When Your Operating System Is Designed for Equity
What does a new meeting structure have to do with increasing equity? A lot.
Take a moment and think about how justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (often referred to as JEDI) efforts commonly show up at your company. Perhaps there are dedicated learning spaces that pop up during Black History Month or global Pride celebrations. Maybe HR organizes a yearly training that tends to have low engagement. Maybe your organization has crafted clear goals for establishing a more diverse candidate pool.
These efforts are important and can help create meaningful space. But to move toward a more human, adaptive, and equitable future of work, JEDI principles must be woven into a company’s Operating System (or OS). Through exploring and exercising new practices, structures, and ways of working, organizations can actually embed justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion — not only through words, but also through actions.
This work is no doubt massive, messy, and hard; dismantling the systems of oppression present in our workplaces requires ongoing effort and empathy, and a commitment to both learning and unlearning. But no matter where your organization resides along this journey — whether you’re just beginning to scratch the surface or deep in conversation — there’s some practice you can try to bring how you work into closer alignment with your principles. And when we say “you,” we mean anyone — because this work doesn’t belong to leaders; if you’re eager to shake something up on your team of three, 10, or 20 people, these ideas are just as applicable and approachable.
Here, we explore several practices that can help incorporate more equity into your OS. The list is far from static or finished — nor are the suggestions replacements for the learning efforts your company may be engaged in. Instead, think of these practices as practical starting points — as actionable places to begin this work rather than destinations to chase after.
What We Believe
Working in a way that supports and activates justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion is critical. And those efforts begin taking shape through principles — through a foundation of beliefs and values upon which practices can be sturdily built. To try having one without the other risks strategic goals around JEDI stalling out and going nowhere. Below, four key principles we believe connect with and inform more human and equitable ways of working.
1. Complexity Conscious: The belief that our organizations are complex systems we can neither control nor predict. It’s tempting to see our organizations as machines with replaceable parts. But our organizations are less like wristwatches or car engines and more like gardens.
How it supports JEDI work: When we become aware of and embrace the inherent complexity in our systems, we can better sense and respond to its needs instead of creating inflexible plans or policies that are allegedly “one-size-fits-all.” Building equity means recognizing different people have different needs in different contexts — and how we meet those needs will inevitably change over time.
2. People Positive: The belief that people are naturally motivated, capable of self-direction, and worthy of trust and respect. This can act as an antidote to ways of working that prioritize micromanagement, productivity-tracking, and information-hoarding.
How it supports JEDI work: The bedrock of this principle is seeing everyone as valuable and capable. Embedding a “people positive” belief into a workplace’s OS can help us check our biases that value some identities and positions over others.
3. Progress over perfection: The belief that work shouldn’t stop moving forward or be perpetually blocked just because it could be better or because one power holder doesn’t like it.
How it supports JEDI work: Being humble, accepting failure, and remaining open to divergent opinions can nurture an environment where people feel safe enough to speak up and take risks. Prizing perfectionism at work has roots in White Supremacy Culture — and practicing progress over perfection can help teams unlearn ways of working that (often unintentionally) reinforce systems of oppression.
4. Transparency: The belief that information should be made available and accessible to all members of a team or organization. Individuals and teams should “default-to-open” when sharing data, knowledge, and insights.
How it supports JEDI work: Transparency allows us to act and work in ways that foster collective growth. When we resist “defaulting-to-open,” it’s easy for the status quo (think information being hoarded by certain power holders and only bestowed upon the rest of an organization when they deem fit) to remain intact.
What We Practice
If increasing diversity, equity, and inclusivity is critical to your team or company, making implicit ideas explicit will help people understand what they’re signing up and on for — what beliefs and foundational agreements will anchor their work.
But where do we tend to see organizations stumble? In the how — in deciding how values translate into action. (Picture dozens of coffee mugs printed with a company’s new mission statement while Carl, Stewart, and Tonya persist as the only decision-makers. That’s a lot of talking and not a lot of walking.) Closing that gap requires having access and openness to different practices, rhythms, and tools. Below, we explore six common organizational tensions and walk through how adopting new ways of working can help increase and sustain JEDI values.
1. The Tension: In meetings, it’s normal to only hear from one or two voices (and they’re often the same). They dominate the space and eat up air time. What’s more, there’s now a default move of prioritizing some members’ opinions over others. A sense of belonging? Yeah, we don’t have that.
