some food for thought about diversity&inclussion on 8th of March (Procrustes, C-PTSD, The Newsroom, Dove, Inspiration Porn)

Today is International Women's day. Recently I talked a lot about D&I. That got me thinking, here is the result of that:

When creating D&I programs make sure to:

-not reinforce the coping mechanisms people used when excluded;

-not create or propagate contexts where people are forced to keep coping;

-not celebrate people just for how they coped.

Connecting Procrustes' bed, complex-PTSD, Inspiration Porn and The Newsroom TV series with Diversity & Inclusion (D&I)

Here we go!

"A diverse and inclusive workplace is one that makes everyone, regardless of who they are or what they do for the business, feel equally involved in and supported in all areas of the workplace. The “all areas” part is important"

When thinking about this topic I find including perspectives from C-PTSD research very useful:

We as humans have two fundamental needs.

The need to attach and belong - to be accepted, be part of, be cared for, care for, be celebrated and welcomed in a relationship with others

The need to be authentic - to act consistent with how we feel, think and need in a moment, to show our whole selves, to express and make visible, how we feel, how we think and how we need.

We have the most meaningful experiences when both needs are met at the same time:

We are accepted, welcomed and celebrated as who we fully are and we can bring our WHOLE selves in an interaction.

If both needs cannot be met at the same time we tend sacrifice one need to meet the other: we might sacrifice authenticity (being who people would accept) or we sacrifice connection (we are who we are at the cost of loneliness). What method we use to cope depends a lot on the circumstances and our histories. We usually end up choosing what the context allows or what is less harmful for us.

What does this mean for D&I? It is rarely the case that exclusion happens isolated. A lot of people dealt with exclusion throughout their whole lives. The way they coped with that exclusion might be the way they cope in the present. Exclusion is the refusal of connection in the face of authenticity. How people coped matters, and it matters even more to remember to not create contexts that reinforce and propagate the same coping strategies (in spite of their effectiveness they caused a lot of pain).

Here are some details about the way we cope when we cannot meet the need for connection and the need for authenticity at the same time:

We Bend to Fit

"I will contort myself in the molds that are accepted for belonging."

The SELF-PROCRUSTEAN METHOD. Do you remember the PROCRUSTES’s bed tale? In the Greek myth, Procrustes had an iron bed, in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night. He then set to work on them with his smith's hammer: breaking their legs to stretch them if they were shorter than the bed, or amputating their legs to shorten them if they were longer. Nobody ever fitted the bed exactly.

We bend to fit when we hide parts of ourselves, we lie about parts of ourselves by minimizing them, by improving on them, changing them or pretending they don't matter. We bend when we act differently than what we feel because what we feel will be used to exclude us, when we don't express what we think, when we don't express what we need.

The extra cost we pay for coping this way?

It is hard to fit in, to be something you’re not, to smile when you don’t feel like smiling, to pretend, to contort. The self withers. Any acceptance we get will never feel full as there will always be a thought in the back of our minds that would say “If they find out I’ll be excluded” or “They don’t really like me, because they don't really know me”. We end up suffering from a constant case of "Impostor syndrome" or a continuous sense of shame.

But what happens when WHAT IS NOT ACCEPTED cannot be changed?

... things like skin color, sexual orientation, disability, social group, family structure, location, background, history and so on. We adopt different coping strategies, all of them heartbreaking:

We become extremely independent

"if I cannot be accepted for how I am and I cannot change that about me, I will numb out my need for attachment"

Extreme-independence is a coping mechanism that says “I don’t need you”, “I don’t care about what others think” "I'm fine on my own". We can see it as oppositionality, isolation, rebelion, hiding-away, making ourselves invisible. Or we can see it as exclusive over-reliance on one's self and a denial of any form of interdependence.

Some of the ways we do this is seen in the bootstrap stories , the “self-made” stories and the overcoming obstacles stories. We might eventually be celebrated and we might be praised, but only if we turn out to be successful. This culturally reinforces a belief that “if you're different you're on your own", if you succeed we will accept you if you don’t we will exclude you.

The extra cost we pay for coping this way?

Nothing worth doing is worth doing alone. Loneliness hurts, hurts the most and hurts wide and deep, and it hurts for a long time. It even hurts physically and makes us physically sick.

We overpay for acceptance

"I will go to extreme lengths to OVERCOMPENSATE. I overdevelop something that is under my control (like a skill or a character trait) so that the thing that is not under my control is tolerated (over-pay for prejudice)."

Over-paying is also a coping mechanism. We find it when we are doing everything to be useful, when we act as “people-pleasers”, “the helpers”, “the smart people”, “the innovators”, “the entrepreneurs” … when we over-develop something to make people forget about the parts that would exclude us.

Overworking, over-learning, over-achieving (putting way more effort or time) so people forget about our “unacceptable” traits, "forgive" us for them or "tolerate" us "in spite" of them.

The extra cost we pay for coping this way?

It is exhausting to pay and pay and pay for something. It is even more exhausting when you pay more than others for the same benefit. Inflation and competition eats away at our effort and we end up burning ourselves out.

We rebrand for goodwill

"I try and work hard to change the minds of people and remove prejudices by rebranding something that was considered "bad" and making it a quality"

This coping mechanism is a bit tricky as it is very reinforced socially, and some of the time forced on us in order to include us. It is about convincing people that what excluded should be the reason to include us. A lot of inclusion happened like this through the years.

