What you Can Learn About People When Looking at a Cauliflower
For the last few years, 4P Foods has been my primary source of fresh fruits and veggies grown and produced by local and regional area farmers. The beauty of farm shares is tasting and experiencing a variety of different produce that you might not otherwise try, or might not be commonly available in the grocery store.
Enter: romanesco cauliflower.
As soon as a friend saw this beauty, he exclaimed: “fractal!” And he was right. Fractals are complex patterns formed by a simple process repeated over and over on different scales. Zoom in and you’ll notice the small florets are replicated dozens of times. Zoom out and can see the same floret patterns in the larger vegetable. How wild!
As Margaret Wheatley once said: “It is the nature of life to organize into patterns.” A dynamic systems-thinker and organizational change leader, Wheatley explores fractals in her book Leadership and the New Science. She writes, “…it is important to look for and identify the patterns that reveal themselves through behavior. Together we can decide whether we would prefer different behaviors. If we do, we need to figure out the values and agreements that we think will support these new behaviors.” While behavioral patterns in people are different from patterns that appear in vegetables, both are complex. Speaking from first hand experience, I know behavioral change in people is hard. After all, why do 80% of people fall out of new year’s resolutions come February each year? While there is more to say about individual behavior change (we’ll get back to that soon!), Margaret Wheatley asks us to think about the broader patterns that exist in organizational life.
In the very personal and often fraught space of diversity, equity, and inclusion work, I think it’s particularly helpful to think about these emotional and challenging topics as a fractal which points to broader patterns of how we are socialized. By recognizing we are subject to greater organizational and cultural forces, we can de-personalize issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. By this, I mean tone down the individual shame and guilt that too often prevent many (white) people from engaging, or going deep, in this work. We can see the broader cultural and organizational patterns that shape us, and then have more agency to do the personal and organizational work necessary to support inclusive workplaces.
Pattern: Minimization (Counter Pattern: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion)
This summer I took a multi-day training called Bold, Inclusive Conversations developed and led by members of The Winters Group, Inc. Winters Group CEO Mary-Frances Winters designed this training in light of a common organizational pattern that revealed itself: lack of skills and permission to effectively acknowledge and discuss hard topics in the workplace. In fact, she says we are taught not to talk about such hard things. Think about issues like unarmed black men being killed by police, gender identity and transphobia, violence against members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, pervasive anti-semitism that simmers below (and above) the surface of our social systems. These are a few of the recent deeply troubling, pernicious, and often personal issues that impact how people show up to work each day. Because external events affect people, they influence work quality (e.g., engagement, productivity, innovation) and shape organizational culture. When we see patterns of gun violence across U.S. communities, we can also identify consistent organizational and societal response patterns in our workplaces and communities.
What patterns do you notice in your workplace?
The Bold and Inclusive Conversations training involves a variety of frameworks and tools to help facilitators and participants understand how to effectively host difficult conversations. One tool used to help us break-down our own individual understanding of difference is called the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a cross-cultural assessment that is used to build intercultural awareness and competence. After answering a series of questions, the output plots your results along the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC), a framework that illustrates your current orientation toward difference and commonality. To my surprise, my IDI assessment revealed that I currently fall into the category of minimization. Generally speaking, minimization is characterized by a “go along to get along” mentality. In other words, it favors assimilation and deemphasizes cultural difference in order to achieve a unified front that doesn’t “rock the boat”. At the same time, the assessment also reveals where you think you are on the intercultural development continuum. My assessment results reveal that I thought I landed in the awareness category which is one step ahead of where I actually am on the continuum. Awareness is characterized by “deeply comprehending differences”, yet still not quite integrating and bridging across these differences. While indeed humbling, these data points reveal a fractal patterning. I, myself, am the fractal which feeds into and reveals itself as part of the larger macro culture that I operate within both at work and in community.
To further illustrate what I mean: Dr. Mitchell Hammer, creator of the IDI, says that 68% of people who take the IDI assessment fall into the category of minimization. A similar stat was also true for those 25 people in my recent Bold Inclusive Conversation learning cohort. Similarly, most people think they are more culturally competent than they actually are. If this is the prevalent behavior in individuals like myself, it’s no wonder organizations writ large don’t know how to understand and effectively converse about differences in the workplace or other social settings. We think we are doing more than perhaps we are.
Pattern: Linear Thinking (Counter Pattern: Systems Thinking)
Workplace patterns are plentiful. As Margaret Wheatley says, “These recurring patterns of behavior are what many call the culture of an organization.” In my experience, Western thought thrives on linearity. This means A + B = C. In other words, if we fix our talent recruitment problem (hiring practices) and we offer competitive packages (salary + benefits) we will achieve our diversity equity and inclusion goals. Linear thinking is not a method that should be applied to something as dynamic as organizational life. For one, it presumes there are individual component parts and a systematic order that when executed properly, produce a guaranteed outcome. It doesn’t consider that organizations are dynamic, living organisms. Using the earlier example, when hiring practices are fixed and benefits are adjusted, we are too often perplexed by our disappointing results: attrition remains high and our workplaces aren’t as diverse and inclusive as we want them to be.
