Who imagines the future? How we’re improving diversity, equity and inclusion in our design team
This piece is written by Nick Kimber, Camden’s Director of Strategy & Design
Imagination is central to the discipline of design. Designers in the public sector work with services and users to imagine a better world, and then identify and prioritise opportunities to move us closer to it. But this raises a crucial set of concerns: about whose imagination is devising that vision, and whose priorities are deciding how we get there. The resources and privilege that are so inequitably distributed across our society mean that any conversation about the need for more focus on imaginative capacity needs to be conducted through an equity lens.
For this reason diversity — of background; of experience; of identity — is central to good design. Unfortunately, the sector is struggling to nurture it. According to the Design Council, 88% of designers at manager level are white. Some 77% of designers in employment at the time of their study identified as male.
At Camden, we are thinking hard about how we can resist this in our own work. I’m writing this blog in the spirit of working in the open — in order to share what we have learned so far from a key piece of work; while holding ourselves accountable for all we still have to do.
Exploring the problem space
Camden’s two-year-old Strategy & Design team sits in an influential place in the organisation. We work with residents and frontline staff to solve service problems across a range of areas while also advising senior leadership on decision making. We want to use that influence to engage deeply with issues of power and privilege at all levels. We also know that who carries influence in an organisation extends beyond the top team and senior leaders and is as often about who has access to them and has their ear.
We knew that, to engage responsibly and credibly, we needed to examine how to diversify the team and develop a greater culture of equity across our service. This sits alongside wider work on this issue in the council as a whole. While the organisation has more to do, it has taken really encouraging steps towards its ultimate aim of being representative of our Camden community.
When we look at Chief Officers (our Directors and corporate management team), we have improved on previous years, with 40% from Black, Asian or other ethnic backgrounds. The council has seen significant growth in diversity at other senior grades too, with some areas fully representative of the community. A commitment to transparency means publishing data and talking about experiences when they don’t tell a good story, with Camden publishing its ethnicity pay gap for a number of years to encourage challenge.
One trigger for the work within Strategy & Design specifically was our early experience in building the team. We were really successful in recruiting colleagues from Black, Asian, and Ethnic Minority backgrounds. We are also proud to have cultivated a team that fosters diversity in other respects — in terms of age, professional background (from journalism to youth work, from caretaking to design agencies), gender and sexuality. Our Head of Corporate Strategy, Osian Jones, is the LGBTQ+ sponsor for the organisation, and I am the corporate co-sponsor of our staff disability network.
But: we had a high rate of turnover for Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority colleagues. This was for a range of reasons, but colleagues who left bravely shared their experiences. Some of it was really hard to hear as a leader committed to this agenda, but one who was coming up short. It was time, we knew, to do more work.
In Spring/Summer 2022 we kick-started this work with a discovery, commissioning Hafsah FitzGibbon, freelance service & strategy designer, to lead it (you can view the original brief here). Over the course of 14 days, Hafsah reviewed existing insight — including evaluations, strategies and exit interviews — and held listening sessions with 13 staff members.
We learned a great deal about the problems we were facing — both within the team, and in the wider system we are part of. That sector diversity gap I touched on within my introduction was one important facet. That applies not only in design, but in strategy more broadly, where one route into roles is via the similarly un-diverse world of Westminster and Whitehall.
But alongside that sat a wide range of issues such as:
- The imperative to move beyond “diversity”, to “belonging”. It isn’t enough to recruit diversely and have a non-hierarchical culture of kindness and compassion. Instead, we require a far more active engagement with unconscious norms and working practices.
- A bias in the council’s strategy teams towards a confident, extrovert flavour of “professionalism”. That’s not necessarily bad in itself, but it can be a code for other types of privilege. For example: neurodivergent people’s different approaches to thinking might be dismissed, or the professional “jargon” used unthinkingly by some team members could feel exclusionary to others.
- A need to support more privileged team members in their desire to function as allies. Staff had an awareness of the issues colleagues might face, and were strongly motivated to help, but lacked the confidence or knowledge to know how best to do so.
What now?
Our understanding of where we are now, where we want to get to, and how we bridge the gap between the two, is laid out in our theory of change — if you’re interested, please feel free to dive into the detail, and let us know what you think.
In brief, it spells out six two-year goals, spanning:
- Growing our awareness and understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion — which should be visible in the way we work.
- Improving diversity in the team, growing our own pool of diverse talent and influencing the wider sector in the process.
- Fostering a sense of belonging in the team so that every staff member feels seen, heard, valued, and can thrive.
- Changing our practice to make it more creative, participatory, and brave.
- Working on collaborating better: with external partners to reach all of our residents; and with projects that can influence the wider organisation towards diversity, equity and inclusion.
- Giving all team members what they need to navigate power and influence the organisation, ensuring everyone has a chance to make their voice heard and work with senior leadership in particular.
There’s much more to do. But we’ve taken some steps.
In terms of changing our practice, these include commissioning Rooted by Design to act as a practice partner, supporting the team around design equity and reflective practice; and contributing to the pilot of the Black Design Guild, a fully funded training and coaching programme that prepares Black designers and researchers to progress within the design sector as a whole.
We’re also piloting training and sharing outputs with the wider organisation to spread our learning, and further developing our capability framework and personal development approach across all of our Strategy Team with equity of opportunity and progression at its heart.
Meanwhile, our 2022 recruitment round left the team more diverse, and we designed and recruited two new roles at lower grades to act as entry routes into design and strategy. We are sharing external vacancies via the Black Design Guild and Rooted by Design, created new apprenticeships, and created and socialised a new skills framework for the team.
We are in the middle of a new recruitment, and will be working with HR colleagues to experiment with more ways to make these roles a great fit for new colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds. We’ll be measuring our progress against our theory of change goals, and will share more about where we’ve got to at the appropriate time.
We don’t have all the answers on this issue, and we’d love to hear more: constructive criticism about what we could be doing differently; interest in partnerships that might help us on our journey; and, of course, expressions of interest from talented people of all backgrounds who might want to work on the team. Please do leave a comment or get in touch with your thoughts.
