end stage diversity 2012

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Copyright © Robert D. Jones 2012 – All Rights Reserved

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P . O . B o x 1 7 0 3 7 , P i t t s b u r g h , P A 1 5 2 3 5

2012

End Stage Diversity An Opening Statement for a CultureNeutral® Paradigm

Robert D. Jones, CEO

nuClusiv® LLC

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“Keep your minds open. Keep an open head about music. I grew up in Florida where there was

no real music prejudice. Everybody was playing everything from Cuban to symphonic.

Everything was hip …

“Keep listening, keep your ears open.”

Advice to Young Musicians from Jaco Pastorious

“Change systems must go beyond (at least philosophically) the endless cycle of organizational

work that leads oftentimes to a state of equilibrium—or a state of more harm than good. Can't

continue, can't be sustained—doesn't work for

company, community or country.”

Amri Johnson

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 4

MEMORY LANE: FAILURE TO WIN THE PEACE ................................................................. 9

TECTONIC DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFTS ................................................................................ 10

D-PHILES AND DIVERSIPHOBES ....................................................................................... 12

WAR BY ANY OTHER NAME .............................................................................................. 15

COST OF DIVERSITY & INCLUSION ................................................................................ 17

END STAGE DIVERSITY – WHY? ........................................................................................... 19

STRUGGLE SPECTRUM ....................................................................................................... 20

DANCING WITH DIVERSIPHOBES ....................................................................................... 24

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE .................................................................................................... 24

FAULTY FOUNDATION OF DIVERSITY ............................................................................... 27

“MORE OF THE SAME” PARADIGM ..................................................................................... 31

THE OLD, TIRED, BUSTED APPROACH ............................................................................... 33

THE EXISTENCE OF DIVERSITY SHORTHAND ................................................................. 37

CULTURAL EXPERIENCES ................................................................................................. 38

THE SEVEN ASSERTIONS of nuClusiv® ............................................................................ 41

BREAKINGING THE CYCLE .................................................................................................... 44

AREN’T PEOPLE GETTING IT ON THEIR OWN? ........................................................... 47

A CultureNeutral® WAY? .......................................................................................................... 49

DEVELOPING, UNDERSTANDING AND LAUNCHING A CultureNeutral® ENTERPRISE ............................................................................................................................. 50

WHAT’S NEXT? ..................................................................................................................... 53

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INTRODUCTION

Diversity is dead.

It’s been dead for a long time. It just doesn’t seem to know it yet. Much like the

pictures of presidents on U.S. currency, we easily recognize their faces, call them by name,

associate a value with them, and carry them around—but they are dead, nonetheless.

The Diversity Paradigm is dead. Long live diversity.

Within a corporate context, “Diversity” may be the most widely known and

promoted program among employees and consumers. Posters adorn corporate walls. Public

relations, marketing and advertising materials splash diversity1 on every communications

piece in some fashion. Every corporate website worth its salt has a dash of inclusion and

“diversity” sprinkled liberally in pictures and prose.2

For all the good Diversity has allegedly done, and for all the talented and caring folks

that have worked in the field, the market for it has matured. Its varied audiences and

adherents have grown weary and frustrated with it. Diversity is suffering the “Lake

Wobegone Effect,”3 as apparently everyone can now be legitimately declared “diverse,”

seeking to be understood from among an expanding array of differences too immense to

comprehend or catalog.

A year-long social media4 discourse among disciplinarians in varying professions

revealed profoundly troubling findings, including:

1 The convention selected for this writing is to capitalize and/or use surrounding quotes, as “Diversity”, to indicate the paradigm, discipline, practice and processes employed in the programmatic sense of it. The generic condition of diversity, meaning variety or variegation, is used lowercase and without quotes other than at the start of sentences.

2 Example of D&I web excellence: http://tinyurl.com/successmeasure and http://tinyurl.com/websprinkles

3 Lake Wobegon, a fictional Minnesota town in which “all the children are above average,” a creation of Garrison Keillor in his show, “Prairie Home Companion”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon

4 LinkedIn.com – Unscientific voluntary discourse among professionals from April through December 2011, facilitated by NuClusiv®

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon

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ONE: From CEOs to distinguished university professors to book authors to Chief

Diversity Officers, no one possessed or offered a uniformly accepted “standard” definition of

diversity.

TWO: Among those participants responsible for managing corporate diversity, none

offered a standard set of measures by which their individual or corporate Diversity

performance was gauged. In fact, after decades of dialogue in America, and more recently

globally, organizations like SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management—the

ostensible epicenter of Diversity science) was said to have been collaborating in a desperate

attempt to come up with definitions and “metrics” for what they do.

Apparently, after more than 40 years of professional diversity efforts, there is no

widely accepted set of definitions, nor are there generally accepted metrics for field progress,

advancement attainments or performance—even for Diversity Officers themselves.

No one seems to know exactly what they do…and they professionals are being tight-

lipped about it.

THREE: Significant management surveys and academic research cited during the

discussion revealed that CEOs generally did not raise the issue of diversity as a significant

business issue if researchers did not prompt for it. In at least four high-level studies of C-

Suite priorities for the 21st century, neither North American nor global senior management

voluntarily cited “Diversity” as a priority. When prompted, “Diversity” ranked among the

lowest of all 21st century global business priorities.

FOUR: In organizations with Chief Diversity Officers, the CDOs themselves were

most often the highest ranking minority or female officer in the organization. In almost every

measure, both in business and the broader social construct—despite far flung modeling of

“Diversity” by the corporate sector—minority and female disparities are generally the same

or worse than they were prior to the advent of ”Diversity” programs.

FIVE: Broad ignorance and disagreement prevail when seeking a common base

definition for the term, “Diversity.”

What should Diversity accomplish, whether in society or in the workplace?

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How should Diversity be measured or managed with positive effect?

Even the more recent attempt to hitch diversity to innovation fails to address decades

devoid of measurable positive results.

SIX: There was little disagreement that the results of decades of effort by the

Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) profession have been disappointing in terms of its failure at

generating consistent equity within corporate systems.5 Yet, there was broad agreement that

the diversity profession itself, from internal managers to external consultants, is on its back

still pleading for senior management support and a silver bullet with which to silence its

detractors.

The good news was that one loosely stated objective of Diversity programs did

approach uniformity and universal acceptance—that of “diversity awareness,” though even

that wasn’t framed the same way in most places. The bad news is that widespread

awareness may have been achieved years ago, and now employees are just flat out tired of

hearing about it. Consultants are increasingly making reference to “Diversity Fatigue” as a

first obstacle to overcome in training and other facets of Diversity programs. There’s some

evidence that Diversity Consultants themselves have contributed to the prevalence of the

fatigue.6

Another nagging and growing problem regarding the credibility of the corporate

CDO/D&I model is the recent erosion of senior management credibility, especially on issues

of major import to stakeholders. The primary expressed responsibility of management is to

its stakeholders, starting with investors. Yet, in recent decades, we’ve seen a certain level of

“moral flexibility” among senior management teams in standards of fiduciary care.

Fortune magazine’s Nov. 9, 2009 issue took a behind-the-scenes look at the auto

industry bailout through the eyes of Steven Rattner, who led President Obama’s bailout

team:

5 Comparative Measures: Failed War on Drugs http://tinyurl.com/Global-Drug-Wars (Global Commission on Drug

Policy 2011) to the Failure of Diversity http://tinyurl.com/DiversityFailure (Hemphill, Haines 1997) 6 Diversity Fatigue: http://tinyurl.com/DiversityFatigue

http://tinyurl.com/Global-Drug-Wars

http://tinyurl.com/DiversityFailure

http://tinyurl.com/DiversityFatigue

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“Among the surprises along the way: We were shocked, even beyond our low

expectations, by the poor state of both GM and Chrysler. Looking just at the condition of

GM's finances and Chrysler's new-car pipeline, the case for a bailout was weak.

“But on the other hand, as we surveyed the interconnected web of finance

companies, suppliers and related businesses, the potential impact of the likely alternative—

liquidation—stunned us. We imagined that the collapse of the automakers could devastate

the Midwest beyond imagination. We were determined not to fail. But as we started down

the road, we saw mainly obstacles.”7

This was, of course, a bad news-worse news scenario—a long way south of the

positive reports of auto industry financial positions that had driven stock prices on Wall

Street right up to the point of the economic revelation and collapse.

Others industries proved to be in that same insolvent boat. If the auto industry’s

major players weren’t open and honest with their No. 1 stakeholder base, along with

banking, insurance and finance firms, perhaps there’s at least a chance there’s a few surprises

along the way with respect to the state of D&I in corporate America. It’s a spillover effect,

impacting even sincere D&I efforts.

When employees and customers see something different at work than the leadership

mantra, the cognitive dissonance can be difficult to quell. In the case of Toyota, as their

automobiles were literally careening out of control around America, the company issued a

dozen safety related product recalls in as many months. Toyota’s public response? The

company “appointed a chief quality officer, created an advisory panel on safety, and

restructured its reporting system in the U.S. to communicate defect issues in a more timely

manner. The changes seem mainly cosmetic…president Akio Toyoda…shows little inclination

to alter the corporate structure that allowed the quality issues to fester.”8

Sound familiar?

In the nuClusiv® social media discussion, the credibility of the CDO position came

under fire at the points where the topic circled back to metrics, tangible results and

7 The Auto Bailout: How We Did It: http://tinyurl.com/POTUSAutoBailout 8 How Toyota Lost its Way: http://tinyurl.com/QualityCosmetics

http://tinyurl.com/POTUSAutoBailout

http://tinyurl.com/QualityCosmetics

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meaningful change—as opposed to meaningless process and questionable structural

solutions.

The alarm over the failure of Corporate Diversity9 is old. Discussions of its broader

death, however, may not be as much of an exaggeration as some might think.

Diversity is often considered close up, through a microscope. Instead, we’re going to

take a giant step backwards and examine the current macro state of Diversity through a

telescope. Each of the questions we’ll examine in brief were implicit and explicit themes that

resonated throughout the nuClusiv® social media experiment.

9 “Discrimination, Harassment, and the Failure of Diversity Training: What to Do Now” 1997 By Hellen Hemphill, Ray Haines, http://tinyurl.com/DiversityFailure

http://tinyurl.com/DiversityFailure

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MEMORY LANE: FAILURE TO WIN THE PEACE

While the emergence of the D&I profession is readily seen as an adjunct of the civil

rights struggles of the last century, most diversity professionals would be reluctant, if not

loath to look beyond historic cultural battles and openly link “Diversity” issues with war.

But the linkage happens, especially when media seek to sensationalize disputes over cultural

differences, opinion or policy.10 And they aren’t wrong. War can be defined simply as an

extreme measure for managing differences.

While there has been no shortage of hostilities of varying degrees between diverse

peoples of North America, there has been no declared war between blacks and whites, no

legal state of combat between men and women, and homosexuals and heterosexuals haven’t

had a Congressional declaration of combat. The last time U.S. citizens were officially

declared to be “at war” with one another was during the American Civil War,11 and even that

war wasn’t black against white.

That was America’s violently defining moment—an epic struggle crystalizing the

difference between the status quo and the cultural future of the nation—with blacks and

whites fighting on both sides. The legacy of that war is the enduring ripple effect it

generated through American cultures that persists to this day.

