Two Steps Back, Three Steps Forward
This month, we are understanding how our built systems effect the world in ways that weren’t obvious before. The places and jobs and people we prioritize have been called into question. This black swan event has exposed the workforce, from food suppliers to water treatment operators, that we consider vital to our critical infrastructure. These people ensure we can blissfully go about our days without thinking about the linkages in those systems, how diverse & inclusive they are, and how that might impact us. Ignorance was a privilege.
"Momentum at the national scale precludes making changes; too much is invested in the status quo by too many people." Martin Doyle
There are many policies and procedures that aren’t working for us within the industry and they have a rippling effect to others outside our industry.
Doyle was referring to flood control and our unintuitive, complex, and sometimes mismanaged ways to deal with floods in the US. But the sentiment is the same when we talk about diversity & inclusivity. In the industry, we have a similar obscured system that needs its own black swan. There’s a federalist hodge-podge of different diversity efforts at different scales. Governments around the world recognize diverse company owners and staff diversity percentages. I think it's a cop out - an easily quantified metric that is a distraction from real change for our communities. To understand why diversity is a proxy, we have to understand what we're actually trying to achieve and need to be quantifying: inclusivity.
Before all this, I was sitting at a roundtable trying to understand what it means to be inclusive. We were iterating on the interconnections of our architectural/engineering/construction (AEC) industry. What motivates us to do the right things? Who decides what is right and who holds us accountable? I heard horror tales of people fired over disagreeing with leaders; but I also heard inspirational stories of managers supporting their people and families regardless of obstacles. My stance, as it usually is, was how to strive even more for excellence and progress by disrupting the status quo. I like to be curious and I like to dissent.
What we do here matters. In every little detail. We have an obligation to challenge each other because we are not just the link to world architecture but also to how our communities interact with each other, virtually or IRL.
Being bold is dancing
One of my work friends IMs me the other day, "I'm taking a dance class". Normally the conversations are about office politics, the tail-spinning stock market, or finding ways to write code to automate our work. So I'm justifiably confused. He responds, "I don't want to eff up in front of all my friends and family during our first dance." Ahh. Engineers are a risk-adverse bunch. That's why you trust us to build your bridges. For some getting out of our comfort zone is risky but for others failing is the greater risk. To do what’s right for our communities, we’re going to have to get better at both. Inclusivity & diversity isn’t easy.
This is the first of a series of posts that I will do in parallel to our thinktank. I am going to challenge our comfort zone, disagree, mess up, listen and above all, take risks. Follow along on my instagram for short snippets and sign up for emails here to get notified when I post new things. This movement takes all hands on deck, so please share with your friends and be a part of the conversation.
Defining diversity
If teams aren’t inclusive, they have no increased benefit than a non-diverse group.
Diversity for me is what each individual person brings to work every day. It includes (*takes a breath*): race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, nationality, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, socioeconomic background, age, education, personality, thinking patterns, neurodiversity, communication styles, conflict resolution styles, empathetic ability, motivation, professional experience, past work environments, political views, morals, worldly beliefs, past trauma, military experience, criminal background, personal style, skills, marital status, parental status, geographical location, accents, citizenship, and on and on… You get the pic. It’s more than your linkedin profile.
Inclusivity can mean being diverse, but that isn’t the full story. A meta-analysis conducted on 108 studies and more than 10k teams reported that the enhanced creativity produced by teams with higher diversity is “interrupted by deep-rooted social conflict and decision-making dilemmas that are rarely found in homogenous groups”. Meaning, diverse groups think better but only if they feel comfortable to do so and can converge on an answer together. Diversity and inclusivity are not the same thing.
Defining inclusivity
If you have diversity, but people aren’t comfortable to share, fail, and be vulnerable, (dashed line) you can increase diversity and you get some of the benefit just by people feeling more comfortable by having some people look like them around. But who wants to stick around in a non-inclusive environment anyway? That dashed line has a hard time making it up the curve. Put your sights on the solid line.
We know from hearing that buzzword a million times that inclusive teams perform better. This isn't because everyone is necessarily comfortable. It's because people are safe to disagree without fear or shame. Disagreement adds perspective. In other words, inclusivity is the beneficial outcome of pyschological and emotional safety. The buzzword comes with a phrase, "diversity is being invited to the dance, inclusivity is being allowed to dance".
