Month: January 2025

Introduction

When I started this blog, I was driven by the question of why Disability Inclusion was so hard. I was a founding member of my department’s Disability Employee Network in July 2010 and when I became its chair in November 2016 membership had dwindled because not a lot of progress had been made. Members were frustrated. It seemed everyone agreed that our cause was just, but change had been moving at glacial pace [though this seems like a vulnerable metaphor these days]. There was also no doubting the goodwill and good intent of most of our colleagues.

This post follows on from the last one because it seems evident that reading in evolutionary anthropology and psychology and the biology of the roots of our behaviour is offering me more insight into why Disability Inclusion hard to do effectively than sources on organisational psychology and DEI.

There is a common message these days that staff in organisations are under increasing time pressure, so volunteers leading inclusion ERGs are struggling to find the time they need to do the work they want. The question I have framed is, “What is the most effective way of utilising the time available toward achieving the inclusion outcomes desired?”

Below I want to further refine earlier arguments.

What we need to figure out

The aspiration for inclusion in an organisation must begin with getting as many people involved in achieving this goal onto the same page. Critically this means that the following people should agree that they are stakeholders in common:

1. The ERG’s leadership.
2. The organisation’s Executive Leadership Team.
3. The organisation’s HR branch, especially its DEI team.
4. The ERG’s executive sponsors and Champions.

Organisations seek to achieve shared visions via policies and strategies. But agreement between all stakeholders tends to be implicit and hierarchical rather than explicit and in common. This work well enough with BAU, but the inclusion challenges that ERGs engage in isn’t BAU. ERGs and their mission are novel developments. They are not fully integrated into an organisation’s functions simply because volunteers aren’t normally used to solve organisational problems. They are more like social or sports clubs. Only in this case they are not.

So, a critically important question is, “What is the organisation’s problem that an ERG is a response to?” The answer will be something like – The organisation has a duty, responsibility or need to foster inclusion. The shape of the answer will depend on the nature of the organisation – public service, for profit or not for profit.

The next question is – Why does the organisation need an ERG as part of the solution? The question that naturally follows on is – How can an ERG be a highly effective partner in achieving the objective?

Asking and answering these questions will generate some uncomfortable insights. These are unavoidable, but their value will be diluted if the stakeholders do not share the process of asking and answering. One great problem with a hierarchical approach to doing this is what the least powerful members of a hierarchy say is modified in its transmission to the most powerful. Stakeholders on equal footing get to share unfiltered insights. This is critical in laying the foundation for a shared understanding.

Organisations have the right and power to withdraw their sanctioning of an ERG’s existence, or to fully embrace it as a partner in solving the problem. Between such options is a tepid shadow land that can border on being unintentionally abusive to ERGs and its volunteer leads.

The goal of inclusion has a long arc

Western English-speaking communities have been successful in incorporating people from diverse ethnicities and cultures over the past 75 years. As well, they have progressed the inclusion and equity of groups previously significantly disadvantaged. I am not suggesting this progress is sufficient, only that relative to the past few thousand years it is significant. I can’t comment on other cultures because I don’t have intimate knowledge of them.

We have inclusion ERGs now precisely because there is widespread understanding that this is a path we should continue to follow. This is aided by legislation and commitment to a range of UN conventions. We have been doing hard inclusion work for decades as a culture or a community – and steady success has been achieved. The general widespread goodwill to embrace diversity is well-attested to.

So, what’s the problem now?

There’s a bottleneck. Our capacity to adapt has run up hard against hardwired reflexes. It’s not that we can’t readily adjust our behaviour without considerable cognitive effort – just that we often under-estimate the effort required and the complexities in making desired change happen. 

We have a mismatch between what our reflexes are finely attuned to and what our environment is. As I have noted previously our stone-age minds are not suited to space-age reality. Two factors drive this mismatch. One is the relative novelty of our increasingly pervasive large complex, diverse, and pluralistic communities full of people who would have readily triggered exclusion reflexes previously [and may still do so now]. The second is the existence of large organisations who are expected to reflect the composition of the communities in which they operate or which they represent.

These organisations are expected to comply with legislation that prohibits exclusion and discrimination. And in the case of public service organisations there is the additional policy demand to be representative of the community. This is a novel scenario. It is an experiment that we are still tinkering with and fine tuning.

