2009 Conference a Success Story!

The Institute's 2009 conference at the Radisson Hotel

was a very positive, expansive, and fascinating one!


To all who attended: it was great seeing you

and sharing ideas with you! And to those who missed it,

we hope that you'll mark your calendars next year and join us,

because talking about and practicing Inclusion is a powerful

way to expand your consciousness, and is a great tool

for increasing your organization's effectiveness as well !


This year we modified our format to feature multiple short

concurrent sessions. Judith Katz and Fred Miller have been to

a couple of TED conferences (see Fred's new blog entry about

this year's TED conference ) and they were very excited about

the energy that that much sharing can create. So we split our

focus this year: we maintained our custom of co-creating

intellectual capital (this year we looked at the areas of Inclusive

Behaviors and at the Values and Language of Inclusion) and we

made sure that we had good chunks of valuable conference time

for presentations and for full group dialog/sharing time, following

the sessions.


I think the format worked well, although our attendance

was lower this year than last year, and I thought that some

of the presentations didn't get the attendance they deserved,

especially because of the lower turnout.


There was a lot of enthusiasm as Institute "regulars" like

Edie Seashore, Fred Miller, Russ Gaskin and Bernardo Ferdman

presented on topics ranging from "triple impact change" to

Energy to Polarity Managment and Measuring Inclusion.


There were lots of presentations from newer attendees too!

For example: Yvette Jarreau and Amy Hall presented on

initiatives underway at Eileen Fisher; and Ruthie Landis

illuminated "points of view" via the Enneagram, as a way to

increase inclusion; Michael Donovan, who is a city councilman

as well as a professor, talked about "bonding and bridging"

types of social groups and public policy in "Opportunity Valley".

Steve Hanamura, at this point still our only regular conference

attendee who is blind, inspired us with the trailer for his new film

(funding needed for the full production, please sponsor!) and

illuminated us with his gentle and loving (yet firm) reminder that

by not transferring our material into Braille text we are leaving

him, a visual learner with a disability, more "out" than "in".

We need to do better, and we need to include more people

in our work!


One of many talented and thoughtful people who joined us this

year for the first time was Margherita Coppolino. Marg is a

leading diversity and inclusion consultant from Australia, and

she presented on her journey in leading the creation of a

social inclusion framework for the government of the state of

Victoria, Australia, through their department of Planning and

Community Development. There are 5 million people in Victoria!

Margherita's thoughtful work and insightful comments were

deeply appreciated, and she also took over 100 photos,

which form a new slideshow on our website.

A pdf file of her presentation will be in our Archives.


A recurring theme for us was how to practice inclusion when it

seems like the "other" is hostile. The KKK was used as an

example, as was radical Islamic fundamentalists, but the

challenge is there for us all - and not just with such dramatic

examples. It's a daily challenge for everyone, but the big

issues still need to be wrestled with. As Ruthie said,

maybe we have to come to terms with the shadow inside of

each of us before we can hope to engage someone who

represents that shadow we "love to hate."

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!