23 – The Enabling Opportunity Principle

[00:00:00] Lily: Hello, and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I’m Lily Clements, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here today with David Stern, a founding director at IDEMS International.

Hi, David.

[00:00:18] David: Hi, Lily. What principle are we discussing today?

[00:00:21] Lily: Enabling Opportunity.

[00:00:23] David: Oh yes, this one actually took a lot of rewording.

[00:00:27] Lily: Well okay, so how about going through that, evolution of the wording for this principle.

[00:00:34] David: Okay, Enabling Opportunity: “This principle describes the company’s relationship to its staff. It challenges the company to aim beyond equal opportunity by creating opportunities.” This element of equal opportunity is really one of the great discussion points which is where this has really come from. That the idea of being an equal opportunity employer in some ways was of course very desirable.

But we had people who had been through systems where that implementation had led organisations to take really bad decisions and decisions which didn’t serve anyone. They didn’t serve the people who were being given opportunities and they didn’t serve the actual projects and, projects failed because of ill thought through equal opportunity guidelines within UN systems. And this was part of the learning that we brought in. It was learnings from members of our teams, but it was also learnings that we had observed and we’d seen elsewhere.

Let me give a very simple example of this. This is why we decided we wanted to go beyond equal opportunity. We believe in equal opportunity, but we believe it needs to be done right, and to do it right is harder than just the approach is taken, even by the best organisations in the world trying to do this.

So I will give a very concrete example where in a UN, I won’t go into details, in a UN software sort of group, the candidates available meant that for certain positions, people were chosen to be promoted, not because they were ready to take on that responsibility, but because of equal opportunity, trying to take people who were from disadvantaged groups and make sure that they had opportunities to rise and to progress, and that there were the right numbers of people progressing or entering into this from these disadvantaged groups.

But what happened and what was observed is that actually because, and I’d seen this in other contexts as well which came from a very different set of problems, but I’d seen the same phenomenon. What happened is you had people who had great potential, but because of being promoted too early or in the wrong ways, actually, their potential was cut short.

They were never able to succeed. They were put into a role that they weren’t able to or ready to succeed at. This is the thing, that actually by being given, creating these sort of balance of people, but where, the skill sets weren’t yet there, they were set up to fail. And when they failed, of course, this didn’t serve them well.

This meant that the project itself suffered because they weren’t good at that role. But more than that, because they didn’t successfully complete that role, because they weren’t able to succeed in that role, they then suffered because their career then potentially was negatively impacted by that. It didn’t serve the project and it didn’t serve the people who were given the opportunity.

I can give another context where I’ve observed this and this is when I was working at a Kenyan institution, a young university, and in that university there were people where it was surprising that actually a lot of people were worried about the wrong people getting promoted. But actually I was really surprised at how consistently the people who I thought were really good did get recognised and got put into positions of responsibility.

But the responsibility they were given, it often cut short their own personal development. For example, they were doing really well at research, and then suddenly they got put into an administrative position where they didn’t have the time to actually take forward their research career. And so suddenly that responsibility they were given actually cut short the budding career that was being created. The very thing that meant they got the opportunity in the first place. In a bigger institution or an older institution, there would be more layers and so they would have had more time to develop.

There are some people who have thrived in this and they’re the exception, but many people I met with really great potential actually lost out so much because before they were ready, they were given responsibilities which cut short their personal development. And so this is really at the heart of what we see as this sort of Enabling Opportunities, that we want to take people from diverse backgrounds who are disadvantaged and we want to enable them to rise through and to succeed in the opportunities they’re given.

And so if, for example, when we look at the sort of equal opportunities angle of our recruitment process, we find we’re not able to recruit the diversity we’re looking for at a given time, in a given way, then what we want to do is we want to then create opportunities further down the pipeline. We want to create opportunities where people can grow into those roles in the future and make a conscious effort to do so. But not to take shortcuts, to recognize that this is a long term process in many cases and that it’s about taking people on that journey so that they can succeed, so that they can win.

That’s what’s really important about this enabling an opportunity. It’s about enabling people to actually seize the opportunities by both presenting them with the opportunities, but by ensuring that they can succeed at those opportunities.

[00:06:30] Lily: Nice. I think that you’ve laid it out really well there, that you’ve gone through the kind of stories of how the issues that can come around when you’re trying overly to have that equal opportunity. I know of people that have been basically given interviews for jobs, because there’s a quota that has to be fit, that you need to interview a set number of different groups.

