Matt Ninihan, Mila Baker, Judith H. Katz, Fred Miller

Fred Miller and Judith Katz gave a well-attended presentation at this year’s conference on OD, Inclusion, and Diversity: Yesterday, Today, and Looking Around the Corner. The presentation centered on how we talk about differences in the workplace and in society has changed fundamentally in the last 25 years. We’ve seen shifts from a compliance focus of affirmative action to recognizing and articulating the business case for diversity in the workplace to focusing on not just representation, but the inclusion of people of all differences. Yet, stories related to diversity and differences are as alive as ever, from Ferguson (and beyond) to Gamergate to the battle for marriage equality. How do we as practitioners address differences and where does diversity fit in moving the field of OD forward? This presentation explored the evolution of diversity and inclusion, the challenges organizations face today, and how emerging trends such as Dialogic OD are shaping our approach to making an impact in how we change organizations.

To view or download a copy of their presentation, CLICK HERE.

On Wednesday, 7 October 2015, a three hour community conversation was hosted by KJCG, along with community partners, about creating A More Welcoming, Inclusive and Safer Troy at Bush Memorial Hall on The Russell Sage College campus in Troy, New York. This conversation, with 230 engaged people, focused on ways that citizens, community members, students, police, city government, businesses, and civic and religious leaders can work together, honor our diversity, and make Troy a more welcoming, inclusive, and safer city. The event sparked a conversation that helped to shape a community that values all and conveys belonging, appreciation and neighborly goodwill; a community that celebrates connection and cooperation with care and respect—without exceptions. The event had a very diverse turnout, with people of all social economic groups, ages, races, and employment conditions. Participants each filled out individual Call-to-Actions and Big Ideas, ideas that are beyond the scope of an individual. This is one piece of a larger movement to make Troy, New York, a more welcoming, inclusive and safer place.

The Chamber will honor KJCG at the annual Van Rensselaer Awards Dinner scheduled for Thursday, September 15, 2016 in Troy, NY.

The Downtown Troy Business Improvement District’s Fourth Annual Fundraising Dinner and Sammy Awards was at Franklin Plaza in Troy on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015.  The BID honored individuals and businesses that have helped make Downtown Troy a thriving place to live, work and explore.

Fred Miller and The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. were honored with The “Troy Vision” Award.  This award is given to a person or organization that has implemented a proven dedication to tackling community or societal issues in Troy in an effort to improve quality of life in the city.

The Downtown Troy BID’s mission is to cultivate and advocate the economic growth of Downtown Troy and to further enhance and make our community a vibrant, attractive destination for visitors, businesses, residents, property owners, daily workforce and students.

On 28 September 2015, KJCG and the Hunger in Troy Planning Group gathered together with Troy community members at Sage Bush Memorial to discuss individual and collaborative actions to help increase food security in Troy. One of the big ideas that came out of the meeting was mobilizing local participation in #GivingTuesday, which resulted in raising over 700 pounds of food that Hunger in Troy donated back to local Troy food pantries and organizations in need.

Checklists have saved thousands of hospital patients. One of them may even have helped the Allies win the Second World War.

Those statements may seem exaggerated. But in his 2009 book The Checklist Manifesto, surgeon and author Atul Gawande tracks how checklists have dramatically reduced human error and, today, enable us to leverage the impossibly complex knowledge that humans have amassed in the past few decades.

Gawande’s thesis, simply stated, is that we can’t keep all that knowledge in our heads any longer. In medicine, in engineering, in finance, even in organizations, our species has uncovered ever more knowledge to handle ever more complex situations. The knowledge and complexity are so great, in fact, that in the attempt to apply the knowledge we often forget the routine things—like ensuring there’s enough soap in an ICU to wash one’s hands. The result, as you might imagine, can be disastrous.

This is the value of the checklist: it frees us from having to remember the routine, so we can devote our full attention to the complexity that our brains are designed to grapple with. As Gawande notes, “A lesson is emerging: checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness.”

In the world of organizations, I see checklists as an ideal way to follow standard work. The whole point of standard work—loosely defined here as the most efficient and effective method currently known for performing a repetitive task—is to eliminate waste. With its origins in Lean Six Sigma, standard work provides an established, repeatable way to perform tasks. As a result, people no longer have to rethink their routines at each repetition; they simply complete the tasks according to standard work and devote their brainpower to unexpected or complex issues.