Every war is first comprised of at least two things: a reason and a flashpoint (though

history often confuses the two).

Some argue the Civil War was fought to bring an end to the institution of slavery—

that barbaric inception of America’s initial human resources management policy and labor

relations strategy. Others argue the central issue was state’s rights vs. federal powers, while

still others contend it was an issue of economics, international trade and taxation.

Reason(s) notwithstanding, a real war it was, the flashpoint being President

Lincoln’s line in the sand, The Emancipation Proclamation. It was the largest single labor

policy decision in American history, equating to a massive layoff with a severance pay of “40

10 Chick-fil-A ignites culture war: http://tinyurl.com/ChickFiletAtWar 11 Stated with respect and deference to native and aboriginal peoples displaced by colonial populations who later identified as American citizens.

http://tinyurl.com/ChickFiletAtWar

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acres and a mule.” Shortly after the ensuing bloody war came to an operational and legal

conclusion, various groups began yielding grudging ground of new freedoms to some, and

then to others.

Varying terms emerged, like integration, desegregation, suffrage, anti-lynching, civil

and equal rights, tolerance and more to describe desired results. Still, among the ostensible

beneficiaries of the end of slavery, equality, equity, parity and peace seemed a long way off

for many. We start with one example in a spectrum of examples of conflict related to

America’s diversity to illustrate a point.12

Diversity has always existed, of course, managed by pure control, stratified and

restrained. Over the decades following the Civil War, diversity was slowly let out of its box,

its prominence accelerating after WWII with a focus on human resources and labor

relations.

Europe’s diverse huddled masses initially responded to the eastward-beckoning

Statue of Liberty in the early Industrial Age. But by the end of the 1960s, the raised lamp

beamed its light southward toward Latin America, It soon became the dominant U.S. source

of tired and poor for the new workforce. As the embers from conflicts in the Vietnam-

Cambodian regions cooled, the door opened to the homeless and tempest-tossed East-

Asians, while the science and technology sectors beckoned India and China (74 percent of

today’s U.S. Asian adults are immigrants).13

And from within, during WWII and down to the end of the century, from Rosie the

Riveter to Jackie Robinson, and from Cesar Chavez to Barney Frank, America’s majority

racial demographic and its extant traditional workforce was inexorably drawn into the

burgeoning forest of domestic diversities.

TECTONIC DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFTS

12 Though this publication is not written to represent a viewpoint from the African American experience, the struggle for African American equality has been a bellwether, both a leading and trailing indicator of broader American and global minority conditions. We use the reflected light of that history throughout this discussion.

13 The Rise of Asian Immigration, Alex Nowrasteh: http://tinyurl.com/ImmigrantAsianUSA

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As racial and gender barriers flexed in the 1970s, and demographic shifts continued

into the 1980s, visionary thought leaders sifted through the tea leaves and sounded the

rallying cry. “Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century,” by Employment

and Training Administration (U.S.) and Hudson Institute (1987) put forward the diversity

scenarios. The term “post-racial” wouldn’t be invented for decades, and yet, with wide-eyed

optimism, some were already reaching beyond America’s first rush of diversity endorphins to

get to that utopian finish line: a level playing field.14

By the 1990s, the concept of embracing diversity and celebrating differences had gone

viral. The reasons for D&I’s historically more recent emergence and import on the global

scene include economically driven government labor policies, proliferation of untenable

foreign wars and policies with related political flight and refuge, new business & travel

patterns, attractive new freedoms and opportunities, natural disasters, medical technology

and tourism, emerging global markets, the Internet, global communications and more.

Despite the best hopes, predictions and proposed methods for Diversity, the laws of

inertia still translated mightily to the course of history.

Playwright William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even

past.”15

In March of 2008, a full half-century distant from Faulkner’s axiom, soon-to-be

President Barak Obama alluded to America’s continued failure to find a fork in the road that

might yet still lead the nation well away from its sordid past to “a union that could be and

should be perfected over time.” The then-candidate’s implication was that the longest war in

American history, the struggle between societal homogeneity and heterogeneity, was alive

and well with an uncertain outcome.

Therein lay a clue to the continued quandary for what is now commonly known as

“Diversity” or the colloquial “D&I.” The U.S. struggle of the late 1800s, a literal ‘war’ over

differences, wasn’t entirely concluded—and certainly not forgotten. Ted Nugent’s lament in

14 Beyond Race and Gender: Unleashing the Power of Your Total Workforce by Managing Diversity, R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., 1991 15 The character Stevens quipped to Temple in William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun” 1951

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The Washington Times (July 5, 2012)16 over the Civil War’s outcome is an echo of the

significant demographic17 he represents—the “if only” Confederate contingent still unwilling

to accept the outcome a wishful 150 years later.

The unresolved differences and concomitant tensions remain. Though not

constituting outright war, the number of documented overt and ugly skirmishes that

erupted, for which diversities were the lynchpin, ranged over the whole of the last century

from coast to coast. For many, those incidents lend sufficient credence to a pervasive belief

in a more covert and perhaps highly cohesive resistance to diversity, including a solidly

resistant contingent within the more staid, genteel organizational environment. As my new

ancient proverb warns, “If you don’t believe there’s a conspiracy, you’re probably part of it.”18

D-PHILES AND DIVERSIPHOBES

As a rule, people start celebrating when struggles end, not while still being waged.

The wishful diversiphilian concept of calling out “differences” then training people to

embrace and celebrate them before the differences are settled was novel. More than forty years

down that road the novelty appears to have worn off. A difference-embracing (D-phile)

philosophy with methodologies rooted in unresolved differences was likely to breed little

other than more differences. The fatigue over lack of resolution is widespread, and

differences (cultural conflicts19) are multiplying like rats below deck, and tensions abound.

Those differences can and do range from mild to profound, as do the associated tensions.

Diversiphilians like R. Roosevelt Thomas acknowledged just such diversity tension—

and the organizational and societal ramifications of ignoring it. Sooner or later, however,

tension must be dispelled. Differences can no longer merely be managed, but must be settled

in one of two ways: They must be resolved or set aside by mutual agreement to relieve the

tensions. There was bound to be increasing tension in the presence of unresolved differences

16 Civil War Still Divides Opinions: http://tinyurl.com/SouthShallRiseAgain

17 Pew Research: Still Relevant, Still Divisive: http://tinyurl.com/DivisivePraise

18 Quote attributed to: Robert D. Jones, IngoodCompany, LLC 19 A. Manis, “When Will We…Get Over it?”, http://tinyurl.com/IntractableDifference

http://tinyurl.com/SouthShallRiseAgain

http://tinyurl.com/DivisivePraise

http://tinyurl.com/IntractableDifference

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in increasing numbers among workers as the D&I paradigm continued to kick the tension

can down the road in management mode.

And yet, rather than a focus on rooting out and eliminating dysfunctional bias as the

core Diversity strategy, the corporate paradigm instead opted to mandate training for greater

awareness of differences, and then promoted embracing in an attempt to counterbalance the

tensions from existing biases through celebration. In the absence of resolution of differences,

however, celebratory dancing cheek-to-cheek would prove to be premature at best—

disingenuous at worst. Apparently childless one and all, D&I “experts” had obviously never

demanded that their squabbling children hug each other after an unresolved spat.

The social and statistical evidence indicates these tensions still abound, as do the

bitter fruits of the “real” learning through corporate Diversity models. One need only

consider the case of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and their recent

secession from the “Unity, Journalists of Color” coalition and absence from the quadrennial

Unity Conference20 to see how corporate professionals21 who are focused on Diversity and

diversities have learned to be divergent instead of being productively diverse.

It seems NABJ may have focused more on their “B” than their “J” in the process of

participating in the coalition—perhaps missing strategic opportunities for their members

along the way. In this case, culture trumped profession. NABJ is today not only on the

outside of “Unity” looking in, but perhaps in danger of being cast as a radical culture-based

splinter group of Diversiphobes instead of a foresighted co-founder and driver of the Unity

Conference.

Today, NABJ has found itself adroitly out-maneuvered in the aftermath of its

voluntary withdrawal. Unity’s new LGBT members have subsequently succeeded in

replacing the organization’s former name, “Unity, Journalists of Color,” with “Unity

Journalists” and positioning themselves as “La Résistance” in the struggle for professional

freedoms and human rights for all. “Color” is disassociated from Unity.

20 NABJ Secedes From Unity Conference: http://tinyurl.com/disruptivediversity

21 Unity Executive Director Resigns for Africa Post: http://tinyurl.com/UnityResigns

http://tinyurl.com/disruptivediversity

http://tinyurl.com/UnityResigns

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Importantly, the Unity Journalists organization is revealed to have been fragmented

by its own diversities, with members now spinning away from one another much like the

breakup of humanity amassed around the Tower of Babel,22 separating by micro-cultures

(Black Female, Black LGBT, Black Hispanic, etc.) after an abortive attempt to unify diverse

members.

Chaos in unity, division in diversity—yet another coalition that flew apart when the

dissipative power of its differences became a stronger force than the cohering power of the

mission that brought them together. This pattern has been duplicated many times in modern

history. The divisiveness inherent in the NABJ-Unity case cannot legitimately be classified

as irony if it was predictable—and it was predictable.

With demographic shifts occurring, long ago forecast by “Workforce 2000,” the

growing array of diversities have redrawn the demarcation lines of bias in America—and

around the world—into two apparent dominant dispositions, or predispositions.

Under the rubric of the celebratory “Diversity” paradigm, the “D-philes” have

emerged as being at least philosophically willing to embrace identified and definable

differences. Bias proves to be the recessive gene among “D-philes” who as “difference-

huggers” embrace a kinder, gentler spin on the struggle for equality.

In a departure from the often rancorous struggles rooted in gritty soil of differences

across the untamed American social landscape, the potted plant of “Corporate Diversity”

allowed for a new style of harmonious management of those very same differences...without

the oft associated encumbrance of resolution. Divested of the burden of resolving differences,

only celebrating them, the Diversity model was then quickly grafted into government,

institutional and social settings. D-philes eagerly embraced the new paradigm.

This group got the party started and began the Sisyphean struggle anew in varying

degrees. D-philes pursued what many mistakenly believed to be high comfort level capacity

building for resolving differences, with an objective of moving the American differences

needle toward the positive side of the societal ledger through an enlightened diverse

22 The Book of Genesis Chapter 11, The Bible

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workforce. Diversity-trained egalitarian employees would, as the theory held, become carrier

monkeys for equality.

Diversiphobes had other ideas.

Diversiphobes saw the thrust of Workforce2000 as more than merely a prediction of

greater diversity. Rather, it was a threat to the status quo—the queen on their societal chess

board. No matter the specific nature of the diversities, it was the encroachment on long-held

familial turf23 that mattered most. Recognizing the old realities of finite resources and the

new reality of legally protected classes, the organic nature of bias kicked in.

Bias being the dominant gene, resolute Diversiphobes nudged the rock back down

the hill at each opportunity, slowing or reversing progress, one test case after another.

Pushback by law wasn’t a new tactic. Well-funded, highly organized and hard-fought legal

victories from Bakke24 to Ricci25 successfully and resoundingly leveraged the definition of

discrimination such that “reversing” a wrong became legally wrong under the law.

