The Thing About Diversity... It's Not What You Think
So many people (myself included) have suggested, there’s no work being done in Diversity & Inclusion, in Advertising. But these days, I feel like that statement is completely incorrect. The problem isn’t that nothing is being “done” to fix our challenges, but rather that there are too many people who measure success of Diversity & Inclusion as the input of intention and effort, rather than the output of cultural change. We celebrate DOING the work, which is absolutely important, but what we don’t do is hold our industry accountable for executing our proposed plans and tactics completely. Our failure is that instead of using impact as our north star, we choose to follow intention, instead.
1. Things are absolutely being “done”, and work is absolutely “happening”.
Instead of asking if work is being done, we would be better off questioning the value of the work that is already in progress. We know money is being spent, training sessions are being instructed, surveys have been launched, and Inclusion jobs have been created. However, I would offer that at this point in our history, it would suit us better to begin to hold more value on the completion of the work, as opposed to the intention to work. If for no other reason, it should be to avoid inefficiency and redundancy. The reality is billable hours and event attendance quotas, don’t equate to cultural progress.
Consider that in our industry, we have been in this very position, before, and I imagine we will be again. Let's take the conversations around race, as an example. Every 7-10 years we experience a heated bout with activism, and we start this exact process over:
Someone calls for data about Black people in advertising
Someone does a study on Black people in advertising
Someone writes publicly about their experience, being Black in advertising
Someone finds money and gives it to outside entities to fix their inside culture challenges, and then
Someone presents a “new” idea to increase our entry level engagement of Black people in advertising, which somehow turns into an increase in engagement of all people who are not white men,
which then transitions the focus to “reverse-discrimination” negatively affecting white people.
Each time we start at the beginning of this process, we lose precious time, and our agency retention sufferers. By the time we get to the last point in the conversation, Black people are stuck in the mid-level of their careers, are tired of the run around, and start looking for other opportunities. Because while a long-term career within an industry they love and an organization that values them is all they’ve been asking for, it’s consistently proven more effective to just quit a job every couple of years, and find a new one to pay them more. Or just leave the industry all together, because while all this work is being “done”, it’s not like anything is changing, for their personal experience.
Candidly, we don't need to start at ground zero every time. There are enough reports, survey results, focus groups and open forums of honest feedback. We should be using the information we already have available, to develop solutions.
Particularly with Black people, we’re tired of the focus groups. In the words of Beyonce, “It doesn't make sense to give you more feedback, when my last set of notes haven't been incorporated”. It’s lazy, it’s exhausting and it’s insulting. I know it’s typical for us to default to the consulting framework, to identify the problem, but it’s time that the advertising industry, trust our own creative framework, and solve for the brief.
2. We have a severe misunderstanding of the difference between culture and Diversity & Inclusion, and how they both relate to each other.
For an industry that roots its work in nuance and context, we have allowed ourselves too much room for semantics versus explicitly defined language. For the sake of universal clarity, we need to define Culture & D&I as follows:
The Culture of your organization is the way in which people experience the values of your organization.
Diversity & Inclusion, are the quantitative and qualitative principles that measure an individual or group’s experiences with the culture of an organization.
A good test to understand the difference between the two, would be taking a look at how an organization describes itself (corporate values), and comparing it to how the people who work within the organization describe their experience. If an agency says, we value openness, collaboration, and creativity, and there is a diverse mix of people who share in that experience, then the culture of the agency is that of openness, collaboration and creativity.
If within that same agency, there are people who do not agree that it is open, collaborative or creative, because their specific and consistent experiences have shown otherwise, then that culture is not inclusive.
If you do a deeper dive into who or what kind of people may not find said agency to be open, collaborative and creative, and you see a trend of characteristics that pinpoint who is having the exclusionary experience, then that is how you identify a lack of diversity, within a culture.
To be explicitly clear, you need the measurements of Diversity & Inclusion to validate an organization’s culture. However Diversity & Inclusion are not synonymous with culture, and it is important that we move away from discussing the two terms in this way.
3. We have neglected to measure the impact of our intentions.
In fact, we treat impact as a moving target. When we discuss Diversity & Inclusion, everything we do is for a future generation, and we require an irrational level of patience from our employee communities, who continue to shout in vain for our help. We have become an ecosystem weighed down, by long term goals. This is not to say long term goals aren't important, but I do believe there is room for balance. As we make plans for future generations of creators, we can also figure out what to do with the low hanging fruit available to us immediately.
Our approach to inclusion is in need of an evolution of our traditional strategies. And if shifting our culture to make our industry more inclusive, would be considered our brief, then what we need to understand is that our clients are our employees and they are dissatisfied.
The work that we have been investing so much of our time and money into, is not affecting the impact our clients want to see. So how do we fix this? I think it’s time for us all to have a “come to Jesus moment”. We need to evaluate our strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, define what we consider success, align on our universal vocabulary, and pivot. Because, that’s how we do it in the war room, anyway.