We want practical solutions! A common problematic demand on the path to equity, inclusion and belonging.

There isn’t a day that goes by without someone demanding “practical solutions” to the issue of inclusion. This post deals with the problems of this demand and why people need to let this go if they are committed to outcomes of equity, inclusion and belonging.

When I hear the term “practical solutions” I hear “I want a solution that’s easy for me to put into action tomorrow”.

To me, I can’t help but feel that it’s a fairly arrogant thing to say. First, it’s because it’s most often spoken by people that have just entered the fray, yes, full of enthusiasm, but often novices.

Second, is that the people demanding practical solutions seem to be of the view that the reason racism, classism, cissexism, heterosexism, ableism, sexism and colonialism have not been solved is because everyone working on dismantling them to date has been totally fixated on non-easy and impractical solutions.

Seriously? LOL. Yeah, everyone else but the Practical Solution Brigade (PSB) wants an impractical and difficult ‘solution’.

What if instead of this, the reasons change is slow to non-existent in our organisations, are because:

• All people want is a cheeky “practical solution”
• Thereby prioritising their intention over their impact
• Ignoring the fact that the issues are nuanced and complex, requiring sophisticated understanding and thoughts
• And that this is fundamentally about power, and those who have it doing everything they can — even when they don’t realise it — to preserve their power at the expense of others (and so a practical solution just isn’t cut out for what we are up against here)
• And that a demand for a practical solution is itself a reproduction of power preservation, because the PSB only want to engage in solving something when it’s on their terms, even if it won’t work
• Whereby a solution that is deep and transformative actually requires us not to do things the way we always do them

Look, I do get it. Most people who want practical solutions are people who are really passionate about ‘inclusion’ or an aspect of it and want to feel energised by doing and hopefully seeing some change. But here is an analogy that might help: Even though you might be passionate about tennis, your passion is not sufficient to support Sereena Williams with improving her back hand. Your passion is useless to her because you have no expertise, understanding or technical capabilities. That’s obviously OK! You have under skills and capabilities. But insisting that you should just skip over developing core capabilities so that you can give advice on Sereena’s backhand is super arrogant, I think we can all agree.

On that note, why are the Practical Solutions Brigade so opposed to spending time thinking deeply about an issue? Isn’t it obvious that the quality and depth of one’s thinking and building up subject matter expertise, will inform the quality of their outputs? Related to this dynamic, but on a separate topic, we would encourage you to read Zeynep Tufekci’s critique of tech billionaire Elon Musk engaging in solution-making regarding the recent Thai cave rescue. In her piece, while Tufekci acknowledges that Musk’s interest in helping was commendable, he ultimately grew irritated when his ideas weren’t adopted because he doesn’t have the necessary expertise, and when his ideas were critiqued he lashed our at those leading the rescue operation. In one part of the article she says:

“The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism, a faith that expertise in one domain can be transferred seamlessly to another and a preference for rapid, flashy, high-profile action. But what got the kids and their coach out of the cave was a different model: a slower, more methodical, more narrowly specialized approach to problems, one that has turned many risky enterprises into safe endeavors — commercial airline travel, for example, or rock climbing, both of which have extensive protocols and safety procedures that have taken years to develop.

This “safety culture” model is neither stilted nor uncreative. On the contrary, deep expertise, lengthy training and the ability to learn from experience (and to incorporate the lessons of those experiences into future practices) is a valuable form of ingenuity.” [my bold].

Elon Musk certainly had something of the Practical Solutions Brigade about him.

Back to the topic of ‘inclusion’, have we ever considered that the very nature of insisting on “practical solutions” may itself be a perpetuation of exclusionary cultures?

Back to the topic of ‘inclusion’, have we ever considered that the very dynamic of insisting on “practical solutions” may itself be a perpetuation of exclusionary cultures? Our society and organisations measure value by the number of our outputs and solutions. We live in cultures that are all about doing, which is a function of our short-term profit-driven society that prioritises speed of output production over process, care and impact. This prioritisation of outputs over process is ultimately why workplaces can be painful places for anyone who:

• Does not want to and cannot exist within a 24/7 hour work culture
• Lives with chronic pain, mental ill-health, is disabled, a carer or a parent among others

And yet when we demand practical solutions after a meagre two hour workshop we are perpetuating the very same high speed output model with our problem solving.

When we have a solution we feel good about ourselves don’t we? We can show it off and say “yes we have done it!”.

When we have a solution we feel good about ourselves don’t we? We can show it off and say “yes we have done it!”. I do see where it comes from too. We can prove that we do care — cause we have solved it. People may clap for us! We also speed up the journey to praise and external validation if we reduce the thinking and deliberation time. And, it conveniently means we get to down tools sooner asap, as we have conceptualised the problem as discrete rather than continuous and iterative.

And in light of the above: What if we come up with a solution that isn’t very good? Do you even have a framework for how you would know? What if it doesn’t have an impact? What if it leaves some people behind because you were more concerned with saying you had a solution than making sure we deployed an intersectional analysis so that it could be powerful for more than one group of people?

Now let’s say someone did off you a practical solution. What if it was to tell you to take it slow? To Think. To not rush to solutions before you have a deep and nuanced understanding of the issues. That’s practical, isn’t it? It’s something you can also do immediately. Would that be a practical solution you’d be interested in? Would you listen? Would you do that?

