My Church put out a post about Diversity and Inclusion here. Some practical points I’ve added for workplace leadership are written under the graphics.
In 1. Looking for commonality can lead to a greater sense of psychological safety but can also create a narrower focus and group-think. So 1. needs to be combined with 2. to balance comfort with sufficient challenge to stimulate our creativity.
In 2. The first law of economics is scarcity. There is a cost and a limit (time, money, energy, emotion) to how far we can gain more and more perspectives. Beyond a point the value gained is less than the cost of gaining it (“decreasing returns to scale”). So there are limits to the desirability of diversity for its own sake. This requires value judgements by those with responsibility. The need for such judgements makes leadership an unenviable task. You won’t always satisfy everyone’s preferences and values about what was decided and how you got to the decision to (inevitably) limit diverse perspectives. Even the decision as to who makes the decision is fraught. But before this point, 2. is desirable, and creative ways of gaining diversity of thought within constraints are to be encouraged. The balance is a leadership skill.
In 3. Similarly, there is a natural limit to Inclusion. Here it is defined only in terms of respect, kindness and love for each other. While that is good, it doesn’t fully cover inclusion. Value added by a worker needs to exceed their cost, unless there is cross-subsidy, and who pays that subsidy? To use the salad analogy, salad ingredients should not be used equally! We are forced to make decisions that make some voices louder than others. This is inevitable. That can create a natural power struggle and create partially self-perpetuating loops. Again, a decision-making unit is forced to adjudicate and implement a structure that includes Power – it cannot be avoided. The question is what ownership or democracy holds the authority to make the decision, and with what consequences?
So some great prompts in the post, and as with any brief model, there’s more to it.
Good luck with leading ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. They can be increased, often to important effect in the org and for wider society. But they are not infinitely-applicable terms. Beyond a point these two terms are self-defeating.
#scarcity
#economics
#valuejudgements
#naturalconstraints
#returnstoscale