21 – The Inherently Inclusive Principle

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I’m Lucie Hazelgrove Panel, a Social Impact Scientist, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:17] David: Hi Lucie. Which principle are we on today?

[00:00:20] Lucie: I would like to talk about Inherently Inclusive.

[00:00:23] David: Oh, that’s an important one.

[00:00:25] Lucie: The description of this principle is as follows: “This principle applies to the company ethos. It builds from the founder’s appreciation of diversity and challenges the company to eliminate discrimination in all of its forms.”

So diversity comes out strongly there.

[00:00:41] David: This is diversity in lots of different forms. There’s good research which shows that if you don’t have diversity, you tend to get caught into sort of cycles of thinking where you don’t actually understand the systems well enough because you’re not seeing enough different perspectives. Diversity in many different ways is important.

[00:01:02] Lucie: Okay, and perhaps we can get into that in more depth in a second. So what does it mean to you? What’s your understanding of being inclusive then?

[00:01:10] David: This is one of the aspects which I think is challenging. The nature of the principle is inherently inclusive. And again, as always, many people want to be inclusive in different ways and trying to think through how the inclusivity that we’re aiming for is different from other forms of inclusiveness is really related to this inherently.

I suppose, what’s this in opposition to? This is really this aspect that the inclusivity shouldn’t be something which is a target or a goal in its own right. It should be something which is inherent in everything we do, and therefore it inherits from other things we do. We take some of our other principles, we have Embracing Diversity as a principle. And so diversity itself and embracing diversity is really important, that’s one of our principles.

[00:02:09] Lucie: So what’s the difference between those two principles then perhaps?

[00:02:13] David: Embracing Diversity is actually recognising that diversity, in all its forms, adds value, even though it’s challenging. That’s a whole other principle, I won’t dig into that here. But what I will do is say that the Inherently Inclusive is not just about diversity, it is about the appreciation of diversity and the desire to make, to be not just inclusive, but to have the inclusiveness sort of naturally from the nature of the culture that’s built into the organisation, the way we embrace diversity, the way we collaborate, the way we enable opportunities, and being consciously ethical.

And so the idea is that being inclusive is not something we should be embracing. It’s something which we need to be inheriting. So embracing inclusivity would be a sensible principle for many, but it wouldn’t be right for us because that would be thinking about it very consciously.

What we need is we need inclusivity to be just natural. It needs to be second nature. We’ve inherited it from how we work, what we do, the way we work, and the way we build structures. So it’s, it is really this element, this is not a bean counting exercise. Being inherently inclusive means that we are not putting the effort into being inclusive.

We should be inclusive because of the way we work in other things. And if we’re not, then that means that we’re getting the other things wrong. It doesn’t mean that we need to put on or strap on an element of inclusivity. This is the power of the inherent nature of our interest.

[00:04:03] Lucie: Okay.

[00:04:03] David: And, almost certainly in our life as an organisation, there will be times at which we get this wrong. Part of the important aspect will then be how do we react to that.

[00:04:13] Lucie: What does it mean, sorry, what does it mean to get being inclusive wrong?

[00:04:19] David: So let’s say we find that we haven’t eliminated all forms of discrimination. Let’s say we have, we identify that despite our principles, despite our approach, despite our culture, we identify that there was an element of discrimination that we had. We need to recognise and we need to understand how we don’t resolve that by simply removing or being inclusive in that. We need to get to the root causes because we should be inherently inclusive and if we’re not inherently inclusive then something’s gone wrong somewhere else, you know it’s a symptom it’s not the problem. That would be to me the way of thinking about this.

If we identify a form of discrimination where we haven’t been inclusive to a particular group or a particular section of society, then it’s probably because we haven’t done something else in the way that we should have.

[00:05:22] Lucie: Can you give an example of that sort of thing?

[00:05:23] David: Well, I’ll have a very interesting one, which I’ve been confronted to relatively recently, related to recruitment. There’s a group that recruits specifically for people who have, I think, disabilities. In a very specific format, there’s a specific job board where you would have to post explicitly there.

And what they were saying is that if you’re not posting there, then even if you try to be inclusive, you’re not reaching the right people. People who would often not look at posts which are not posted there because they feel that actually…

[00:06:00] Lucie: It’s not for them.

[00:06:02] David: It’s not for them, or whether it’s for them or not, the organisation is not thinking about explicitly including them. So, we don’t have any upcoming big jobs coming up, but we do have non executive directors positions, and one of our plans is to actually formally post for those positions in that place as well. Now in the past, we’ve just really, the only place we paid to post is the charity job support. And that’s been a very conscious decision, the sort of people who are interested in that sphere are the sort of people that we’re really interested in attracting. But I think this was a very important aspect.

