Friday, November 5, 2010

Modeling Equity

This post is the third in a series on Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and organizational equity.

Mental Models are our understandings of how things work. They are the shorthand we use to make sense of the world. They can be simple generalizations or complex and specific. They shape how we act.

I made coffee for myself this morning. That’s what I did. But it’s not really what I did. What really happened was: I walked into the kitchen, found my cup, found, my conical plastic filter-holder, found the paper filter that fit into it, etc… But that’s not what I really did. Here’s what really happened: taking advantage of a subtle and tacit kinesthetic knowledge I have of my own body, I used my legs to convey my body into a specific area of my home. Turning my head in the direction that experience tells me that I am likely to find the ceramic object that I prefer to hold the coffee, etc… But that’s not what really happened. I won’t go into detail, but the process started with electrical impulses traveling within my brain and between my brain and certain impulse receptors in various parts of my body…

And thus we see the power of the Mental Model. If I didn’t have a Mental Model for “Making Coffee,” I would never actually be able to make it. I would be too busy trying to describe it to myself to actually do it.

Our mental models determine not only how we make sense of the world, but also how we take action. For example, I don’t make coffee with a coffee maker, but I’d be willing to wager that those readers that do envisioned a coffee maker as part of the process when I first mentioned making coffee. If you were at my house and I was a poor enough host that you were forced to make your own coffee, it may take you a moment to get on board with the no-coffee-maker method. That is because our Mental Models of how to make coffee would be different in that situation. To make life easier for you (without becoming a better host myself) I would have to give you some information about making coffee in my house. We would then have a Shared Mental Model of how to make coffee and the process would be more efficient.

How much more important and intricate are the Mental Models we have about how human beings and society work? Senge’s work on Mental Models addresses things like the way we work, what the culture of an organization can look like, and how we define success.

Senge also points out that Mental Models that do not effectively address the environment become liabilities because they hinder us from taking effective action:

“New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting.” (P174)

Mental Models are often tacit or implicit instead of intentional and explicit. People work within systems and their shared understanding of how things are supposed to happen is learned and communicated unconsciously through the actions of others, what is rewarded, what is punished, what is ignored, etc… within those systems.

In the realm of racial equity, tacit assumptions about people of different racial and ethnic groups as well as our assumptions about the source of inequity shape the discourse and our actions. If those assumptions remain unchallenged we Whites are likely to play roles that perpetuate inequity. Challenging our assumptions and building new skill and understanding about the reasons for inequity can lead us into new, equity-building roles.

Here are some examples of relatively common mental models about race and how they can impact our decisions and behavior.

If we believe that racial inequity is the product of some kind of cultural deficiency in Non-Whites then the means of creating equity would be to teach Non-Whites how to act more like Whites.

But:

If we believe that racial inequity is the product of a historic and present-day system to which we are all socialized without or knowledge, then a great deal of very important learning needs to occur in the minds of Whites.

If we believe the system reflects “the way things are supposed to be” or “the best way to do things,” then we assume that conformity to the norms that are in place would be the goal, regardless of what our race is.

But:

If we believe that the system reflects specific White ways of doing things, then to create systems that are inclusive to all may mean that we assume that Non-Whites are already making personal and cultural accommodations within their organizations and that White people can learn to do things a bit differently, making some accommodation to others.

If we believe that talking about race just perpetuates our differences when what we really need to do is highlighting the ways in which we’re the same, then the reality of the lived experiences of other racial groups are actually shut out. As Whites, we can take this seemingly friendly and supportive view of race and minimize the realities of members of other groups. In so doing, we think we take ourselves out of he racial equation but we’re actually actively (if unconsciously) continuing the status quo.

But:

If we believe that there are important cultural differences (the Human Genome Project has already proven that physical differences based on race are superficial and impossible to define clearly) and that we can speak in overarching themes about different cultures, then we can begin to have frank discussions about race that can lead to new understandings and connections for all.

If we Whites are to be truly effective partners in creating equity then we have to seriously examine the systems that we help to create simply by going in the same direction as we always have and using the notions of race that we’ve always had. Not taking action is a decision. You can tread water in a river but that doesn’t mean you’ll stay in one place.