A transcript of a 40 min slide presentation/talk by Colin Wilson at the Counterweight Conference, September 2022
(some light corrections or additions from the spoken word are in parentheses)

Colin:
It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Introduction

Well, hello everybody. I’m Colin Wilson. My question for today is: How do we stand for good D and I in a polarised world?

This presentation is for a special audience – which is you! You might be a Human Resources Manager, or an organisation leader. But just as importantly if you’re here simply as a member of any organisation – that’s just about everybody – or if you’re a person who has conversations with friends, family, or in social settings about this topic, this is for you. So, I hope you enjoy it.

Extents and Limits of both Classical Liberal and Critical Theory

So, what we’re going to do here…is look at a quick introduction. Make some acknowledgements. Look at some of the extents and limits of both Classical Liberal and Critical Theory and thinking.

I think it is very important that if we get maybe one word to take away today it’s “bounded”. How do we use boundaries to look at the extent and the limits of both Classical Liberal and Critical Theory and thinking. To open that up we’ll look at some assumptions, assertions, facts and outcomes. We’ll look a little bit about why this is happening and then talk about how you stand up for good diversity and inclusion.

My Positioning today

So, my starting point here is a little bit of positioning. So, if I tell you about myself and a bit about my beliefs. So, first of all to acknowledge; life isn’t fair. Life is tough. Almost unbearably so for many of all backgrounds. Life’s a lot more unfair for some people than others and for reasons for which diversity and inclusion is an important topic. Personally, I care about those less fortunate than myself. I care about individual effects. I care about systemic effects. I can’t make everything equal. No one can make everything equal, but I hope that between us we can all make the world a better place. I abhor racism and sexism and I own my own racism and sexism. It does happen to all of us, and racism and sexism has been in all societies I think through all parts of history and we’re all trying to, I hope, work together to do a lot better. I completely understand the idea of how awful things can be. How life changing things can be. Principles of weathering and how people can get beaten down because of these things, for example.

However, I’m still critical of Critical Theory and I’ll talk a lot more about why that is the case. So, in terms of my position; as well as being a business coach and consultant, I’ve worked with FTSE100s, Fortune 200s (and lots of non-profits). I’ve worked in New Zealand, Eastern Europe, East Africa, Western Europe and Scandinavia, and the Middle East. And my background is also in sports. I’ve coached and mentored many young sports people to national or international standard over several decades. Many have won against the odds. Looking back, they turn out to be from very diverse backgrounds: Black Caribbean, female, autistic, disabled, Eastern European, Indian heritage. I’ve loved the work and I’m interested in the next generation of young people having the best and fair opportunities as far as I can help achieve that. I currently work on a project in a poor area of a poor city in England. I’m quite passionate about that. I think racial mistreatment and exclusion around the world have been and are terrible and we want to do better.

Secondly, in terms of exposure, I’m putting myself out for exposure that I might be criticised. I might say the wrong thing slightly. I hope I’ll be forgiven for that, and I hope I’m on a journey as well that leads myself and society to better places. I’m not convinced of my own power, but I like to try to do what I can. So that’s me but yeah, I will be criticised, and part of critical theories is to be critical so I guess I’ve got to live with that part of it.

Criticism of both applied Classical Liberal and applied Critical Theory

OK so if we look at liberal theory we can think of some of the limits of liberal theory. There are some benefits of course. The enlightenment, reason, science. All of those things which we don’t need go through in detail now, but we could go through more detail. Massive benefits but we do accept there are some limits to liberal thinking. One of those is human fallibility. We think we’ve arrived (certainty), when we know that science tells us that we’re only on a journey. And we make mistakes both morally and scientifically – and we overestimate our abilities and that leads to bad outcomes for society and for certain types of people in society. The language we use can reinforce that tradition. It’s one of the central tenets of critical theory is that language can reinforce the tradition, the hierarchy. I completely accept that that is the case. I hope that liberalism tends towards better, progressively, but I can understand that people on the wrong side of it currently would feel impatient about slow progress.

The power and the inequality is maintained if we’re not careful and that’s where we talk about systemic effects. I’ll show you another slide in a second. And therefore, liberal theory is open to critical theory.