Now we’re a small organisation still, but this is important for us to consider, being remote helps us to be inclusive in certain ways, but I’m also conscious that actually there are disadvantages to young people starting out in work with remote work. So as we grow as an organisation, it is clear we will have to have other forms of opportunities which are maybe more place based, maybe related to actually creating those opportunities.

This is our Enabling Opportunities as a principle about trying to let people in and find routes to get them to come in. But the Inherently Inclusive, the main aspect to this is that when we identify elements where there could be some element of discrimination at play, we don’t try and fix it at that level. We try to identify the root cause so that being inclusive is inherited from the systems that we’re working in and the way…

[00:07:49] Lucie: Well, it becomes embedded within our ways of working.

[00:07:52] David: Exactly. Exactly, it’s not a quota system. Being inclusive is not about quota, it’s about having culture and structures which remove discrimination, which encourage diversity, enable us to embrace diversity. This is where all of these principles are very intertwined with each other. But I do think that this idea, the important part of inclusive here is the inherently.

[00:08:20] Lucie: Exactly. I think in your example, it made me think then that whereas a lot of companies, they talk about being inclusive, and it just means they, if you apply or something, then they will welcome you.

[00:08:30] David: Yeah.

[00:08:30] Lucie: Whereas I think this Inherently Inclusive principle is more saying we will do the extra effort in order to be inclusive, it’s taking it upon ourselves to make sure that we are inclusive.

[00:08:43] David: I don’t think many other organisations could have inherent inclusivity as one of their principles. I don’t think it fits. It fits with us because of our other principles. And many of the other principles that relate to this come at a high cost, being Collaborative by Nature. That comes at a cost.

So there’s elements of this which only work because of the set of principles that we have. And I would argue that in some sense, by its name, Inherently Inclusive is one of the ones that we can do the least about. Why is it a principle if we can’t do much about it?

Well, one of the things, and we discussed this in another podcast around the sort of monitoring and evaluation and how principles relate to monitoring and evaluation. Of course, we should be catching if ever we’re not inherently inclusive. That’s why this is such an important principle. I would argue that it’s one of the few principles which is more focused on the other end rather than helping the individual decision making.

There’s very few times where we would actually be using this principle directly in our decision making because the whole point is it should be inherent from everything else. It should be inheriting the inclusivity from the way we work. But what we should be doing is identifying and noticing when we are not inclusive, if ever we have any form of discrimination. And that is where this principle will then come up and say alarm bell, there is something which has gone wrong in our systems, in our culture, in our structures.

So it’s a principle, you know, the principles both serve to help us in our immediate decision making, but also to say wait a second, we’re not doing what our principles say we should do. I feel this one is much more at that second, of that second type.

[00:10:43] Lucie: Yeah, it came out in what you were saying earlier too.

I wanted to ask, is it possible to Embrace Diversity without being Inherently Inclusive? I wanted to know more about the relationship between those two principles. What does having the second one add?

[00:10:56] David: Well, when Embracing Diversity is discussed, one of the things that comes out very strongly there is that this is, this includes the fact that as an organisation, the nature of our work is very diverse. The types of projects we take on, the disciplines we work in, the whole set of structures. It’s not just about the people. So diversity is much, much wider than if you think about being inclusive, which is really about who we are as an organisation, and who’s part of us, who do we include. So this is really rather different.

But there are so many elements of inclusivity which rely on us embracing diversity. Embracing the fact that we have some people working full time, part time, subcontractors, through employers of records, because they live in a different country, and so on. The fact that we embrace that diversity of mechanisms, even though we’re relatively small, it makes our lives harder, but it’s something which enables us to be more inclusive, and to include people who would otherwise have been excluded.

So embracing diversity is certainly important with respect to inherently inclusive, but it’s not even one of the principles that’s associated to inherently inclusive.

[00:12:13] Lucie: No.

[00:12:14] David: Really embracing diversity, this is about how we think about systems. This is part of our systems thinking principles and the importance of diversity in sort of robust systems. So diversity in this context is much broader than our staff. The inclusive, Inherently Inclusive, this sort of is, if you want, the title principle, which also includes Collaborative by Nature, Enabling Opportunity, Consciously Ethical. And these are all very careful layers, of course, other podcasts on each of these. But they’re very carefully thought as being, these are what really leads to us inheriting inclusivity.

