D,E or I: Which Is More Important?

Good afternoon, Cadre community, and happy Friday. Doctor E. Here. Hope you are doing well and I hope your week has gone well. Hope you have some wonderful plans for the weekend. We are expecting a few inches of snow here in the Twin Cities, so bracing ourselves for that. A little bit worse in other parts, but it is January in the Midwest, so this is what the tundra does. Happy to be with you today. I wanted to kind of talk about a topic that a follower posed to me on email, and the question was out of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Which one is most important? And if you recall, you know, talking about those three dynamics or areas in different ways is very important, and understanding them different is very important. And not conflating them is so imperative to your organizational efforts, your personal efforts, as well as your team efforts. And so again, diversity for me is simply about difference and how difference is understood, how difference is seen, and how difference is approached. Now, those differences can be on a number of different levels, visible, invisible surface, below surface, personal, interpersonal, all kinds of things, far beyond just, you know, race, gender, socioeconomic status, all of those other kinds of things, and permeates into how we think, how we receive information, how we process feedback, our experiences, our backgrounds, our perspectives, all of those values and ideals.

That's really what diversity is about. Inclusion simply is the ability to inform and make decisions, or to be at the table when decisions are being made. And so how are different persons, how are different perspectives, how are different voices allowed to influence decisions that are made in certain aspects of your teams, your organizations, and so forth. And then equity is really about how are you evaluating your efforts and what does it look like to really assess the impact and the effectiveness of what you're doing.

And so when you think about those three terms in those distinct ways, that is probably the first step that I really want to get across. And then when asking the question, which of those three is most important or more important, honestly, I think it depends on where you are as an organization, where you are as a team, where you are as an individual. If your diversity, inclusion and equity efforts are just getting off the ground, you're just beginning to understand where you are and who you are as an organization.

Honestly, I think then diversity becomes the most important, because now you're trying to integrate and incorporate differences and how that might look in terms of changing your dynamic from a monolithic one to a multi purpose or multicultural one. Very important. If you've already tackled diversity, if you are already engaging in different perspectives and different opinions and different experiences and really bringing those into your teams, bringing those into your organizations, then I would say inclusion is probably the most important because now just having those perspectives present, but not allowing those present perspectives to inform and influence what you do totally negates them being present.

Right. And so that way, in that manner, inclusion is most important. If you've already gone about the practice of bringing in difference, right, or even engaging and approaching difference in a way that allows you to attract it. If you've done both of those, or if you've already been in the process of both of those, and now you're trying to understand what's really making a fundamental impact on what you're trying to do, where are some gaps? Where could you be doing some things better? How do you even know whether you're doing something well or not?

Then I would say equity becomes most important. And so again, depending on where you are as an organization, each one of those could be important depending on your journey and where and where your placement is on that journey. So think about that in that way. Not that you have to really delineate which one is most important all of the time, but recognizing that one of those or each one of those could be very important at any point in time. And so as you start to think about your journey, your efforts, your approaches to diversity, equity and inclusion, don't pigeonhole yourself to have one.

Be the important one all of the time, consistently. If you're making progress, if you're moving, you could find yourself having an emphasis on each one of those at any given point. So I'm doctor, either. Thanks for joining me today and I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll see you next week.