Still, not everyone will remember every step of standard work every time. Here is where a physical checklist, posted prominently, can come in: as a continual reminder to attend to the routine but essential details that make standard work as efficient and effective as it is.

Moreover, the benefits of checklists can extend well beyond processes. This is why we developed the Inclusive Meeting Norms as a checklist for more inclusive, more effective meetings, and the 4 Keys that Change EVERYTHING as a checklist for interactions in general. By practicing standard work and checklists in our human interactions, we will reduce waste, create a common language with which to communicate, increase our personal effectiveness, and get closer to Right First Time interactions.

Where could you use a checklist—in your own work life, in your team, throughout your organization—to ensure that everyone is focused where their brains are most needed to focus: on the complexities of the workplace? What pieces of your standard work would run more effectively through the use of checklists? How could you use checklists in your home life: packing for a trip, for instance, or keeping track of bills? Feel free to post your thinking here.

Editor’s note: Catherine M. Volk, Judith H. Katz, and one of their key client partners will present on this topic on 10 April at the Multicultural Forum on Workplace Diversity. You can register for the forum here.

In organization development and change management, a wealth of models measure how individuals respond to change. How might a model evaluate the movement of systems, teams, and individuals through a change effort? What happens when the change effort in question is focused on improving inclusion in the workplace?  Over the past few years, we have asked these questions while partnering with a global organization to implement Inclusion as the HOW for accelerating results and achieving higher performance.

With the permission of change consultant Daryl Conner, we began by adapting the Patterson-Conner Commitment Curve—which charts the progress of individuals through a change—to plot the inclusion change effort at individual, group, and system levels. Our team designed a brief survey focused on the behavioral outcomes we anticipated at each milestone on the curve. With that survey in hand, we interviewed groups across the organization, testing the questions while evaluating how people were progressing up the curve.

The results gave us data about the progress of the inclusion change effort. Just as important, they provided far greater clarity, not only on the definitions of relevant behaviors, but also on which behaviors corresponded with which milestones. Early in the process, for example, we tested two questions: one asked people whether they had heard about the change effort overall, and another inquired whether they had heard about specific elements of the change. In accordance with the Commitment Curve, we identified the first question as an indicator of Contact and the second as an indicator of Awareness, thinking that people needed to hear about the change effort as a whole before exploring specific elements. What we found, however, was that people moved through the change much faster than we expected: so fast, in fact, that there was no significant difference in these questions. Instead, the better differentiator between Contact and Awareness was whether people had begun to undergo some education (formal or informal) on the components of the change.

We also saw, through measurable data, other dynamics of the change effort, among them:

• If the change effort has enough momentum, even developments that might traditionally be seen as non-inclusive (e.g., downsizing) will not move the organization backward on the Commitment Curve—as long as those developments are handled inclusively. In the wake of one large restructuring, for instance, engagement scores remained consistently high, largely because the leaders modeled inclusive behaviors throughout the process.
• Internal change agents must not move too far up the Commitment Curve vis-à-vis the rest of the system. Being “out of sight of the pack” often leaves change agents feeling vulnerable and alone. Their own momentum up the curve, and the creation of critical mass within their own organization, are at risk without senior leader sponsorship, strong leaders from their function, and a community of others practicing the new behaviors. This highlights the value of Communities of Practice, which bring change agents and early adopters together for mutual support.
• Sequencing is essential. Some change agents, energized by the vision, try to engage all aspects of the change at once. For the system and the people in it, this is too much too fast, actually creating more resistance because the groundwork for the next stage is not yet ready.

As organizations feel ever more pressure to quantify return on investment, it is imperative to create reliable tools and strategies to measure change. Our hope is that this extension of the Patterson-Conner Commitment Curve helps organizations make the case for Inclusion as the HOW to accelerate results and achieve performance—and, more broadly, for design interventions to help individuals and the system integrate new behaviors so they become a way of life for the organization.

Last month, noted surgeon and author Atul Gawande visited our region to discuss the future of healthcare. What I heard him talking about was the need to share—and hear—street corners.

Gawande, the author of The Checklist Manifesto, was in town to present the keynote for “Health Care in the 21st Century: A Community Call to Action,” sponsored by The University at Albany School of Public Health and The University at Albany Foundation. For about 45 minutes, he spoke of the sea changes in public health over the past 80 years, the extraordinary leaps forward in the care of wounded soldiers, and, especially, the value of systems.

