Vulnerability: The Key Ingredient for Equity and Inclusion

// Hilary Sedovic, Learning + Education Manager at Creative Reaction Lab

What if we talked about striving toward equity and inclusion like we do innovation?

Surprisingly, I was first exposed to the concept of failing small, fast, and often while pursuing a graduate degree in Social Work. Specializing in management and macro (programs-level) practice gave me opportunities to learn about performance management, continuous quality improvement, and social entrepreneurship — all of which tend to exist primarily in the business realm. And while my systems-oriented brain found these concepts appealing, my social justice heart was telling me this isn’t okay to do when people’s lives and well-being are at stake; we can’t treat people and their experiences as disposable or as cogs in a machine. I completed my graduate degree while still percolating on this internal conflict, unsure of my next step to blend these two worlds. I then joined the team at Creative Reaction Lab and dove headfirst into Equity-Centered Community Design.

Equity-Centered Community Design takes the typical design process (defining, iterating, prototyping, testing, and improving) further by integrating factors that are essential for equitable design practices and outcomes (humility, history + healing, acknowledging + dismantling power constructs, inviting diverse co-creators, etc.). It centers the lived experience of people and the value of context, recognizing the significant influences that identity and power have on the narratives that we shape around ourselves and others. For example, in our Equity by Design Immersive Series, we invite Living Experts (people who have lived experience, and therefore, expertise) to join us for the weekend at the level of participation that makes sense for them. Rather than engaging in the work as research subjects, Living Experts are paid for their time while also engaging in a professional development experience in which they were interested, at no cost.

Creative Reaction Lab strives to integrate Equity-Centered Community Design into everything we do — not just supporting others in adopting it into their own practice. When we were developing our new Theory of Change, we put out a call for feedback and were intentional about whom we engaged for their perspectives. As we piloted the Equity by Design Immersive Series, we consistently asked participants to let us know what we could be doing better (one response was to make a shift in the programming name because there were various negative/traumatic associations with the original use of the word bootcamp, so we crowdsourced names and have adjusted). Understanding the history of artists being undervalued and underpaid for their work, we ensured that our Artwork for Equity contributors had the opportunity to engage in a profit-split where they had the opportunity to receive the maximum profit.

While Equity-Centered Community Design [unsurprisingly] centers equity and community, the underlying competencies are aligned with concepts of entrepreneurship, innovation, and design. In the entrepreneurial world, the concept of an MVP (minimum viable product) is to create something quickly at a small scale, in the most resource-limited way possible, that can be tested for proof of concept and then ideally, scaled. The design world focuses on research, iteration, prototyping, testing, and improving. Both frameworks rely on testing and failure for moving forward and vulnerability is the key ingredient for learning. As I have watched products and organizations in the innovation sector grow immensely at a rapid pace, I began to ask myself why their same ideas of iteration and testing were not being adopted by organizations looking to integrate equitable and inclusive practices into their culture and programming. It felt like a missed opportunity.

I have an inkling that the hesitation organizations have in being public about equity and inclusion attempts and failures might be linked to feelings of shame and blame. After all, it seems that we are most likely to hear about this kind of work either:

1) when somebody has been “successful” in their efforts (successful is in quotations because we always want to know who determines what success looks like), or more likely

2) somebody has failed miserably in ways that have caused significant harm to those involved (and sometimes beyond).

And in the second case, it is far more likely that we’re hearing about the failure because it leaked versus the organization sharing of their own volition.

As the Learning + Education Manager at Creative Reaction Lab, the concept of humility integrated with testing and learning is what drives my work. This includes in-the-moment feedback opportunities opposed to only focusing on post-program evaluations. What is the point of collecting data if we aren’t actively utilizing it for improvement efforts? Further, what could be learned if we consistently shared those lessons with others, including and especially in times that we’ve fallen short? How might we develop an evaluation and reporting strategy that responds to the needs of the Equity-Centered Community Design community and helps us continuously improve our policies, processes, and programming in ways that center equity?

The combination of being something of a Brené Brown devotee and my experience working with white folx around racial identity led me to consider how might we let go of shame and step into accountability. Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher of shame and vulnerability (and a fellow social worker!) whose 2010 TEDxHouston talk “The Power of Vulnerability” is one of the top ten most viewed talks on TED.com. While her work is extensive, Brown has boiled her findings down to several key themes, one of which is that vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, innovation and change. While we might have our own personal experiences of shame dampening our own creativity, innovation and change, imagine further how shame might manifest at an organizational level.

In Braving the Wilderness, Brown wrote:

When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead.

With this foundation, the Creative Reaction Lab team began to ask ourselves: how might we create brave spaces in which people and organizations aiming to integrate equitable and inclusive practices and policies in their work can ideate, co-create, and share their prototypes to engage in collective learning and growth? What role can vulnerability play in accelerating our progress toward equity?

In his 2018 Forbes article, “The Foolishness of Fail Fast, Fail Often”, Dan Pontefract notes that the aim of this concept is not to fail, but to be iterative. Be open to failure, but ensure that we are learning from our mistakes. So how might we support folx in being more intentional and iterative in their efforts toward equity?

To start, Creative Reaction Lab is going to be sharing more publicly about our own attempts and lessons learned. We’re also going to continue asking for feedback at every step of our work, because time and again, the responses we’ve received about our efforts in engaging humility has been overwhelmingly positive — even (and maybe especially) when we mess up.

We’re also looking to bring this conversation to a larger stage — both metaphorically and literally. We were provided the opportunity to organize a panel for the St. Louis Racial Equity Summit in October 2019 featuring:

Natalie Self [moderator ]— Program Officer, Entrepreneurship, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Dr. Kira Hudson Banks — Founder, Raising Equity // Racial Equity Catalyst, Forward Through Ferguson

Antionette Carroll — Founder, President and CEO, Creative Reaction Lab

Cristina Garmendia — author of the St. Louis Equity Indicators Project

Justin Idleburg — Community Catalyst of Equity and Innovation, Nehemiah’s Mission St. Louis // Board Member, Forward Through Ferguson

Adelaide Lancaster — Co-Founder and Director of Community & Collaboration, We Stories

These panelists from a range of backgrounds across the St. Louis area shared about their struggles and successes in promoting equitable outcomes both internally in their organizations and externally in their community work, and discuss strategies for building a culture of humility and accountability. While this was Creative Reaction Lab’s first opportunity to organize and host such a discussion, we certainly don’t plan for it to be our last.

I’d like to propose a dangerous idea that we need each other to show up in both our publically-poised and vulnerable states. Dr. Brené Brown has written that “we’ve come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we’re very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It’s as if we’ve divided the world into ‘those who offer help’ and ‘those who need help.’ The truth is that we are both.”

Help us cultivate a community that is collectively striving toward equity, failures included.