Diversity and Inclusion

Human thoughts when expansive will lead to an inclusive mind.

The basis is in improving basic human ethics.

The talk of inclusion by focusing and pronouncing mainly on differences and divisions can lead to more fractures if one is not careful.

Diversity talk can at times be misleading. If diversity is only forced, we actually destroy the real goal of inclusion. Such programs instead lead to divisive teams, organisations, society and countries lacking in mutual trust, empathy and happiness for overall success.

We can see many examples of how the forced diversity in the name of affirmative action and reservations appear to produce short term results but are a failure in true transformation of society even after so many decades of implementation; more importantly they even cause enormous damage to the social fabric in longer run.

What can we learn from past failed experiments? Why even in new programs of diversity we try to apply the same formula again knowing fully well these approaches didn’t produce expected results.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity. Isn’t it? If we want a different result, we either need to change the approach or change the variables or the environment. Otherwise societies would be spending few more decades, and achieve nothing except gainful employment to few activists.

A wrong woman president for a country who has been made to sit at that table for tokenism may cause further damage to the true social transformation. If the person is unsuccessful, it may be used by some as an excuse to thwart progress of other deserving by showing that one wrong example at the top.

There are no major examples of tokenism (for gender, race, religion, caste or creed) actually achieving considerable transformation in the societies.

Forced diversity programs only provides job security of few activists in the society. And may be a few awards to the corporate HR teams in the short term. They do not necessarily bring the expected change.

For true diversity and inclusion in the culture, we need to create the culture of equanimity and harmony both in business and society by building on the ethics.

This certainly is a time consuming task and may take an entire generation but produces a much longer sustainable value to the future societies and organisations.