All this places organisational workplaces under novel pressure to respond to imperatives to go against our personal reflexes to exclude and discriminate. For many, adapting to this demand conforms with personal values, but that doesn’t necessarily mean such adaptation will be easy or swift. Others will preserve their reflexes for personal or cultural [including religious] reasons. 

Not everyone agrees that inclusion in general is a good thing. They may agree that some should be included, but not all. How that is managed within an organisational culture varies. And among those readily disposed to be inclusive their responses will be on a spectrum – from highly motivated to weakly motivated – as well as widely inclusive to narrowly inclusive. This spectrum reflects the degree of effort [cognitive, intellectual and emotional] individuals must expend to behave in ways that meet the objectives of inclusion stakeholders. It also reflects the personal, cultural, and religious values that sustain individuals in their families and communities.

While we are moving towards greater inclusiveness as a culture that change arises from many factors – demands for equity and inclusion at a cultural level, legislation, policies and their strategies, attitudes expressed in workplaces, the influence of senior organisational leaders, and ERGs. These combine messily but positively.

Conclusion

Evolutionary psychology and anthropology tell us something important. Reflexes to be biased or exclusive live in all of us because they were once [and still are] vital for our survival and wellbeing. They are the foundations of our behaviour. But the reality in which we must survive and thrive has changed hugely and rapidly over the past few centuries, and like any environmental change demands, we must adapt our behaviour to match. 

Workplaces are where we are under additional pressure to consciously manage when we are free to go with our reflexes on a personal level and we have an obligation to modify them, so our behaviour is appropriate to our work-related context. It’s not a case of whether an act of bias or exclusion is good or bad, but whether it is appropriate in the context of the expectations and obligations of our workplaces.

The fact that we have legislation and policies to guide inclusion is a significant environmental change – and something we are expected to adapt to. That means there will be an ongoing uneven response to that adaptive pressure – from resistance to struggling with the cognitive effort – to enthusiastic embrace. ERGs, DEI staff and other advocates and supporters of inclusion reflect one extreme of the spectrum of response – the most enthusiastic. They will be most effective when they interpret the unevenness of the response from others with insight and respond with kindness and patience. 

Organisations will be more effective in fostering a culture of inclusion in their workforce when the key stakeholders have a shared understanding of the challenge and an agreed approach to achieving the goals of collaborative action.

Introduction

I am finding Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson an immensely useful read. Having a theory about exclusion/inclusion is essential if we want to perform well as change agents in the Diversity Equity & Inclusion [DEI] space. And whether that theory is based upon our beliefs or upon the best science and thinking we can find matters a great deal.

I started reading intensively in DEI in July 2021 after I quit fulltime work. I wanted to catch up on what I hadn’t time for in the past 5 years. I was initially excited, and then progressively disappointed as I read more about what wasn’t working. At the back of my mind, I had a lingering sense of the frustration I felt about the resistance I had encountered as a disability ERG lead.

I was in fact very successful, but that was down to me listening to Kate Nash, the founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. She was the keynote speaker at the 2018 Australian Network on Disability Annual National Conference and introduced me to the idea of Networkology. Kate radically transformed my performance as an ERG lead. There was a discipline to running a network. It was informed by data and critical knowledge. It was a professional skillset.

But the more I researched the more it was apparent that there was more data and knowledge that could inform our understanding of the dynamics of how workplaces change or evolve. This is critical knowledge for a professional change agent.

ERGs are operated by volunteers who have a passion for their cause, but its rare that what they do is understood as a professional level role. This is an unfortunate legacy which persists in devaluing the challenges ERGs undertake.

Organisational change

There are very well-paid professionals who help organisations adapt to the constantly changing world they operate in. My stepdaughter is one. There are many books on that theme and there are courses as well. Adapting to changing markets, technologies, and cultural expectations is a complex and difficult challenge. There’s a lot of research devoted to the theme, and some of it embraces DEI.

But it is also fair to say that making workplace cultures less biased and more inclusive is rarely treated as having the same level of complexity and difficulty as other change themes. Having volunteer ERGs reinforces that illusion. If the theme is really that important why have untrained volunteers playing a leading role?

We have become comfortable with the familiar idea that equity and inclusion efforts frequently fail or make progress very slowly. I participated in activist events for women’s, gay and Aboriginal rights in the late 1960s. That was 50 years ago. Around the same time multi-culturalism became a thing. Disability rights movements also kicked off around that – but that wasn’t something I was aware off.

