How to Understand Individual and Institutional Willingness to Advance DEI and Social Impact
““It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.””
We can imagine the main reason for the lackluster impact of DEI is poor strategy, mishandled implementations of strategic goals, or a lack of staff and resources being allocated to issues of organizational and societal social change. But we’ve had enough brilliant people developing social impact and DEI strategies and billions of dollars spent over the past decades since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The issue isn’t strategy. The problem is people who lack the will to change, and the protection they enjoy from people who spend time and money trying to convince them of a thing. At the same time, disagreement on an issue is rarely a binary “I believe/I don’t believe,” and a practitioner can make quick enemies of people who simply do not know how to partner with us in the work. Concurrently, spending time with disbelievers can stall out momentum and will in those who need little convincing of the importance of urgent social change.
We have strategies for mapping outcomes, impact, inputs, and outcomes for DEI. But many practitioners and organizations lack a framework and path forward for understanding and engaging how willpower is or is not present in their organizations. This is of particular importance for corporate practitioners since they often face more resistance to progressive DEI actions by nature of working in a culture where money/profit is the most important social output. The Justice Informed Willingness Spectrum is the answer. In this post, we will explain the Willingness Spectrum, identify why it is important, and walk through two case studies—one with a racial equity practitioner who realized the power of applying it to the issues within her governmental organization and one with a former Justice Informed client and prominent banking institution with a DEI strategy made immobile by its leadership team’s lack of will.
Social equity work is inherently people work, and that means that understanding the nuances of personhood—egos, personality, diverse experiences, etc.— is often just as important as the ability to define organizational goals, advance key performance indicators, engage antiracism through an endowment investment policy, or write an equitable workplace policy that centers people with disabilities.
At Justice Informed, we believe that prioritizing the specificity of an individual’s social equity stance and then engaging with them specifically based on their current point along their individual equity journey is some of the most pressing, crucial work. This is especially true at a time when virtue signaling or the ability to prove a “social justice track record” are prioritized over all else, which excludes many curious potential partners and perspectives who simply may not currently possess the knowledge or life experiences to be social equity champions, but who can be drawn into a meaningful partnership nonetheless. As Justice Informed CEO Xavier Ramey says, the most “hard work of heart work” is that social equity practitioners must “hold people as they thrash into learning about people they didn’t know they weren’t choosing.”
Specifically, the Justice Informed Willingness Spectrum breaks down the various points along the continuum where an individual or organization can be situated into five distinct categories, each of which requires a different approach when building relationships:
The Willing: A person or organization that has a declared supportive approach or belief about your commitments and demands for social equity in the world.
The Curious: A person or organization who is uncommitted, but open to committing to your view and methods for equity. Although they often hold onto existing beliefs, they are willing to change if motivated.
The Agnostic: A person or organization that has a declared belief, but a lack of willingness to participate in your type of equity work (though they will not explicitly work against you). Remember that a car that in neutral still moves backward, and agnostic folk’s impact on DEI and social impact progress are no different.
The Disbelieving: A person or organization who has all the information necessary to work with you, but actively does not agree with your theory of change or that the work is important (though they do not actively fight against you).
The Antagonistic: A person or organization with a declared, antithetical approach or belief about your commitments to or demands for equity in the world. They have committed to working against you to stop your work, movement, and partners by using their resources and efforts.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the Justice Informed Willingness Spectrum in transforming how organizations and individual practitioners consider relationships in the work of DEI and social equity, we spoke with a social equity practitioner (please note that this practitioner’s name, organization, and other identifying details have been removed for the sake of anonymity) who works as a psychiatric professional within the criminal justice system. Due to the heartbreaking racial disparities in the quality of psychiatric care provided to youth in the system, this practitioner named the stakes of her ability to powerfully carry forth the work of racial equity as especially high.
