"Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic."
~ Audre Lorde
Hiya - Liz here 🙂
After attending a workshop recently, I wanted to highlight some of the learnings I took from it. It was a masterclass about 'Deep Democracy' - a session exploring the art of navigating polarities.
What does that mean?
Polarities are sets of opposites that frequently show up as tensions in the world and workplace. Think work vs life balance or liberal vs conservative.
Deep democracy is the approach and the tool that allows us to hear, recognise and count every voice. It's work AND life balance. It's liberal AND conservative.
This particularly resonated with us as we see how DEI awareness has sometimes shone a light on more polarities and tensions in the world. Think trans rights vs female rights, supporting Israel vs supporting Palestine.
HBR believe that seeing polarities is a core leadership skill to navigate complexity. We believe inclusion comes from allowing all of the voices to be heard, even the dissenting ones.
It's the opposite of what we see happening on social media at the moment where voices are routinely shutdown for having a different opinion. In fact, a study carried out by Channel 4 referred to 'Young Illiberal Progressives' – the Gen-Zers who are the most open minded of the generations but also the most intolerant of those who have different views to them.
The Deep Democracy approach is a shift from the Newtonian view of seeing people as individuals to the quantum view that we are all interconnected in the same energy field. Unresolved conflict, they suggest, leads to this energy field being polluted, resulting in tension.
We've all found ourselves in a meeting at some point in which we felt tension, through difference of opinion or someone getting shut down. The negative affect on the atmosphere is palpable. Unresolved tension affects how you relate to each other and affects your behaviour – often leading to a breakdown in communication, resentment, a lack of creativity and a lack of trust.
The worry from an inclusion perspective is that the polarities offer people a fast and easy sense of belonging – 'come and join us! We're right, they're wrong. You belong here!' . However, they only include those with the views of that polarity.
What is the alternative? We learnt an exercise to help us to 'navigate the polarities'. We were asked to put ourselves in the shoes of an opposing opinion and to argue on behalf of it. The group physically moved across the room to opinions we were asked to 'try on', leaving one person on the other side to represent the opposing view. A few key learnings came from this:
- It is initially uncomfortable to argue for a side you don't believe in deep down and this difficulty can mean you want to give up.
- Once you get over this discomfort and start to find arguments to defend the opposing view, a shift begins to happen – you start to better understand and empathise with it (without it necessarily changing your mind).
- Seeing the one person alone on the other side of the room, representing an opinion that no-one else agrees with, receiving a deluge of arguments from the other side, really highlights how isolating it can be to be unsupported in speaking out against the majority opinion.
This isn't easy. In fact listening to voices that we don't agree with is one of the most challenging things about inclusion, especially when they are views we categorise as non-inclusive.
What do you think?
- Should DEI be about the liberal, progressive, anti-Brexit, Guardian reading agenda (we admit we exaggerate to make the point here!)
OR
- Should DEI be about holding the space for all of the views, and enabling people to belong, whichever their POV? And if so, where are the boundaries?
Liz x