Again with the dancing metaphors.
Inclusivity is the same strategy. It's complicated. It can be overwhelming. Not everyone comes forward with "hi I'm Andi; I go by she/her pronouns". Not even I feel comfortable doing that in front of all my clients. And I know if I feel like I'm going to be judged as "not professional" then it's certainly happening to other people. That’s the work we need to do for the betterment of our industry, our designs, and our communities.
Like dancing, getting better takes practice. Be kind to yourself. Leave your ego behind and let's see what we can accomplish together. You might find that there's no reason not to enjoy it.
Our communities have already started to change. These are the AEC industry’s end users. It’s a type of positive disruption that unlocks innovation to benefit our communities where we all live and work.
Benefits of Inclusivity
For AEC, we trend right along with the changing needs of our 21st century demographics. In the past our predecessors enjoyed customization and then mass production. We now demand a combination of the two: personalization. We have 3D printed retaining walls (structural walls to protect against floods) and can send in our spit to be DNA tested by mail. Personally, I’m waiting for a 3D printed respirator that actually fits a womxn’s face comfortably.
Our landscapes are shifting: end users are becoming more diverse each year with the US projected to become a majority-minority nation in 2043. It’s been an interesting world for a while now. To be alive in this century means inclusivity of every diverse person. In the AEC that starts with our leaders, our employees, our clients, our suppliers, our customers.
Where we build, what we build, and how we build are all part of the design process. Inclusivity of the process is involvement of the right people all the way through the chain: suppliers, communities, designers, sponsors. It’s bigger than the AEC community.
Better designs For everyone
What we build has both positive and negative consequences for different groups of people. Our friends and families and neighbors. This is why it’s imperative that we understand the costs to the communities where we are building. They might intangibly be paying through transportation access, noise pollution, excessive flooding, or other social factors. They pay directly (bonds and taxes) and indirectly. Part of our job should be focused on understanding our customer base better.
There is no accomplishing inclusivity - there’s just always trying to get better. Inclusivity looks different for different projects and communities. Think about how there is generally a lack of resiliency projects for neighborhoods that are historically underserved. It’s not just the projects we do, but the projects we don’t do. We need to listen and always be striving for improvement.
Educating our people & our final customers alike
Education of people is key to being inclusive: education of technical professionals so that good designs can be replicated elsewhere; and education of the public so they can be empowered to disagree with things happening in our industry. The first is easy - we can characterize this metric through conferences and online interactions between professionals. Licensing requirements do a good job requiring knowledge transfer. Let’s focus on the second one.
IMO, community engagement can be biased (i.e. townhalls or focus groups) and is subject to the squeakiest wheel (a multi-faceted type of privilege). I’ve been reading up on modeling tools for social value measurements and how we can actually quantify a boost or draw to a region’s standard of living based on the types and places we put projects. For example, you can ask the program if the new highway project adds accessibility or if it disrupts life for too long and will be little use to the immediate area. If the social value is put into the return on investment (SROI) calculation, it can completely change the nature of the project.
Another example is in my travel post to Medellin, I took a look at designing for the most marginalized communities through communication, education and involvement with las comunas. Plus, fun travel pics so check it out!
Designing for the future
By keeping in mind the values of the people who are ultimately buying our products, we prepare better for the perpetuity of our organizations.
Inclusivity means that we design for the end user, however that might look right now and however it looks 50 years out. It’s not an easy task. We use past experience to drive our design considerations.
Put on your time travel glasses for this. Our models should be calibrated for future conditions, future people, and future populations (as best we know it in present day) and purposefully avoid getting stuck in present day politics. It is not just what meets the needs of development today, but how will this impact future generations if we are doing things like… building homes in floodplains. These are disagreements that should be considered and is beginning to be required by governments like the UK.
Responsibly growing & Surviving as an industry
Which brings me to my next point, responsible corporate citizens. Being diverse is the right thing to do. A lot of companies and governments are moving towards social governance metrics. This is our traditional triple bottom line.