But they were never going to get the job anyway. And so in that case, they’ve had to waste their time, and waste their day, take a day off from work, from their current job to be able to go to that interview, for something that they were never going to be given anyway.

It’s a bit of a controversial one, however. I’m sure that you would agree about this, about equal opportunity. Because there’s also then the argument that we want to put people in those positions to inspire future generations to be able to see that is something that is becoming the norm.

[00:07:26] David: Absolutely, and I’m not at all against that. On the contrary, what I am wanting is, I want the people who get given those opportunities to succeed. I think this is really important. If you, for example, through an equal opportunity recruitment process, and I’m going to use gender in mathematics because it’s something which in the UK is a big issue. And if you had a process whereby because of the equal opportunity sort of processes, you recruit a woman through a recruitment process who then does not shine in the role that she’s recruited into, then, the likelihood is that, you’ve now met your quota and then you won’t consider women in the future.

What you want to make sure is when you recruit the woman into that role, that she is able to really shine. You want to enable her to succeed. So if that means that enabling opportunities means you recruit her, but then you give her extra resources or extra support to make sure that she grows into that role and succeeds, that would be the correct approach.

That’s the enabling opportunity. It’s going beyond equal opportunity. Too many times I’ve seen people go through this and say, oh, we’ve got to do this, but look, it won’t work. And then they make sure it doesn’t work. And oh, it didn’t work. I told you it wouldn’t work. No, that’s exactly the wrong way to think about it.

But it’s what happens when you just have quotas. If you’re going to have quotas, you have to have the backstopping behind that to say, okay, we’re going to have these quotas and if you need extra support, we’re going to have the resources behind that to make sure that they succeed. And, as you say, inviting people to an interview when you’re never going to recruit them, that’s unethical. That’s, to me, worse than not inviting them.

If you’re never going to recruit them, then you’re wasting their time. The ethics of this is not about the quotas of how many people you interview, if you never actually follow through. If you want to actually go beyond equal opportunity, you need to recognize that, okay, because of the background they’re coming from, because of the situation, maybe they’re not as competitive now. But if I give them the right support, if I give them the right environment, actually in five years time, they could outperform. How do you put in place the structures to make sure that you succeed in that role? If you’re going to recruit them, you’ve got to make sure they succeed. And that’s, this is the enabling opportunities beyond just equal opportunities.

[00:09:53] Lily: I can absolutely see how, why at the start of this you said that the naming of this principle went through a few iterations and I can absolutely see how that could have happened or how that happened. I agree with the principle and I agree with what you’re saying. But is there not then a fear of, how could you handle the idea of, okay we’re promoting this person and we’re going to give them this extra support so that they can really thrive in this role, how do you then prevent their co workers from thinking that’s not fair?

[00:10:25] David: This is the whole point. This is why it has to be a company principle. If the co workers feel it’s not fair, then it doesn’t work. You have to want the co workers to have to be the ones to make it succeed. The whole point is that it’s not about it actually being imposed from outside. This has got to be inbuilt to the company culture from within. Otherwise it won’t work, because it won’t be an enabling environment. And you can’t take this where you have a competitive process for promotion. It has to be a collaborative process.

Without our Collaborative by Nature, I don’t believe we could do this. Because it’s not that you’re promoting someone at the expense of somebody else. It’s that collaboration of trying to say we need to enable everyone to succeed in different ways. But we are going to make a special effort in our recruitment to be able to support diversity, to be able to Embrace Diversity, that’s one of our principles, and recognize the value that it will bring, even though it comes at a cost.

And I think this is the important thing. I am certainly not saying other people should be doing this. If you were a commercial company that has to maximise profit, you could not afford to do this. We can do this because we’re a social enterprise. Because we’re a social enterprise that wants to maximise impact, as long as people are profitable in their role, then there’s no competition needed. So we can enable people in this way and enable those opportunities not at the expense of somebody else.

And that’s really what’s critical here. That this does not work in isolation. This is not something for everyone. I would not say to the UN you should be doing this because they couldn’t. No, the UN have to take an equal opportunity approach. It’s the best that they can do in this particular period in time, even though it has some of these negative effects. Now, should they be, when they find it difficult to recruit someone, then creating a whole program to support people from diverse backgrounds into those jobs in the future? Yes, I believe they should, but that’s a big ask.