The Bold Inclusive Conversation model is counter to our notion that A+B=C. You might notice that conversations do not follow a linear process. (And if they do, they probably are a bit boring and stale!) Generally only bound by time, conversations do not necessarily have a clear beginning or end. You might often revisit certain topics to learn more or go deeper. Bold Inclusive Conversations too is based on a cyclical process that presumes there are layers upon layers of understanding, shared meaning, and integration that occur over time. Unlike a linear process, there is no arrival point when the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion is done, the outcome is achieved, and we have all arrived at our desired anti-racist destination.
Pattern: Habituation (Counter pattern: Awareness Practices)
As I think more about the relationship between individual and workplace patterns, this is a common “chicken or egg” scenario. It’s challenging to discern which comes first: do individual behavioral patterns influence organizational patterns or vice versa? Likely both.
As I think about Bold Inclusive Conversations, I’d characterize it as a combination of training and gathering. A training infers there is a transfer of knowledge. A gathering is designed to be relational. By this I mean, there was sound content and an intentional process I was there to learn and the hosts created a container that was steeped in relationships. Too often corporate training of many kinds offers glimmers of inspiration and wonder in the moment that we are part of the training. And as soon as the training ends, we step out of the classroom and into our daily grind. In other words, inertia is too strong. We easily fall back into well-worn behavioral work patterns that we know. There isn’t a great enough or consistent enough counter-force to support alternative ways of working, relating, and doing business beyond the finite training period.
Returning momentarily to the image of the romanesco cauliflower, imagine each cauliflower fractal represents a different segment of society. Each segment, representing a group of people, has similar qualities including a well-defined structure and boundaries. The only difference is that each fractal sits on a different part of the whole. Said another way, the difference is in our position. What if we acknowledged how this positioning (think: role and placement in an organizational hierarchy or societal caste system) makes all the difference? What positional power does a given segment hold based on its placement? How might this positionality influence our identity? Finally, how do we become aware of how positionality and identity impacts behavior? In my experience, greater awareness and understanding is developed through on-going relationships with different parts of the larger whole. In other words, this means actively widening our awareness through exposure, education, experience and empathy practices. Practices might include things like reading books and articles or watching films written and produced by people from different backgrounds, or segments of society. It also means developing authentic relationships with our neighbors who occupy adjacent fractals. Because each fractal’s orientation is slightly different, we naturally acquire blindspots. However, awareness raising practices help us engage and relate to each other from a deeper place. Our orientation and relationships reveal patterns and habits that influence our worldview. Without understanding these patterns and introducing counter-patterns that create new habits, inertia will remain a powerful force.
How do we sharpen our awareness to include perspectives beyond our immediate boundary?
When it comes to training of various kinds, we can very easily develop a “check the box” mentality. However, in diversity, equity, and inclusion work, there is a lot more relational work to be done. In fact, I’d argue this is the work of our lifetimes. That is not to say there aren’t worthy goals like achieving representation in leadership across all levels of government, business, and community, or influencing hiring and promotion practices within organizations. These are necessary things too. However, Bold Inclusive Conversations illuminated the power of the communal and relational web that we are collectively weaving. It’s easy in a dominant (white) culture to lean toward metrics that are easily counted and quantified. It’s not as easy to foster an organizational culture that emphasizes understanding things like cultural communication patterns that influence and impact the quality of the relationships we have with one another. This means understanding how we show up with humility, and embrace vulnerability to build trust, especially when there are things like positional power dynamics at play.
As I think about what it means to fall into the IDI’s category of minimization that I mentioned earlier, I am actively tracking my behavior in meetings at work and in social relationships. I am asking questions like: How do I acknowledge different perspectives? What are the ways I engage different learning and communication styles? How do I integrate this learning in order to form different more inclusive patterns in my leadership style and work? With greater awareness and intentional practice, I have the ability to change my behavior and move along the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC) toward greater cultural awareness and competency.
Closing thoughts (for now)
The wondrous romanesco cauliflower is a great teaching and learning tool: our individual everyday behaviors and actions are part of broader societal patterns which shape cultural conditioning. If we interrupt well-worn patterns and introduce more generative counter-patterns, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, systems thinking, and awareness practices, the potential impact is significant. From this new orientation we get to create meaningful dialogue with our colleagues and leaders, choose more human-centered business practices, identify new ways to retain and nurture talent, and accelerate creativity, relationships, and innovation to truly live into our values and highest potential.
“To do this, we have to develop much greater awareness of how we’re acting; we have to become far more self-reflective than normal. And we have to help one another notice when we fall back into old behaviors. We will all slip back into the past — that is unavoidable — but when this happens, we agree to counsel one another with a generous spirit. Little by little, tested by events and crises, we learn how to enact these new values. We develop different patterns of behavior. We slowly become who we said we wanted to be.” — Margaret Wheatley