Last month, at Leadership Now, I had the chance to sit in discussion with John Inazu, and the conversation is one that I continue to replay in my mind. John is a legal scholar and author who thinks carefully about how we live and work across deep difference and about how we navigate those differences when they become disagreements that can feel like a true fracture in how we see one another.
One idea in particular stayed with me: the difference between confidence and certainty. John argued that when we hold our deepest convictions with confidence, rooted in trust rather than the need to be unassailably right, we become less anxious in the face of difference. We are able to partner more generously, take more risks, and stay in relationship even when we disagree. Certainty, on the other hand, tends to turn disagreement into threat.
That resonates with something I've been reflecting on more broadly. We live and work in communities shaped by an enormous range of values — some grounded in religious tradition, some in secular frameworks, some in both. I like to say, “We all believe in something!” Across that range, those who hold to specific faith traditions and those who don’t are often animated by the same underlying commitments and values: love of neighbor, care for those who are struggling, a sense of being responsible to and not just for our community. Whether that comes from a sacred text, a love of the planet, a deeply held sense of justice, or the memory of what it felt like to be helped by a stranger, it's often pointing in the same direction.
And while this pluralism yields incredible benefits, it requires navigating difference as part of the work, not a detour from it. I’ve been exploring these ideas in my Bridge-Building Leadership series written for nonprofit leaders, but I want to expand the conversation for everyone here because each of us is navigating more difference these days than we historically have. Not all differences are the same depth and knowing which kind you are navigating matters. I think of it in four levels:
- Norms and practices are the most navigable. These are differences in timelines, accountability structures, and decision-making that create friction but yield to relationship and mutual understanding.
- Values require more. When organizations share a commitment to the same community but disagree about what it needs, or whose voice should shape the solution, honest conversation about what each party believes, and why, is the only way through.
- Ideology is harder still. Differences about the role of government, the causes of poverty, or individual responsibility versus systemic change are shaped by deep convictions about how the world works. Navigating them well requires what John was describing: earnest curiosity, the ability to hold your convictions without weaponizing them.
- Worldview is the deepest terrain. These differences — about human nature, the source of dignity, the ground of moral obligation — aren't resolved by finding common values. They require the willingness (when you are safe and able to do so in a healthy way) to be in real relationship with someone whose most fundamental assumptions differ from your own, and to build from shared commitment to people rather than shared metaphysics.
Our best work begins when we can name the level in which we are operating. John put it plainly: pluralism is simply a fact of the world. We do not get to choose whether we live or work alongside those who agree with us, but we do get to choose the posture we bring to it.
The nonprofit sector is uniquely positioned to model this. We are regularly invited into rooms where people don't agree, where the stakes are real, and where showing up is itself a form of commitment. The leaders I most admire in this work have learned to hold conviction and relationship at the same time. They do this because they understand that staying at the table is part of what faithfulness to the work requires. That kind of leadership is what I hope we're building together, and it is what I'll keep writing toward this year.
Romanita Hairston
Chief Executive Officer