Welcome to Module 3 of this four part series regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion in your organization. Off the bat, I have an issue to pick with some of the DE&I courses out there. I promise I'm not hating. There are some really incredible offerings available to you and I encourage you to take advantage of them. But occasionally when I hear something or see a clip or an article of someone's guidance on how to do DE&I work, I immediately think that sounds dope, but how are you doing this again? How do I take the list of actions you just gave me and connect those things to discrimination free environment or some other desired outcome? For expedience sake, I'm going to say that in most cases, the list of actions usually just remains undone because I have no clue how to implement it. This really came into focus for me when one of my colleagues asked me, what should she do in her organization that has a DE&I edict from a CEO, but clear sabotage from the management team charged with implementing it? She asked me, what do you do when your organization is not ready for DE&I? I gave an off the cuff response to her, but I could tell it's not what she needed. I thought about it and followed up with her a week later with a couple of ideas. But I could tell that none of them really appealed to her either. I had to pause for a minute and really ask myself what it was that she was asking me, what do you do when your folks are not ready for DE&I? While the answer is obviously to get them ready, which is what I told her, her response to me was very similar to my response to the list I referred to earlier about my DE&I peers. She was asking me, how do I take the list of actions and turn it into desired outcomes? How do I make this be more than just buzzword, feel good jargon speak and turn it into work product when I actively have key stakeholders sabotaging my efforts? Ain't that a great question? My answer, I have no idea, but I have a great starting point and it starts with planning. Many of us, whether we realize it or not, spend 70 percent of our time reacting to edicts, the needs of the stakeholders, the board of directors, the check writers, the consumers, patients, students, the government, or putting out operational fires. Seventy percent of our time is spent reacting, while 20 percent of our time is meeting about fires that only tangentially involve us. About five percent of our time is spent on planning DE&I and the other five percent is spent working the plan. The percentages may be all for you, but you get my point. We spend most of our days not doing what we plan to do. When we do planning, we're pretty bad at it. The time we decided to adopt the DE&I training, make it mandatory and expected certain outcomes when we hadn't planned, to explain why we need the training in the first place or the time we collected data to support our DE&I initiatives, but because we were so busy fighting fires that that data sat on the shelf for a year and by the time we got back to it, the data was too old to be useful. Or maybe like my peer trying to implement a DE&I edict without planning to get the team ready to receive that edict. Maybe the problem is plain and simple obstruction. But my point is, if we're being honest, we would admit that we are not planning well. Because if we were, we'd plan for the obstructionist too. In this module, to achieve the desired outcomes that you want with your DE&I initiatives, we're going to focus on planning and turning the list into actions. Just please be honest with yourself and come to accept the fact that you are trying to juggle too much and that you're planning to suffer because of it. You must be intentional and carve out time to plan and protect it. Consider this alternative approach. Instead of putting out fires aimlessly, you spend a portion of each day answering the questions of why your organization has fires in the first place. Where are these fires coming from, and are they a part of a trend? While you may be a pro at fighting fires on the ground, I would argue that you are at better position to answer those questions if you are perched 30,000 feet up. No one is in a better position to fight a blaze than a person seeing all of it. I want that to be you. You just need to carve out time to do it. Speaking of time, I advise you to stop trying to create plans that takes years to implement. At most, your plans should not go further than six months. The data that you collect will last that long. The fire you're fighting should still be blazing and at least some of the stakeholders you need support from should still be on the team. An ambitious plan that is years out is cool, but your plan to complete that goal should be done in six month increments and keep it moving from there. I'm going to keep it moving and close this intro out so that we can get started planning.
