How would YOU make the case for Inclusion?

Today two young men met with me in my office. They had made an appointment to explain how their bank could help the Institute. They represented a local bank which wanted to contribute a small amount of money for each Institute for Inclusion member who opened an account with them, and also a percentage of interest earned on linked accounts, thinking that some of our multi-million dollar net worth Board Members (we wish!) would be depositing substantial amounts. The young man taking the lead wanted to know more about the IFI, and that’s where the conversation became special, for both me and for the young men.

It’s interesting to try to explain the Institute for Inclusion, or just Inclusion, to a fresh face, and if you haven’t done so recently, I encourage you to bring the topic up with someone.

I first mentioned the Inclusive behaviors of including those impacted by decisions in the dialogue, and of increasing the transparency of decisions. I took a tough example, storing nuclear waste materials. Would you want that in your backyard? But if you had waste to store, you’d feel strongly that it had to go somewhere, right? Or you’d feel that way as long as it didn’t have to go into your own community, probably! Assuming that nobody will be eager to welcome the waste, what do you do if you have committed your organization to Inclusion? You create a dialogue and you commit to making the solution a Win/Win solution, somehow. And you make your reasons for wanting the waste to go into a given community more transparent than opaque.

The two young men were nodding in agreement, but I could see that the idea was still not really hitting home with them. So I pointed out that another principle of Inclusion is to encourage full participation from everybody in an organization, to bring together individuals’ talents, skills, and perspectives to compliment and enrich each other. I said, “Look, what if your bank came to you and told you that you had a lot of talents that weren’t being used in your current (sales) role, and asked you to use more of them?”
The young man said, “I have a degree in Organizational Psychology, I could use that!” “Exactly,” I agreed, “What if the bank asked you to create a project, maybe do some research or writing about the organization from that perspective, in addition to your work in sales, would you be interested?” “I sure would be,” he said, “and I’d be excited about it, and if I didn’t have to go to them to propose the idea, if they came to me about it, it would be such an honor that I’d work really hard. But how would you get the bank to adopt the Principles? Are there case studies that show that Inclusion gives a good R.O.I.?” Smart young man.

I had to admit that there aren’t, not yet, anyway. And I told them that the real catch is getting the Chairman of the bank’s board to want to adopt Inclusion. I said that it was easy to show these two young men how inclusion could benefit them; they could see that it was in their self-interest to work for an inclusive organization, it was all upside potential, but the first thing a CEO was likely to think about was whether their power to make decisions and control the organization would be affected. And I had to admit that while hierarchical organizational structures were probably going to still be possible, the typical pattern of making decisions in an organization that has adopted inclusion principles was going to look different than before. That’s where the sale gets tough, and I could see that if I was pitching Inclusion to a CEO instead of to two young sales reps, there could be some hesitation instead of the energy and excitement I was seeing in the young man across from me.

I invited him to our next conference, and took his card to add his name to our mailing list.


But if you were talking to the CEO instead, how would YOU make the case?

Your comments would be most interesting!