Monday, August 9, 2010

Learning Organizational Inclusion

This post in the first of a series on Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline and Diversity and Inclusion.

Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline describes the path to creating what he calls The Learning Organization – “an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future,” to quote him. Since my goal as a practitioner is to continually expand organizations’ abilities to create equity for all, the model of The Learning Organization can act as a resource. Senge describes five clusters of attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs: disciplines, he calls them. He asserts that these five disciplines are the essential ingredients to create The Learning Organization.

The Fifth Discipline, (which Senge, in a rare lapse of clarity, lists first) is Systems Thinking. This is also an appropriate place to start when setting out to build identity equity in organizations for a number of reasons.

One is that White culture is very individualistic and often does not acknowledge any system at work. Post-European thinking, especially in the sciences, has led to many great successes by reducing complex phenomena to series of simpler ideas. However, in systems, human systems in this case, the action of parts of the system that are not visible or obvious to the perceiver often impact others who are outside of our awareness. Or the parts of the system we experience may be impacted upon by other parts of the system that we do not know. Because so often systems in organizations treat people inequitably, Systems Thinking will help us to think about ourselves as parts of a greater system that we may not see in action but which we impact and benefit from.

A second reason that Systems Thinking is a good place to begin is that when Whites do acknowledge a system to be at work, they believe that those systems treat everyone equally. Many Non-Whites have painful stories about deep, systemic racial inequity that they have combated all their lives and, having not experienced it, many Whites believe it does not exist. Systems Thinking will allow many Whites to begin to explore the inequities they may not perceive. It allows us to start taking others’ experiences of inequity as valid data rather than minimizing their experience.

There are a number of aspects to Systems Thinking that Senge discusses, but the one I will focus on here is his notion of “Shifting the Burden.” Underlying problems cause symptoms that are stresses on the system. Often solutions that people devise to those problems shift the burden of the symptom from where it is to another place in the system. The underlying problem persists, but the new solution exists to bear the burden of the symptom. This is the proverbial “band-aid,” surface solution to a deeper underlying problem.

In a Systems Thinking approach, problems are addressed at their root causes rather than at their symptoms. This is achieved by using the right kind of leverage in the right place.

Organizations often address Diversity and Inclusion with a “Shifting the Burden” approach. They see that groups that are traditionally known as minorities are underrepresented in their ranks or are experiencing numerous difficulties in negotiating their careers in spite of their high levels of skill and task success. Positions are created to hold the task of recruiting minority members and helping them succeed in the organization. There are all kinds of remediation and support for them to succeed. Many of these do help and have some success, but still, there is often persistent inequity in the very organizations that are trying to build equity.

To use Systems Thinking to address inequity, we would seek to understand its underlying causes. If we believe that all groups of people are just as capable on average as the White male power majority, a statement that I believe most people would happily agree with, then we have to believe that the problem of inequity lies in the system rather than the groups who are excluded from it. That being the case, the point of leverage for change in the system is not in the people who are treated inequitably but in the people who have the power in the system to change it. None of this is to say that recruitment and support of traditionally minority people should stop. It should continue if it is happening and commence if it is not. But to create organizations that succeed at embracing diversity at every level and create cultures that continue to do so, the people who have power have to be just as skilled at diversity and inclusion as the people who have hitherto had no power. This tends to be Whites, White males in particular.

For some Whites, simply taking a systems view of inequity would be a huge shift of mind away from the traditional individualism of White U.S. culture. Organizationally speaking, leadership that takes a systems view of diversity and inclusion will begin to create learning opportunities for members of the system who have the power to make the system truly fair.

The next post here will discuss Senge’s concept of Personal Mastery and some of the options for curricula that may help those Whites who can benefit from learning inclusion.

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