In short, rather than calling it “war” outright, the relationship between diverse

belligerents at odds over differences is generally recognized as a state of mostly nonviolent

“struggle.”

WAR BY ANY OTHER NAME

Thomas Barnett, as senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College,

described rethinking “war in the context of everything else.”26 He allocates three strategic

spaces, one for Battle (war itself), and one each for “Transition” and “Peace,” which he deems

the “everything else” of his strategic equation. Retrospectively, “differences” included racial

diversity as at least one element of the Civil War. Another, “diversity of thought,” could

apply to the States Rights vs. Federal Rights issues.

23 Take Our Country Back: http://tinyurl.com/ReclaimBirthRight

24 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)

25 Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658, 2671, 174 L. Ed. 2d 490 (2009)

26 The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century: Berkley Trade (May 3, 2005), http://blog.ted.com/2007/06/14/thomas_barnetts/

http://tinyurl.com/ReclaimBirthRight

http://blog.ted.com/2007/06/14/thomas_barnetts/

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Barnett might apply the post-Civil War “transition” space to the “Reconstruction

Era”—a promising moniker, but one that didn’t end so well for the Free Persons of Color.27

New labor laws quickly reconstituted aspects of slavery at the state level, pushback within

the framework of the law a well-established, highly respected American tradition even then.

Barnett’s third space, if applied similarly to the failed post-Civil War hope and quest

for political and racial peace, has extended more than a century now. And what a tenuous

peace it has been to this day.28 The Civil War itself was won/lost in only five years.29 But to

Barnett’s point, with 20/20 hindsight, we can posit that the post-Civil War failure to

quickly and deftly ‘win the peace’ ensured far more than 150 years of managing manifold

struggles on multiple levels. In fact, a century or two of post-Civil War turmoil might be

considered “just getting started” compared to other lingering conflicts and hostilities around

the globe.

Winston Churchill said, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”30

Precious ground may be won by war, but neither minds nor hearts are to be found among

the spoils. The ‘everything else’ phases of Transition and Peace are postwar endeavors. Yet,

the termination of American Civil War military hostilities was never followed up with deft

and effective termination of racial hostilities, which flourish down to this day. This failure is

akin to what Barnett terms “catastrophic success.” The Emancipation Proclamation, as one

aspect of it, just might have been Abraham Lincoln’s “Mission accomplished!” moment.31 No

matter how one measures it, the post-Civil War cost of perpetual fencing with lingering

diversiphobic issues has been incalculable.

As stated at the outset, the American history of racial struggle is only one wave-

length in the spectrum of diversity’s struggle in this global economy. Union vs. Confederacy

was but one among many wars of many kinds around the world that have raged in parallel.

Each one propagates its own set of rippling multigenerational and increasingly global waves,

27 The Black Codes, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jsb01 ; and, The Black Codes of the South, University of Alabama Press; 2nd Printing edition (1967) 28 The Last Lynching (1981 in Mobile, Ala): http://tinyurl.com/NotLongEnoughAgo 29 Civil War Trust – Timeline: http://preview.tinyurl.com/7cjtqnd 30 Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874–1965), Speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943 31 POTUS George W. Bush, 2003: http://tinyurl.com/MissionAccomplished-Sort-Of

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jsb01

http://tinyurl.com/NotLongEnoughAgo

http://preview.tinyurl.com/7cjtqnd

http://tinyurl.com/MissionAccomplished-Sort-Of

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creating intercultural “interference” that disrupts communication, understanding and

productive operation.

More of these histories than ever before are being woven into the social fabric of

hiring organizations. Lingering social conflict based on differences flourishes in the wake of

wars—throughout nations and the workplace—where mending, healing and winning hearts

and minds has not been an effectively executed postwar strategy.

COST OF DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

D&I fans the flames of differences with each wave of newcomers, going far beyond race,

gender and generational differences to yet newer forms of differences, each acquired and

recognized, but none being either resolved or set aside. Instead, members of each ascriptive

silo are taught to both demand and expect a share of finite, increasingly scarce budgetary

attention and mind space until they erupt into open conflict over those limited resources, as

occurred in the case of NABJ and the Unity Journalists coalition. Their diversities divided

Unity, fractionation of the profession to the extent that they no longer looked like

journalists, but instead like an array of civil rights activist groups. Might this be precisely

what the C-Suite through the HR/CDO prescript has been trying to avoid by keeping

diversity within the minimum levels allowed by law?

As corporations employ workers from a more diverse workforce and hire or retain

employees who have committed to diversiphobic philosophies, they incur an incremental

cost from America’s past failure to win the postwar peace. And every time the C-Suite

invests capital in D&I to build a bias-free image, they join the ranks of those paying the

incremental cost of past failures to effectively win the peace.

Embracing and celebrating differences have proven inadequate replacements for the

tasks of eliminating either the costs or the effects of social conflict—as witnessed by the call

for new layers to be added. Inclusiveness, respect and dignity, equity and more are common

cries, proving not to have been natural outgrowths of embrace or celebration. CDOs today

are calling for their C-Suites to bolt on even more layers of investment to their already failed

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D&I programs. How likely is that to work, given the history of it, and to what end its

predictable failure?

Corporate style D&I is at best a short yardage strategy for those carrying the

diversity ball. Inside the organization, individuals strive for career success, taking what’s

given. These are the one-rung of the career ladder at a time, short yardage gains for

individual scores in disproportionately smaller numbers for some than for others. Much

gifted individual athletes, the books are replete with record-holders on losing teams.

The long yardage gains or deep yardage losses are traditionally made in societal

norms, policy and law on the “outside” of any organization. As long as the “struggles”

continue on the outside, is it reasonable to expect that those citizens inside any corporate

community will readily celebrate and embrace differences if the preponderance of employees

believe that important internal processes and decisions are driven by the attitudes and

beliefs inherent in external societal struggles? How can we understand this dynamic better?

How do we deal with it more effectively than with interventions that have long proven to be

of questionable or low efficacy in the workplace?

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END STAGE DIVERSITY – WHY?

Why are we characterizing the current state of affairs as “End Stage Diversity?” The

answer is found by further examining the matter of managing struggle. It may be of value to

consider an ancient source of widely praised wisdom regarding conflict.

“Sun Tzu is the earliest strategic book in human history...also the most brilliant and

widely applied strategic book ever written,” according to J. H. Huang.32 At the very start of

Huang’s edition, the perfect description of the corporate Diversity dilemma appears as a Sun

Tzu admonition.

“Strategy without tactics is the longest road to victory. Tactics without strategy is

the noise before defeat.”

Lt. General USA (Ret.) David W. Barno points out how the aphorism “relates well to

many of today’s most complex environments.”33 Truly, few environments are more complex

than intense human interaction where diversities [differences] abound. Barno’s forward to

the book is an invaluable read for CDOs and anyone else interested in a brilliant insight into

the noisily chaotic world of D&I.

Sun Tzu’s observation is proven generalizable by the current desperate attempt of the

corporate D&I discipline to change horses well beyond midstream. The D&I field has shed

old links to the Civil Rights struggle, its goals and objectives. D&I is loudly and proudly

hitching itself to what it foresees, with 20/20 hindsight, as the next big thing—a tribute to

its 40-year history without clearly expressed goals, objectives or strategy.

Diversity professionals have been proactively nibbling around the edges of

“innovation and creativity” as a rationale for Diversity’s continued existence (i.e., funding).

This pursuit, however, risks putting Diversity in the same category as coffee house noise,

recently shown to increase creative cognition,34 or a shot of vodka with cranberry juice,35

32 The Art of War, Translated, Edited, and with commentary by J. H. Huang, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, Modern Thought Edition, 2008 33 Ibid. 34 “...Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition (Ravi Mehta Rui (Juliet) Zhu Amar Cheema)” http://tinyurl.com/6qpm2ch

http://tinyurl.com/6qpm2ch

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recently shown to increase ability to find a greater number of solutions to word puzzles

faster than sober volunteers who were more focused but less creative.

Are CDOs are leveraging innovation to promote diversity or leveraging diversity to

gain a toe-hold on the business of innovation? Either way, “Chief Innovation Officer” has a

sweeter sound, among other sweeter things. The innovation chase is one more path to

frustration as diverse members of organizations will be increasingly pressured for

contribution to innovation misattributed to ascription rather than on anything more

substantive…like talent. Moving from soft-side embrace and celebration of differences to

quantitative application and contribution to measurable innovation through differences is

risky business for everyone affected. Innovation becomes the value proposition while

diversity becomes merely one commodity of dozens with the potential to generate it.

This horse-swap is happening in a most interesting space. Attempting to make the

leap to revenue/profit generation is not a step, but a stop in the right direction for CDOs.

History bears witness to many a socio-political struggle that has ended before it succeeded

in achieving its aims. With the end of the struggle in full view, but with success nowhere in

sight, many a leadership team over the centuries has headed for the hills with the townsfolk

and troops left to cope in the aftermath. It’s nothing new. So let’s examine what “End Stage”

may really mean.

STRUGGLE SPECTRUM

In examining the process of struggle, John W. (Sam) Keltner36 lays out a helpful

“Struggle Spectrum’ consisting of six progressive stages. They are:

1. “Mild Difference” characterized by relatively limited collision of interests,

2. “Disagreement” characterized by mild differences that are not resolved, with

differences that become explicit and focused,

35 Lost in the sauce: The effects of alcohol on mind-wandering. Sayette, M.A., Reichle, E.D., & Schooler, J.W. (2009). Psychological Science, 20, 747-752.

36 The Management of Struggle: Elements of Dispute Resolution through Negotiation, Mediation and Arbitration, John W. (Sam) Keltner Consulting Associates, Hampton Press, Inc., Cresskill, New Jersey

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3. “Dispute” characterized by failure to resolve disagreements, escalation to heated

argument, powerful polarization and rule-controlled and/or intense attack and defense

behaviors,

4. “Campaign” characterized by public dispute, expanding the struggle to involve

supportive participants in an attempt to mold constituencies to ultimately influence the

behavior of the opponent,

5. “Litigation” characterized by law and regulation, lawyers and a hierarchy of

courts. Also by key elements of blocked/controlled communication along with the processes

of advocacy, formal argument, debate and persuasion; and then and finally…

6. “War,” types of which include, but are by no means limited to, trade wars, fist

fights or military actions—all destructive of people, resources, facilities and relationships.

Keltner acknowledges flexibility in the order and overlap of the stages. Still, the

striking correlation of Keltner’s Spectrum for the purposes of this discussion is its

applicability to the progression of stages from January 1, 186337 to the present day in the

progressive American Negro-to-African American experience. Amazingly, the Keltner

progression is almost precisely reversed, starting with the American Civil War as stage six

(War) up to and through the current D&I paradigm, which easily correlates with Keltner’s

stage two (Mild Differences).

For example, a C-Suite paying a CDO six figures a year to tell them what they already

know, while the CDO says what the C-Suite wants the CDO to say instead of what he or she

may want to say seems to fit nicely under the classification of “mild differences,” especially

compared to what the CDO job description and compensation would have looked like only

150 years ago.

Sun Tzu’s “longest road to victory” may be well epitomized in the more than 150-year

process of dancing backward away from the Emancipation to the present, along a regressive

37 Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, an Executive Order by POTUS Abraham Lincoln, freeing all slaves held within the then United States.