And here we have an example. “Church members seek out those in need and render aid to all of God’s children without regard to religious affiliation, race or nationality”. Fine and that’s great. I can see that it could be looked at by people who say, “Well you can try to do that but I’m not sure you’re being as successful in being as ‘without regard’ as you could and therefore you really ought to have ‘more regard than without regard’ (to some types of people) and I understand that principle.

However, there are limits to Critical Theory as well. So, we’ve got some extents of critical theory. Why it can be useful. Why it can raise awareness. And at the same time, it suffers from the same issues because it’s a human-derived theory so it suffers from human fallibility. Humans who have created critical theory might have some things wrong. The extents and the limits. One of the problems is about ‘bounded’. It’s an unbounded game. It’s an infinite game. We never arrive at equality as it’s defined and therefore it’s an eternal quest. Maybe that’s not a bad thing but it does mean that criticism is around forever and with the post-modernist elements behind it, it might mean that just about anything is open to criticism forever and that can make life quite difficult even if we’ve got a fairly or very equal society, it’s never achieved.

That could be regarded as a good thing or a bad thing. It does have a post-modernist base and that means there’s a lot more subjectivity in it rather than objectivity in it. Critical exponents would say that’s a good thing. Liberal exponents would say that’s not such a good thing. Certainly, I see some risks and dangers to society from tearing too much away from tradition and I think this is the case of ‘The Baby And The Bath Water’. We don’t want to throw out the baby – the good parts of liberal society – as we throw out the bath water which is the bad (limiting or slow )part of the liberal that need updating (eg due to unconscious biases).

Okay. A base of Critical Theory in Marxism. Some people challenge this, but I think there’s some fairly good evidence that there’s a Marxist base to this because we’re talking about oppressor and oppressed and the idea is that the oppressed then take over the establishment and creates a better society. History shows that that’s not necessarily the case (we maybe get a far worse society not a

better society). Maybe it’s never the case (that we get a better society from Marxism), but we’ve got to look out for that.

So rather than the Christian or the Enlightenment tradition where we have basic Christian principles; ‘love thy neighbour’; ‘judge ye not that ye might not be judged’, there are some criticisms around some critical theory that it’s only about Power. If we take it to an extreme, we have the Voldemort quote in Harry Potter that “There is no good and evil. There is only power and those too weak to seek it”. I do see that critical theorists are looking for power. I can quite see why, and I can see that there are probably reasons when people are seeking more power to accept what is good – but also bound it with some liberal tradition to say what is the extent to which this is appropriate and where are the natural limits to this to be applied?

And then, if you are the oppressed…I’ve been in situations where I’ve been the oppressed. Not in deep ways but in ways. We all experience those things. And (in this position) you have to be a bit Machiavellian. You have to get together and be a bit subversive and then dig around and kind of uproot what’s going on and clearly that’s what’s going on with the challenges to traditional society. And therefore there will be some Machiavellian activity. So, it’s not all explicit. It’s not all out in the open and I just want to uncover a couple of those things as we go.

Be Careful with Language

Largely we’ve got (a situation where) language can be weaponised and shifted. I think that’s part of the Machiavellian if we’re going to be critical, and we’ve got some examples here where I think even Counterweight are falling into the language trap.

This talk that I’ve been being given is on the topic of diversity and inclusion. The question for me is: Is that the right terminology? If liberal approaches and Counterweight are looking for diversity, what kind of diversity is that? I think diversity is one of those words that actually is a contradiction in terms beyond a point. So is inclusion. You can’t have inclusion for everybody in any viable system because there will be differences of opinion, there will be things that Karl Popper said: “What is it that you will not tolerate in a tolerant society?” So, it leads to a logical conclusion from an academic point of view that we can’t be inclusive of everybody because what about those people who want to, let’s say, destroy a system? So you have to exclude people. You have to put those in jail that want to destroy us so therefore we are never trying to be inclusive of everybody.

We are never able to create diversity because one person’s diversity is another person’s offence. We will never assume equality. Just about nowhere in nature does equality exist. Does it even tend towards equality? Certainly, in this life we can’t achieve it. I think equality in the Christian tradition is about an eternal perspective. A critical theorist would say – if they were atheistic, and I think a lot of liberal traditions are also atheistic, and Counterweight to some degree…”Well that equality might exist in the next life where God makes everything fair but what about in this life?”. We’re a bit more impatient and demanding that we get to equality here (not waiting for heaven in an afterlife).

