Part 3: An agile approach to diversity & inclusion — Prototype and Validate
This post is part of a series on how you can use the Design Sprint concept for tackling diversity & inclusion in the workplace. You can read the introduction & context for the series here and I’d highly recommend starting with the Understand & Define phases outlined in Part 1.
Phase 5: Prototype
During a traditional design sprint the team would storyboard what the product you have decided to develop will look like and start to pull together basic wireframes in order to rapidly test it with users. There are some scenarios in a diversity & inclusion design sprint where you might do this sort of rapid testing— for example one team I worked with decided to prototype a more inclusive job description and application process and guerilla test it with some potential applicants. However, given that diversity & inclusion is about people and behaviour change it’s likely that you will be needing to run a pilot over a longer period of time in order to really test whether it’s going to solve the problems you’ve decided to focus on.
There are loads of great examples of conducting trials or longer experimentation in the workplace in order to measure the impact. For example many companies are trialling 4 day weeks, either for a set period of time or with a particular department or team, before rolling it out to the whole company. With diversity & inclusion it might be that you decide to pilot a mentoring scheme with a small group of people first in order to garner feedback on how effective it is before inviting more people to participate, or perhaps trial a new interview process with a particular team to see if it’s effective before asking the whole company to change their practices.
Taking this ‘pilot’ approach will help you to more quickly get results as you only need a small group of people to adopt a new way of working to test your hypotheses. It also enables you to manage and tackle any negative effects or feedback before pushing for bolder, bigger change in your workplace.
Phase 6: Validate
This is the part people often forget to do when it comes to diversity & inclusion but it is so important to validate initiatives in order to know whether you are heading in the right direction. When it comes to tackling large systemic problems, measuring the impact of each individual change or initiative is what gives us the momentum to keep going and ploughing on through the endless obstacles. At this stage we also need to feel confident to have a more open dialogue around what we are measuring when it comes to diversity & inclusion and sharing that with the company (or others outside of the company) in order to get feedback that will help us to improve and iterate on the initiatives or practices that have been put in place.
I remember when I first took on a Director of People role and talking to someone about how impossible it is to truly measure the impact of ‘people’ related work. They said to me it’s not impossible — it’s just that as a society we’ve put much more effort into measuring things like Gross Domestic Product, Sales forecasts and Profit & Loss than we have into measuring things around People & Culture such as inclusion, happiness, and productivity.
Whilst there are some obvious measures that can be linked to diversity & inclusion such as pay gap data, demographics and staff turn over rate, there are a lot more nuanced ways of measuring things like ‘inclusion’ if we put the time and effort in.
I found that doing quarterly staff surveys where you repeat inclusion related questions (like the above example) allows you to get a good measure of how your culture is changing over time.
However, you have to be really careful with staff surveys not to let the majority view drown out or diminish the experience of the minority. For example many companies fall foul of assuming their company is inclusive if 90% of their team say they feel heard and understood. But there is a possibility that the 10% who don’t feel heard and understood are being excluded and marginalised by the exact behaviour and culture that gives the majority that sense of belonging.
So when it comes to measuring and validating any of your diversity & inclusion initiatives take care not to celebrate too soon and ensure you make the time to have deeper conversations with people about what their experiences are rather than simply relying on the numbers.
Embedding an agile approach
As part of building a diverse and inclusive workplace we need to make regular opportunities for people to speak up about their experiences and provide feedback to those who have most influence over the culture in the organisation.
Following an iterative agile approach will encourage you and your team to create a habit of gathering feedback from others and bring people along on the journey with you.
And whilst taking an agile approach to diversity & inclusion may make it feel like the changes you are making are small and inconsequential at times, breaking down systemic change in this way empowers you to make much faster progress at the end of the day.
Your team or company is a microcosm of wider society — if you start setting examples and iterating on your ideas for tackling diversity & inclusion others will follow. When one team invites an individual to speak up about their needs and barriers, people in other teams will feel confident to take opportunities to speak up about their experiences. When one organisation puts in place small but important practices around inclusion, people who leave that company may take those ideas with them and put them into practice elsewhere much more rapidly.
You may be the first in your company, or the first in your field, to start taking small but vital steps to address inclusion. But unless someone takes those first steps we won’t ever create organisations where people are empowered to thrive and be the best they can be no matter what their background is. Not everything will work — we will make mistakes on the journey towards building more diverse & inclusive organisations. Which is why an agile approach is so important; it helps you to iterate and react to changing circumstances and ultimately develop better and bolder solutions that transform the workplace and wider society.
If you would like to work with me to explore diversity & inclusion at your workplace you can email me on tessa@collaborativefuture.co.uk.
I also run a free monthly remote meetup called “Collaborate for inclusion” to encourage more open discussion around creating more inclusive environments. Sign up here.
And if you benefited from this post and want to support my work please buy me a coffee in return for my time.