My point is that we see that desired change started 50 years ago, and it’s still not done. So, either of two things must be true. We don’t know how to make change happen faster or its not change that our culture wants. I think it’s the first option – we don’t know how to make change happen faster.

This is, I believe, because this is a novel challenge. We are not good at rapid change to reduce bias and increase inclusion and equity because we haven’t needed to do so for most of our human history. 

It isn’t that we don’t want to be inclusive so much as we don’t know how in the contemporary context. 

Contemporary organisations are novel in the span of human history. They are where we experiment with novel aspirations, try to get it right – and fail routinely. Anybody with a substantial history of working for an organisation will be aware of the constant fiddling with how business is conducted and how staff are treated. Organisations are often the Petrie dishes of cultural change. This is evolution playing out in the lives of staff. How do we intentionally stimulate the evolution of workplace cultures effectively?

Things are mostly going in the right direction – albeit slower than many desire. The question is, “Can we make the desired change happen at a faster rate?” I think we can, provided we accepted some truths. The most important truth is that the desired changes are difficult to attain [as the past 50 years have made plain] and will require the acquisition of new skills and knowledge if we want to influence the rate of change.

Why is it so hard?

We evolved to be highly cooperative in small groups of people we know and identify with. But we are now asked to cooperate with strangers who may also have indications that they are not like us. We don’t reflexively see them as potentially members of our in-group. We must learn that behaviour.

The value of that fundamental small group seems overrun by the social environments we live in. But it’s still there in work teams, sporting teams, groups of friends, and in gangs. At least the psychological reflex is still there. But this often means we favour in-group members and exclude members of perceived out-groups. While this is ‘natural’ it is also maladaptive in the context of social values. 

The situation is complicated by the focus on the individual and the large organisations we often work in. On the one hand our focus on the individual can seem to isolate inherently social people, leading to anxiety. This can be self-induced. On the other hand large workforces are full of strangers [people not like us] and this can make it difficult to build inclusive in-groups. It can also make it easy to see co-workers as members of an out-group. This is especially the case if we bring culturally and religiously conditioned reflexes to exclude people who are not like us with us into the workplace.

Even unintended exclusion can push individuals into feeling a sense of isolation and this can cause significant emotional pain because it denies their deep instinct for belonging. Exclusion, isolation and loneliness are related because they trigger the same adverse reaction. We can harm others with no ill intent if we rely on our ancient reflexes to guide our behaviour. Do we want to do that?

Citing the work of John Cacioppo, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, David Samson notes that “loneliness was highly correlated with cortisol levels; so much so, the experiment found, that acute loneliness was about as stressful as a physically violent encounter.”

Exclusion isn’t necessarily the same thing as loneliness, but the accumulated impact of exclusion has the same consequence. We can quibble about language or focus on the very real adverse consequence of being denied belonging. Cacioppo observed that: ”The people who had been triggered to feel lonely became radically more depressed, and the people who had been triggered to feel connected became radically less depressed.” Samson goes on to say that “Isolated people felt less secure and thus more vulnerable to threats and succumbed to hypervigilant states to compensate. The consequences are profound, as this creates a type of negative feedback loop, where loneliness begets depression and anxiety, behaviors that end up driving people away, in turn pouring more fuel on the loneliness fire.”

The experience of workplace isolation, rejection, and denial of membership of a group or community isn’t openly discussed, but it is real. One thing I tried to tackle as a disability ERG lead was the stigma of mental illness. People living with anxiety or depression dared not ask for any accommodation because of the fear of being targeted as incapable of doing their job and expelled from their sense of belonging in a work team. It remains an uncompleted aspiration. 

The problem is that we can have multiple competing impulses. Our own reflexes don’t necessarily mesh with organisational expectations. These expectations are essentially aspirational but expressed as if compliance is easy. It isn’t. We are naturally inclusive and exclusive. Samson makes the point that our natural reflexes haven’t caught up with the reality we live in. We can feel we are being unjustly blamed for something we don’t understand. Or we can see our situation as an opportunity to stretch ourselves.

The aspiration toward inclusion to ensure harmony and equity in the novel [in an evolutionary sense] communities and organisation we have created is vital for our shared future wellbeing. But how we transform aspiration into actuality isn’t well understood.

Using volunteer ERGs to achieve this aspirational goal makes perfect sense because they are best placed to influence workplace cultures. But let’s not under-estimate the complexity and difficulty of the task.