But we’re not going to achieve it and in trying to achieve it and trying to achieve it quickly and rebalance, do we end up with (including, but not limited to) a neo-racism called anti racism? Do we end up with a neo- everything that’s designed to get to equality in various areas and therefore we’re just changing the seesaw from one side to the other? Are we sure that it’s actually going to even out in the end? I would say that it doesn’t and the history of communism for instance Marxism, Stalin and Mao, it didn’t. It led to an ever-increasing tipping of rejection of the old. So, I think again we just need to be careful and bounded. Not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Belonging? Unity?

Belonging. Well, if people want a sense of belonging in organisations it can be offered but again it’s got to be limited – all of these things are bounded. If I don’t go to work; if I’m not punctual because it’s part of a tradition in my family that I’m not punctual then we could talk about my diversity and what I bring and the value of that, but ultimately… no, the organisation has to say I’m sorry you don’t belong here. And unity. Unity is being used by Counterweight as a word. Again, I just think it’s almost a logical impossibility to try to achieve all of these at 100% level. Therefore, they are used in a partial sense for particular purposes but that means that the language can be used differently in different situations, and I think that we’ll see over the next few years this whole language structure will be seriously challenged and possibly changed by both liberals and by the critical theorists.

Not to allow criticism leads to totalitarianism

So, moving along. One of those things that Ricky Gervais said around his… I think it was Supernature tour. “If you want the ugliest possible result from your thing, make it immune to criticism”. So, I think it’s very important that both liberal and critical approaches are open to criticism both from inside their own traditions and from each other’s traditions. I can understand if a critical theorist would say, “Well that would only support the weight of the traditional hierarchy and we want systemic change”. So, I accept that but the cost of making something immune to criticism and punishable if you don’t agree with it is, I think, even more dangerous and both of those things should be taken into account.

Bibliography

So, if you want a busy slide this is your one! This is a bibliography of some key social philosophers that you can read so take a screenshot (of 30 books). I’ve studied some of these in depth and many of them through reviews and many of them through biographies but here are some of the key texts on both liberal and critical sides of the fence that you’d do well to go away and study and then compare and contrast.

The Certainty Trap

Moving on. Bertrand Russell…even once you’ve done all the reading, possibly hopefully the reading helps…he says, “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day”. So, we believe what we want to believe and we carry those with us and we’re comforted that we’re right and that can lead to some of the polarisation that we’re seeing – that both sides are encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions. I think it’s beautifully put.

How to Spot Assumptions amid Certainties

Here’s the first one. So, Greenpeace recently sent me this one. It’s a lovely poem and it’s really about climate so if we’re talking about social justice as a whole then we can talk about climate.

“No one owns the water.
No one owns the lands.
No one owns the oceans.
No one owns the sands.
These are given by our mother. The planet provides for free. Only by hands of the greedy Does the earth require a fee”.

So that’s clearly an anti-capitalist statement but having said that is there an assumption that’s tucked away in there that we perhaps don’t notice? I would say in lines five and six it says these are “given by our mother”. Well, the raw materials maybe, but the manufactured materials wouldn’t

be. “The planet provides for free”? Well, the planet provides the raw material but it takes entrepreneurism – taking between as the French for entrepreneurism – that makes it happen. In Christian terms, through the blood, toil and sweat of Adam and Eve will they be fed. So, I think there’s an assumption there in the middle. I don’t mind what you make of the poem. What I do like is that people at work and in social situations don’t make assertions without recognising the assumptions that they are unwittingly putting into various ideas. In this one for instance, I find it a little bit Machiavellian with a hidden assumption to make us think in anti-capitalist terms rather than think of the terms in which mankind has made the earth work for us. Should we consider whether there is an externality called climate change? Yes, but at least we should be clear about the assumption that’s hidden in there.