In some sense, Enabling Opportunity, this is going beyond embracing diversity, because it’s actually saying where opportunities don’t exist, we need to create them. And that allows us to include people who would have been excluded otherwise, not because we weren’t embracing diversity, but because they didn’t exist in the pool of people who we could recruit.

So without Enabling Opportunity, Embracing Diversity is not enough. If you go back a number of years and you want to recruit scientists, and you want to recruit female scientists, then there just weren’t very many of them around. Now that’s changed now. But part of what we’re looking to do is to enable opportunities where there are groups that seem to be excluded to create those opportunities for them to engage.

And this issue about being Consciously Ethical, the fact that this is not something which is inherent. We don’t want to be inherently ethical because we want to think about that explicitly. Of course, if you’re not inclusive, I would argue, that you’re not being consciously ethical in some ways.

But being consciously ethical is something which you can use to help yourself be inclusive. If ever you’re excluding people, there are ethics against that. This is not an ethical thing to do. And so being very conscious about our ethics helps us to be inherently inclusive. But it’s something we can act on because this makes what is internal visible, that’s the conscious aspect.

And similarly, our collaborative nature rather than competitive, I don’t know that you can be inherently inclusive unless you really embrace collaboration, because there’s ways in which competition is set up about being exclusive. Competition is built to exclude people in different ways.

Now, of course, we have to exclude people as well. We are competitive as an organisation. We compete for contracts with others. When you applied, you were one of sort of 50 people who applied and actually, you know, we did exclude a lot of them.

[00:15:15] Lucie: Oh, I’m very glad that you excluded some people then.

[00:15:20] David: We couldn’t have afforded to take on. We actually had a short list of 10 or 12 people from that who were all incredible in different ways. Of course, you stood out in really unique ways, but it’s this aspect that there was an element of competition there and we had to think really carefully about who do we consider, why, what value can they bring, what can we afford at this point in time?

We actually recruited you in some sense, not for the position you applied for. But that was part of being, no, this was part of Enabling Opportunities, which falls under being Inherently Inclusive. That, in fact, for the position you applied for, you couldn’t compete, in some sense. But there was value you could bring to the organisation, which was really rather different. And so we enabled and actually you saved me in many different ways because there was a piece of work where nobody else in the organisation could do this. And so I was doing this alone and you came with a skillset which I didn’t think we could recruit for, but which just matched that particular task, and so we were able to create an opportunity from nothing for you into that.

[00:16:31] Lucie: And I’m very grateful for that.

[00:16:33] David: We’re also very grateful for how you embraced that position and have grown into the organisation. And it wasn’t a particularly generous position that was originally offered, but it was a good match. And this element of being, in some sense, how is this, certainly this is opportunistic, so this is related to…

[00:16:51] Lucie: I know, I was thinking of the word opportunistic in my head.

[00:16:54] David: Yeah, and that is an important part of how we work. How does that relate to being inclusive? Because who didn’t apply who also had skill sets that could have been good for this? And should we have had an open call for that? And what might have happened if we’d had an open call? So there’s elements around that which are important, but I think one of the things which has been shown time and time again is that actually open calls are not always as inclusive as people think because they strongly favour the people who know how to write and how to actually respond to those calls in that particular way.

And so actually this is where, again, being inherently inclusive isn’t just about saying this is the right way to be inclusive. There’s no one way to do this. We’ve got another principle about that, Options by Context. Being able to recognise where thinking about options and what the different possibilities are, thinking about the context and whether this matches or doesn’t.

[00:17:54] Lucie: Timing and everything, yeah.

[00:17:56] David: Exactly, yes. Another principle which relates to this, or there’s a couple more, about Informed Decision Making and Critical Assessment, actually thinking through when we had that, there was a six month period where we were adjusting and checking. We were assessing critically, is this a good match? Is it good for us? Is it good for you? And so on, and trying to use the information we have available to help in that decision making.

The principles aren’t perfect, they’re not rules to be followed, but they are there to guide us. So when we recruited you in the way that we did, we questioned ourselves, is this okay? Is this inherently inclusive? What’s the issues? Who might we be excluding by recruiting in this way? We considered that and we considered that your particular skill set and the way that it matched, we didn’t know that we could recruit for that. There’s not many people who have your unique combination.

It’s one of the things that happens once you start recruiting people with PhDs, they tend to be unique! You don’t tend to get lots of them with the same profile. But there were elements of that, of thinking about how do we make sure that people who could be interested, who might feel excluded have the opportunity to engage, interact and we might be able to create opportunities for them.

