Looking to Promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion In your Workplace? Give AI a Try

Coming out of two years of COVID and the great resignation, top of mind for many leaders and organizations lately is how to attract and retain talent. One way to get the attention of talent and keep the talent you have is to foster environments that are welcoming of diversity and are inclusive of all ways of being. Have you thought of using an AI approach? You might be thinking “how can artificial intelligence (AI) help here?” – However, in this case, I would suggest a different AI approach - Appreciate Inquiry.

Just last year, I was struggling with the way we recruit. I was finding the process too bureaucratic and lacking connection, with not only our candidates, but also with the search committees. Feedback from the search committees told me the process wasn’t feeling inclusive and at time even alienating. And added to that, we weren’t attracting diverse candidates. I knew there must be away to ensure that we were following recruitment policies, while ensuring committee members felt it was inclusive and our candidates felt a connection with us. . To problem solve this issue, I decided to use Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a way to investigate what we really wanted from the structure and how to envision it.

Appreciate Inquiry is a strength-based approach through which an organization or a leader can engage and collaborate with all their talent to co-create the culture and environment they want to see. AI is the opposite of the shame and blame culture, rather at the heart of an AI approach is “the power of the unconditional positive question” (Ludema, Cooperrider & Barrett, 2001, p. 189) as a means to build on the collective wisdom of everyone in an organization to engage, energize, and enhance diversity and inclusivity.

The focus of the AI approach is not to fixate on the problems, failings and deficits but on strengths, successes, opportunities. Staff are encouraged not to see themselves, especially staff who have diverse identities, as complainer or outsiders, but rather AI allows a dialogue to be started on what is working and what do we want to see more of. The fundamental AI question is “what gives life here?”

Reframing the “what isn’t working” question to a positive and appreciate approach, refocuses the attention from complaint, blame, and critique towards creativity, invention, and inspirations. The AI approach is clearly aligned to fostering inclusivity and the co-creation of a vision for an even better future. Using powerful positive orientated questions, AI helps to expose the “positive core.”

The AI process works through a four-stage model of: Discovery, Dream, Design and Destiny.

The discovery stage seeks to establish the positives in the current situation. Key here is to conduct some research, collect data, and gather feedback. The themes that emerge from this stage form the basis of the dream stage.

In the dream stage, you can work with your team to build on the best of what is and envision a future where these statements are not just true in some places, but foundational throughout the organization.

Moving from the dream stage, we now move to co-construction at the design stage. At this stage, it is important that everyone feel included in the development of shared principles building on the positive core that came out of the earlier two stages.

Finally, the destiny stage invites everyone to live the ideas and principles established in the design stage. Key here is to enact and innovate from the principles, not like an action plan, but rather to establish a sense of purpose and a will to move forward.  

Coming back to using AI to address my recruit processes, I found having the search committees reflect on times that a search process went really well and what were the conditions that supported that. We also dug deep on what we wanted the outcomes of the search process to be not just the candidates but for us on the panel. We took the time to design our guiding principles on how we were going to work together to ensure an inclusive approach and decision making. AI helped us get our diverse voices out on the table and to co-create an environment to ensure a more inclusive approach to hiring.

Here is how I used the 4 D’s to help us with the process:

Discovery---Sharing the Positives----What was the most inclusive recruitment experience you ever had? What were the conditions that supported that? -----How are we currently succeeding in making our recruitment process an inclusive one?

Dream----Sharing a vision----What would our perfect life-giving recruitment process look like?---How would we look if we were inclusive at every stage of the recruitment process?

Design----Sharing what we think should be---What will be our guiding principles?-----How could we be inclusive all the time?

Destiny---Sharing a commitment to change---What are our first steps towards creating this future with our recruitment process?----What can I do now to help us move forward inclusively?

Leadership that embraces an AI approach can create an environment that is inviting of diverse voices to engage in meaningful conversations to co-create a more diverse and inclusive organizational culture and approach to how we do the work.

 By Shailoo Bedi, BA MA MLS PhD, IRG Associate Coach