From a chapter excerpt written in “The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity and Inclusion Pays Off,” managing partners Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan bring to public light the cognitive and ever-present yet rarely discussed behavioral effects diversity and inclusion can take at the workplace. Through the day-to-day operations of the protagonist character Kim, readers are able to relate and sympathize with the perspective of a company executive as she goes about her busy work schedule. Kaplan and Donovan go on to discuss in detail the impacts Kim’s words and actions may have created or at large, contributed to a bigger crisis of mismanaged events.
The issues they present here ask one to reflect on our humanly inherent biases which commonly create unfair advantages and dividing insider-outsider work relations. Specifically addressing the need for systematic views at various scales, their argument stands to reduce micro-inequities that oftentimes goes unrealized and creates obstacles for underrepresented people. Kaplan and Donovan reinforce the idea that an individual’s good intent, while it may as well be in everybody’s agenda, is not enough to create lasting impacts a company should learn in order to move themselves forward. The goal of inclusion, as they put it, “should be apart of our daily decision.”
Good work, Bryan