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:
- The ERG’s leadership.
- The organisation’s Executive Leadership Team.
- The organisation’s HR branch, especially its DEI team.
- 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.