The Road to Serfdom

Secondly, if we want to go the other way, let’s have a go at Hayek. Right wing economist. Free market economist. Where does that go wrong? We’ve got…this is how it works when you start to get intellectuals and sociologists making public policy. And the question is, does it work this way? Does it work that badly? Hayek would say, “Well absolutely” after he wrote this in 1944 it happened with Mao in 1949 onwards with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and this is what happened. Is it an extreme? Well, you could say this doesn’t happen in Scandinavia and that has quite a lot of intellectual and sociological egalitarian policy. So, we could challenge Hayek’s free market and right wing thinking there.

A Racially Hierarchical Society?

Another one to look at. Liz Pemberton, the (self-styled) Black Nursery Manager. I think this is a great quote. I think there might be something slightly hidden though. “In a racialised society where hierarchical value is placed on all of us because of our skin colour, one of the ways in which you will not have experienced discrimination and marginalisation will be because of the colour of your skin if you are perceived as white.” I am perceived as white. I have white skin and therefore I can see that. One of the ways that I have not experienced discrimination and marginalisation is because of the colour of my skin. I have experienced discrimination and marginalisation and I have my own afflictions and difficulties irrespective of my skin colour but that is one of the ways. I think it’s beautifully put. Possibly though an assumption in there where it says, “hierarchical value is placed on all of us because of our skin colour”. I’m not sure that’s always the case. I think it can be the case, but I think there are some significant times when it’s not the case and certainly certain exceptions to that. But I think there’s if there is an assumption there it’s not a huge one.

American Teachers Union

We see here the (website of the) Association For Teachers in America and you can see front and centre the picture in the background which is clearly conveying a message from the teachers’ union about what they believe (George Floyd). I think I’m right in saying that in the trial there was nothing brought by the prosecution that indicated that the terrible events themselves had a racist motivation. I could be wrong so please correct me on that, but I don’t think there was anything actually in the trial that said that. Maybe it wasn’t needed to be said or maybe actually it wasn’t actually the case. Now what I’m saying there can be very heated but I’m just looking at how things are used and symbolised, and sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly. Maybe correctly, maybe incorrectly in this case. But if we look at right wing commentary and Thomas Sowell for instance would say that symbolism is actually not as important as it’s made out to be and he uses the example of Japanese workers in America earning more per capita than white Americans and says, “Well you name me three Japanese politicians”. So, I’m sure that could lead to a much broader discussion around symbolism and how things are taken into wider discussions, as indeed that terrible event which is taken and maintained in a wider discussion here.

White Privilege?

Okay another assumption here. White Privilege and White Supremacy. So, Jordan B. Peterson. “The idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group…There is absolutely nothing more racist than that.” So, Jordan B. Peterson is saying I think where Robin DiAngelo is talking about generalising about white people and their ability to see or wanting to see black perspectives – that he is saying that if you then apply a lower status to whites on that basis, that he would disagree with that. Again, something that we could talk about. His fear would be that you would lead to a kind of a Marxist element where those people who are ex-privileged are then under-privileged and punished in terms of a kind of generational retaliation.

So some assumptions there (in each of those slides).

Why is Polarisation Happening?

Why is this happening? Well, we know from sport, and we know from high performance sport that under pressure people revert to using their amygdala and as a result of that they tend to react rather than respond in more appropriate ways, whether it be subjective or whether it be rational. But in the amygdala we can end up with the “Drama Triangle” effect. So, if I just move onto that now.

The Drama Triangle

The idea is that when we get caught up in the drama, we first of all see a Victim and a Victim is in a difficult position and needs help. We then identify that if there is a Victim there must be a Persecutor. That can be true. That could be not true. But we identify a Persecutor and that Persecutor or Perpetrator…it’s their fault that the Victim is in the situation that they’re in and that leaves us in a position of Rescuer. It’s very attractive to be a Rescuer, which says you can’t do this on your own but you need help. Let me help you and there’s a kind of a moral comfort in being the Rescuer and I’m seeing this sometimes in society across all races and across many other forms of people’s backgrounds. So, I think one of the things that we need to be careful of is that we don’t inadvertently or inappropriately get into a situation where we get into Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer mindset. What happens when you get into this Triangle is that you start to move around it. So, the Rescuer then becomes a Victim when they’re not listened to, then that creates the new Persecutor. Those Persecutors need to be prevented from creating bad outcomes and the whole thing can go round in a circle so that Victims can become Persecutors and I think we’ve just got to rise above this. The idea is to create a Third Dimension where we rise above this. We recognise the potential for the Drama Triangle but then we make sure it doesn’t happen in practice.