[00:19:17] Lucie: Sorry we jumped into what it means to be Inherently Inclusive without actually discussing much about what situations we want to be inclusive in. So you’ve mentioned in terms of staffing, is this principle also useful in terms of the software and the tools and things that we develop, everything that we develop? Like the products, I think that’s another word for it. Is it to do with our partners too?

[00:19:40] David: Yep. You’re absolutely right to expand this out. I’ve been too narrow in the way I’ve been discussing this so far.

[00:19:48] Lucie: We’re always so used to just hearing inclusivity meaning always just about the people, about staffing and things like that.

[00:19:54] David: Let me tell you, Santiago, one of our colleagues, recently was going to start up a new line of work within IDEMS. And he said, he’s got a real problem with it. He doesn’t see how it fits with our inherently inclusive models, because actually this was a sort of direct service to customers. And it’s only people who could afford to pay for it who would have access. And that goes against our Inherently Inclusive principles.

Now, that particular service has a high cost to it. We can’t afford to offer it to everyone. How did we reconcile that? We reconciled that because the service wasn’t just about that service. It was about building something bigger which could be more inclusive, and could be inherently inclusive in the future. So we recognised that was a moment where we have a service which we could only afford to offer to people in a particular way. And therefore it was an exclusive service to people who could afford it.

But behind the exclusive service was work which would happen in the background, which we would aim to lead to an inclusive service that’d be widely available. And so that exclusive service would create an inclusive service over time.

[00:21:13] Lucie: So some exclusivity is okay if it leads towards inclusivity?

[00:21:17] David: We need to be inherently inclusive. That doesn’t mean that we can afford to never do anything which is exclusive because we are a business, we need to make a living.

[00:21:26] Lucie: And you can’t, just, you can’t guarantee to always be inclusive. There’s always going to be something that you haven’t thought of.

[00:21:32] David: But it’s not just that you haven’t thought of, even if you’ve thought of it. We have a service, which costs us money to provide that service. We cannot afford to make that service available to anyone who wants to use it. We just don’t have the capacity, we don’t have the resources to do that. We don’t have a backer with deep pockets to then fund us to do that. How do we do that?

One of the things that we think about when we have such an exclusive service, and we do have this, the nature of almost all our services is of that form, in some form or other, but behind it we’re always building these underlying structures, these public goods. And the public goods, those are part of what enable others to benefit from similar services.

We also have Capacity Building, which is how we can enable others to provide those services, not just us providing those services, we can support others and our partners to provide those services, often undercutting us in price. And so being, part of our inherent inclusivity is this aspect that our business model is very difficult. We do make life hard for ourselves.

Normally as a business, you protect what you use to generate your revenues. Whereas almost all our revenue streams, we try to undermine them. Not to our own detriment, I don’t believe. But, the point is that, and this comes back to the Continually Evolving, the services we offer now are not the services I would imagine us offering in five years time.

So very often I would imagine our role shifting from being actually doing certain services, ourselves, to training others to do them, because that’s how they can get out at scale. Or providing tools with services attached to those tools so that others don’t need us to do them, they can do them themselves.

And our business model is all about being able to manage those transitions, to do what’s needed now, to understand what’s needed at scale, and to then find scalable models that are inclusive, which enable it to get out at scale. This is hard. IDEMS is set up to do hard things in some sense. But I believe that if we get it right, this Inherently Inclusive principle applies to our customers.

It applies to the fact we would love to envisage inclusive tech business models, inclusive digital services. And I’ll just give a very simple example there that people know: Netflix or Spotify. These are good services which are offered at scale. And, arguably Spotify has a free version, which is supported by ads, and therefore that’s inclusive. Anyone who wants to access, can access it, as long as they’re willing to listen to the ads.

[00:24:29] Lucie: Yep. I’ll admit I’m one of those. I’m sorry, I dunno about the pay aspects for the musicians, I haven’t looked into that.

[00:24:37] David: But the point is that the Spotify business model is very much that, if you are using the free one, you are paying through the advertising. And so that’s their business model. That is an inclusive business model in many different ways because people can access it as long as you’re happy with the advertisements. Netflix has an exclusive business model, if you don’t pay for a Netflix subscription, you cannot legally consume their product.

[00:25:03] Lucie: Yes, I think a lot of people manage to, but illegally as you say.