““We unfortunately have people in positions of power who are really not connected to or care about the work itself. This is just something that they do everyday to collect their check and go home.” ”
Despite the high stakes of the work, this practitioner described feelings of intense frustration at her inability to turn the work of racial equity into reality. The stalling of progress of her racial equity work has nothing to do with this practitioner’s knowledge, education, or ambition; this practitioner holds a Psy.D. and has been a robust mental health advocate for marginalized and minoritized populations throughout the course of her career. Rather, in both her general professional field and within her specific teams, this practitioner cited the inhibiting environment of being surrounded by those who are Agnostic at best and outright Antagonist at worst as the primary barrier to the work.
In her specific field, even those who she deemed Curious or Agnostic often appear unwilling to engage in the work, not because her invitation isn’t convincing but rather, because they constantly witness the negative treatment she faces at the hands of the organization’s Disbelievers and Antagonists when she speaks bravely and boldly about pursuing equity work.
““I started to specifically look for individuals who would join this [racial equity] space, so that I could create a collective voice to be able to speak to these issues, so that it wasn’t just me.” ”
For many Curious folks who don’t always possess a stake in the game as it relates to the experiences of those who hold marginalized or minoritized identities, a lack of whole-scale encouragement from the workplace can suppress their curiosity and even move them back to Agnostic. This brings us to the role that Disbelievers and Antagonists play in the workplace; while it may seem apparent that a social equity practitioner would not expend the resources to “convince” a Disbeliever, the unchecked presence of these folks in the workplace, particularly in positions of power or leadership, can also explicitly halt progress in developing other partnerships.
In order to help combat this seemingly bleak composition of social equity stances in her workplace, this practitioner shifted away from finding partners already in her organization and toward a presence in the hiring and recruitment process that would bring in more staff that are already fully Willing and committed to doing the work.
While in better circumstances and under the possession of more resources and time, this practitioner might have been able to invite Curious and Agnostic folks into her work, here, a different approach was necessary.
Now, let’s look at another case study with a different willingness-based challenge. When the leadership team of a prominent U.S. banking institution hired Justice Informed, they believed they were ready to commit to DEI. They had already published a publicly-accessible DEI statement, and thought themselves ready to jump into the how of their DEI work. However, not only had this bank not yet determined the heart of what their DEI work is, more importantly, they hadn’t determined if their team was even ready to commit to the work of DEI in the first place.
Therefore, Justice Informed suggested that this leadership team be surveyed to determine their comfort levels in pursuing various DEI-related actions. The results, shown below, demonstrated that organizational levels of willingness were far too low to jump into the work anywhere near the level this client initially anticipated.
Prior to this survey, when these leaders spoke about DEI vaguely and without pinpointing any specific expectations they held as individuals, there was no true understanding of organizational consensus on DEI, regardless of other DEI efforts and budgets at the organization. Sometimes, it’s not about how much money you throw at the problem or if you have the right KPIs. It’s all about the level of will held by those around you.
Also keep in mind it’s crucial to pay careful attention to the method you use to measure willingness as your organization to ensure that the results are as accurate and useful as possible. At Justice Informed, we recommend the following when surveying your staff:
To understand and evaluate willingness, you have to first create a safe environment for people to respond anonymously to various activities and ideas related to social equity that your organization would be willing to consider.
Oftentimes, that’s a difficult thing for an organization to do from the inside. Consider hiring a third-party to conduct the survey.
Develop a survey apparatus where you can get a wholistic population understanding (i.e., everyone) of the team you are surveying, keeping in mind that:
One person can stop the show if they’re the ultimate boss.
A collective lack of will is usually what stalls out progress.
Create a part of that survey apparatus that in some way makes visible the specific activities they would agree to (see the Justice Informed client example above).
Oftentimes, people are great at telling you what they don’t want, but they have a harder time telling you what they would agree to.
Create a space for reporting.
Make sure that the information is being reported to the whole team so they can be confronted with the results.
We encourage you to conduct a survey using the above parameters to determine your staff’s willingness levels for social equity, and to reach out at info@justiceinformed.com to let us know how it goes! We know it can be a professional challenge to identify where folks’ willingness is at. That’s why we’re here to help.
If you’re looking to get clear on how to operationalize the Justice Informed Willingness Spectrum in developing powerful partnerships for your organization in carrying forth the work of DEI or social equity, visit justiceinformed.com or email info@justiceinformed.com for more information.