It is about trying to convince people that being adopted means that you have more people loving you, that when the learning system categorizes us as having learning difficulties we should be accepted because our different ways of learning are valuable. This is all true, but changing the perceived value of a trait (turning it from negative to positive) still enforces the idea that "you will be accepted based on how valuable you are to the system that excluded you".

Take the Dove "Real beauty, real women" campaign. Although the intention is good and their message is right "every woman is beautiful" we end up reinforcing that beauty should be a criteria for acceptance and belonging. We just try to expand the definition of beautiful. Slippery!

The extra cost we pay for coping this way?

It is very stressful to do this, to convince people that a thing about you is not bad it is good. To put in the time to argue in your favor, to sell your value ... It is also very unstable, because any time any person can come and argue the worth of a characteristic and diminish it. Or we end up being responsible for the actions of all the people having that same characteristic.

Another cost, more of a side-effect, is we end up being reduced to that one trait, being the disabled person, being the adoptee, being LGBTQ or POC and not be allowed to define our own lives, or our own selves fully and broadly. We end up being made to be just one thing, to be contorted to fit the definition of what that “one thing should feel, think or act”.

I love The Newsroom series, it has a lot of insightful moments (like any good series). This scene remained with me through the years as it opened my eyes and made me think a bit more broadly:

"I am more than than one thing! How dare you reduce me to the color of my skin, or my sexual orientation? There are people who look just like me, thousands and thousands, who died for the freedom to define their own lives, for themselves. How dare you presume to decide what I should think is important? [...] I am not defined by my blackness, I am not defined by my gayness, and if that doesn't fit your narrow minded expectations about who I'm supposed to be, I don't give a damn, because I am not defined by you either"

We become INSPIRATIONAL

"I will be accepted when I can be inspirational to others, when I succeed in spite of my challenges. "

This is usually a COPING mechanism that is mandated on us - we are there to be inspiring for others. People celebrate us for overcoming something that was not supposed to be there in the first place. We are celebrated because we were able to overcome something that was designed to exclude us.

The extra cost we pay for coping this way?

We cannot be normal, we have to be exceptional. We are used, we are accepted based on our ability to inspire based on succeeding in a world created against us, in spite of us or just ignoring us.

"And that's when it dawned on me:This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. We are not. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair,and you are probably kind of expecting me to to inspire you. Right? (Laughter)Yeah.

[...] And these images,there are lots of them out there,they are what we call inspiration porn. And I use the term porn deliberately,because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people.So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people.The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you,so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is,it could be worse.I could be that person.""

________________________________________________________________________

All of these things, are ways, most of the time the only ways, available or accessible to be accepted, included, respected, cared for. In a lot of circumstances they are survival mechanisms aimed to protect us from harm.

We do not choose these ways, we end up coping like this, because in our contexts it is the only way to cope or even the only way to survive. It is amazing to me the human ability to endure and to survive even in the most dire of circumstances. I bow my head to the resourcefulness humans have to cope.

What does this mean for D&I?

1. Thinking of all these things I feel we need to be mindful that our D&I programs, out of the best of intentions, do not reinforce the coping mechanisms and create or propagate contexts where people are forced to keep coping or worse celebrated just for how they coped.

Although we can be amazed by the mechanisms people used to survive, it might do more harm if we keep propagating “COPING” for inclusion:

• Don't celebrate just how people coped with exclusion by overcoming (how someone overcame poverty by creating a successful business, how people overcame lack of access to education by learning from youtube, how someone overcame their ADHD to fit into a rigid system, how someone overcame a history of under-assessment to fit into a feedback culture, and so on)
• Don't celebrate over-independence by reiterating the bootstrap stories where people had to isolate themselves from others and make it on their own, but acknowledge the tragedy of their circumstances.
• Don't reward over-compensation, but acknowledge its survival benefits and create a system where we don’t need to overwork to be accepted in a environment we are already part of.
• Don't reduce people to one trait, people contain multitudes and people fought really hard to be able to define themselves wholly.
• Don’t turn the stories of coping with a non inclusive environment into Inspirational Porn to perpetuate the pressure to cope with an environment functional only for some people.

A human's value should not come only from how they survived, even though survival is part of people's story.

2. We can look at the social model of disability and find inspiration from there to adjust environments so that people can be authentic in them:

“The social model of disability proposes that what makes someone disabled is not their condition. It is the system that makes something a problem by not fitting. It identifies systemic barriers, derogatory attitudes, and social exclusion (intentional or inadvertent), which make it difficult or impossible for individuals to attain their valued functionings.”.

You know that left handed people have more accidents? Not because they pay less attention, or that the left part of the body is less accurate or able, but because the world was built for right handed people.

but ... the best strategy just might be the simplest one:

3. Make sure the need for connection is met at the same time with the need for authenticity

Circling back to the start, to the two fundamental human needs. Maybe, just maybe, the effective way to attain diversity and inclusion is to create the context for deep, full and meaningful human connections. To create an environment that supports safe and secure connections to others, where people can bring their whole selves into those interactions. Maybe even developing our ability to create trust and safety in a relationship, to develop our ability to connect to others in meaningful non-transactional ways, to show care. People will not need to sacrifice authenticity if connection is there in all forms of authenticity. Yes, this is possible even at work.

__________

|simplifying leadership in plain language|reducing noise, keeping complexity|

• If you use Medium for your reads you can follow simpLEADfy vs. compLEADcate
• If Facebook is more of your thing you can follow simpLEADfy
• If Linked-in is your go-to you can follow here