The other issue of course, is that the Practical Solutions Brigade seem to see “the problems” as discrete tasks that can be taken on and put in motion. i.e. “We have very few women in senior leadership, let’s start a mentoring scheme — that’s a practical solution!”. I honestly don’t have the time to go into the multiple issues with this particular problem and solution statement and why it’s probably going to be ineffective, so for now, please just take my word for it. But what’s clear, as my colleague Sara Shahvisi notes, is that this problem and solution statement do not see inequities as embedded in interconnected systems and cultures.

And this is a problem.

If we adopt a lens that actually acknowledges the reality that inequities are systemic, then there are in fact a never-ending list of ways, combinations and permutations for how problems can present themselves. To meet this reality, ‘practical solutions’ would need to be impossibly expansive in number and combination. And the very nature of this would mean they would fall foul of the “easy” and “actionable” criteria that the Practical Solutions Brigade demand.

What’s the answer? Well it makes more sense in our view to develop an overarching, flexible and nuanced framework for action that can be applied to differing contexts and mechanisms rather than discrete solutions. And this requires, deep and nuanced knowledge of the root issues: power, privilege, systemic oppression, intersectional analysis among them.

Which brings me to the final and biggest issue of all with the Practical Solutions Brigade. When we make a demand for practical solutions, there is an assumption that you — as a person — are not in fact the problem that needs to be solved.

Which brings me to the final and biggest issue of all with the Practical Solutions Brigade. When we make a demand for practical solutions, there is an assumption that you — as a person — are not in fact the problem that needs to be solved.

When everyone makes demands for practical solutions, they seem to see themselves as people who need to act on a problem outside of themselves. Like they are a mechanic to a broken car. What if you are just the broken car?

What if you are the problem?

At Fearless Futures, with thanks to the many scholars and thinkers whose shoulders we stand on, our starting position is that there are aspects to our identities that mean we are beneficiaries of systems of oppression. As a consequence, our beneficiary status determines that the harms of the oppression(s) in question are invisible to us, we deem them less or un-important, we don’t have to think about them, and we can walk away whenever we choose from being involved— among other behaviours. This makes us totally unreliable as solution-makers, because we have a very narrow conception of what the problem actually is — making us a problem.

Process matters. After all, wherever you are, YOU are the common denominator. You are therefore your most powerful solution. Without doing deep and nuanced thinking about you and you in relation to the oppressions from which you benefit, you won’t be able to detect (hard at the best of times because of the Paradox of Privilege and Power*) when you are perpetuating the problem. What if without continuous deep thinking required to shape new behaviours, the process of designing a practical solution involves you silencing and de-legitimising people who experience the oppression you think you’re aiming to challenge? Are you ok with that? And if you are, because you may say the ends justify your means — are you actually committed to outcomes of equity, inclusion and belonging at all?

Starting with a commitment to nuanced, sophisticated deep thinking that honours the complexities of people’s lived histories and experiences has another benefit. It makes us better able to take on feedback without engaging in the excuses and justification that so often emerges from the Practical Solutions Brigade. Because the PSB, as described above, are more keen on the razmataz of saying they have a solution rather than the actual impact, they can sometimes get real tetchy when people identify that their has been zero impact or there are perverse outcomes from whatever their solution might have been (see Elon Musk earlier too!). They tend to engage in the techniques of power and privilege preservation (derailment, white tears, attack, self-victimisation, privileged fragility, denial, dismissal, silencing etc). This is very common among the Practical Solutions Brigade.

So what might be a practical solution, I hear you ask?!

I have none to offer. But action can still be taken: a terrific intermediary step on the long road to transformative (not practical!) solutions would be to read or listen. Read writing or YouTube talks by bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Sara Ahmed, Akala, Janet Mock, Christine Burns, Reni Eddo-Lodge among so many others! Read articles on Media Diversified and gal-dem.com. Take in these perspectives. Consider how you can incorporate them into your everyday actions.

You also might wish to consider participating in our programme, Design for Inclusion. Design for Inclusion is fundamentally a process, because an intersectionally inclusive process has a much higher likelihood of generating intersectionally inclusive outcomes. You cannot have one without the other.

There aren’t any hard endings for these kinds of considerations, so I’ll simply leave you for now with the following: this post is ultimately a call to the those who frequently demand practical solutions to consider the implications of your demands, and to reflect on what the primary anchor is for wanting ‘practical solutions’. Is it truly to serve the world and dismantle the harms of systemic oppressions, or is it to feel positive, useful and good about yourself? May the option you choose guide your subsequent actions.

Onwards!

End.

*The Paradox of Privilege and Power:

The very people who have the power and privilege to take transformative action to end injustices (many of whom may be among those who want to develop practical solutions) are precisely those who because of their positionality are:

• Oblivious to the other side of their experience (and the material reality of oppression(s))
• Focused on their intentions over their impact in the world
• Invested in the ideas of the status quo because it serves them and their comfort
• Opposed to being informed of how their behaviour perpetuates harm and oppressions
• Implicitly and explicitly trained to preserve their position of power and privilege through a variety of harmful — though normalised — techniques, some of which they may not realise they are deploying

And so despite the power and privilege they have and occupy to transform the status quo, they keep the unjust status quo as is.