Advancing Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity by Embracing Design Thinking

In spite of our best intentions, our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts often prove to be less effective or futile. Let’s consider two actions that might fetch us some different outcomes: Firstly to challenge our thinking, understanding and assumptions in DEI from that we’ve withheld from a few decades now and reconceive our ways of working to effectively solve problems. Second is to ?learn to perceive this as a design challenge.

As DEI practitioners we often wish to challenge our assumptions and inspire innovation. The traditional approach of “best practices” is rather tactical because of its reactive and compliance driven style with peripheral thinking. Thus, we witness stagnant outcomes and limited value addition in the workforce. Becoming a designer can assist us transform and renew our DEI initiatives by being more agile and human-centric.

Stanford University chalks out the process of design thinking as shown in the figure.

Let’s use this as a roadmap and evaluate how design thinking principles can help us to solve complex and entangled DEI challenges more holistically

1. Understand Current DEI State by connecting with different stakeholders (Empathize)

Since, design thinking goes with the human centric/user centric approach, it helps us to achieve DEI solutions centred around eliminating roadblocks for employees to accomplish their career aspirations with fair, equal and inclusive policies and practices. We can facilitate the co creation DEI initiatives with the internal stakeholders rather than the outmoded top-down and prescriptive approach. This helps us create a buy in or co owning of the desired actions.

The first step of design thinking is empathy. The heart or essence of DEI work is people. Hence it is imperative that we have an in-depth understanding of the needs, desires, fears, insecurities and feelings. We need to submerge ourselves in their experiences, form rapport, empathize with them and view the world through their lens, including their intricate pain areas, perspectives and expectations of an inclusive environment

We can then validate our insights by analysing the defined In-depth metrics like descriptive, predictive and prescriptive approaches. This can give us inputs on what is missing in their journey or what could fuel their passion. These results can assist us in refining our strategy, process and initiatives with innovative solutions.

2. Unleash ?and Define Key blockages that hinder Sustainable growth (Define)

Research specifies that usually organizations waste resources and energy in addressing the wrong problems. We must thus hone our skills to ask the right questions, select the right key indicators, identify ?the right underlying ?patterns and then look at generating solutions.

While defining our area of concern, we must put our people at the core of the problem-solving process. This helps us to create the most authentic and fervently resonating solutions.

The objective of the design challenge is to help leaders internalize the experiences and disclose or rather dissolve the ?mental knots so that they become a supporter, champion and leader in cultivating an inclusive culture.

3. Encourage different Perspectives to identify the Root of concerns and ways to Tackle (Ideate)

At this stage, we can first employ certain processes to facilitate divergent styles of thinking and unearth more possibilities, defer our judgment and create an open safe space to allow the maximum number of ideas to emerge. We then apply convergent style of thinking to maintain an overall objective, funnel down using the pre-defined categories of evaluating solutions and isolate potential solutions, which pave a path forward.

4. Design the initiative with a bigger picture and Environment in Mind (Prototype)

Many of today’s DEI programs are based on fixing others’ attitudes. With design thinking we can rather create the low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes in the form of strategies, approaches, to capture the feedback of our stakeholders, story boards thus evaluating the acceptance and readiness.

5. Pilot the Solution to test results, create the next iterative and let it serve as a social proof Test)

Before rolling out a solution on a larger scale, it is always viable to pilot the solution with controllable groups preferably with personas who are ready to experiment, receptive to change and have an exploratory outlook to test the results and study the experience. Based on the feedback and observation, we can then refine our early prototypes into solutions with more hopeful potential.

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