Conclusion

There are 3 important points I want you to take from the above:

1. Our reflexes do not match our cultural aspirations for inclusion. 
2. Adapting those reflexes to meet our aspirations for inclusion requires conscious intentional effort. 
3. Not everyone is committed to making the effort. Indeed, even those who are committed, may struggle. Personal and work-related stress can reduce our capacity to change our behaviour, no matter how well-intentioned or idealistic we are. 

The challenge for ERGs is figuring out how they can best work with their organization’s DEI team and the executive leadership to foster aspirational cultural change within the workplace. This is about crafting evolutionary change rather than addressing deficits. It is important that we understand that driving inclusion is aspirational rather than corrective. 

The strategic question is “How do we grow the sense of the in-group – and scale it up to embrace a whole workforce?” Working positively within the workplace culture to do this is the critical function of an ERG. This includes working with groups and individuals across the organization. 

Importantly it is skilled work. I think ERGs leads are more effective if they are already well down the path to being intentionally inclusive. This applies to executive sponsors and champions as well. 

From my reading in evolutionary anthropology and psychology it seems there is the potential for a new skillset to emerge – intentionally evolving workplaces towards greater inclusion. This is a whole-of-organization challenge – DEI teams, executive leadership and ERGs.

For anyone interested in deeper reading on the foundational insights of our inheritedI can recommend a few other resources as well as Our Tribal Future. These are:

• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky. This is a very accessible book on what triggers human behaviour. Do note that this is a significant investment in time – over 26 hours in audiobook form.
• Tribal How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together by Michael Morris. This is a very good introduction and only 9 hours as an audiobook.

Michael Patterson 

14 January 2025

Introduction

I recently came across Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson. I was alerted to the book via an episode of CBC’s Ideas [podcast – Political tribalism is an existential threat to humanity: evolutionary anthropologist]

This has been a theme I have been pursuing for some time now. We must understand why we exclude if we are going to be effective in crafting strategies to foster inclusion.

This is especially important in times when the staff who lead Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and those who support them are time poor. It makes sense to ensure that maximum benefit is had from the time and effort directed at making workplaces more inclusive.

The Trust Paradox

Samson opens his book with “For all social species, one of the most intract-

able problems is whom to trust. I call this the Trust Paradox.” Whom to trust is a fundamental question at every level of community – from family upwards. Samson says the next level up from family is friendship, and then there’s the tribe.

Tribalism served human communities well as an answer to the Trust Paradox: “If your signal is not received as honest, you gain no entrance into the social inner sanctum. But if others recognize your signals as honest, you pass the test and are treated with a positive bias and, buttressed by your shared identity protective cognition, given tribal privileges.”

However: “Humanity had a new way to promote cooperation… but at a terrible, horrific cost. Once in-groups exist, by definition, so too do out-groups. It was both feature and bug, curse and blessing.”

Samson here introduced the idea of evolutionary mismatch. We adapt to what was rather than what is. In a sense the speed at which we adapt means we are playing catch up. That wasn’t a huge problem when things didn’t radically change. There was a chance to catch up. That’s no longer the case. Population growth and greater urbanisation are taxing our tribalism’s virtues and exposing its limitations.

As I noted in my last post, we are space-age people with still stone-age minds. We need to re-imagination how we trust and how we expand our sense of in-group.

The importance of getting our ideas right

Not being inclusive is often seen as a failure. We have legislation and policies that require inclusivity. There is an expectation by some that this means compliance is required, and non-compliance is a failure.

The problem with this perspective is that it fails to account for something fundamental in our psyches. We don’t adapt our behaviour to edicts unless strong self-interest is activated. The Neuroleadership Institute observes that behaviour change can be stimulated by moving away from danger [a strong impulse] or toward reward [the preferred]. This is more sophisticated than the reward/punishment duality.

The mere presence of inclusive legislation and policies will stimulate a minority to adapt their behaviour, but for the majority compliance isn’t triggered strongly. Our tribalism impulse, which is valid in so many ways, will continue to exert its dominance.

Changing attitudes and behaviour takes significant emotional and cognitive effort. There must be a strong need to adapt and move from an adverse situation to move toward a rewarding one.

Not everyone is highly motivated to conform to new attitudes and behaviours. If we understand this as a spectrum, we will see a minority with little motivation and a minority with high motivation and in between a range of degrees of motivation which might be responsive to canny persuasion.

