Mutually Inclusive

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

Shared Vision and Team Learning are the final two of the five disciplines that Peter Senge espouses to be the facilitators of The Learning Organization.

Shared Vision is logical to follow the previous discipline of Shared Mental Models since the both disciplines involve shared meaning making. Shared Vision is, in a way, a Shared Mental Model of what we are trying to create. Our vision will flow from our mental models. Yet, as with any attempt to move a group of people from one way of doing things to another, it is key that the group has an explicit goal or destination in mind. Senge states that people who share a vision are “bound together by an aspiration.”

To quote Senge further: “At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, ‘What do we want to create?’” An explicit Shared Vision is essential when we gather together to create racial equity. People have such disparate ideas about what race really is, how it impacts our lives, and what should be done about it that without a Shared Vision, we could spend a lot of time and energy working at cross purposes. We could also have members of our group who have visions for our future that are based in assumptions that do not include the perspectives of non-dominant groups and unwittingly perpetuate the dominant discourse. It’s very important that we Whites internalize other groups’ perspectives to avoid this, and work in active and honest communication with them to be sure we’re inclusive. (I guess what I’m saying here is that to be inclusive we had better be inclusive. An inclusive future starts with an inclusive present!) In fact, it is often advisable to have non-Whites leading the drive to create more equity in organizations, but we must be sure to guard against two habits that White led organizations often have: 1) to “outsource” diversity to members of non-dominant groups in such way that Whites are not responsible or accountable for building equity, and 2) having members of non-dominant groups lead in the diversity drives but nowhere else in the organization.

The final of the five disciplines is Team Learning. Team Learning is a way of creating alignment among members of a team so that their individual visions become extensions of the team’s Shared Vision. Team Learning calls for all members of the team to be skilled in dialogue and discussion. These two words have very specific and different meanings in this context. In dialogue, the goal is to build understanding. People in dialogue suspend their own opinions or beliefs while they deeply listen to others’. By practicing this, people are able to internalize others’ perspectives and build communication within the team. In discussion, different views are presented, defended, and the preferred view is chosen. These two types of communication practices can be highly complimentary. They allow the best ideas to surface and synthesis to occur in a way that a final decision is truly made by the team rather than some subset of people who may have the most power, or who may be the most verbally dominant. In groups where racial equity is the subject of their focus, Whites often have a hard time stepping back and allowing Non-Whites to express their experiences , views, and aspirations. Practice in dialogue as it is defined here could help minimize this dynamic in groups. On the other end of the spectrum, discussing race can be such a heated and frightening experience for some Whites that a team with good discussion skills might be a place where they can express their views and get the kinds of developmental feedback or support that can facilitate their own racial awareness development.

When people come together to make meaning, there are often members of the group who have unconscious needs that they seek to gratify. We Whites who do racial work can be so ambivalent about what we’re doing. We are raised in a society that teaches us to act according to the dominant discourse and these habits of mind are often slow to leave us despite our best efforts and intentions. We can be so determined to avoid our own racism that we become the “racism police,” projecting our own unconscious racism onto others, seeing them as the bearers of racist thinking that, if we were to be completely honest, we still harbor in a dark corner of our own minds. We can create a sort of “hegemony of the oppressed” by rejecting all things White as bad. Seeking to share a vision can become cover for squashing dissent and disallowing a certain kind of open diversity. Dialogue and Discussion can act to keep the group form doing this as well.

One of the reasons I chose to use The Fifth Discipline as a framework for creating racial and ethnic equity in organizations is because of its pragmatic transcendence of the usual individualistic approach of US organizations. In our attempts to be objective in how we approach organizational life, the emotional, intuitive, and interconnected quality of human performance is often ignored or deemed too personal to discuss at work. Senge’s work makes room for the emotional and intuitive in the organizational setting. How often do we try to acknowledge and address our lived experiences of work? Some people don’t want to be bothered, thinking it’s all a waste of time. Some don’t trust their organizations to respect their more personal experiences, often with very good reason, having suffered in one way or another for any kind of personal disclosure. Add working on racial equity to the mix and the emotional stakes get even higher. Most people believe that their own approach to racial issues is the best way to create fairness for everyone. When one of my fellow White males says that the best way to deal with racial differences is to pretend those differences don’t exist, he truly believes, at least in his conscious mind, that he is advocating for equality for all. How can one intervene to move another person from a belief which is destructive to others but that he believes is truly generous and liberating? Is it even possible? Can we afford to believe that is isn’t?