The Kind of DEI that Strengthens Organizational Cultures

 Sarah Hobson, Ph.D.
Founder/President

When DEI work is shallow or ineffective, it is sometimes because we ask people to explore their biases without helping them situate those biases within historical and cultural contexts.
 
The result is often that judgment, blame and shame and moral superiority are what come to define our learning processes and our relationships. 
 
Our media and our political parties make some financial and branding profit on keeping this spirit of shame, blame, judgment and moral superiority in operation. When we buy into the camps they provide us - we support and even begin to own our own national divisions.
 
It becomes easier to just not like one another instead of committing to investing in the relationship building that would help us tap into what we all know. When we tap into our collective knowledge, we together become a part of the urgent solutions we need to some of our most pressing problems. 
 
Our political camps feed us moral superiority, based in our version of religion or family values or science or intellect – as though we don’t share these sources as common starting places for our values. When we stick to our political camps - dialogue becomes silenced and we limit our views of others to simplified statements about one another that keep us from exploring why other people think the way they do. In the process, we also limit ourselves from exploring the political sound bites that have become leading ideas about current issues and about people that may be totally inaccurate. 
 
We can end up getting in our own ways of exploring together where we have very common values. The moment we orient towards what we have in common, a host of new non-binary solutions begin to appear. We begin to deconstruct some of the messaging behind the sound bites we have received.
 
Our ethnodramatic process provides us a helpful roadmap for how to step outside of our divisive camps and into really good conversation about even better solutions that produce even better outcomes for our shared values.
 
We say Honoring Stories because as we learn together how to honor one another’s stories, we all learn to shift away from our way as the only way forward. Our insistence that others do what we say is best won’t be the reigning orientation of how we advance progress together.
 
Our Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™ workshops take us through a process of building collaboration situated in healthy relationship-building. Teams practice and observe how their communication and market research processes contribute to advancing trust and new ideas for product and service solutions that communities want and need.
 
These solutions include better products, better communication processes, better relationships with a broader array of clients, and pathways into hiring a more diverse employee base.
 
Our ethnodramatic process helps us listen to the heart of one another’s real values and goals for our nation.