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:
- Our reflexes do not match our cultural aspirations for inclusion.
- Adapting those reflexes to meet our aspirations for inclusion requires conscious intentional effort.
- 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