What The Land Can Teach Us About DEI | The Other Side of Silence

Silence.?

It is one of nature’s loudest alarms.?

I learned this my first day tracking as our group was headed down a short trail.?

It was one of those typical sunny California days where the birds were chirping loudly.?One couldn’t help but feel happy and grateful to be living in the “Golden State”.?

Almost as suddenly as we had entered into a heavily canopied area, the chirping and tweeting from the birds stopped.?Something about our presence has caused a disruption amongst the “feathereds”.?That day, the city girl inside of me who knew at most the behavioral patterns of the urban pigeon before it’s about to go splat on a freshly groomed head, realized how valuable silence is in nature.???

Fast-forward a year later, when about a month ago we were out for another tracking adventure.?This time, we are in different location but the same phenomena occurred.?

It hadn’t been a particularly sunny day but the birds were out and about chirping.?The entire day a light fog drifted in and out throughout the heavy gray sky.?A few points during our trek, the sky threatened to burst and pour down on us, a rare event for drought-stricken California. Now, walking along the path returning from the beach back up the trail, the fog had just started to settle in for good. ?

Picture us - a motley crew of animal trackers with clanking backpacks and water bottles making our way up the worn path from the beach back up to the main trail to our respective cars after a long day of being on/with the land.?We are all talking and laughing with each other rather loudly.?

And, yet all around us, there is a silence that we don’t even notice until the lead tracker holds up his hand softly whispers,

“Hold on.?This is a good teaching point.?Listen.?Do you notice that??It’s silent except for the sounds of our voices, our bags & bottles, and our feet hitting the ground.?Are you curious why?”

We look puzzled but he continues,

“Silence is one of nature’s greatest alarms.?Birds often go silent when they perceive a threat.”

True to form tracking and being on/with the land have taught me something new about DEI time and time again over the past year.?

We barely notice the presence of silence until it’s almost too late.?

Think about it…

In our modern workplaces, silence is rarely acknowledged.?It’s hard to talk about the silence, which makes it even easier to miss, overlook, and register.?It’s a data point that we have a challenging relationship with and that we often underestimate.?Why would when:

• We reward those who are the most vocal?
• We are conditioned to gloss over our silences and the voices that we don’t hear??Seriously, I’d be rich if I received a dollar every time I heard a leader or peer say, “We don’t have time or budget” to capture let alone honor certain perspectives & voices that have gone silent or are missing from the conversation. I'd be even more rich if I tallied the number of times that when asking for feedback about an initiative after a presentation or proposed plan of action, said leader or peer is met with silence. The silence is unsettling and there's so much to be done. So said leader or peer simply responds with, “Okay.?Well, I’m going to take your silence for agreement and consent.” ?

Silence is a pervasive theme that comes up in my DEI work with organizations and individuals.?

Like the birds, we humans tend to get silent around each other when we perceive a threat either unconsciously or consciously.?

Maybe you can relate to these all-too-familiar moments that have occurred during in-person, virtual, or hybrid meetings:

• We hit a tender spot of vulnerability or are very close to it during a conversation that has DEI intersections & themes.?Our conditioning kicks in and we don’t want to go there because it’s painful.?Our conditioning kicks in and we’ve grown frustrated with trying to explain our perspective and not being heard.?We are fed up with not having anything in the way of sustained behavior change.?So, we choose silence hoping it will keep us safe and that the challenge of the moment will pass over but it never really does, does it??
• We stay silent about microaggressions or offensive actions, behaviors, or comments that reinforce biases, prejudices, and the array of -isms & phobias in our organization because it’s too risky or even painful personally or professionally to address or discuss.
• We don’t what to say/do, how to say/do it, or whether we should even say/do anything at all when any of this comes up especially when it comes up in the moment.?So, we choose silence. Why? Because, well, let’s face it, even with our degrees, certifications, and/or job titles we are only just beginning to actually learn and practice talking about DEI as a collective and be in relationship with each other around the pain & proverbial “Trouble That We’re In”.?To top it off, these conversations can be scary, unpredictable & volatile. They can be triggering for both individuals who hold marginalized social identities & members with dominant group social identities. Strong emotions like anger, shame, guilt become especially challenging to navigate particularly when our work systems are hyperfocused on compartmentalizing our true selves for the sake of "just getting it done".?This silence is one of the worst because not only does it makes the individual uncomfortable, it makes others uncomfortable as well who inevitably start to wonder what that individually is really thinking, if they can be counted on as an ally, if they even care, and, ultimately, if they can even be trusted. It also perpetuates a wider culture of silence within our organizations and the wider collective. ?
• We’re in the best of conversations or relationships with someone and say something we think is either hilarious, extremely profound, or somewhere in between.?But, in someone else’s reality, it’s incredibly offensive, insensitive, and painful to experience and hear.?A storm of silence appears either suddenly or as one of those angry rainclouds that we didn’t even notice was in the shadows slowing doting the horizon.?The connection that we shared is broken and we don’t have the words to reignite it. Again, silence.

