive in today’s complex workplaces. Navigating conflict and cooperation in our offices, homes and communities requires exactly these skills.

And the need to navigate those dynamics cuts across demographic, economic, generational and psychographic factors. Managers, parents, leaders, investors, students, elders - we can all use the same approach to get out of this gridlock we’ve arrived at and see immediate personal value from the results.

The good news is that the majority of Americans agree on the values we believe are the way forward. We’re all the proverbial boiling frog right now, so we need a pathway out isn't just inspirational but that's actionable. And that’s what you can expect from Starts with Us in the form of content, tools, and community going forward.

Email me for the full results of this research, or for a worksheet to build purposeful habits (like Compassion, Curiosity, and Courage).