The Practice: Check-in rounds
The Impact: Check-in rounds help meetings begin on time — and meetings that begin on time respect everyone’s time and disrupt the habit of waiting to start until a leader shows up. Check-in rounds also normalize hearing from every voice in the room and model the belief that all voices are valuable and contain meaningful insight.
2. The Tension: Only leaders run meetings (or speak during them) and micromanagement is off the charts. Plus, it’s unclear who’s responsible for seeing through specific tasks.
The Practice: Action meetings
The Impact: This meeting structure increases engagement from all team members and busts up the dynamic that leaders should speak more. Action meetings also help teams unblock work together (reducing the burden of projects falling onto any one person), weave strategy into day-to-day conversations, and make accountabilities clear.
3. The Tension: Rather than members inside everyday work having the authority to make progress and create clarity for themselves, power is pooled at the top — creating frustrating bottlenecks and confusion. Who exactly has the authority to do what and when is implicit instead of explicit.
The Practice: Role and team chartering
The Impact: This practice is great for helping teams clarify, reflect on, and intentionally shape the specific work and authority of any given role. Chartering allows teams to co-create their purpose and mitigates the risk of power being held by roles or people not directly involved in the work.
4. The Tension: A team has zero space to reflect and take stock of where it’s been and where it wants to go. When feedback is surfaced or shared, it’s one-way or cascaded down from the top.
The Practice: Retrospectives
The Impact: When reflection only feels like an afterthought or a nice-to-have, a sense of urgency can creep in and contribute to patterns of exclusion. Retrospectives encourage teams to press pause and create collective understanding of what’s gone well and where there are opportunities for improvement. They’re designed to surface insights and perceptions, not solutions that demand immediate action.
5. The Tension: Unless you’re a senior leader, there’s no meaningful path for shaping or questioning processes and systems that directly impact you. The loudest voices in the room (or the folks holding unspoken power) dominate every conversation about significant, wide-ranging decisions.
The Practice: Integrated Decision-Making
The Impact: This practice is rooted in participation and invites more voices to be heard. It follows a clear process for both making a proposal (which anyone can do at any time) and for gathering input, which allows a greater number of people — with their own experiences, skills, and opinions — to process decisions. Advice and proposal-shaping happens collectively and publicly (not behind proverbial closed doors) and objections are welcomed. And those who make objections are also responsible for helping to improve the proposal and making it safe-to-try.
6. The Tension: There’s a tremendous amount of swirl around who “gets” which piece of work. Teammates constantly experience criss-crossed boundaries and implicit power dynamics make clarity hard to find. Work often stalls out and individual needs feel shelved.
The Practice: Working agreements
The Impact: Without explicit working agreements, resentment can percolate and fester within a team. Approaching projects with clear agreements means work can get done in a way that avoids duplication or perceived toe-stepping — and it helps prevent tasks from slipping through any cracks. Working agreements can also support both team and individual needs. For example, you can establish ones that draw explicit boundaries around work-life balance: “We don’t schedule meetings after 5 pm.”
There’s No Future of Work Without JEDI
Consistently using JEDI-informed practices in day-to-day work — in ways fit-for-purpose to meet an organization’s distinct needs — makes it easier to see a connection between a company’s purported values and their actions. What’s more, embracing JEDI-informed ways of working means more employees, regardless of their roles or positions, can shape their organization’s OS on scales both large and small. That gives work principles and practices rooted in JEDI a chance to benefit everyone — to help increase autonomy, trust, and empowerment throughout an organization.
In this way, bringing about a future of work that’s adaptive, human, and meaningful is deeply tied to (and perhaps even reliant upon) prioritizing and enacting JEDI work on a systems level. The future of work and the future of JEDI need each other — and might even be one and the same.
This article would not have been possible without advice, feedback, and rich conversations with Ali Randel and the partnership and collaboration of Zoe Donaldson. I’m grateful to work with colleagues who approach our work with curiosity, empathy, and a commitment to JEDI.
The Ready is a future-of-work consultancy that helps you discover a better way of working. We partner with some of the world’s largest, oldest, and most inspiring organizations to help them remove bureaucracy and adapt to the complex world in which we all live. Learn more by subscribing to our Brave New Work podcast and Brave New Work Wednesdays newsletter, checking out our book, or reaching out to have a conversation about how we can help your organization evolve ways of working better suited to your current reality.
