How do we drive inclusion to unlock innovation and solve the biggest problems facing the world today?

We have long understood the importance of diversity; and yet we’ve too often neglected the thing that makes diversity work – inclusion. Not only is inclusion important for individuals and positive for wellbeing, it also feels good! Inclusion unlocks the innovative ideas that diversity gifts us. Innovation provides much needed solutions in a fast-changing world.

This was the topic of a thought-provoking discussion Simon Cooper and I hosted at Davos and we are not alone in seeing the opportunity that is going untapped.

Moving from diversity to inclusion

We can see why the conversation has tended to focus on diversity – much of what we traditionally consider when discussing diversity is easily seen, easily measured, easily quota’d. The penny is dropping however with leaders increasingly shifting their focus towards inclusion, and the conversation is now growing about how to create a true culture of inclusion across organisations.

Noble as it is to see inclusion as an end in itself for the benefit of the workforce, it is also important to look at it as a means to another important end – innovation. Moving away from a broad base ‘business case’ around inclusion & diversity to focussing on more direct ‘business impact’ will give more teeth to the agenda.

Traditional diversity efforts have failed to produce a significant shift in large institutions and corporates. McKinsey’s research indicates that the change between 2015 and 2018 has been slow on diversity and most companies are still uncertain on how to use D&I to create value creation.

This is clearly a problem, given that the ongoing stream of research confirming that diverse and inclusive organisations are more likely to succeed in new markets, be innovative and agile, are better positioned to weather tough times and to respond to uncertain risks.

It’s only a matter of time before shareholders widely demand to see that firms are taking this value link seriously – many already are. This is an existential debate for every boardroom, and not a fad tabled by HR or an innovation unit.

Why does it matter for us?

At Standard Chartered, we have a clear purpose - Driving commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity. We know that the only reason we will be successful in driving commerce and prosperity into the future is because of our diversity – diversity of markets, of products, of clients and critically our colleagues. But that alone isn’t enough. Creating an environment where our people can innovate together – generate new ideas, solve problems and continuously improve - is where we will see true value creation.

We track diversity metrics and have made clear commitments about addressing these. But beyond this we also have designed an inclusion index and an innovation index, so we can measure the impact of harnessing our diversity.

Our own evidence suggests that inclusion and innovation are linked. It’s indicative, but people’s views towards innovation change considerably when we compare those that are satisfied with D&I with those that aren’t.

“84% of those satisfied with D&I say innovation is positive in the Bank.

Only 25% of people who are not satisfied with D&I are positive towards innovation.”

What practical steps have we taken?

Having evolved our approach around what we measure and evidencing positive correlation between inclusion and innovation, we have consciously started with awareness and behaviours. We believe that our people leaders will have the biggest impact and we have been investing in their development, so they behave in a way that ensures that their team members speak up and are heard, and make it safe to propose novel ideas and innovative.

Other specific interventions have included:

• We crowdsourced 70,000 views on how we describe the culture we are trying to build (articulated in our valued behaviours), using machine learning to analyse the information and launching them through our People Leaders rather than a top down directive – embodying the end game we are trying to achieve.
• Using our intrapreneurs programme (unlocking innovation internally) we set a challenge to find new innovative ideas and business models specifically designed for women. We are using this approach for tacking many other key challenges- such as climate and sustainability. It is great to see colleagues from across the organisation pitching ideas and business models, without being constrained by their job description, location or organisation hierarchy.
• We’ve launched Women in Technology Incubators in several markets, supporting female-led entrepreneurial teams with training, mentorship, and seed funding to tackle social challenges faced by the community.

Driving inclusion is also translating into different offerings for our clients. For example, South Korea offers preferential pricing to support low-income clients to build their wealth; Bangladesh provides a preferential rate to female entrepreneurs; China supports women-owned small to medium entrepreneurship by offering credit limits and other financial services.

There were many other practical ideas that came up in the roundtable- recruitment testing for adaptability traits rather than qualifications; the use of technology to enable virtual sharing of ideas; use of inclusive language with clients and colleagues and pushing for supply chain diversity.

Importance accepted, this isn’t a mission that’s easy to achieve. There is no perfect formula to create inclusion... but simply asking “who have we not invited to dance” before embarking on a new project is a good place to start.

#diversity #innovation #inclusion #culture #prosperity #davos