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path through stages five to three (Litigation through Dispute) during which time African

Americans had to be freed twice.38

During the most recent third of that journey, many others have hopped aboard.

Though it’s gotten a bit crowded, the freedom train lumbers along on a track to equality.

America’s tepid embrace of cultural differences, reserved celebrations of diversity, and

newfound dignity and respect for all diversity is expanding globally. Despite this, these

primary tactics employed for the last forty years of the struggle, while far more pleasant than

prior alternatives, appear to have failed to live up to expectations of equality for many

diverse groups, starting with Native Americans39 and extending to most others.

Along the way, corporate “Affirmative Action Officers” rose and fell away. Corporate

EEO Compliance Officers ascended and then descended in prominence and stature. The

steam pressure of the struggle that led to putting CDOs in place has been relieved in the

form of paychecks, while equity and parity remain out of visual range, beyond the horizon,

perhaps even over the rainbow.

So, perhaps it is not such a bad time for CDOs to consider a horse trade. The shift to

an emphasis on innovation and creativity during the bridge constructs of inclusion, dignity

& respect won’t work as an exit strategy for D&I consultants and practitioners, but it’s a

valiant effort for CDOs, even as the walls of corporate D&I are crumbling around them.

Conduct your own unscientific survey and you’ll find at least some with fears (others

with hopes) of seeing the realization of part two of Sun Tzu’s axiom, “Tactics without

strategy is the noise before defeat.” If the regressive journey along the Keltner Spectrum were

to hold true into the future, there is only one last phase (a.k.a., “river”) of struggle to finish

crossing, that of “mild differences.” But, cross it to where? To what?

Standing midstream, waist deep in “mild differences,” we can still see the “Dispute

Phase” on the riverbank behind us. Implicit in Kelter’s phases is what’s on the other bank of

phase one, “Phase Zero,” peace, an absence of conflict or nullification differences. Is that

38 Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and Civil Rights Act (1866), and subsequently, the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) 39 State of the First Nations, Crosscut.com 2012.10.31: http://tinyurl.com/FirstGovernments

http://tinyurl.com/FirstGovernments

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clearly visible from where we stand? Is it credibly attainable by means of stocking the

workforce waters with unresolved differences? Can embracing and celebrating differences,

dignifying and respecting them, elevating them without resolving them or setting them aside

get us to the opposite bank from “dispute?” Or will they sink the boat?

If the energy of D-philian philosophy can sustain the 150-year marathon to keep

everyone dancing the “Backwards Keltner” with Diversiphobes until peace is achieved, then

perhaps endurance is the only thing standing between the America of today and “The

Dream” of the world of tomorrow.

Then again, maybe not. At the current rate of progress (or regression), tomorrow

won’t exactly be tomorrow. Maybe the row to the other bank isn’t quite that straight.

HOW WOULD YOU ANSWER?

‘Has the Corporate Diversity model been a legitimate path to inclusion, equity or

ending at least some disparities…even one of them? Was it ever meant to do so?

Given its track record, should the 20th Century corporate diversity methods or

models be the foundational guide for driving a 21st Century global multicultural

paradigm toward a state of diminishing cultural conflict?

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DANCING WITH DIVERSIPHOBES

Keltner suggests that the order of the struggle phases can be managed, but what of

the velocity of change phases? Given the historic push-forward and push-back cycle, the rate

of change feels absolutely glacial to those with long lives and healthy memories. Some things

are so far reaching that we cannot fathom that there’s a plan to it. But when the results are

summed up, we have to wonder. Here’s one quick look back at a similar end of a struggle

with a similar absence of results, that of political process.

Adam Smith, 18th century economist and philosopher, said, “No society can surely be

flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

Is it possible that there are societal mechanisms in place to ensure that some part of America

must remain poor and miserable?

The Black U.S. poverty rate had been in ostensible overall decline since 1959 when it

was 55.1 percent, according to the U.S. Census. In 2002 it stood at 24.1 percent. On the

surface that appears to have constituted significant economic progress—but maybe not.

Let’s review the trends.

Black poverty rates dropped sharply to 34.7 percent by 1968, dropping an average 5

percent per year after 1959. Had that continued, Blacks would have reached parity with

White poverty before 2000. But, a funny thing happened on the way to the polls—a velocity

change.

Roughly coincident with the first totally free U.S. elections, the decrease in Black

poverty effectively stopped. During the 26 years following 1968, the average annual decline

was reduced to a mere 0.48 percent (less than one-half of 1 percent per year). Suddenly, the

possibility of playing “catch up” with poor Whites was set back by centuries, ironically

contemporaneous with the newly granted right to unrestricted participation in the political

process.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

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The Black poverty rate finally crept below 30 percent in 1995, when the average rate

of decline increased to about 3 percent per year through to 2002. Even at this pace, it would

have taken decades of consecutive and consistent declines to reach the 2002 White U.S.

poverty rate of 7.8 percent. Unfortunately, there has never been a long run of steady declines

in Black poverty. In fact, once again, increased Black voter turnout was followed by bad

news about poverty. The Black poverty rate rose from 22.5 percent in 2000 to 24.1 percent in

2002, and the number of poor Blacks increased by 500,000.

Dishearteningly, in 2002 the absolute number of Blacks in poverty, 8,602,000 was

about the same as the 1966 report of 8,867,000, a 3 percent difference after the 36 years

following the culmination of the struggle for civil rights and voting. Even that gain could

have vanished overnight if the trend of the prior three years continued.

More bad news: the intensity of poverty was increasing, and census measures masked it.

Incarceration rates quadrupled over those two decades—disproportionately so for Blacks.

But Census measurement of U.S. poverty omitted the increased share of the institutionalized

population and thereby significantly understated the true degree of poverty. A central

finding of one important study was that, “in the late nineties, the Sen poverty intensity

statistic is between 9% and 15% higher when we include the incarcerated population ....The

growth in sentencing has meant that this effect is stronger in the late nineties than in the

eighties.”40

In other words, the intensity of poverty was increasing, but was ignored by a

standard calculation that chooses an income level, then merely counts how many are below

it. It ignored incarceration impact, dispersion around a poverty line, and other factors like

the “pure transfer of income [that] is made from someone below the poverty line to someone

with more income.”

Such was the case, for example, through census manipulation whereby rural

communities gain prisoner populations along with accompanying state and federal income

40 Crime, Punishment and the Measurement of Poverty in the United States, 1979–1997, Ian Irvine and Kuan Xu1, November 2002

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at the expense of poorer communities from which the incarcerated were taken.41 Therefore,

poverty researchers increasingly use measures of intensity to account for depth of poverty

and inequality among the poor, in addition to sheer quantity.

As the November 2012 Presidential elections arrived, a disproportionate number of

Blacks woke up at varying depths below the poverty line, in public housing, their only way

to the polls via jitney or community voting drive busses.

In 2010, 15.1 percent of all people lived in poverty. But looking at children alone,

white non-Hispanic children suffer a 12.4 percent rate of poverty, while the rate for Black

children is 38.2 percent.42

More than a half century since the 1964 Voting Rights Act, if nothing else has been

proven, Blacks have learned that they cannot vote their way out of poverty. For all the loudly

voiced imperatives and pressure for participation in the political process, the results echo that

paraphrase of the laws of thermodynamics: “You can't win, you can't break even and you

can't get out of the game.”

Forty years of this Diversity paradigm has proven that attempting to foster societal

change of any kind from within corporate America with the hope it will go viral in society is

not a game for the shortsighted or fainthearted. No wonder the D&I field has largely

abandoned equity and parity, and is shifting to a new focus and pursuit in the exciting field

of fostering innovation and creativity. Given the glacial pace of economic change, even with

Diversity and all its new accessories of inclusion, dignity and respect dangling in the

forefront, America’s minorities may want to look to 2064 A.D. for the next set of Landmark

Rights Acts.

For African American freedom, the third time could be the charm, with another

quarter-century beyond that to work through the Supreme Court decisions. But let’s not get

ahead of ourselves. Let’s stick with failures in history for the present time.

41 The House I Live In – Documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8 42 Poverty in the United States Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8

http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/

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FAULTY FOUNDATION OF DIVERSITY

We should take a hard look at why the Diversity paradigm, as framed in the 1970s

and 80s, has taken so long to accomplish so little for so many in the way of equity. The short

answer: It wasn’t supposed to.

Again, the “fatigue” people have felt and expressed for quite some time now relates

directly to corporate Diversity’s oddly false start—a loud mixed message, one from which

the field is still struggling to recover—and its continued failure to accurately portray its

purpose to those affected by it. On the heels of great forward progress in the Civil Rights

struggle, a powerful and widespread misconception was that Diversity was supposed to lead

somewhere beyond the point at which the Civil Rights Movement had apparently stalled.

Discussing “10 Ways to Combat Diversity Fatigue,” one author advised that we

“Stress diversity as a journey, not a destination.”43 That is always a frightening metaphor

that generally doesn’t work in western civilization. Imagine your employer telling you,

“We’ve made your travel reservations and are sending you on a journey with no destination.”

What spouse, seeing their mate heading out the front door at 10 p.m. would accept

“On a journey, dear,” as an answer to the question, “Honey, just where are you going this

time of night?” You could, no doubt come up with a hundred areas of life where that

response simply doesn’t work…including on the job. Try putting “Journey” on your expense

report in the “Destination” box. See how long you last on that job.

But it is precisely that type of “Zen Diversity” language that created a nation full of

skeptics back in the early 1980s, and why its landing on fatigued ears as of late. Perhaps it’s

no coincidence the ‘fatigue’ article44 was written for Diversity in the legal profession, a

professional sector in which Diversity has collapsed and is struggling for any validation it

can find as females and minorities have been universally unable to find their way to partner

status, but for a relative handful.

43 Dr. A. N. Reeves, MSJD, Ten Ways to Combat Diversity Fatigue: http://tinyurl.com/JustPlainTired 44 Ibid.

http://tinyurl.com/JustPlainTired

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By the mid-1980s it was an inescapable conclusion for some, a growing suspicion for

many, that Corporate Diversity Programs as they were being framed would result in broad

failure to produce meaningful incremental results. The “no destination” syndrome was

manifest in the programs that were tweaked into varying states of compliant non-effect

despite the best work of top diversity consultants. Consultant recommendations were often

watered down or negotiated away by middle and senior management, reframed to become

diversionary in nature, doing little more than placating minorities and women with

celebrations while “the real work” related to core business continued to be managed and

performed by traditional employees.

Even well-intentioned management teams seldom outright rejected Diversity, but

gave provisional support and tolerated costly programmatic efforts, executing a set of token

gestures. Legal departments neutered programs, stripping anything even remotely

measurable from Diversity plans or goals. Corporate succession pipelines remained

protected and solidly defended,45 while soft-side programs deflected attempts to penetrate

the succession process.

