What drives diversity change? Not what you think.

-David Robinson, The Circle Project (www.thecircleproject.com)

Think of the Grand Canyon. Or of a river gorge closer to home. We know from those examples that water follows the structure of the land. Behavior is also like water; it too follows the structure of the land.

And yet, as we provide diversity expertise and training in organizations whose core values include a commitment to inclusion, often they're not in it for the long haul - they don't really want to investigate the structure of the land, but want to quickly look at the water and move on to things that are more "mission critical."
 
We can either belittle their shortcomings or we can move them to deeper and more intentional action about diversity issues. But how?
 
There are two things required of a good model for change: 1) the issue has to be personal, and 2) it has to be relevant for the long view - it has to apply to something bigger than me, go beyond me. Perhaps there are actually three things - the third has to do with believability: I have to believe that my actions matter (the actions are immediate but the impact is long term).
 
Relevance is actually the first thing (if we don't do this now we'll lose in the long run), then making it personal (this is mine to do, in everything that I do), then believability (I may not see the change but I know if I act now the change will happen).
 
After watching An Inconvenient Truth, I am re-astounded by the capacity of human beings for denial, or truth construction based on what we want to believe. Given all that Al Gore has presented, all the science and data, the actions our leaders are taking (and in fact, we ourselves) are less than minimal. The same can be said of diversity efforts.
 
Regardless of what we want to believe, people do not act out of reason. Smokers who continue smoking in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are killing themselves provide one good example of this. Approaching diversity solely from the standpoint of data and statistics is ultimately futile.

Executives demand data and the omnipresent "business case for diversity," but they will not really respond to it in significant actionable ways because it is irrelevant to their experience (they can't see it) and the only kind of "personalization" they can see is "I will lose or my people will lose." They have no visceral reason or understanding to act on the data and data, in fact, is largely a negative impetus, not a positive one.

I've spent much of my career training young actors to free their impulses so they can get to the root of what drives their actions, what defines their intentions on the stage. People like to think that reason rules the day but it doesn't. We act out of emotion (usually fear or desire). If reason ruled the day, modern marketing wouldn't work, diversity would be a non-issue, and I'd be selling my car (which, come to think about it, isn't such a bad idea).
 
Significant diversity change is not possible as an intellectual exercise or “data dump,” nor can it be legislated. Significant diversity change will only come when it is personal and relevant to the leadership of our organizations. Until then we are incapable of looking beyond our behaviors to the structure of the land.

[amazing, beautiful river images from David Jensen]