A presentation at Chicago Camps in in Chicago, IL, USA by Eli Montgomery
Designing for Diversity in Organization Design Prototypes, Process and Play August 2017 Eli Silva - @EliSymeon
Designing for crisis
Image Credit: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Catherine Barde/American Red Cross via Flickr)
Image Credit: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
Occupy Sandy was my first experience building an organizational response to real human needs.
Advanced Persistent Neglect You design what you are
Every single day, the products you ship show customers, employees and the world what you value. See also: Conway’s Law – Thanks, Jared
“Approximately 86% of professional designers are Caucasian.” – Antoinette Carol, AIGA.Org, 2016
“Top universities graduate black and hispanic computer science and computer engineering students at twice the rate that leading tech companies hire them.” – USA Today, study cited by Bonnie Marcus, Forbes 2015, “The Lack of Diversity in Tech is a Cultural Issue”
Product Design Scrap everything you think you know. Listen to the user. Test. Discard. Test again. Listen. Ask more questions. Fine tune. Refine. Clarify at every step. Question each and every assumption. Org Design Welcome to your desk. This is who you report to. This is who reports to you. Please keep your hands, feet, and questions inside the dominant paradigm at all times.
No.
To develop a culture of renewal, reinvention, and resilience we must challenge assumptions where they are most entrenched.
Lacking diversity is often a culturally acceptable form of dysfunction
Lacking diversity is often a culturally acceptable form of dysfunction …and business risk
“Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else.” — Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, 2017
Diversity Debt (n.) A concept in organizational design that illuminates the extra work that must be done when decisions about culture and diversity are ignored or optimized for short-term gains instead of long-term sustainability.
Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos/Antonio Olmos
In the United Kingdom, senior executive teams proved a 3.5 percent increase in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) with every 10 percent increase in gender diversity.
Top Quartile McKinsey report on the benefits of diversity across 366 public companies Racial and Ethnic Diversity 35% more likely to have returns above the industry mean Gender Diversity 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean Other Findings Senior-Executive Diversity For every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity on the senior-executive team in the USA, EBIT rose 0.8 percent.
A global company survey by Credit Suisse of 2400 public companies found Organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth
Your Org is a Product Culture is your artifact
A design org is a human institution built to validate a product or service under conditions of extreme bias
We learned to bring organizations closer to their customers, taught them to listen. For a time, it was good.
The experience of inclusion is the product of organizational design.
After spending two years and $265 million on the effort, Google’s employee population was only 2% black in 2016, the same percentage as it was in 2014. - Beth Winegarner, “Google’s Hardest Moonshot: Debugging Its Race Problem” Fast Company
Even the most powerful ideas in the world cannot survive persistent institutional dysfunction.
Effective product teams align the organization through a regular cadence of interviews, prototypes, and playbacks.
Participatory Org Design Inclusive Organizations By Design
Taking ethics seriously as design orgs, means we understand that what we make is a direct reflection of who we are.
How might we use the design process to build more people-centered organizations?
Inclusion Creating the necessary conditions for organizational reflection, course correction, and change by design.
Participatory Design: An approach to design that invites all stakeholders (employees, end-users, designers, citizens, candidates) into the design process to better understand and meet the complex needs that exist in a large system.
“As designers, we find ourselves not just functioning as human-computer interface designers, but as designers of an interface to systems that never saw ‘users’ coming ” – Gretchen Anderson, “Designing for Social Impact”
Build, Measure, Learn Listen, Include, Empower
Build, Measure, Learn Listen, Include, Empower
Listen.
Image source: All Booked Up
Who is telling our inclusion story? Ask if the story your company tells about its own diversity and inclusion is coming from the ground up. If not, find out why. Image Credit: William Stitt
What do we look like to the outside world? Look at job descriptions you control for words like “Dominate, competitive, pleasant.” (Descriptions that use biased language get 42% fewer submissions.)1 Run language in job ads through a Gender Bias Reduction Tool like Textio.com or Gender-decoder.katmatfield.com
What are the numbers? How many under-represented people are making it into your pipeline? How many are extended offers? How many accept? Do you know the data about your attrition rate in the first 90 days? If you don’t have data, start capturing it. Give yourself and your organization the information they need to design better experiences. Image Credit: William Stitt
Include.
How do we value difference? Embrace the value of ‘Culture Add’ and ask yourself where people are most likely to accidentally wash out. Make it a priority to welcome those who are most likely to spark meaningful conflict. Audit your definition of and define the value of ‘Culture Fit’ very tightly, on paper, so there’s no ambiguity. Revisit often to check for bias.
What about employees? How effective or useful is onboarding? Have you designed that experience to remove friction? How do you help new team members achieve autonomy and success early? What is the employee experience like for your underrepresented groups? Do you offer training on unconscious bias and review practices you control to change known biases? If you don’t do exit interviews, start doing them.
How does our idea meet the needs we have heard? Before you generate a single idea, pick a feasible goal, that you can align on. Seriously and without question, involve the people you’re trying to include. Listen to them and let them help steer your efforts. Learn from your own internally marginal groups and empower them to generate AND implement ideas for change. (Women, Minorities, LGBT, Disabilities, Neurodiversity) Define a way to measure impact before you start building something.
Empower.
Inclusive leaders consistently design experiences of empowerment. They create the conditions for teams to take charge and exercise collective ownership.
Have difficult conversations. Evaluate against honest, frequent feedback. If your effort focuses on a marginal group, bring them to the table during the idea phase, give them the power to shut you down. Ask, “How might what we’ve built here hurt someone,” BEFORE you release it into the wild.
Course Correct. Often. Measure your impact often. Don’t wait until you’ve expended your entire budget before you validate. Build a feedback loop into new D&I efforts, as well as existing ones, and react to feedback as quickly as possible. You only get to succeed if you can demonstrate: [ ] We Listened. [ ] We Included. [ ] We Empowered.
The Balanced People Team UX Business Technology People Operations Advocacy + Empathy Practices Rep Balanced People Team
Reducing the distance between designers and the many populations they serve is perhaps the single most important charge to the design profession today. – Beth Tauke, Korydon Smith, and Charles Davis; Diversity and Design: Understanding the Hidden Consequences
Thank You Eli Silva, @EliSymeon White House LGBTQ Technology Fellow. Inclusive Design Explorer. Friend of the otters.
Extra Resources Buildwith.Org Projectinclude.Org 28Blacks.com Code2040.Org BlackGirlsCode.com LadiesThatUX.com XXUX.Org AlterConf.com CreativeReactionLab.com CHI Gender Workshop, 2014
The lack of diversity in design organizations is a fact that we can design for. We can drive innovation and increase creativity, but we have to be honest about what’s holding us back. Eli Silva will outline ways to design cultures that support design thinking, organizational growth, and diversity in the workplace.
Great design is the result of hard work and cultures that foster empathy, creativity, listening, and honest conversations. These happen to be the groundwork for diversity, so why is diversity still such a challenge in technology and in design organizations in particular?
In this talk you will learn practical steps toward designing for diversity—including quick tips on how to audit your processes and practices today. Learn how to effectively consider minorities and underrepresented groups in your approach to hiring, everyday work, and leadership development. The result of diverse design organizations is products that increasingly reflect actual people, across the age, gender, and income spectrum. That’s something worth working for.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
A full transcript of this talk is available as well as audio from the event.
for free. You
can too.