This is something where I think there are things that big organisations can and should be doing in this vein. And there are ways in which, as a society, or as societies, we have had efforts which had been built in, I mean, the efforts to get girls into STEM has been really successful. Whereas a number of years ago, one of the reasons you couldn’t recruit women into sort of good STEM jobs was because there weren’t enough women going through the system. Now, there are wonderful role models, there are enough women coming through the systems, and now, that is not an excuse any more.

[00:13:11] David: And this is exactly what was observed where you use historical data in AI models to then try and do evaluation of CVs. Sometimes, it is not aware of the current situation, it thinks that the situation is like that of the past, but it’s changed. In not all societies, but in some societies. And so, what I’m really keen on here is this is something which we can try, we can do, we can only do in a small way at the moment and I hope in the future we’ll be able to do more of this. We did this a little bit through our internships this year, trying to take people who are not really in data science and give them avenues. There’s a whole group, another group taking the lead on that and we just provided a couple of opportunities.

This is where we’re trying to get that diversity in different ways and provide opportunities over time, taking a long term perspective. A lot of our work with African universities has this at the back of our minds, you know, in the future we want to recruit their graduates. We want them to have an education, which means that we can recruit their graduates, and their graduates are going to be successful, and they’re going to be able to really succeed and take on the sort of roles that we would like to recruit in the future.

It’s a really challenging principle for us. It’s a challenging principle for everyone. And as I say, I don’t think many others could afford to do this. On both sides of the spectrum. Companies, because it’s too expensive, and the likes of UN and other big organisations, because it takes too long. They need to have approaches which work for now, they can’t be, necessarily building for the future in the same way that we can.

[00:14:59] Lily: Sure. And so what would you say are the downsides for IDEMS to this principle?

[00:15:06] David: It’s a really interesting one because, in isolation, it seems unachievable. But together with a lot of our other principles, it becomes very natural, the Collaborative by Nature, this is something where without that I don’t think this would be possible. We’ve got other things like Inherently Inclusive. This fits within that. This is part of how we want to be inclusive. We’ve got the Consciously Ethical.

Now, these are all elements where if we didn’t have these principles together, I think trying to implement something like this would be impossible. If we didn’t have Capacity Building as part of our principle, there’s a whole range of elements where it’s actually very natural, Embracing Diversity as one of our other principles.

Given all of these other principles, this isn’t hard. It’s obvious. It’s positive in terms of creating the relationships between co workers, that we’re not putting people in competition. We’re trying to get them to collaborate. And therefore, the fact that they’re enabling people to take up and to grow into what they can become, this is incredibly natural.

Part of the, element, and this is where we’re seeing things come together in a sense. If you were to try and just put this and implement this in isolation, it wouldn’t work. But as part of the system, the culture we’re building, it’s such an integral part and such an essential component. It’s very natural. And that’s maybe come from the Systems Thinking principle, that we are thinking about the systems. And so for us, I don’t, I think if you had all our other principles, but we didn’t have Enabling Opportunities, we might do it anyway, because it’s the natural thing to do.

But I think making it explicit and say, this is what we’re trying to do, this is how we’re trying to do it, is I think important, but I do think it comes and it follows fairly naturally from our social enterprise model, from our other principles. So I don’t think the cost to us is negative. As with many of our other principles, once you put them together, any individual principle, I believe, for us, even though there may be a cost in isolation, for us, it’s part of what makes the whole work.

It’s part of what makes the system work.

[00:17:40] Lily: Thank you. Thank you very much for that. I guess just the final question that I have that’s leading on from that is, I’m hearing this from your perspective as one of the directors. Have you spoken to, do you know how it’s perceived amongst the co workers at IDEMS?

[00:17:56] David: You’re catching me at a time which is really very difficult for this. Probably the two people who I was most excited about related to this principle, we’ve lost recently. And we’ve lost them because financially we can’t afford them.

And this has been a really, a really hard set of decisions for me as a director. You know, we have gone through difficult times, we are first and foremost an enterprise, a business, and we have to make ends meet. And we weren’t. We have had a period of time where we’ve struggled for a number of different reasons.

