Inviting diversity

I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive that the context or your competition.

If your organization used a DEI policy as the only addressed the need for diversity of lived experience in your work, you were probably not doing it right. Performative diversity doesn’t help. Mandating a certain amount of diversity is still a technical solution to a complex problem. The problem is “how do we best understand the current context in which we are operating in order to find the best ways to act.” If the context is a complex one, increasing the degrees of diversity in the process gives one more access to the distributed intelligence of the field in which you are operating.

One of the places that this shows up in participatory work is in the way we invite people to the work. How do you find people you don’t know and generate enough comfort, trust and ease that they can show up and contribute?

Trust is an emergent property of relationships so one trick here is to work with the constraints of connection and exchange. The challenge is how to find people that have proximity to the issue at hand and that are unknown to those who find themselves in the centre of the problem. And it is compounded by a need to overcome trust issues stemming from factors such as status, knowledge, power, power and resources.

We once addressed this problem using this constraints strategy when working with a local foundation who was conducting some community engagement sessions for a new program design. The issue for them had always been the “usual suspects” problem: the same people kept showing up in the same way. Part of the problems was structural: meetings were held during the day and there was no child care for example. Part of the problem was the power and status gradient between the foundation – who was a powerful presence in the community – and the community itself. Many of the people who would show up to engagement sessions were those hoping to secure grants or those who were already funded but the foundation. This would skew participation in unhelpful ways as people tried to balance competing agendas around their own participation.

Yet the tension was real. We needed familiars to extend the reach of invitation to those who had knowledge to contribute to the problem and who would have enough trust to share it.

We began by making a list of invitees and we contacted them to ask them to personally invite one person in their network who was different from them and had never been to a foundation event. We didn’t specific how they had to be different, but we did ask that the invited person be new to foundation events. This simple action extended the invitation beyond the group that was known to the foundation staff and used existing networks of trust and relationship to cultivate difference and diversity. The resulting gathering was positively received and the program staff and participants said the quality of learning was noticeably different. Many of the new people who came felt pleased to be directly invited and so the level of engagement and participation at the meeting was higher than usual as well.

This idea and this approach was enabled by our understanding of how constraints work in shaping complex environments. Working with constraints to shape interactions between people is the work of the host in complex environments. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but when we want to change things, we settle on a direction towards “better” and work with the constraints available to us to see what will happen. In this case simply removing barriers – by providing food and child care for example – was not enough on its own to increase diversity. We needed to work with the exchanges between people to piggy back on existing trust networks to see if we could generate more trust and a different profile of participants.

It worked. What emerged at the event was a broader perspective on the issues at hand and ideas for crafting the new program. It alos brought new people to the work of the foundation, some of whom carried on to be involved with the new program.

Increasing diversity didn’t require a policy or a program. It was rooted in the real need in a complex context, which will always require diversity to scan, plan and design with the community in a context-appropriate way.