Those few individuals who may have penetrated the pipeline were often marginalized

and ended up leaving. Stories abound of legitimate minority and women candidates who, in

worst case scenarios, became tacitly approved targets for bullying, even covert sabotage. At

times, when highly qualified and competent minorities still managed to shine, orchestrated,

strategic and deeply personal attacks ensued that ultimately resulted in the demise of their

effectiveness and careers. Many attest to have seen it happen.46

In such dispute scenarios, HR may not only fail to protect beset minority/female

employees, but instead is obligated to work to minimize damage to the company, hasten the

minority employee’s demise and facilitate their exit from the company. The related HR

behaviors become policy, with clearly definable but unwritten processes and procedures

embedded in the culture of the organization, often working against the interest of minorities

and women, curtailing minority hiring and even reinforcing privilege inside the organization.

45 See Monster.com, “…Minorities Distrust Employers Promotion Policies…”: http://tinyurl.com/24yxco5

46 Race & Workplace Bullying: 2010 WBI Survey http://tinyurl.com/RaceBullies

http://tinyurl.com/24yxco5

http://tinyurl.com/RaceBullies

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Worse yet, it has been the case that such organizations have received accolades and

best practices awards for Diversity programs as preambles to their alleged offenses.

Prominent examples abound. We won’t name them here. Its easy enough to run the match

list by Googling for class action discrimination lawsuits or settlements, and then searching

for those same companies using the search criteria of diversity programs and awards.

Though neither a definitive or precise measure, comparison provides a sense of the abundant

tension that pervades in D&I and the organizations it serves.

In those types of organizations, diversity fails to reach senior levels—the pipeline to

the top effectively sealed off at the bottom—just as it has proven to be right up to the

boardrooms in many large and small corporate organizations. The pattern is replicated

across corporate America through “best practices.” Surveys continue to reveal results that

are, for example, “very disenchanting but not surprising,” as in a recent Advertising Age

story which reports, the “average ad-industry employee likely agrees that the diversity issue

is a very unfortunate situation. One that should be remedied.”47 The story is being repeated

in the legal profession,48 49 journalism,50 and among a long and distinguished list of other

large scale retail employers,51 52 and others.

And yet, Diversity has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, a cadre of well-

known consultants reaping the benefit of it. While some Diversity offerings are said to

“work,” most Diversity programs fail to produce meaningful results according to well-

known researchers like Frank Dobbin of Harvard, and others.

Given national statistics on disparities in attainments among minorities and women,

a veritable disenchanted forest, one of two things must be true, either:

47 Industry Employees Speak Out About Adland Isolation: Results of Study Called 'Very Disenchanting, But Not Surprising', By: Ken Wheaton Published: March 26, 2012 http://preview.tinyurl.com/DisenchantedForest

48 Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Challenge Remains, Terry Vogel, posted Jan 12, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/74zn2zp

49 http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/Public_benchmarking_report.pdf

50 http://www.nabj.org/news/95378/

51 http://tinyurl.com/6kclg6d

52 http://tinyurl.com/7quyhoy

http://preview.tinyurl.com/DisenchantedForest

http://tinyurl.com/74zn2zp

http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/Public_benchmarking_report.pdf

http://www.nabj.org/news/95378/

http://tinyurl.com/6kclg6d

http://tinyurl.com/7quyhoy

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[A] Corporate HR folks cannot tell the difference between ‘the wheat and the weeds

among diversity consultants,’ OR: [B] Corporate HR folks do know the difference, and

prefer the weeds.

If [A] is true, then legitimate Diversity consultants are doomed to a life of poverty. On

the other hand, if [B] is true, then legitimate Diversity consultants are doomed to a life of

poverty.


Can you distinguish between any Diversity Program’s “processes” and the actual

measurable “results” that a Diversity program is supposed to achieve?

Can you clearly articulate the key differences and the key results for each?

From the CDO to the Diversity Manager, is “success” publicly defined and

tracked in the D&I programs you’ve seen?

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“MORE OF THE SAME” PARADIGM

The nuClusiv year-long and intense social media discussion over its two principle

phases ended with one simple question: 'What's wrong with Diversity, and how do we fix

it?'

The “Big Discussion” opened in 2010, shortly after the release of an AchieveGlobal53

leadership study. The dialog caught hold and sustained interest throughout 2011, when it

was completed.

That discussion had a wide range, and perhaps representative sample, of excellent

contributors, ranging from international experts in the field to CEOs looking for answers, to

just average folk. With many more lurking and watching, contributors claimed sundry

diversities and represented each in some fashion. The discussion revealed no consensus on

workable solutions for Diversity’s shortfalls.

The size and scope of the Diversity challenge is universal, seemingly infinite, its

complexity growing continually. As varied as humanity itself, diversity defies definition. In

that Big Discussion we saw it behave like a balloon. Squeezing an issue on one end

protuberate another. Bring up discrimination against blacks, whites get defensive. Bring up

straights, LGBTQIA’s get upset. Refer to the Bible, atheists get upset. Rail against

boardroom access and the disabled get upset about lack of building access. Refer to religious

differences, everybody gets upset.

Matters become increasingly complicated as other considerations are introduced,

such as the fairly new “generational diversity, "white diversity," “diversity of thought” and

“informational diversity,” among others. As the Big Discussion grew, too many competing

differences surfaced to address effectively. Sound familiar?

Can any corporation of thousands or even millions of diverse employees realistically

expect to “manage” diversities so complex that it cannot even begin to classify and inventory

them? There is no way to fathom it all, learn it all and manage it from one understaffed office

53 AchieveGlobal Diversity: http://blog.achieveglobal.com/blog/diversity/

http://blog.achieveglobal.com/blog/diversity/

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buried in an HR department in a global corporation stocked to the gills with unresolved

differences.

The C-Suite knows it (including CDOs), as does lowly HR, and the consultants —

just, nobody wants to say it out loud. Until someone does, the corporate world will allow

workers to continue playing Diversity Bumper Cars, a game of caroming random cultural

collisions as the norm in the course of business.

There’s got to be another way.

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THE OLD, TIRED, BUSTED APPROACH

The current failed approach to Diversity has relied on ascription54 to define categories

of workers not considered to be among the organizational norm. Next, management gets

about the business of wedging them into organizational processes, and into the

consciousness of its leadership and its traditional workers with a drumbeat of positive

Diversity messages. In time, and with the right mix of training and process adjustments, the

new diverse members can hopefully be grafted into the organization as “normal” diversity.

That's been the approach and theory in a nutshell. But some history.

White women and Negroes were among the first nontraditional members introduced

into mainstream corporate North America during and after WWII. At least some diversities

were easy to identify and their inclusion easy to implement…so some thought.

Then everybody caught on. Fast-forward to today, and attempting to manage D&I is

a horrid, burdensome mess. The Big Discussion, as a social research experiment

demonstrated that no management team in their right mind would want to introduce that

kind of quarrelsome complexity into an organization if it could be helped.

It can’t be helped.

By law and nature, management has little choice but to allow a few in. The choice

management does have is what's done and not done with diversity once it is inside, to the

extent they must let it in. Once diversity arrives, the ceilings, barriers, disparities and

process losses begin to manifest themselves over time, based on the choices management

makes about its newer diverse members.

Celebrated books like "Cultures & Consequences" (Hofstede) and “Managing

Cultural Differences” (Harris-Moran) are almost 600 pages, each monumental reads; and the

Hofstede companion, "Cultures and Organizations" (550 pages) doesn't make it easier to get

one’s head around the issues. Employees want to become experts on their work, not on

diversity. Diversity consultants do what they can; but the statistics and the dismal diversity

headlines indicate that they haven't helped to the extent many hoped.

54 “Ascriptive Diversities” are those that can be seen and easily described.

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The waters of the Diversity rubric, a programmatic approach to inclusion, respect

and dignity, have become so muddied with today's urging that everyone learn an

overwhelming array of potential cultural missteps so as to avoid offending, underserving or

failing anyone else in any way (cultural competence) that people are overwhelmed.

Look what the term ‘cultural competence’ encompasses: the ability to acquire and use

knowledge of relevant beliefs, attitudes, practices and communication patterns, specific

cultural values, socioeconomic perspectives, cultural practices and worldviews, building

knowledge-based cultural skills, that may require considerable effort, time and expense to

acquire, and doing so with a thorough foundational understanding of one’s own biases,

attitudes, behaviors and beliefs. This is lofty, not to be taken lightly, and is in fact a

requirement for specific professions, like doctors who hold life or death in the stroke of a

pen on a chart or a prescription pad. Cultural competence is a potent niche market for the

skilled consultant.

Being both wide and deep in competence with multiple cultures and exceeding

superficiality in all of them may be the exception rather than the rule. Some may possess

cultural competence between two or three cultures, but it’s the rare American that gets

much beyond that.

“Diversity” has obviously come a long way from eliminating inappropriate joking in

the workplace. That’s a good thing. More broadly, however, we’ve moved past mere political

correctness to the extent that people now sense Diversity as demanding that we learn every

culturally sensitive word, movement and positioning of everything from the soles of their

shoes to their head covering choices to avoid giving offense. It has created the feel of a carpet

made from eggshells, a pervasive sense of cultural inadequacy (incompetence) that can

inhibit the uncertain from seeking out and enjoying the simple pleasures of good

relationships.

The more diversities that are uncovered and promoted, the greater our multicultural

exposures, the tougher the game gets; and the less likely it is that Diversity will continue to

thrive as a field as the costs vs. benefit of administering highly complex programs (swatting

at each alighting mosquito in a swarm of micro-cultural differences) simply won't justify it

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any more. Some large corporations have even appeared willing to be sued and take their

chances to avoid the high cost of Diversity programs, preferring that their traditional

workers stay focused on the core task of enriching the shareholders.

And so it is that approaching a half-century of Diversity, exclusion rather than inclusion

is still the prevailing norm, not only in corporate America, but in government, institutional,

economic and social settings. No grand new research report is needed here. No footnotes

necessary. Anyone can easily Google more supportive empirical and anecdotal evidence than

can be read by a single human being in a lifetime.

The economic and societal effects of dysfunctional bias in the form of racism, sexism,

colorism and religious bigotries are subsets of diversiphobia: palpable, measurable

manifestations, epiphenomena, secondary byproducts of ingrained diversiphobic behaviors.

The outcomes are well documented—the metaphorical needle still far from where D-philes

had hoped—with disparities of all kinds still a prominent part of the societal landscape from

which corporations draw workers.

My newly coined ancient proverb, “No matter how long you’ve been driving, if you can still see

where you started in the rearview mirror, you haven’t come very far.”

Some 40 years down ‘Diversity Road,’ what does your naked-eye observation reveal?

We are getting more diversity and the differences that come with it, and it is being managed

with a vengeance. Yet, from impenetrable glass and bamboo ceilings to intractable dirt floor

poverty, from gay rights to health disparities, from educational attainments to sentencing

and incarceration, from immigration policy to public building accessibility, the array of

palpable disparities remains as diverse and daunting as the diversity of the population itself.

Societal walls and enmity are alive and well, while the connecting D&I infrastructure built

over the last half century seems to be aging and crumbling under the weight of diversiphobic

incapacity for resolving differences or altering an unwillingness to set them aside—unable to

bridge the chasm of disparities.

Global resolution of diversity as differences is an enormous ongoing societal project, too

big for even the largest businesses to undertake. No incorporated legal entity is assigned a

culture by the state. Each will emit the collective cultural exhalations of the members of

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society whom it selects, both directly and indirectly, as employees, contractors and service

providers. Employers, both large and small, are only part of the equation required for a

systemic societal solution.

