Diversity As A Territory
BFNow Self-Study Module 5 - Exploration 5
[This is part of BFNow Self-Study Module 5: Collaboration. For more about the overall Self-Study program, please look at About BFNow Self-Study and BFNow Self-Study Orientation.]
If you haven’t done so already, let me encourage you to pause, relax and release, perhaps with a big stretch or three deep breaths.
Today’s topic, diversity, is a BIG territory with many facets. In its root meaning, diversity refers to the condition of having or being composed of differing elements, which is very general. Since this module’s theme is collaboration, we are going to focus on diversity in human groups.
In the What Time Is It? presentation, I suggested that human diversity was an important characteristic of the Planetary Era and that thriving in this new time would require us to learn how to treat our diversity as an asset.
Here, I’d like to explore human diversity in more depth. I encourage you to set aside here whatever political associations you have with the word and simply see it as a big, general, neutral territory. In that broad frame, we’ll be looking at both where it functions as an asset and as a liability in collaborative groups.
Diversity
As an asset
There are many, many dimensions along which each of us differ from one another. The following mind map gives just a few.
For most of these, having diversity in that dimension can make a group more effective, creative, perceptive and productive. A diverse group sees any territory from more perspectives, develops more maps and thus will come to know that territory more fully.
With so many benefits of this kind of diversity, why do groups so often not embrace it?
Similarity bias – We tend to be most comfortable with and associate with those who are similar to us. One fun experiment subtly morphed the faces of politicians to look somewhat like the test subjects. Viewers of the morphed pictures were more favorable to the politician that now looked like them than they were otherwise. This bias appears to be innate and largely unconscious. To overcome it we have to train ourselves, as skillful job interviewers do, to compensate for it.
Empire Era social hierarchy traditions – This is, especially for gender/race/ethnic exclusion, the big reason groups resist diversity but fortunately, it is learned and not innate. The Empire Era took similarity bias and accentuated it into a social order built on violence-enforced, religiously-sanctioned hierarchy – men over women, some classes over other classes, some racial and ethnic groups over others, etc. As part of your position in this hierarchy, you are trained by the culture to defer to those above you (as in the Enduring character style) and demand deference from those below you (as in the Controlling character style). You collaborate only with your peers in the hierarchy. In this tradition, for men to collaborate with women or for whites to collaborate with blacks was seen as a profound violation – and threat – to the social order.From my perspective, none of these traditional forms of dominance hierarchy are actually about what they appear on the surface. It’s not really about gender or race or whatever proved to be an easy way to stereotype people. Rather it is about the need for enforced hierarchy. As far as I am concerned, this need and its consequences have no place in the Planetary Era (I’m willing to be categorical about this!) and the more we can do to replace these traditions with deep mutual respect, the better – seeing each person as a territory full of mystery rather than an instance of a category.
Oppression is traumatizing and disabling – the violence (physical, psychological and structural) used to maintain the hierarchy creates profound wounds, for everyone but especially as you go down the hierarchy. Some who have endured heavy oppression develop remarkable wisdom and maturity, but even still, carry the wounds. They are also excluded from learning important skills, all of which leaves them less able to step into roles that the more privileged find easy. This in turn becomes an easy reason (“not qualified”) for maintaining the exclusions that limit diversity. This reinforcing feedback loop is a significant factor in maintaining these cultural patterns. Progress has been made in the past few decades but much more remains to be done to proactively heal and reverse thousands of years of Empire Era traditions.
We need to make a conscious effort to overcome these barriers to diverse inclusion if we are to reap the strong benefits that come from collaborating in a group with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and capacities.
As a liability
Yet there are certain kinds of diversity, in its broad sense, that can be problematic in collaborative, purpose-oriented groups, especially in the dimensions of behaviors and intentions.
Relative to behaviors, group members who bully or can’t keep agreements can make it hard for a group to function. Especially for collaborative groups organized around a purpose, there need to be norms of acceptable behavior and the capacity to respond when behavior goes outside those norms. That response may, in some situations, require removing a member from a group.
Relative to intentions, personal motivations need to be reasonably aligned with the group purpose. How close that alignment needs to be is always a judgement call – a difficult call to make at times but necessary for the health of the group. It is especially challenging when a member has sub-personalities with divergent motivations, some aligned with the group purpose and others not. For example, have you ever encountered someone who seemed to be aligned initially but as time went on became increasingly demanding, co-opting the energy of the group away from its initial purpose to instead focus on their character-style needs?
These situations can provide a major challenge for collaborative groups, especially if the member who doesn’t fit wants to stay. This is a strong form of the larger question of how a group maintains its identity and self-definition. Removing a member can be an issue even for paid employment but it is especially problematic for volunteer groups. I’ve seen groups fall apart because they couldn’t deal with this challenge and other groups grow stronger by dealing with it.