Extremism

Extremism basically… I’ll let you read it… but it’s about a level of fixation or preoccupation on one item. For instance that might be climate change. If you think let’s fix climate change but have a fixation where nothing else is considered, you might do more harm than good and make climate change (and other human outcomes) worse. An overriding need for control, affection, achievement can also underpin an extremist mindset and those extremist mindsets can come on both sides of the fence. So again, if we want good diversity and inclusion we just need to be awake and alert to these sorts of possibilities and again we’re looking at what can be bounded. If we can recognise these things; if we can keep them in a bounded sense, then it stops us getting fixated. It stops us getting preoccupied and it stops us getting into a drama triangle.

So, there were some actions that we can take.

The Constrained and Unconstrained Vision

I think in each Vision – I think in the liberal tradition on the right, this is an income distribution so an income distribution in a western democratic society might look like this with a small number of very

wealthy people and a large number of people with fewer resources, and you can easily argue that individual and systemic discrimination can lead to an unfair result for certain kinds of people within that hierarchy. Therefore, a desire to shift the underpinnings of society and maybe go to something more on the left, which is theoretically more sustainable, more conscious and more egalitarian. But both of these visions can be categorised and they can also be criticised.

Again, not wanting to throw the baby out with the bath water. Some of the bath water might not be great. We might not be doing things perfectly but I think we want to keep what’s good on both sides of ‘critical’ and ‘liberal’ and make sure that we still have the baby to nurture.

Risks of Extremism.

A risk of any of us getting into an over tight frame and therefore getting then involved in force whether that be through HR policy around ideological committees that gain power within human resources departments and make judgements post-hoc on micro aggressions or biases. That, I think, would be a transgression to liberal minded people but I can see why it’s there and there needs to be clear rules as to what’s not acceptable. Personally, I would rather these were more explicit, upfront to maintain a kind of sense of ‘rule of law’ rather than people not know what is unacceptable until after the event. We can’t live on ‘planet Colin’ so easily, but I think that’s a factor for organisations to think through and work through in teams with their workers so that we get as clear as we can do, whilst not distracted from the external mission of the organisation.

But the second part on this slide is about the risk of over-permissive frames. So, we can have too tight a frame and be extremist and dogmatic. Any of us can. At the same time if we’re too permissive of the other side – whatever that is – then if we’re over-permissive then that authorise, enable, empower, validate – force and extremism on the other side. It’s one thing that I think Jeremy Corbyn was criticised for when he was leader of the UK Labour Party, not that he himself was aggressive or tolerant of, but because there was a bit of over-permissiveness there, so that this stuff could grow and could happen. So I might not have said that more than clumsily, but what I’m trying to get at is we do need a frame and we need to agree a frame between us all and we can’t let that frame get too tight and we can’t let that frame get too permissive because that enables a tight frame to come into our place. So we all have to be the adults in the room. We all have to create the right frames in negotiation with each other to create what we can.

A Hierarchy of Thinking Styles

So, we might ideally end up with a move from a cult leader who thinks they are always right to a politician through to a contrarian. I guess I can sound like a contrarian today. Saying that ‘this is wrong and that’s wrong’! We need to find a better way but my talk doesn’t necessarily give a firm solution. Or a critical thinker that things might be wrong – not people are wrong but things might be wrong. But I hope that we can all be learners. This is a nice slide from Adam Grant, so my acknowledgements there. So if we can move from cultish, political, contrarian thinking into critical thinking and learning, whilst accepting that ‘critical theory’ would be conscious that ‘critical thinking’ itself has limits. Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Christians and Equality – and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Just looking up Christians and equality – I think around the world if you add up the numbers, Christians are more persecuted than any other religion. And at the bottom the Universal Declaration of Human Rights talks about “freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion or belief and to change that belief and to express that in teaching” so if you’re thinking about what to do about this kind of thing, if you’re feeling like you are being put upon, then you could go back to this in green and appeal to the powers that be to adhere to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights so that the organisation doesn’t go too far away from having a diversity of thought as well as a diversity of other things that we can find very attractive.