Thus, HR pursues the continual search for “cultural fit” in selection, as well as

requisite talent. Though an organizational culture is built from the ground up with the rest

of its operational facets, it is still the case that within the four walls of each organization

there are sweeping powers and inducements that can be applied for bringing a workforce to

the point of setting aside differences.

So, what to do for those still left out? What to do as all sectors see increasing cultural

diversity with concomitant costs and complexities, along with unflagging dismal results?


Could there be another way? Do we need another way?

What's the alternative to issuing a Master’s Degree in Diversity to everyone, or

thousands of pages of complex reading and study?

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THE EXISTENCE OF DIVERSITY SHORTHAND

Can cultural differences truly be set aside? Can corporations ask—even demand—

that their existing and new employees make a specific pact, agreeing to become cognizant of

any dysfunctional bias and set it aside for the furtherance of the organization’s objectives

and for the duration of their employment? Can individuals convince themselves to do so? If

so, how might that be done?

What every diversity consultant worth their salt knows is that “embracing

differences” is just a code phrase for “changing behaviors.” Likewise, inclusion, dignity,

respect describe situational (contextually) desirable behaviors. Differences aren't the

problem. The real challenge is managing unproductive, dysfunctional conscious behavior

choices when faced with differences. That isn’t breaking news. Bias is recognized as being at

the heart of it; but bias isn’t intrinsically dysfunctional.

The CultureNeutral® rubric is set around an understanding of the ongoing cultural

meta-struggle between an ever-shifting mindscape of diversiphobes and D-philes

throughout global society. CultureNeutral® learning and behaviors can enable people to

access the broader root issue at a different level than the old and faulty level of differences.

A CultureNeutral® approach to dysfunctional bias across all classes of people

recognizes bias as a legitimate human trait, not one that must be trained out of a person, but

one that must be properly channeled for the best and highest functional use in most, if not

all circumstances and situations. Extant Diversity efforts have attempted an indirect

approach, but have failed to successfully address dysfunctional bias in a meaningful way,

and may have made things worse.

A CultureNeutral® approach can transcend all subsets of race, gender, nationality

and religion. Absolutely anyone can shift between D-phile and Diversiphobe as they either

succeed or fail in dealing with the natural functioning of organic bias, and the cultural bias

that can grow from it. But we’ll continue to be direct about how the D&I paradigm has not

addressed the broader issue, so that we can better understand how CultureNeutral® can

address it successfully.

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D&I has focused so much on differences in cultures, it has missed completely the need

to elevate the understanding of the difference between what is “organic” behavior and what

is cultural phenomena. When that difference is understood, we can better begin to assess

what changes are truly possible and which changes may not be possible.

In his book “Theory of Culture Change,” Julian H. Steward simplifies it:

“All men eat, but this is organic and not a cultural fact. It is universally explainable in

terms of biological and chemical processes. What and how different groups of men eat is a

cultural fact explainable only by culture history and environmental factors.

“All men dance, but the universal feature of dancing is bodily rhythm which is a

human rather than cultural trait. Specific movements, music, attire, ritual, and other

attributes of dancing which have limited occurrence and give dances meaning as cultural

facts are not subject to universal explanation or formulation. A formula that explains

behavior of all mankind cannot explain culture.”

Steward points out that having a culture is organic, “but no cultural phenomena are

universal.” Organic matters are those things over which we collectively have little choice, if

we wish to survive. Like eating and sleeping, language and procreating, having culture(s) is

something common to all peoples. But no one culture is common to everyone. Individual and

unique cultures are not organic, but are instead national, regional, organizational,

neighborhood, street, block and familial variants that are predominantly responses to

environment. They are options chosen from a locally available set.

CultureNeutral® first engages in understanding how to separate what is organic

from what is cultural, how to then exercise self-management, manifesting capacities to be

attitudinally and behaviorally neutral toward their own diversities before they can

successfully engage with the diversity those of others. Perceiving an environment and the

people therein through a CultureNeutral® lens is an ability that virtually everyone already

possesses, but may not be conscious of it or have it honed as a skill.

CULTURAL EXPERIENCES

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If a young person has had breakfast at home with their family, then hopped on a

school bus for a typical day of various classes, ate in the cafeteria at a table with friends,

participated in scheduled playground time or team activities with teams, sneaked a cigarette

in the bathroom or cut class with wayward schoolmates, stayed after school for detention or

for a chess club (group) session, then got back on the school bus and went home, having

survived it all, that person would have experienced a half-dozen micro-cultures or more in

the course of a day with no conscious thought about diversity or culture.

What was organic behavior, cultural behavior or neutral behavior? If they were able

to get back home safely to have dinner with the family at the end of the day after navigating

each of those very different micro-environments, that is proof enough they can be neutral

navigators, eventually even full-fledged natural cultural chameleons. The key is learning the

attitudinal and behavioral techniques for switching between and among micro-cultural

environments, without sacrificing deeply held personal principles, beliefs or values.

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Could there be an easy-to-learn cultural shorthand that might cut through

virtually ALL of that?

Are there behavioral (mental, physical and verbal) techniques or process that

would allow people to be themselves, yet still avoid "primary offenses" that sour

business deals or result in being immolated on a street corner?

Could there be a universal method for neutral communication and day-to-day

interaction that forms a common ground set of standard behaviors for multicultural

and/or global settings, even where transactions are high stakes, in everything from

international politics to global business ventures to job interviews?

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THE SEVEN ASSERTIONS of nuClusiv®

People adapt, survive, thrive. Culture can be an inconvenience, a speed bump, but its

proven not to be a show stopper.

Industrial Age European immigrants of all kinds discovered solid, workable and

replicable patterns of success behaviors in North America at the turn of the last century.

Persecution, discrimination affected many. Some immigrated collectively and strategically,

others individually and tactically.

Immigrants even went so far as to deny their American-born children the native

language of their parents. The children became acculturated, assimilated, Americanized.

Retaining vestiges of ancestral culture, “old country” ways equilibrated as those immigrants

bought wholesale into the “When in Rome” axiom. They individually and collectively

resolved to integrate into the fabric of Anglo-American society quickly and with finality.

They did so within a single generation by discovering, learning and adopting practices in the

workforce and “socialforce” that were sufficiently neutral so as to fare well.

Asian/East Asian people of color have similarly immigrated using similar chosen

strategic immigration patterns, but individual tactical patterns as well. Privately they retain

heritage and culture, but also publicly focus on the business at hand, neutralizing necessary

aspects of their cultural differences to the extent that they detract from their ability to

pursue the American Dream.

Similarly, Latinos/Hispanic, Middle Easterners, Africans are continuing in familiar

patterns, establishing communities and integrating into the cultural landscape.

Its no secret. Most intuitively understand to varying degrees what similarly happens

within business organizations. There is sufficient evidence that real success can be achieved

in the face of seemingly insurmountable cultural barriers, even for ones in traditionally

persecuted groups. We easily point to a handful of individual achievers (e.g., Oprah, Magic,

President Obama), but there are many more.55 What cultural “magic” happens, what cultural

behavioral keys unlock those individual successes that, if identified and taught more

55 Positive example of decades of individual achievers honored: http://tinyurl.com/ManyChosen

http://tinyurl.com/ManyChosen

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broadly, can translate into broader success of diverse in employment, entrepreneurship, and

society?

For the greater number, whether the disparity we see is a result of a mere failure to

value diversity hasn’t seemed to be the question. The fact of phenomenal successes achieved

by many despite covert and overt discrimination would seem to render the question moot.

As well, despite Diversity, rampant disparity within Corporate America and in society

remains. Even if D&I efforts are innocent of worsening it in total, it may be simply a non-

effect, unrelated to any great change in disparities.

Still others contend that discrimination/disparity will never go away. Critical Race

Theory (CRT)56, for example, would hold that all the Diversity programs in the world

cannot celebrate away Diversiphobia, and are instead designed to further entrench it, if not

spread it. Worse than D&I being merely ineffective, such a conclusion would demand

reconsideration of a good many things about Diversity.

There are numerous nuanced priorities we assert as key to changing thought and

action so as to achieve more broadly based success in recalcitrant anticultural environs.

Here are seven examples:

[1] Overcoming ingrained reluctance/refusal to selectively forego exercise of aspects

of personal culture (I’ve got to be me, without “situational compromise”),

[2] Meliorating skills deficits in navigating the psychopathology of diversity

(learning what differences represent rather than merely what they are, and the reactive

behaviors),

[3] Nullifying cultural mistrust by individuation (dumping ascription and shifting to

more effective models; quelling the “TheyThink” model of D&I),

[4] Respecting the value in important facets of the inherent and powerful systemic

mandate against organizational integration of “differences”, D&I’s Achilles Heel (corporate

“Roach Motel”57 Model, where cultures go in, but never come out),

56 What is Critical Race Theory? UCLA: http://tinyurl.com/What-is-CRT 57 Roach Motel is a subject of a trademark registration by the insect control brand Black Flag

http://tinyurl.com/What-is-CRT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Flag_(insecticide)

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[5] Understanding the need to separate behavioral norms into two little discussed

but highly meaningful and relevant categories (and knowing when they matter),

[6] Redirecting counterproductive and ineffective determination to keep banging up

against a narrow field of cultural locked doors, fortified walls and ceilings (misdirected

commitment),

[7] Enhancing abilities to perceive or comprehend organizational culture as a priority

rather than co-worker culture (deciphering cues and clues that are precursors of personal

success or failure).

These are counter to current Diversity thinking and practice in varying degrees. Lack

of skill or ability in these seven brings consequences. Even if individuals are skilled in all of

the seven items above, due to decades of ascriptive Diversity training (type/category-based),

others may believe that they are not skilled based on their primary cultural attributes, rather

than immediately believing they must be the exception. That carries its own unique set of

pathologies in anticultural environments.

The result we see today is a workforce that is generally untrained and unprepared to

deal with the weightier issues of increasingly intercultural and anticultural challenges inside

organizations large or small, business, government, institutions, or even religious

organizations. The deficits pervade in society, but are particularly troublesome for

employees when the time to learn how to remedy them is in short supply under the crushing

demands of performance-driven contemporary. There is a need for “shorthand”, a means of

cutting to the chase, especially when in higher stakes situations.

There are those who are sufficiently advantaged so as to enjoy the luxury of cultural

complacence. If you’ve read this far, you’re almost certainly not one of them. Some argue

that white males are taught (culturally) to view themselves as insiders, born queued up to

get in and succeed, a condition often referred to as “privilege.”58 Others whole heartedly

reject that idea.

58 Tim Wise on White Privilege: http://tinyurl.com/insiderprivilege

http://tinyurl.com/insiderprivilege

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A corollary belief is a sense that minorities are not taught or treated as if they were or

will ever be part of the in-group. They are, some hold, perceived and trained to be cultural

outsiders, from their parental training to the education provided by the institutions most

responsible for early learning. 59 Mounting evidence indicates minorities and women are

taught to “be” and to expect to be ‘strangers in a strange land,’ even if they possess incredible

intellect and abilities.

In either case, whether insider or outsider, the common issue is one of effective

teaching on both sides of the cultural ledger to break through the noise, compensate for the

interference of Diversiphobia and see advantages where we have been taught that otherwise.