And so there were two people who very recently, I’ve had one who’s been working with us for a year and we were able to offer her an Impact Activation Fellowship which wasn’t actually financially viable but for various reasons was really impactful to support her and I was hoping to do so for two years. But we were only able to do so for one. And she’s moved on into other things and she’s setting up a business of her own. And she appreciates the fellowship that she had for a year. But we’d always discussed that I wanted to make it two years and we were not able to. So that’s one which hits me very hard and where I feel that I would have liked to provide more of an enabling opportunity than we were able to do so.

I’m really grateful that she recognizes the opportunity she was provided as being enabling for her, and this is something we discussed, and she was really grateful for how it enabled her to bridge between what she was doing before and what she’s trying to go on to do. But that was a tough one for me, to not be able to provide more there. My hope had always been that if we provided enough there, then in the long term she would be profitable to IDEMS because of the things she would have gone on to do and so on. But we never got to take that relationship that far because of our current financial situation.

There’s another case which is similar but a bit different. But in both of these cases, what I believe is the opportunities, and what I’ve been told by them, the opportunities we were able to provide, were really appreciated. And they were in various ways, they helped at a time when they needed help. That’s not to say we couldn’t or shouldn’t have done more and I would have wanted to do more if we could have. But those decisions for us as a company, these are hard. We have a limited amount we can do and balancing that, that I’m not putting other people’s jobs at risk, that we can afford to do this.

[00:20:33] David: What I can say is that everybody who interacted with these people as part of it were enriched by that interaction. And so as an organisation, they enriched us. So in that sense, the investment was worth it. It was just unfortunate that it’s happened at times when we could not afford that investment to that extent, and it was part of creating financial difficulty for the company, which everyone is feeling. It’s an expensive principle to follow. I know that some people have benefited from this. If you were to ask people, was that benefit worth the cost we’re paying for it? I don’t know, but that’s not the point.

The point is that we lived the principle as much as we could, when we could, and we will do so again. We’ll continue to do so. But we have to balance it with the needs of the organisation, because first and foremost the organisation has to succeed because it cannot do any, it cannot live by these principles, if it can’t succeed.

[00:21:36] Lily: Thank you very much for that, David. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish?

[00:21:42] David: Finishing on the note we just did, make this sort of sound like it’s the enabling opportunity which has created the financial strain within IDEMS. And there is some truth to that, but it’s important to state that it’s not entirely true, in the sense that there were many other things which hit at the same time.

This is natural for small businesses to have ebbs and flows and to come and go in terms of our cash flow and our finances. And that would probably have happened anyway. What I think is important to state is that these aren’t the only elements of where we’ve really put in place these elements to enable opportunity and to enable people to step into roles that they wouldn’t necessarily have had otherwise. And that generally within our current experience, this has been extremely positive. And it’s something which I’m deeply committed to. And we are looking at how we can actually make this and make sure it’s embedded sustainably in what we do and how we work as we grow. It is a really challenging part of how we work and what we try to do, but it is something which the payoffs in other contexts have been enormous.

And I would maybe give one example of that. One of our most successful Impact Activation Fellows, in fact, our first ever Impact Activation Fellow, she started before we even had the term for it. We created the opportunity and we didn’t really have the work to follow it up, but through the way we created and enabled that opportunity for her then when the opportunity came up she was ready to seize it.

Not only did she seize it, but she’s now carved out a niche for herself where I would argue she’s internationally becoming, you know, at the forefront of that field, that particular element. And this is something where, it was nothing to do with her expertise, with her mathematical background she brought to it, but it was about finding that opportunity and enabling her to take it, and to seize it, and to grow from it, and to then take that on.

It’s one example amongst many, and I don’t want to get stuck into it too much. But I do think that there are elements of this principle, which have, which make IDEMS what it is today. It’s really, it’s been central to many of our decisions. It’s a lot of what we do. I suppose, Lily, you’re also part of this because the way that we enabled you to sort of join your PhD, to have opportunities different from tutoring, which I think you found enriching, and then transition into a role as it suited you and your time scale. This is to me part of what Enabling Opportunity is about.

[00:24:31] Lily: No, absolutely, and I think what goes around comes around, because, you know, IDEMS have helped me a lot and given me a lot of opportunities and so then you want to give other people those opportunities.

[00:24:44] David: Exactly. It’s about creating that culture and it is not about an individual doing this, it’s about creating that culture at the institutional level that this is just how people want to work.

[00:24:54] Lily: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:24:58] David: Great.

[00:24:58] Lily: Thank you very much, David. It’s been a very enlightening discussion.

[00:25:04] David: Thank you.