Paul Simon – The Boxer
Okay. Nearly there. So with all of that, I hope that helps you to think a little bit more clearly, a little bit objectively. I realise that those in themselves can be criticised but I’m deliberately trying to keep away from being too passionate and too subjective. But again as Paul Simon reminds us when he wrote ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ all those years ago during I think the years of the Vietnam War in the USA, “Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” So like Bertrand Russell we carry these comforting airs of conviction around us despite all of this study, and despite all of this possibility to think and to get together. But I hope we can think and get together.

The Continuum of Social Philosophies

And so finally, I think what Counterweight are trying to do here is put Classical Liberal Social Justice back to the front. Libertarian maybe a bit further right wing. Critical Social Justice which has come more to the front. I think Counterweight is trying to move that again back to the side and restore some Liberal. And then we’ve got still some various forms of Totalitarian situations at the back which might be more extreme from right and left wing.

So that really takes me through my talk and Laura I invite any questions that you might have and at this point I’ll stop sharing. I hope that’s given you some food for thought.
End of Slides

Further Open Discussion

33:42 Laura:
Lovely. Thank you very much for that. I especially like that hierarchy of thinking pyramid. I’ve never come across that before, that’s great.

Colin:
Well that’s not mine. That is Adam Grant’s indeed.

Laura:
Very nice. So I wanted to hear from you a little bit more I know that you do a lot of work with leaders and business leaders and I wanted to hear from you how you think that people watching who are business leaders or who work in HR could actually put some of these principles into practise in their workplace.

Colin:
OK well here’s a little list then.

Prioritise the External Mission

So, I hope first of all that gives us some underpinning philosophy. Some theory, but underpinning philosophy as to how to recognise what’s happening and to recognised that could go into a conversation. I think the main thing is the frames and the boundaries, I think they need to be created and restored where the unbounded effects of postmodernism can infect some of critical theory which then can get into some kind of critical situations in D & I policy for instance. But what I would say they can do is to make it clear that the external mission and the internal behaviours need to be balanced. That the unboundedness cannot be allowed to become so prevalent internally to the organisation that it becomes effectively navel gazing or disabled, or interfere with the external mission. Now, to the extent to which this work is important and good it must go on and must continue, but of course we can’t put 100% of our time into the internal. We have to have the external mission as well. So I think business leaders can talk about how these need to be sensibly balanced with the rights of all taken into account. And have it fully shared and recognised that

historical systemics might need to allow some emphasis for some voices that are not traditionally heard.

Who Decides on D&I?

I think a second one would be about representation. So once these things are discussed who decides? Is it the board? Is it the shareholders? Is it the senior management? Does that feel constricting and frustrating to some? So to what extent can you empower your organisation but not be so naive that that the empowerment of the people in the organisation at large always provides a good result for senior management, for the board, for shareholders. So that needs to be held in balance and I think in education it does need to be balanced and is legitimate that it is balanced. I think that’s important.

Justified Inequality

Another thing I think that business leaders can do – and we help some organisations with this – is to say, “Well wouldn’t it be a good idea to justify your legitimate inequality”. What do I mean by that? We say, well if people are talking about equality and achieving equality that’s a little bit kind of infinite. A little bit impossible to achieve but it gives a good agenda and some suggestions for what can be done. It can also exceed its bounds as well. So what are your justification for inequality? Now, not to say that these inequalities should be struck down but actually so that they can be upheld. Inequality of pay, inequality of representation of various people of the types in the community, inequality in terms of what happens when there are redundancies, so really it’s a case of saying we don’t need to completely remove hierarchy but what we can do is to say, well even if we went to a completely new way of doing things and struck down all of the hierarchy we’ll then know that a new hierarchy then emerges. So hierarchies are actually inescapable. It’s just a case of who holds the power in it and therefore we are not saying we’re going to strike down hierarchy but we’re going to say as it’s inescapable so how can we do this in the most justifiable way? We sometimes work with organisations and leaders to help them map out and think through what the inequality ought to be, rather than just assume a blanket of inequality always needs to be removed or reduced without really questioning where it should actually stay.

Another one they can do is to say, well okay we need this conversation to be an ongoing conversation and an ongoing negotiation so let’s keep this open let’s have the conversation keep going within sensible bounds and with that we will have greater awareness and shared understanding where we can get it. Then there’s less need for policies and restrictions and punishments written in, implicitly or explicitly, into the system.