There are several things that can and should be done that few, if any, are doing or talking

about broadly in corporate circles or other organizational venues. This includes Diversity

practitioners, even CDOs, but extends far beyond that.

BREAKINGING THE CYCLE

The maddening circularity in D&I models is that it has entrenched mono-cultural

thinking. It is a herd mentality that corrals people into neat theoretical cultural silos, types,

exploiting them as if market segments, creating inventories of attributes that must be

learned and addressed for one to be certifiable as culturally competent. That may work for

selling salsa vs. ketchup, but not for long term resolution of intractable problems. The term

“multicultural diversity” refers almost exclusively to interactions between people, each of

whom are imagined to be of unitary cultures and mindsets, thus crippling the ability to see

others in multiple unique and unexpected ways that may vary dramatically by circumstance.

The language of Diversity is convenient, but stifling.

D&I has thereby created a broad embrace of a new and pervasive micro-cultural

polarization. It has distilled societal fragmentation under the cluttered rubric of ascription,60

and built a framework that ensures both individual and organizational failure to achieve

inclusion or counteract the effects of an organic, if not genetic Diversiphobia that has not,

59 AC360: Doll Test: http://tinyurl.com/DollTestCNN 60 “Ascription” is the act of arbitrarily ascribing or attributing characteristics to a person based on predefined and

often subjective categories determined by qualities beyond their control rather than allowing the person to reveal or

present their personal attributes and characteristics. Race, sex, age, class at birth, religion, ethnicity, and residence

are all good examples of these qualities.

http://tinyurl.com/DollTestCNN

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and may never abate. The struggle with Diversiphobia obviously isn’t over, but the nature of

it has changed to the extent that frustrated D&I professionals are beginning to realize that

we may no longer even have the vocabulary to deal with what the Diversity paradigm has

wrought. 61

Diversity is struggle-bound, not resolution-bound. It has been trapped in the

wilderness of linear incremental improvement for forty years…a death march. It has reached

the end of the line. The initial sense of it was as a transitional step to a higher state of

existence, not to create a framework for D-philians to become expert at engagement in an

indefinitely lasting struggle against Diversiphobes…who also attend the same corporate

training and briefings, by the way.

But that’s exactly what it has become. Stymied D&I professionals toy with pinning

the tail of “Diversity” onto well-used organizational management schema like

“Transformational” and “Disruptive,” or “Innovative,” and the social fabric continues to

degrade all around it.

An America so deeply consumed in and concerned with differences but without focus

on resolution or reconciliation is revealed by self-report. An AP survey reports that “a slight

majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those

feelings or not.” Through various measures, racial prejudice has increased by at least three

percent since 2008, and perhaps by as much as six percent when measured by a popular

Harvard University test of racial attitudes. Other forms of Diversiphobia increased as well.62

Corporate Diversity, whatever its successes within, is simply not working its way beyond

the organizational boundaries into society in a way that sufficiently translates into positive

societal change. Diversity is making dubious headway against the Diversiphobic tide, as in

the same article, University of Connecticut professor Jelani Cobb points out, “When we’ve

seen progress, we’ve also seen backlash.”

Is that really what we want to export to the rest of the world?

61 Rinku Sen, Oct. 18, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/Equity-v-Diversity 62 ColorLines, Agiesta & Ross, Oct 27, 2012 http://tinyurl.com/World-Of-Status-Quo

http://tinyurl.com/Equity-v-Diversity

http://tinyurl.com/World-Of-Status-Quo

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It may be a reality that Diversiphobia is on autopilot in a nation where an aspirant

can, against all odds, achieve the political perihelion of an office that constitutes the chosen

leader of the entire free world, while beneath him the attitudinal plates shift toward a

Diversiphobic fault line. Without succumbing to the cheerless philosophy of Critical Race

Theory entirely, it idea is not without merit that Diversiphobia will likely find a way until

the payoff is no longer there, mentally, emotionally, financially, politically, psychologically or

culturally. Like any behavior, Diversiphobia will abate when we conclude that the energy

devoted to the effort exceeds the value of the potential gains. When the cost is no longer

worth the reward we will drop it from our repertoire on our own. But until then, is the only

alternative simply the status quo?

Or is it time for a transitional framework that goes beyond a cost justification for

programs and professionals rooting for the occasional corporate truffle of true innovation? Is

it time to adopt a framework that exposes Diversiphobia as bearing a far greater cost than

individuals, organizations or societies should be willing to sustain?

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AREN’T PEOPLE GETTING IT ON THEIR OWN?

It is reported that some are just beginning to take Diversity seriously. The American

model is even being adopted in Europe, and familiar strategies and tactics are being applied.

For example, one professional wrote, “We are just about beginning to take diversity

seriously and force its implementation into our work life.”63

Granted, yes, recognition of the value of diversity is the good news, a genuine

breakthrough of sorts. The bad news may be the very same thing for Europe and beyond. The

American model of “forcing its implementation” into work life bode ill from the start, and

has proven Diversity’s undoing, making it the bane of existence among those leading the

backlash…not all of whom are white.64

The efforts of the last fifty years for American minorities and women may have been

largely rendered moot, as measured by the results as opposed to the effort. That time period

represents nearly three full generations of a diverse workforce that have moved into the

workplace, with one already pretty much out and into retirement, the second one at least

twenty years in, all without having realized the expected or hoped for equities and parities

in the attainments of entry, elevation or compensation.

Sticking with and expanding the current HR/CDO Diversity paradigm at the expense

of other potentially more effective methods of dealing with Diversiphobia could mean that

new generations of nontraditional employees will work through and out of the workforce

before they realize what's happened...again. A discouraged Dr. Frederick Harris, Director of

Research at Columbia University indicated just such a feeling that, “It will take more

generations, I suspect, before we eliminate these deep feelings” of prejudice.”65 As well,

broader society is unlikely to transcend the status quo with the current paradigm as its only

alternative.

If Diversiphobia is here to stay for at least the foreseeable future, the issue for our

purposes cannot be limited to whether we keep slogging along for a few more generations

teaching about diversity & inclusion, dignity & respect at some level. The question is what 63 The High Flyer, Tina Buchner Da Costa, http://tinyurl.com/Diversity-Seriously-Now 64 Ward Connerly, “The Cost of Diversity”: http://tinyurl.com/ConnerlyProphecy 65 J. Agiesta, S. Ross, AP Oct 27, 2012 http://tinyurl.com/World-Of-Status-Quo

http://tinyurl.com/Diversity-Seriously-Now

http://tinyurl.com/ConnerlyProphecy

http://tinyurl.com/World-Of-Status-Quo

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else we teach, who we teach, and how we teach it. It’s a strategic error to "just keep

teaching" the same things as we have. We'll keep getting the same results we have gotten,

trending toward worse66 as the limited, fragile progress of the last forty or fifty years is

erased as fast or faster than it can move forward.

So is there a legitimate game changer out there?

66 Ibid.

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A CultureNeutral® WAY?

The phrase “culture neutral” has biology and anthropology as the primary venues for

its applications. But it has crept into other areas, including law (arbitral justice), sociology,

teaching and instruction, even into the multicultural diversity arena in niches.

But there's not yet a vast collection of substantive thinking wrapped around “cultural

neutrality” or CultureNeutral® attitudes, behaviors and variants in the sociology of

corporate or organizational Diversity, or more broadly, societal diversity. The thinking

around neutrality has been avoidance oriented, has tended toward cold artifacts, language,

instruments and measurements that compensate for differences or manipulate results to

nullify differences in systems as opposed to being directly applicable to neutral thinking

patterns, behaviors, process.

The nuClusiv® term CultureNeutral® does not indicate or promote an acultural

environment, i.e. an avoidance, absence of or indifference toward culture(s). As in

biochemistry, it defines an environmental substrate in which individuals of varying cultures

can be prepared for and buffered from certain naturally occurring anticultural elements in

the environment.

In business organizations, it is seldom thinking and thoughts alone that create tensions

and dysfunction, but attitudes and motivations that subsequently translate into

dysfunctional behaviors. Thinking processes and the thoughts they produce are the

precursors of decisions, and the right strategic motivations channeling those processes and

thoughts proposes to alter decision-based attitudes, behaviors and their outcomes.

CultureNeutral® operations can and do affect attitudes, behaviors and outcomes in a way

that Diversity training and interventions has not and cannot.

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DEVELOPING, UNDERSTANDING AND LAUNCHING

A CultureNeutral® ENTERPRISE

We can all easily comprehend separation of the globe into the two primary groups of

people we’ve discussed herein, those who have learned to appropriately value diversity and

those who are Diversiphobes, regardless of gender, class, race, religion, height or shoe size.

Diversiphobia may not trigger the same reaction as "racist" or "homophobe" or "sexist" or

"bigot." At the same time it encompasses aversion to any and all diversities, conveying the

idea that everyone fears or favors some differences at some point in time. Though some

choose Diversiphobia as a core lifestyle, we can recognize that anyone may be affected by

Diversiphobic tendencies at some point, without having to also assume they are influenced

by a core trait of dysfunctional bias. We can shift focus away from changing Diversiphobes or

finding a cure for a dysfunctional bias gene, and shift focus to empowering people and

organizations to neutralize the effects of Diversiphobia and shed its burdensome costs.

Importantly, CultureNeutral® is not a ‘silver bullet’ for dysfunctional bias. It is not

designed as a wooden stake to drive through the hearts of Diversiphobes, and it is not a clove

of garlic to hang around the neck of diverse members that will enable them to sleep

peacefully in the workplace or in society. It is a means of rethinking the value of traditional

approaches to long standing problems affecting us all, and moving into a different space to

achieve what matters right now.

We are coming to realize that corporate "Managing Diversity" is not the same thing

as managing people at all. It is managing their differences without either resolving them where

they are individually or collectively deleterious or even mitigating them where they are

organizationally unproductive. It is purely a manipulation of human factors that can impede

or promote business processes, sorting out which ones matter and which don’t. The one

thing that all of “Diversity’s” new “people differences” had in common initially was not that

people were different from one another, only that they were different from those in the

"traditional" workforce who suddenly had to manage them. It has taken generations to begin

to get beyond even that.

We can accomplish more than that. We can do better…if we want to.

Commented [AMG1]: Workshop material?

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in a discussion about NASA’s most recent successful Mars

landing, described an important aspect of NASA’s culture that relates to the dilemma of a

myopic Diversity paradigm.67

“Normally we think of NASA as ‘What is your mission today, where are you going?’

And, I think, I don’t want to make the same mistake we made in the Apollo era, where

Kennedy said, “We’re going to the moon!” Well, then we got to the moon. Then you say,

“OK, what’s next? And there was no other plan…where else are we going? No one thought

about that. Because all the hardware, the engineering, the science had streamlined the moon

as the target. So, to do this right…what you want is not a [single] target. What you want is

an enterprise. An enterprise is [to be] spacefaring. If we’re spacefaring, then all…destinations

are in our portfolio.”

We have diversity. Some claim we’ve achieved it, but the greater truth is that

everyone now realizes that it’s always been here, and always will be. We got it. We’re there.

The goal of diversity awareness has been achieved ad nauseam. To Tyson’s point, “OK, what’s

next?”