Perhaps his most startling comment, however, concerned the use of penicillin early in the 20^th century. Even as the “wonder drug” delivered tremendous benefit, Gawande noted, it also led to an overreliance on medication as a treatment model. Now, amid the advent of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, the focus is shifting to a systems approach. Where healthcare is most like a system, Gawande said, is where it’s most likely to succeed.

And what does this system consist of? In part, it features groups of people delivering great results together. “We are now all specialists,” Gawande said. “We each have only a piece of healthcare.”

Or, to put it in KJCG language, each healthcare professional sees healthcare from a particular “street corner” or perspective. Bring them together, and you get closer to a 360-degree vision of the issue at hand. This applies to understanding individual patient cases as well as the field itself.

It is a textbook example of the need for one of our 12 Inclusive Behaviors: asking who else needs to be involved to understand the whole situation. Providing the extraordinarily complex care in today’s healthcare requires bringing together all relevant people, from physicians to nurses to administrators to public health experts and others, all sharing their street corners.

Yet this runs counter to the way healthcare has evolved: as a model that revolves around the autonomous, all-powerful physician. Or as Gawande put it, “We’ve trained people to be cowboys, when it’s a pit crew we need.”

If anything, today’s healthcare requires even more people contributing their street corners than ever, because a 360-degree vision encompasses more factors than ever before. After decades in which the mortality rate for war-wounded soldiers stayed the same, the U.S. Army tried new medical advances to lower the rate further, but without success.  What did prove successful were several initiatives outside the traditional bounds of medicine: mandating the wearing of Kevlar, for instance, and establishing mobile hospitals nearer the front to provide care faster.

Solutions like these might come from a team of physicians. More likely, they would come from a larger cohort of people who saw things from many different street corners.

At KJCG, we bring this message into organizations continually: The world is far too complex for a single group of people, with a single perspective, to even understand what is happening, let alone arrive at solutions. Organizations will only be successful if they hear from all relevant street corners in every situation. We find it encouraging that a thought leader like Atul Gawande would put the same approach to work on one of the most bafflingly complex systems of all: healthcare.

At one client site—on our very first visit—we were pleasantly surprised to see our 12 Inclusive Behaviors posters already displayed throughout the facility. Signs accompanying the posters urged people to “pick two behaviors and practice them.”

The site was clearly off to a good start. Yet we were reminded just how far it had to go to make the change last.

Sustainable change ranks among the most challenging dilemmas that consultants and organizations face. Many change efforts thrive when the consultants are onsite—partnering with leaders, coaching people, modeling the new state—only to founder when the consultants move on. So “what happens when the consultants leave?” is a common and legitimate question.

The optimal situation, we believe, is when no one asks—because no one needs to ask. In that state, the change effort has gone beyond posters, the focus on metrics, or even the practicing of new behaviors. Rather, inclusion has transformed people’s mindsets. In day-to-day interactions, they use inclusion to make problems visible and create solutions—in other words, to conduct their business. No longer just a “tool,” inclusion has become foundational to the way they operate. No one worries about “when the consultants leave” because the mindsets and behaviors have been adopted, institutionalized, and internalized.

How does this happen? At KJCG, we use a version of the Commitment Curve (developed by Daryl Conner) to illustrate the journey from “poster on the wall” to “the way we operate.” On their journey along the curve, people in the organization move from simple awareness of the behaviors to experimenting with those behaviors. As those experiments bear fruit, they adopt the behaviors, applying them to every facet of their work; leaders institutionalize them into policies, practices, and processes. At the top of the curve, each individual owns and has internalized the behaviors as her or his own; living them is as natural and automatic as breathing.

How do we facilitate this movement up the Commitment Curve, particularly in organizations with large numbers of people? Part of the answer is to develop internal capability with a core group of internal change leaders from all levels of the organization, who together develop a deep understanding of—and passion for—making inclusive behaviors a way of life. They must learn not only the day-to-day application, but also how inclusion connects to the organization’s strategy, mission, and goals.

By providing peer-to-peer coaching and leadership, these internal change leaders shift the focus of the work from the consultants to the internal capacity necessary to ensure that the organization has the support and knowledge it needs to change interactions daily. The change leaders understand how to leverage inclusion as an essential lever to transform the organization, as well as how to incorporate it into every facet of conducting the organization’s business.

If we can develop a core of people who have internalized inclusion—and they subsequently engage and coach others—no one will have to ask the question “what happens when the consultants leave?” In that state, the people of the organization are living and practicing the change, whether the consultants are there or not. Consultants can then leave knowing that the change has every chance of becoming the way the organization does business.