We must understand what modifies levels of motivation. At one extreme inclusivity may be dampened by cultural or religious influences, or personal psychological circumstances. Others who may be inclined toward inclusivity might not feel able to give the emotional and cognitive effort needed to integrate inclusive attitudes and behaviours into their personal repertoire because of other life demands. These can be carer responsibilities, adverse personal relationships, health challenges, financial or other woes, and adverse work circumstances. 

Aside from a minority who are resistant, and a minority who are highly motivated, the majority might be seen as responsive, but passive to varying degrees.

Quite simply, intentional change to attitudes and behaviours, even when very desirable, can be very hard to do.

The risk of inclusion champions becoming excluders

There is nothing that necessarily makes a member of a diversity group a paragon of inclusion. And the worst risk is of creating an inclusive in-group muttering about a non-inclusive out-group. 

Samson’s vital insight about trust is important here. An inclusion champion must earn the trust of people they want to influence. This is to say that changing attitudes and behaviours is often about doing things on other people’s terms rather than your own.

Militant inclusion champions are not unknown. Their passion might be comprehensible, but their behaviour just triggers hardwired tribalism reflexes.

Tribalism is everywhere

The stone-age mind is everywhere, in everyone. The extent to which it exerts influence differs from person to person. Groups in a workplace can become in-groups with no awareness of exclusion.

Whether executives and managers like it or not they will form in-groups that relegate subordinates into an out-group. And non-management staff can equally see organisational leaders as an out-group.

Likewise frontline staff can see members of the public [customers or service users] as the out-group.

As individuals we can be members of multiple in-groups [and out-groups in other people’s eyes] and have a sense of multiple out-groups – at work and in the community.

Now this isn’t always a bad thing. In large complex communities this is inevitable. Our natural sense of tribal grouping is reckoned to be around 1500. In urban settings with populations in excess of 1 million it is clear that our communal sense is beyond its natural limit.

Being aware

Anti bias training has been shown to have outcomes contrary to intent. You can’t train a person to not be biased. You can help them become aware that bias is natural but not appropriate in every circumstance – and to know the difference.

Being aware of bias doesn’t make you inclusive. You can be aware of your bias but still go with it. For example, you might be recruiting and decide not to offer the role to a clearly superior candidate whose ‘diversity’ attributes you calculate won’t be a good fit for your team. That’s activating in-group privilege. It makes sense, and your superiors may even be sympathetic. But its counter to the ideals of inclusion.

Being aware of how your stone-age mind influences you is the first step.

Principles and ideals

The fact that our ability to adapt to novel social and communal settings is slow means that we must see legislation and policies mandating inclusion as ideals to be attained rather than mandates to be enforced.

The stone-age mind’s tribal reflex renders accountability in enforcing compliance with legislation and policy profoundly problematic. Organisational leadership will invoke the in-group privilege of being more forgiving of its members. This creates a problem since this in-group is the one charged with enforcing compliance with legislation and policy.

Often members of the leadership’s out-group are more likely to be held to account for non-compliance – with resultant angst or anger.

Principles to be adhered to and ideals to be aspired to should be guiding principles in any community. But how this guidance is expressed is another matter.

Effective leadership – at ERG or organisational levels requires self-awareness and knowledge. The challenge is to open up our stone-age mind’s reflexes to reflective awareness in the context of our space-age world. That way we can identify when they don’t fit a contemporary workplace situation, and a canny approach to adhering to principles and ideals can be developed.

But for that to happen there must be buy in on acquiring and applying the knowledge. There are many strategies that can reduce risk and build trust that can then be developed.

Conclusion

In our space-age reality exclusion is something we all do out of necessity. But, because we don’t live in a stone-age reality, we need to modify our behavioural reflexes to ensure that we can manage to be exclusive when its okay to do so, and inclusive when we have a duty to be so. 

The word discrimination used to refer only to choice. Decades ago, being a discriminating person was a good thing. Now, because we have the idea of anti-discrimination, it is no longer a good thing. Its short for inappropriate choice – because we have created a principle and an ideal which say we must not make choices about people because of certain attributes and in certain settings.

It would be nice to argue for universal inclusion regardless of setting – and that might flow from effectively growing inclusion in workplaces – but that’s a bigger challenge than I can explore here.

Workplaces, because of legislation and policies, are remarkable petri dishes where we are learning to better adapt our stone-age minds to space-age world. We are building Tribalism 2.0 – how well can we do that?

Michael Patterson 

6 January 2025