Vulnerability

By the time I walked into dinner at Din Tai Fung last Thursday, I was admittedly more than a little frazzled. I found myself navigating a firehose of personal and professional emotions: visiting Seattle for the first time (the site of my remote MLIS degree) as an Information Architect (the position I dreamed about while juggling grad school and full-time employment) to attend IAC2024 (a major professional conference that my employer was sponsoring). The experience was incredible and also more than a little exhausting. Before heading out to dinner that night, I had stuck around the conference venue for a little while to quickly congratulate my colleagues Erik Lee and Sherrard Glaittli on successful turns at the speakers’ podium, so I ended up arriving after the rest of the party had already been seated. I walked in and saw that not only would I be dining with some of the “big names” of information architecture, including Rachel A. Price (my mentor and the person who helped facilitate the invite), Dana Bublitz , Sarah Barrett , Dan Brown , and James Melzer , but also that I would be using chopsticks, utensils I have never been very good at using and have not attempted in well over a decade. So I felt a little out of place. I felt nervous. I felt vulnerable.

Fortunately, I’m an information architect who worked in libraries for almost a decade, so I have some solid tools to navigate those feelings. One of the most foundational ideas around library reference work is that asking questions is a discomfitingly vulnerable experience, often for both the patron as well as the reference provider. Asking any question–let alone the “right” question–is deceptively difficult, and the value of solving information problems often comes from a collaborative and iterative process rather than a perfect one. Many people have already written quite eloquently on what our collective field learned about itself through the theme of AI at the conference, and I would chime in to say that I walked away thinking about the productive vulnerability I saw on display while wrestling with this particular information problem.

Over and over, I heard speakers and attendees articulate the ways in which our work can cause us discomfort: from navigating workplace politics to managing complex artifacts to even standing up in front of a group to explain why IA work is valuable. Some of the speakers even had to admit that they weren’t able to find the closure on their topic they originally intended (another foundational value of library reference work, by the way). I have spent most of my professional life working to make patrons/clients/stakeholders feel like they can show me the kind of vulnerability that asking a question usually demands. This conference reminded me that I need to work just as hard to normalize feeling that kind of vulnerability myself if I’m going to continue to grow in my career.

One of my favorite tools to navigate that feeling is admitting it. Before I left on this trip, I hyped myself up to step outside of my comfort zone and really experience as much as Seattle could offer me during my big adventure. In the spirit of vulnerability, here are some assorted experiences where admitting discomfort in the moment paid off:

• My former iSchool classmate and current colleague Sydney Peterson gave me a tour of some of the most famous Seattle landmarks, including Pike Place Market, the first Starbucks, and Pier 66. Unfortunately, I happened to be wearing new heels and not comfy boots during this excursion. Sydney was very accommodating when I admitted my feet were crying uncle and we got to experience an enriching bus trip because of it!
• Here’s another confession: this conference is not the only major-ish life event I’ve navigated this year. In the past 6 months, I’ve moved from Southern California back to the Portland metro area, left behind the library career I’ve been building for my entire adult life, and started a new job at Factor. As I mentioned earlier: incredible but exhausting. I had my first experience as a Factor facilitator when I ran a card sort/discussion activity with Sherrard at our company retreat on Wednesday of conference week, and knew that I needed to engage in a little bit of transparent design and admit I felt a little intimidated. Everyone was incredibly gracious about it and I really think it made the activity a better experience.
• I divulged that I was both a novice wine and seafood consumer one night at dinner with some Factor folks. Luckily, I was with experts in these areas and I walked away from that evening feeling very cosmopolitan. I remain grateful for my oys-tour of oysters from a real shellfish farmer (thanks, Bram Wessel !) or the Chablis I memorably described as tasting like “licking a used firework.” (thanks, Bob Kasenchak !)

And so we finally come back to that dinner at Din Tai Fung, the moment of vulnerability that kicked off this piece. I did indeed survive it by admitting my lack of confidence in my skills, and it turns out I was not the only one at the table who needed Rachel’s help to mix my soy sauce with my ginger. It was a great ice breaker! Those big names who intimidated me at the beginning of the meal turned out to be perfectly lovely people who laughed at my corny jokes. And I didn’t even drop anything with my chopsticks.