Those are just a few micro-level examples of how silence plays out at the interpersonal level.??There are many more that you might care to share via DM or in the comments below.

And, it would be great if I could just stop there but I can’t.?

As a DEI practitioner & facilitator, I’ve noticed that similar patterns of silence steadily creeping into the DEI efforts of many workplaces the wider macro & systems level.?

I'll even let you in on a little secret. Much of my job, especially this year, has been guiding and encouraging people to unpack the silences that keep us disconnected from ourselves, each other, and this wider world that we live in. ??

Allow me to explain…

Looking back, 2020 spurred almost every organization that I know into DEI training cycles.?In 2020 and 2021, the metaphorical chirping was loud.?We were finally in long overdue collective conversations about how we relate to each other, how we impact each other, and the changes we’d like to see in the workplace.

But 2.5 years out from those initial trainings, I’m noticing that we’re growing quiet again for a number of reasons:

• Training, while a helpful & powerful intervention, hasn’t gotten us to the finished line we thought it would. Folks still don’t quite know what to say or how to say or if they should even say it even though they’ve taken unconscious bias training and, for some, a course or two on microaggressions, allyship, and maybe even anti-racism.
• Companies worried about the looming recession are gradually deprioritizing DEI efforts in favor of cost savings, which creates an institutionalized silence just adds to the collective silence that we are trying to find our way through.???
• The tensions of our mounting political polarization keep us silent.?We don’t know what we can talk about anymore let alone how to talk about it in a way that connects rather than divides us.?To top it off, we don’t really know how to do the deep listening that will help us finally understand that our DEI efforts are here to help us see that:

What’s really at stake is our very own humanity.????

• Overwhelm at how deeply entrenched the roots of oppression and inequity are within our systems. That in and of itself is enough to propel us into silence but then we also maintain a silence around how deeply these roots run which fosters a state of inaction, half-baked solutions, an/or a state of analysis-paralysis, which, in turn, further reinforces the toxic culture of silence that has become pervasive in the workplace.?It’s like, “The song that never ends” for those of you who love a good Lambchop jam session or who want a soundtrack to go with your knowledge of systems theory.

What I know to be true is that getting to the other side of these silences will require more than tweaks & changes in our processes & structures.?

Exploring these silences through the lens of tracking offers an opportunity for deep introspection & reflection around why and how we use a naturally occurring common protective measure from nature to disconnect when what we most desire is connection.

So, I ask myself and invite YOU to wonder with me:

Why are we going silent?

What might these silences tell us about us and what’s happening with and between us as agents in a wider ecosystem??

What is the cost of our silence to ourselves, our teams, our organizations, and even our personal relationships?

What would it take to get us chirping again?

We each will have different answers and perhaps one day we’ll find ourselves in a space where we can talk and exchange our ideas or come up with more questions to explore.?

For now, my sense is that the next level of DEI work requires us to be conscious of and courageously curious about those places where we have gone silent or are tempted to go silent.

Because THESE are the spaces where systems-level & mindset level changes as well as deep connection & transformation are actually available to us when we commit to unpacking that silence in ways inspire us to:

• Show up differently with and for each other
• Adapt & shift in ways that get the metaphorical birds “chirping” again; and that, most importantly,
• Get us back into connection with each other and the land that holds us