Anymore, companies need diversity to have a competitive edge. But honestly, the companies that don’t already know this aren’t the ones I am focused on. They won’t last through this generation if they can’t meet future market demands. Our futures expect not just the bottom line but the triple bottom line. The triple bottom line is inclusivity.
decision-making that reflects the community
For the future, we need to focus on the things we can’t automate because they require too much of the human element. One of these things is advanced decision-making in the engineering context. From the highway impact example, the SROI model may seem like a one-size-fits all but the success is wholly dependent on having a diverse group of people who run the program. In the industry we like to say, junk in means junk out. This means that your model is only as good as your data and, in this case, the person analyzing the data. In my example, the model might say that it will raise the standard of living but that’s only true if people have cars or economically benefit from those that do. That’s the sort of decision my clients make for our end users. They are decision-makers with a knowledge of the intricacies of their community. If they use the model early enough, and avoid their own political and social biases, communities can then discuss changing the project from a highways project to…maybe a metroline project.
According to the research, teams outperform individual decision makers 66% of the time, and decision making improves as team diversity increases (15% better for gender diverse teams and 21% better for age and geographic location diverse teams on business decisions).
“That our decisions get sidetracked by biases is now well established. While it is hard to change how our brains are wired, it’s possible to change the context of decisions by architecting the composition of decision-making teams for more diverse perspectives.” Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School Professor
Companies can put in the money to build the culture and, if they succeed, they’ll end up outperforming (lowering costs) once inclusivity naturally starts to occur within the teams.
We need teamwork from diverse teams that better reflects local and global communities appropriately. Those teams can better integrate the needs and sensibilities of the customer base. Understanding and listening to diverse people isn’t enough. Diverse people need to be the leaders driving the growth strategy.
More Profitability for most
Just because you’re diverse doesn’t mean you’re inclusive.
There's lots of numbers floating around about how gender and ethnically diverse teams outperform monoculture teams. A McKinsey report from 366 companies showed an increased performance by 35%. The reason we still keep saying these stats is because they're just so easy to measure. You take financial returns and you compare to gender and race percentages. Filter it out and wa-lah. Knowing that diversity is the correlation but not the real causation, if you could easily measure teams rich in inclusivity the number would exceed 35%.
What if it is more likely 50%? or 75%? With those stats, companies can’t afford not to be working towards inclusivity. And with more profit for companies, is more profit for stakeholders and shareholders. And most importantly, cheaper AEC projects for our clients and communities when we partner together in inclusivity.
Innovation & Creativity
A group that is untrusting or can’t explain their ideas to non-similar audiences isn’t inclusive because they can’t meet that criteria of conflict resolution. Inclusive groups perform better because they have more thoughtful answers and can defend it better. They are more creative because they are diverse people.
What we’re really talking about when we talk about profitability is innovation. This is the root of why inclusive teams outperform non-diverse teams financially. It’s all in the quality of the product they are producing and the decisions they are making. By increasing the individuality of project teams, you'll see more creativity. But by increasing the interconnections of the team, you’ll see higher quality.
Inclusivity is being able to freely think, freely fail, and freely dissent. The point isn't to have token minority diversity or to calculate percentages of diversity. It's to get real benefit from inclusivity by putting in the efforts. I’ll talk more about what these efforts can look like in future posts.
My personal opinion is that our industry is failing our communities if they don’t do better with inclusion & diversity. It’s not just about us and having an enjoyable workplace. It’s about our legacy for our friends and family. So I'm challenging myself and my teams to figure out how we do this better. To feel uncomfortable. To fail. And then to get better. Step by step. One step forward, two steps back until suddenly… we’re dancing.
Reading: The Source - How rivers made America and America remade its rivers by Martin Doyle. It was a gift and I love it. I’m trying to read it slowly and make sense of all of it from things I studied in school and some of the entities I interact with in my job.
Working: From home. Like all of you. Last couple weeks I’ve had some conversations with my client about scope creep. As we were trying to be agile to shifting project needs, we didn’t do a good job limiting creep and papering it all up. Now my client will have to explain to his higher ups the extended engineering cost after the fact. It will benefit the client in a more cost-effective construction but… people don’t like surprises even when you’re doing the best thing for the circumstances. Learning is unfun sometimes! Luckily, everyone in the management teams trusts each other and we had some very productive conversations.
Listening: Just finished Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. It was a well written book about women that was not superficial (true to SR’s writings) but honestly I thought the characters were hateable.