[00:25:06] David: Well, I think this is the thing. And then Netflix has real efforts to cramp down on that. And and you shouldn’t use these things illegally because then you’re undermining the system. So how do you build inclusive models if you don’t rely on advertising?

We have good reasons why actually, especially if you’re looking at kids, if you’re looking at people who in certain cases need a protected environment, which might be meaning that they need protection from even advertising and being marketed to. Then how could you have inclusive business models which enable that, which enable a Netflix type service to become inclusive.

So those are the sort of questions that we’re grappling with, and we believe we have some of the answers to this. The likes of Moodle have tried this, whether you have a opt out of payment, there is a payment, you are expected to pay, it has a cost. But if you have a need, you can actually, there is a process to go through where you can opt out of actually making that payment.

And I believe that could be built into sort of digital services in the future at scale in ways that actually could be profitable and could outcompete then the less inclusive business models or the ad driven business models. There’s nothing per se, well, this is the thing, is there anything wrong with a free service which is paid for by advertising? Well the thing which is potentially wrong is that the service does not serve the people it serves, it serves the advertisers because they’re the people paying for it.

[00:26:51] Lucie: Yes, okay.

[00:26:53] David: And so now of course to serve the advertisers you need to have the audience and so it has to serve people enough to keep them as an audience. But the people who are paying for the service are not the people receiving the service, so to speak. So if you’re watching YouTube and you’re not paying for a subscription, then the company is making its money from the adverts which are sold to you. And therefore, it’s, if you want, business incentives are all related to where the money is coming from.

Now for the advertisers to be interested they need to have lots of people watching so therefore it does have an interest in its consumers. But it doesn’t necessarily have a direct interest in prioritising particular consumer needs. It just has an interest in keeping them watching. Whereas the advertisers, it has a real need to serve their needs.

And so therefore, the nature of that means that as a service, if you are a minority group, which is excluded for different reasons from this or the advertising is particularly inappropriate for you, therefore you’re not able to use a service because the advertiser isn’t appropriate for your group. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of ways in which there can be elements of exclusion coming which do come for minority groups in particular, where losing the minority group doesn’t make a big difference to the business model. Whereas actually a really inclusive and inherently inclusive solution would be the other way around and should be the other way around.

And so there’s elements there which are really tricky. We haven’t got all the answers. These are elements where it’s not just us grappling with these problems, but I think we are grappling with them in a way which I haven’t seen many others try to do, building this into the other things that we’re doing.

[00:28:56] Lucie: This is where the sort of thinking hard comes in too, doesn’t it? The sort of going into depth.

[00:29:00] David: Exactly, this idea of really going to depth. And I think, it’s interesting that from a principle which is so inherently simple, in some ways, of being inherently inclusive, there’s quite a lot of depth to it. There’s quite a lot which comes out behind.

[00:29:15] Lucie: Exactly. I was just thinking we started off, perhaps started off the discussion going in a direction which I thought was fairly simple and, an obvious direction. And I didn’t expect to end up talking about the ethics of YouTube and things and then how to build a sort of a business model which is inclusive.

[00:29:32] David: Yes, but this is where, again, I would argue as a principle, it is a guiding principle for us, maybe it actually serves more when we think about our customers than just us as an organisation. Are we being inclusive? Who can access our services? Who can access our products? And that sort of thing.

Then it’s maybe more directing, but even there, I would argue, it is when we notice that people are being excluded from our products and services. That’s when we know that we’re getting things wrong. This is a canary principle.

[00:30:08] Lucie: Canary in the coal mine.

[00:30:09] David: Exactly. It tells us, if this isn’t working, if we are excluding people, then probably there’s something somewhere along the line which we’re going to have to change at some point. And this is exactly to come back to Santiago and his example, of that service, which we recognised had elements of exclusion because if you couldn’t afford it, you couldn’t access it. Then the question isn’t should we give that service or not? The question is what is that service serving to create something more inclusive? And therefore are we going to in the long term be able to turn this into something inclusive or not?

We can’t always be inclusive all the time, as you say, but if we, if inclusivity is not inherent to something we do, we need to ask ourselves why. We don’t need to change it at that point in time. It doesn’t mean we’re wrong to do it, but we need to ask ourselves why and make sure we understand why, and we understand why that’s temporary and that’s not our end goal. Because otherwise we’re not satisfying the principle.

[00:31:21] Lucie: Great. Thank you, David. You’ve given me a lot to think about.

[00:31:25] David: Thank you. It’s been wide ranging and I think a discussion of two parts. So thank you for making sure that the second part was included.

[00:31:35] Lucie: Great.