Having not asked that question goes to Diversity’s current lack of traction in

corporate America. It may be that the C-Suites believe that sufficient ascriptive diversity has

been achieved, and little, if any additional investment is required to attain it, expand it or

even sustain it. They gave it a shot. Many others may feel the same way, seeing diversity

present but languishing as the interest in diversity itself is finding growing competition from

the increasing din over matters of persistent, relentless inequity.

For the business entity, Diversity is reduced to a process of managing the mix,

targeting its purpose and applying it to business needs, like any other tool or commodity.

That isn’t likely to change. While some may find self-improvement, gratification and new

friends while working within corporations, corporations are not designed to make people

friends. Corporations are not created to make people better. Corporations are there to

make people money. For those who have entered a corporation for any other purpose, it is

67 BigThink.com: http://tinyurl.com/SpaceFaring

http://tinyurl.com/SpaceFaring

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time to rethink your entire life, not just your diversity. Corporate D&I cannot address your

needs in any other way, as millions have already discovered.

For those who appreciate cultural diversity, the humanity of it, and who clearly sense

the social value and the direct link to personal identity, commendation is in order.

Nonetheless, stop and consider that a focus on convincing reticent Diversiphobes to

sincerely embrace and celebrate unresolved (and perhaps irreconcilable) differences will

prove to be a resource intensive and emotionally draining pursuit. Individual victories dearly

won will be discreet units of success, and likely short-lived in a corporate setting as

“turnover” creates square-one scenarios a great deal more often these days. The

psychological investment in the expectation of a corporate soul that inhabits the hearts of its

employees seldom pays off.

So, what do we do with D&I as we know it? Where do we go from here?

Has our society reached a point where there are limited collisions and clashes of

cultural interests between at least a few key diverse groups? Certainly not all by a long shot,

but are there some between which differences are truly mild? The prospects of moving those

differences forward to a state of becoming entirely insignificant could be a powerful

inducement to do whatever it takes to work with those diverse groups, model them, and

challenge them to cross into and through the final “End Stage” phase of the Diversity

paradigm, and on to new goals, new destinations, the truly diverse enterprise. We may finally

have the ground floor diversity awareness and related capacities to do it.

What we don’t have is peace, the greatest enterprise, too little of it individually,

organizationally or societally. Mankind’s history has demonstrated that humans are built to

achieve whatever it is that we focus on. We once focused heavenward and wondered at the

stars. Now we are on the verge of visiting them. Men have a history of getting what we focus

on...even when it’s the wrong thing.68 But peace still eludes us.

Are you among those who have come to dread hearing, “Let’s get together and talk

about our differences”? At this point, continuing to emphasize differences in the same way we have

68 History of the Atomic Bomb & The Manhattan Project: http://tinyurl.com/QuestionableGoals

http://tinyurl.com/QuestionableGoals

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will get us little other than more differences, more frustration, and more division.69 70 It’s well

past the time for a focus on fractioning, differentiating. It is time to turn to methods that are

more productive, more unifying, more practical, and more teachable.

WHAT’S NEXT?

People are already asking, “What’s next?” Organizations and nations are eagerly

searching for a post-Diversity “culturefaring” modus operandi.71 Crossing through and beyond

the final phase of struggle toward a new frontier of peaceful “culturefaring” requires a path,

and a name for the place on the other side. It must be a destination, the first of many, and an

enterprise, not merely a journey for its own sake.

Sobering though it is, the laws of pushback have not changed. The prospect of

achieving genuine peace between diverse groups is just as powerful an inducement for

Diversiphobes® to push in the opposite direction. Other forces come into play, as well. The

simple idea of “Diversity Fatigue” discussed earlier should signal the need for a societal

“second wind” after having travelled so far and seeing so little real change in the hard

measures related to equity.

Another theory that has gotten legs, introduced some forty years ago by Michael J.

Apter, may find supportive evidence in the creeping reversal72 of attitudes about diversity

and the resurgence of thinking and behaviors from which many thought or hoped we had

been busy shedding once and for all time. The entire D&I field of endeavor may yet fall

victim to the human need to reverse field, change polarity and revert to behaviors once

rejected. Not just retrenchment, but a strategic reorientation is in order for the D&I field

before reversal culminates in its disappearance altogether. The signs are writ large all around

D&I; what got us here won’t get us there.

69 NYT Aug 17, 2012 http://tinyurl.com/NABJAnger 70 Heated issues can’t be resolved today: http://tinyurl.com/SantaAnna 71 What’s next: http://tinyurl.com/PostDiversity ; http://tinyurl.com/PostDiversity2 72 Reversal Theory: The Dynamics of Motivation, Emotion and Personality, Michael J. Apter,

http://tinyurl.com/NABJAnger

http://tinyurl.com/SantaAnna

http://tinyurl.com/PostDiversity2

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Just as there is culturally neutral language, there are universally non-offensive and

fruitful attitudes, behaviors and methods of learning and teaching about one another. They

are, in fact, practiced every day. Though average people may generally believe they don't know

how to pull it off in the ongoing conflict between the diversities, in actuality, they do. It is

practiced everywhere, from schoolyards to corporations every day, and can be taught.

Average people move seamlessly between cultures of all kinds daily, billions of us, physically

and psychologically secure and without thinking twice about it. We can teach willing

people to think about it, get it right and make sense of it all such that they won’t need to

dedicate such mental and emotional resources to it going forward.

Like physical training to develop “muscle memory,” we can develop an intercultural

muscle memory that minimizes the mental energy required under the current Diversity

paradigm. We are and will be incorporating the winning attitudes and successful behaviors

that thousands and even millions already know and employ, things that work, both in everyday

life and in unique and unusual situations.

The oncoming wave of CultureNeutral® thinking, behaviors and methods will

provide a new set of guideposts and values for a complex sociocultural scheme, one that

focuses not on the impossible task of identifying and managing a universe of differences,73

but on creating and teaching a set of attitudes and skilled behaviors that can enable

frictionless motion atop the tensions, helping everyday people or extraordinary people

navigate through and atop the cultural barriers they encounter in today’s complex

multicultural environment.

That's the power behind CultureNeutral® concepts. The first year of public

discussion under the nuClusiv® banner is complete. We have a great deal more to share as

the next phase begins. nuClusiv® continues its lead role in developing a new or significantly

altered paradigm based on behavioral concepts.

We hope you will embrace and celebrate the evidence that the “Diversity” paradigm

is in its End Stage. But it doesn’t have to mean the end of the progress of diversity. Like the

moon, we got there. As North American style Diversity processes are being exported for

73 U.S. Census Mismatch: http://tinyurl.com/CensusMismatch

http://tinyurl.com/CensusMismatch

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consumption abroad, we’ve already seen and puzzled at the long term results right here. No

need to wait and see how it will turn out. We already know. The next destination looms

before us here.

In any river, one need not swim backwards to go downstream. It will happen

automatically by simply not swimming upstream. The current of Diversiphobic thinking and

attitude is manifesting itself in many different ways. The team invites you to jump in, join us

at nuClusiv® and be a part of the growth of the CultureNeutral® community, contribute to

the refinement and dissemination of this new approach as we reshape the way we think

about and manage our natural states of bias and of diversity.

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Affirmative Action, 24

African American, 11, 30

Akio Toyoda, 9

America, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 24, 25,

27, 29, 32, 37, 39, 46, 51, 57

anticultural, 47, 48, 55

attitude, 61

awareness, 7, 14, 57, 59

behavioral, 44, 45, 48, 61

Bible, 35

Big Discussion, 35, 37

Bumper Cars, 36

CDO, 7, 9, 24, 34, 53

celebrate, 13, 20, 47, 58

Change, 3, 43

cognitive dissonance, 8

Columbia University, 53

communication, 23, 38, 45

competence, 38

complexity, 35, 37

Compliance, 24

conscious, 42, 44

consultant, 38, 42

corporate, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 16, 20, 21, 24,

25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 39, 50, 51, 55,

56, 57, 58

credibility, 7, 9

cultural collisions, 36

culturefaring, 59

CultureNeutral, 42, 43, 55, 56, 61, 62

Cultures, 37

cycle, 3, 27

differences, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,

19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35, 36, 39,

40, 42, 43, 46, 51, 56, 58, 59, 61

dignity, 20, 24, 25, 29, 38, 42

diverse, 5, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 24, 36,

37, 40, 47, 53, 56, 58, 60

Diversiphobes, 15, 16, 17, 25, 50, 51, 54,

56, 58, 60

Diversiphobia, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56

diversiphobic, 18, 19, 39, 40

Diversiphobic, 51, 56, 61

Diversity, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16,

21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37,

38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55,

56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61

D-philes, 16, 39, 42

dysfunctional, 14, 39, 42, 55, 56

EEO, 24

eggshells, 39

Emancipation, 11, 18, 23, 24

embrace, 13, 16, 20, 22, 24, 50, 58

employees, 5, 7, 8, 16, 19, 20, 31, 32, 36,

40, 42, 48, 53, 58

enterprise, 57, 59

equity, 7, 11, 20, 25, 26, 29, 30, 60

Europe, 11, 53

Fatigue, 7, 30, 60

financial, 8

focus, 11, 14, 29, 51, 56, 58, 59

game changer, 54

generational, 19, 35

Hofstede, 37

HR, 19, 32, 33, 36, 40, 53

human, 10, 11, 15, 21, 39, 42, 43, 56, 60

Human Resource Management, 6

Immigrants, 46

inclusion, 5, 25, 26, 29, 37, 38, 39, 42, 50,

54

Inclusion, 7

inequity, 40, 58

informational, 35

innovation, 7, 21, 25, 29, 52

Keltner, 23, 25, 27

Lake Wobegone, 5

moon, 57, 61

multicultural, 26, 39, 45, 50, 55, 61

nuClusiv, 46, 61

organic, 17, 43, 44, 50

overwhelmed, 38

Paradigm, 5

parity, 11, 25, 27, 29

pathologies, 48

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pushback, 60

reorientation, 60

resolution, 13, 14, 16, 40, 51

respect, 8, 10, 20, 24, 25, 29, 38, 42

Roach Motel, 48

secret, 46

social media, 5, 9, 35

socialforce, 46

societal, 13, 14, 16, 20, 27, 29, 39, 40, 50,

51, 55, 60

Spectrum, 23, 25

strategic, 15, 17, 21, 32, 54, 55, 60

strategy, 10, 14, 19, 20, 21, 25

Sun Tzu, 21, 24, 25

The Dream, 25

TheyThink, 47

thought, 12, 35, 37, 44, 57, 60

white, 10, 29, 35, 49, 53

women, 10, 31, 32, 33, 37, 53

workforce, 11, 12, 16, 19, 40, 46, 48, 53,

57

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About nuClusiv®

nuClusiv LLC is as game-changing

innovative company pushing the envelope of

personal and organizational change.

To Learn More about the

CultureNeutral® Framework

Visit us at: www.nuClusiv.com

About the Author

Rob Jones

PROFILE: http://robertdjones.com

Email: [email protected]

http://www.nuclusiv.com/

http://robertdjones.com/

mailto:[email protected]

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This page deliberately left blank,

except for this sentence which says it’s blank,

but we all know it isn’t really blank. Not now.

We just didn’t want you to spend valuable time wondering

if we left it blank on purpose or not.

So we didn’t, but said we did.

end stage diversity 2012

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