How to create genuine commitment to D&I progress?
DE&I work can sometimes be summarised as ‘we celebrate minorities and blame others for the slow pace of change’. While it feels good and fuels belonging, the critical way to comment and demand progress does not seem to enlist support from those we want to win.
The DEI Trilogy ‘Stop polarisation & exclusion’ – part 1: Learn from my vegan experience
From a DE&I expert perspective, facts – like representation numbers – seem to speak for themselves as well as obvious related goals or ambitions. Accordingly, we love to speak about traction, improvement and, above all, progress. What if our approach wasn’t the only way to frame and tackle the overall DE&I agenda in an organisational context? And what if our communication actually made it difficult for some audience to buy into our story?
Unnoticed toxic elements in D&I communication
In DE&I, we pay attention to implicit assumptions as we know about their potential negative impact. Yet, even some of OUR storylines or widely used phrases include elements that create unintended, unwanted reactions like defensiveness, resistance or active backlash. Embedded norms or judgements can be such elements, and we may not be aware of them. It is possible though to discover them as this real-life example shows.
My vegan experience: Another personal aha moment
We never stop learning – if we are open to it – and I keep converting private experiences into DE&I insights for myself, as these three examples show https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtO-C6zQSphlk9pJCQzZjTTQ5XeKV-oiV
In a later situation, I was shaken up and shocked by my own defensive reaction to a friend who suggested that a vegan recipe we could look for would probably improve the outcome of our planned baking session. It took us an entire evening to reconcile the intense resulting dissonance. The following days, I realised that many DE&I storylines create similar forms of resistance and for similar reasons. For our DE&I framing of, e.g., ‘progress’ can contain assumptions, judgement and an idea of normative evolution which many of our audience cannot intuitively understand.
Watch the entire 4-minute story on LinkedIn or YouTube
Example: How we frame ‘progress’
Pitching our mission ‘traditionally’ starts from looking at existing ‘diverse representation’, flagging out gaps and ‘slow change’ that we need to ‘accelerate’ as there is still ‘a long way to go’ etc. We see different types of data to support the story and little alternative to describe our agenda. For us, the past, the root cause, the current situation and the way forward – all is crystal clear and the itinerary is best described by a rail track (in a tunnel) rather than a landscape to navigate. However, this clarity rests on some assumptions that can be challenged and does not look the same for others.
Exploring the perception of other stakeholders
People with different backgrounds than ours often perceive and interpret the data differently or have different life and work experience as their reference frames. They may well share the evolution aspect of D&I but reject the assumption that any more diversity will always be better or needs to be promoted. Talking about the past in an othering way also doesn’t help people to buy into our agenda – and it is contrary to what we recommend in our training and education. To that end, the dismissive micro-messages we convey should be considered as one element that contributes to backlash.
Warning indicators from your organisation
As implicit assumptions are almost impossible to detect from within a system, we need outside help to understand if our storylines include undesirable messaging elements. Here are some reactions that may well be indicative of an unconsciously normative DE&I storyline
- “Diversity is great, but do we know when it is actually too much (for business / in a workplace)?”
- “We are steadily changing for the positive and need to keep going / give it more time”
- “Does our workplace have to be as woke as the future / urban society?”
- “How can we make sure we do not sacrifice past and current business success?”
If you have noticed specific reactions feel free to send them to us and we’ll be glad to help unpack them.
Convert scepticism into support
The ENGINEERING D&I approach to turning resistance into buy-in uses our combined strength in insight-based, international and innovative thinking. In most cases, there is no need for a large revamping of the existing DE&I storyline. Often, finetuning language and adjusting the framing has a huge impact. Our work starts from the respective context and aims at the best possible business alignment, connections with existing models and a strong fit of the DE&I storyline, the corporate story and organisational maturity.
Some of our biggest successes came from eliminating commonplace phrases – even if many love them – and introducing specific language instead. Our spin doctor and ghost-writing services have also been extremely well received just as our DE&I workshops for and with communication and marketing experts.
Further Reading
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dei-activism-helping-hindering-corporate-diversity-progress-stuber
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/arguable-value-being-different-michael-stuber
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hey-di-stop-being-dismissive-excluding-populist-michael-stuber
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-avoid-toxic-targets-wishy-washy-values-c-level-di-michael-stuber
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-memo-discussion-misses-point-question-must-why-michael-stuber
