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Challenging & Expanding Your Diversity Competency: Moving Beyond Your Comfort Zone

This program introduces 9 diversity practices to challenge assumptions and explore diversity as a "wicked problem." It provides active learning experiences and tools to enhance diversity awareness and facilitate organizational change.

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Challenging & Expanding Your Diversity Competency: Moving Beyond Your Comfort Zone

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  1. Challenging and Expanding Your Diversity Competency: Moving Beyond Your Comfort Zone Nine Practices for Organizational Change • Agenda • Deeper Diversity Awareness: What You Really Do Vs. What You Think You Do • Beyond Awareness: The Structure of the Land • Outcomes • Introduce 9 diversity practices • Explore diversity as a “wicked problem” • Challenge basic assumptions about diversity • Explore the utility of experiential learning as a diversity tool • Provide an active learning experience • Tools • Circle Project Inclusion Model • 9 Practices for Organizational Change • Structure of the Land Change Model • Circle Project Toolkit “Tell me, and I'll forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I'll understand.” Native American Proverb

  2. Water follows the structure of the land… Behavior, like water, follows the structure of the land We’re trying to bring an awareness to underlying structure

  3. What is learning? …a process that leaves you changed

  4. Reframe your story What if you focused on strengths, not shortcomings?

  5. Put down your clever What would happen if you picked up your ordinary instead?

  6. See and be seen How willing are you to really be seen?

  7. FIND YOUR EDGES Is your edge a boundary or a horizon?

  8. Focused Free Write

  9. WICKED PROBLEMS AND TAME SOLUTIONS • “…humans are oriented more toward learning (a process that leaves us changed) than towards problem solving (a process focused on changing our surroundings)... • business and government persist in applying inadequate thinking and methods to solving problems. One reason they do that is it is possible, in fact easy, to tame a wicked problem. • To do so, you simply construct a problem definition that obscures the wicked nature of the problem, and then apply linear methods to solving it (this sets off a chain reaction that perpetuates the problem).”- Jeff Conklin, “Wicked Problems: Naming the Pain in Organization”

  10. Embrace wicked problems What would it take for you to resist tame solutions?

  11. Blueprint

  12. Know your mask How would taking off your mask change the quality of your engagement with others?

  13. Grant Specificity to the Other Can you acknowledge that every single person you meet is as richly human as you are?

  14. Focused Free Write

  15. Say “yes, and” How might your language reduce or negate the offers of an Other?

  16. Remember the triangle How big is your sphere of influence?

  17. Do.

  18. REVIEWNine Practices for Organizational Change Reframe Your Story • Meaning-making has very little to do with truth or fact and is more a function of your frame of reference. How would changing your frame of reference change the meaning you make? Celebrate what might look like a problem. What do you see now? Put Down Your Clever • How would your relationships change if you let go of your need to be right? What would you see if you let go of your need to be the expert or any other “role” that keeps you separate? What you judge as “ordinary” in yourself is actually what makes you unique; you are at your most powerful and authentic when you “put down your clever and pick up your ordinary.” See And Be Seen • After you are able to put down your clever you will discover that you are capable of being seen. Only then will you be able to see others. There is directionality in “seeing;” relationship requires that you allow yourself to be seen. Find Your Edges • All significant change and learning happens at the edges and the edges are rarely comfortable. Discomfort is a signal that you are on edge. Find it. Don’t judge it. You’ll discover there is often a significant discrepancy between what you think you do at the edge and what you actually do. Know Your Mask • The majority of your communication is nonverbal. How are you consciously or unconsciously blocking your communication with others? Discover and come to know your mask; when is it necessary and when are you hiding? Grant Specificity To The Other • How would your engagements change if you recognized that every human being has the same depth of experience as you do? That their hopes, dreams, frustrations—their lives—are as rich and varied in experience as yours? Notice Your First Thought, Work On Your Second • We won’t every stop making assumptions or quick judgments about others. Diversity work that is designed to stop that process will always fail. As the Chinese saying goes, “we see what is being our eyes.” But what we can do is notice our first thoughts and work on our second. Say “Yes And…” • How does the language you use facilitate or impede connection? Using a “yes, and” approach is always generative and expansive, while using a “yes, but” approach is always reductive and exclusionary. Remember The Triangle • We’re rarely aware of the impact of even the simplest action. Are you underestimating the impact of your choices? How might your smallest action ripple through a community or organization, and beyond?

  19. Bibliography About playing an infinite game… Bayles, David and Ted Orland. Art and Fear. Santa Cruz: Image Continuum, 1993. Carse, James. Finite and Infinite Games, Ballantine Books, New York, 1986 Fritz, Robert. The Path Of Least Resistance, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1989 Making meaning through story… Brown, John Seely. The Social Life of Information. Harvard Business School, 2002. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press, 1990. Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind. Riverhead Trade Press, 2005. Vicious & Virtuous Circles… Hampden-Turner, Charles. Charting the Corporate Mind: Graphic Solutions to Business Conflicts. New York: Free Press, 1990 Wicked problems and tame solutions… Conklin, E. Jeffrey and William Weil. “Wicked Problems: Naming the Pain in Organizations,” in Guindon, Raymonde (1990) Designing the Design Process: Exploiting Opportunistic Thoughts. Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 5, 305-344. Langer, Ellen J. Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989. Creative exercises… Boal, Augusto. Games For Actors and Non-Actors, Rutledge, New York, 1992 Johnstone, Keith. IMPRO, Routledge/Theatre Books, New York, 1981 Johnstone, Keith. IMPRO For Storytellers, Routledge/Theatre Books, New York.

  20. "I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles, in which vital and transforming events take place." • Rufus Jones • thecircleproject.com • Achieving personal, organizational, & cultural insights • through experiential learning

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