Three design methods for diversity & inclusion innovation

The history of the “Diversity and Inclusion” (D+I) role is one of legal mitigation and compliance. A recent job listing for Human Resources D+I specialist lists as it’s first requirement: “Responsible for Affirmative Action Plans enterprise-wide…Manages the company’s compliance to regulations enforced by the OFCCP and other applicable federal and state agencies.”

Today, a new wave of D+I professionals are emerging and their focus is on company culture and developing and supporting pathways for all types of employees to move in and up their organization in an equitable and transparent way. The D+I field is morphing from reactive to proactive initiatives and policies and the new diversity thought leaders need more tools and resources to do their innovative work.

Applying human-centered design to D+I challenges unlocks the opportunity to collaboratively build, co-create, and design company cultures where everyone can thrive.

IDEO defines human-centered design as “a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs. Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in the world.” Many companies already adopt these techniques for building products and services, and they can be useful approaches for developing companies too.

Below are three human-centered design techniques to thoughtfully craft inclusive company cultures, together with your employees.

1. Service Blueprinting

By Joy Oil Co Ltd [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine trying to construct a building without a blueprint — sounds like a recipe for disaster. Yet we regularly create services without the same level of rigor. The concept of a blueprint can be applied to how we serve our employees, codifying the employee experience to illustrate how employees interact with various systems across an organization.

“Without the intentional design of backstage systems and operations, the work of navigating them is outsourced to the customer.” — Kendra Shimmell, Head of Service Design at Adaptive Path

How do promotions work? Why do some people get key projects and others miss out? Is there a way to find a sponsor internally? How do I figure out who my HR person is? A Service Blueprint can help answer these questions and ensure employees aren’t overlooked or feel excluded because of unconscious bias. By bringing more intentionality to how we design the employee experience in a holistic way, we can build thoughtful experiences for all employees, including those who have been historically excluded. For example, you could consider how the employee experience might differ for: an employee of color vs. a white employee, a younger employee vs. an older employee, and someone in your main office vs. a remote office. It’s important to have a diverse working group collaborate in developing the Service Blueprint in order to identify blind spots and bring all voices to the process. An approach could include:

1. Create a current state blueprint for the employee lifecycle. Define the employee actions, the front stage actors, back stage actors, and support activities. Questions to consider: Is the experience the same for all employees and is there unconscious bias that is affecting the experience for people of some groups?
2. Develop a future state blueprint for the employee lifecycle (envisioning the the ideal scenario for all employees).
3. Put together an implementation plan to move from current to future state. Use this as a working doc and internal team tool for setting people-related priorities and goals.

Adaptive Path’s new Guide to Service Blueprinting has step-by-step instructions on how to get started with blueprinting. Also helpful is the description of Service Blueprinting by the Cooper design firm.

2. Systems Thinking + The Iceberg Model

Most diversity work starts and ends with hiring goals and recruiting plans, addressing the most visible and relatively easy-to-address issue. Simply hiring diverse employees from a competitor will only (temporarily) boost your numbers and is not solving the problems that caused the undesirable outcomes in the first place. In systems thinking, this is known as focusing on the symptoms, rather than addressing the underlying causes of the symptoms. Systems thinking asks how various elements within a system influence one another, and allows you to focus on the root causes rather than react to individual problems. As you notice issues in your organization (i.e. poor diversity numbers, higher attrition for women and people of color), you can apply systems thinking to understand what caused the problem and focus your resources on fixing some of the systemic issues. Let’s look at diversity numbers through the lens of an iceberg model:

1. Event (symptom) — a senior women of color leaves the company.
2. Trend/Pattern — look at attrition data and discover people of color have been leaving the company at a higher rate.
3. Infrastructure — understand the underlying structure and processes that caused her to leave, for example unequal pay, being passed up for promotions, and key work going to a select few. Note: a service blueprint would be a helpful tool at this level to breakdown how employees are served (or not served) in the existing system.
4. Mental Models — discover there is unconscious bias in the promotion process and an internal company value around respecting and promoting people who attended certain schools and worked at certain companies.

Focusing on the internal infrastructure (i.e. promotion process, etiquette, sponsorship) or external infrastructure (pipeline, partnerships) and mental models (assumptions, values, and beliefs that keep the system in place) will allow you to make sustainable and scalable change and maximize the impact of your resources.

A description of systems thinking and the iceberg model is provided in George Ambler’s Systems Thinking as a Leadership Practice. You may also download an iceberg model worksheet to get started.

3. Co-Creation Workshop

Known as “designing with the user, for the user,” a co-creation workshop brings stakeholders from across the organization together to design how the company can work for them. This is beyond hearing their voices and is about understanding their needs, receiving feedback, and getting them involved in developing the culture and company processes and policies. People support what they help to create, so this is a powerful way to start shifting the culture. This could be a particularly useful method if you are starting to define your D+I program or in the process of developing your Employee Code of Conduct.

An approach could include:

1. Identify a diverse group of people from across the company to participate.
2. Develop a detailed schedule with specific milestones and desired outcomes.
3. Use a creative space (with walls that you may stick something up on, ideally natural light and breakout spaces).
4. Start with a warm-up activity. An example could be to have each individual draw what diversity and inclusion means to them and use their drawing as a way to introduce themselves to the group.
5. Proceed with interactive sessions (brainstorm, role plays, rapid prototyping — see below links for more info) following your schedule.
6. Capture everything — take notes, photos, video.
7. Take action.

IDEO.org’s Design Kit has more details about how to set-up and run a co-creation workshop. Further methods and tools are available at DIY.

This is the start of an exploration of how human-centered design can help advance diversity and inclusion. Using visual and verbal communication and design techniques, we can raise the important issues and raise the bar on how we serve and include all employees.