The demise of a Transition Town effort where I live is an example of the former. The removal of a member from Winslow CoHousing while I was living there in the 1990s is an example of the latter.
This may not be an issue for short-term and low-engagement groups, but as the level of engagement rises and the goals of the group become more substantial, it is good to take the issue seriously. It may seem like a downer to contemplate, but considering it early is likely the best way to prevent ever needing to go as far as removing a member.
I don’t have simple solutions to offer you but I want to explicitly acknowledge the issue and offer some suggestions.
Group Immune Systems
I’d like to start in the spirit of biomimicry. Biological organism generally have semi-permeable boundaries (skin, cell membrane) that separate the organism from its surrounding environment. The organism must take in resources from the surrounding environment yet some things in that environment are toxic. The boundary needs to keep out as much as possible that isn’t helpful but it rarely succeeds 100%, so the organism also needs some way to render harmless anything harmful that gets through the boundary. This is the role of the immune system in multicellular organisms. Is there anything here that can serve as an analogy for groups?
One of the most important resources that groups take in are members. What happens when a member has persistent behavior patterns that prove to be harmful to the group?
I’ve seen two common responses to this situation that usually don’t work well:
Denial – Everyone tries to behave as if the issue doesn’t exist. This may seem to work at a superficial level, but the overall energy in the group shifts. Eventually the issue breaks through and has to be dealt with.
Caretaking – The group sets aside its initial purpose and shifts its attention to working with the difficult member. While this can be appropriate as an initial response, the group needs to decide how far to go in this direction. If the issue isn’t resolved quickly, continued caretaking will likely kill the group.
Steps To Take
What can be done to get a better outcome? The hard part is knowing when it is better
to keep the group together and work it through, or
to remove a member.
In system terms, where is the threshold between these two? I know of no easy practical rule for that threshold. It all depends on the specifics of the situation and requires discernment in that context.
The keys for me are:
Be clear on the group’s purpose and keep clarifying it as a group – The group’s purpose should be the touchstone for deciding whether or not some one “fits” the group. As part of this, get clear on how committed the group is to personal growth work. What are the expectations individually and for the group’s support for individuals? How does this fit in with the group’s larger purpose?
Prepare your immune system process and tools before you need them – Get agreement early on about ways to surface uncomfortable feelings and perceptions so that they don’t fester. Also agree on a respectful process that can be used when it starts to look like a member doesn’t fit. Don’t let things build and then explode.
Have a membrane – Have a joining process that allows everyone to get to know each other before a new person becomes a full member. Have the courage to say no at this stage if there is group consensus and there are strong warning signs.
Distinguish between differences of opinion and differences of motivation – Among people who share the same purpose, there can be useful differences of opinion about how to go about that purpose. These differences, if they can evolve to a meaningful synthesis, are valuable for the overall wisdom and vitality of the group and should be welcomed. Working through these differences will generally make the group stronger. Differences of motivation can also be beneficial if the various motivations are mutually supportive – e.g. in a community if one person is motivated by sustainability and another by non-violence, those two can likely be brought into harmony. But when someone is, for example, heavily influenced by strong unresolved psychological issues unrelated to the group’s purpose, it can be hard to pull the various motivations into harmony.
Start with Group Optimal Zone First Aid – Give it your best attempt to work it through with the skills you have or can bring in. Get help with conflict resolution if the difficulty involves explicit conflicts. Only consider removing a member if good faith attempts at healing and reconciliation have gotten nowhere.
The group is the immune system – This issue is fraught with grey areas, pitfalls and choices that need to be made on the basis of inadequate information. If you reach a point where a member is removed, there should be broad support in the rest of the group that this is the best choice for the group. Along the way, the assessment of what’s going on is best if it emerges from the group. Even if one person takes the visible lead in interacting with the difficult member, they need to be able to do so with the support of the rest of the group.
Minimize blame – Keep the process framed in the specific terms of “not a good fit in this situation, with this group, for this purpose.” Avoid judging anyone in more categorical or context-independent terms. Help everyone, especially the person who is being removed, to save as much face as possible.
You aren’t the only game in town – While removing a member should be treated with care and respect, keep it in perspective. Life will go on for everyone.
Experientials
Start these in the morning, carry them through the day and add reflections to your journal at the end of the day.
Have you seen a group that was particularly good at treating diversity as an asset? What enabled their success?
Have you ever been part of (or known about) a group with someone who didn’t fit in a way that impacted the overall energy of the group? What was that experience like? In hindsight, how might that situation been handled better?
If you could design it your way, what kind of group immune system process and tools would you want in a group that you were part of?
If you have questions or comments, please post them here.
Thanks,
Robert
[Link back to the Module 5: Collaboration Overview page.]