The Inclusion Programme 1.0 - Starting a Learning Movement.
Action not words. It’s a sentiment few would with disagree with, but it’s still not enough. The inconvenient truth is that our inclusion efforts aren’t leading to the change we want to see in the world. We need look no further than unconscious bias training for an example: an initiative that attracts billions in investment and is reported as a flagship intervention in so many Gender Pay Gap Reports. Yet is comprehensively shown to be an ineffective means of influencing behaviour.
At MoreThanNow, we believe little progress will be made until organisations move away from the noisy silver bullets of recent years, and instead, align with the world’s leading thinkers on inclusion. Those – like Professors Iris Bohnet and Sarah Kaplan - who urge exploration and experimentation, and who see our future in collective enterprise and an evidence-based approach to change.
This is not as simple as adopting new and more effective inclusive practices, because more often than not we don’t know what they are. Behavioural science offers breadcrumbs and a trail but not easy answers. To deliver on its potential, we need our biggest organisations to stand up and make an active contribution to the research. It starts with building capability.
Introducing The Inclusion Programme.
The last 3 days have marked the beginning of that journey. We welcomed teams of D&I and HR Leaders from BT, The Cabinet Office, Transport for London, Phoenix Group, The Home Office, and Ericsson to explore the power and potential of behavioural science.
The objectives were clear:
To explore how to break the big challenge of inequality in the workplace into discrete research questions.
To form hypotheses and design interventions with the MINDSPACE framework.
To test that work with causal experimentation.
To share the learning with the world.
As ever, we’ll judge our success on the outcome: these teams aren’t just going back into their workplace with an evidence-based intervention, they’re going back with a randomized controlled trial to test its effect. The question is not just about their impact, but also about what they learn. Because in the long-term, it’s knowing what works and what doesn’t that will lead us to genuine progress. It’s that method of causal experimentation, repeated at scale, that will take us somewhere new…
The movement starts here.