Values – Organisational or Individual

So there’s a few ways of creating this. Our own values basically boil down to one word and that’s ‘Respect’ (literally – to ‘look again’). And that splits into different things to respect.

a)  Respect for self.

b)  Respect for all others, and

c) Respect for the environment around us – be that the working environment, the social environment, or the physical environment.
And that’s something that I think you can fairly readily write some policy that’s not too draconian from the back of. But if this leads to policy-making, then there are a number of things to think through. Happy to talk about it. Just give us a call. I would encourage you to go the ‘awareness’ route rather than the ‘rules’ route where it’s appropriate to do so. So does that answer a little bit of your question Laura about what leaders can do?

www.socialphilosophyanalysis.com

40:27 Laura:

Yeah it does definitely. This slide that you’ve got up now. Social Philosophy Analysis. www.socialphilosophyanalysis.com What’s this organisation?

Colin:
OK so this is our organisation so I I’m leading it and I’m looking to expand it and be fairly egalitarian about who owns it actually but it’s in its early days. But it’s ours and if people want to just have a look. It gives you a simple way of getting hold of us. I don’t think it’s appropriate to handout telephone numbers and things but if you emailed us on either of those e-mail addresses then we could open up a conversation. More than happy to talk.

Sports Coaching across Diverse Backgrounds

Laura:
Very nice. I’m curious to hear more about your experience as a sports coach and in the world of sports and how that… I’m sure you probably get this question a lot ‘cos it’s so interesting that switch and how that’s kind of impacted your work in business.

Colin:
Wow. Yes, it has, so I can tell you a couple of stories. I don’t know why. I didn’t set out decades ago to coach people with particular backgrounds although table tennis is a pretty democratic sport. If I’m going to talk in ‘old money’…In the same hall two people on the same table could come from rich, poor, black, white, disabled, able-bodied, male, female, et cetera and all dimensions within and around those so it’s a sport that is, I think, great in that it can be a great melting pot and unifier of people so by its nature it can be pretty diverse and pretty inclusive. Having said that, the sport itself is trying to push this further, but by its nature, the sport can be and that’s great. But yeah I’ve had some coaching success. I mean I was very pleased and proud to ‘produce’ international players with diverse backgrounds and I’ll get criticised for my for white privilege there!

42:38
Coaching a young, black, inner city, one parent family child and I’m coaching them and we worked together every week for three years. This is a long time ago.. some of these stories are older… so I don’t have to worry about naming individuals. But we met again this year and we cried together. We met and we just cried and they’re now 47 years of age and we talked about those times and what sport did for them. Sure if I could, if I can be of help then that’s a part of it. I’m not ashamed of that. That’s fantastic. That’s great. You know, it stroked my ego of course, but I’m really glad that I did it. I loved the work and they became National Junior Champion in the sport. And it’s amazing what people can achieve given a bit of a chance and given the fact they grasped the opportunity. We go back to personal and individual responsibility. You know, there’s no substitute for that. We can’t look at systems only and not do the (individual) work. We have to do both and they came from a difficult background but they grasped it and they could have complained that other people (that they were competing with) had more resources than they did. Which they certainly did, and so why should they have to achieve over the odds to achieve what they wanted to do. But they did it. So, I accept it’s not a fair world. It was tough for them, but they grasped it, they wanted to do it. They did it and then proved something amazing.

44:22
More recently, and we will get to recent political times, I had someone come to me. A father came to me… I had questioned the sport’s policy of gender identification on-demand and it was kind of advertised as guidance and I challenged back to the governing body. I used to be on the national Board… and I challenged back to the governing body on the appropriateness of that policy/guidance and what would happen in certain circumstances. Typically the transgender argument in sport comes down to two things which are:

1. Safe spaces for women, i.e. toilets et cetera for biological women or trans women et cetera and the other one was
2. Fair competition for women. Which is about do you allow biological males to compete in female events. And that’s raging across society and across countries and across most sports at the moment and I think the Sports Council said that there is no single simple answer to this. In each sport it’s going to have to work its way through this itself. But when you have the father of an 11 year old girl come to you and say, “I think you could help my daughter. I think she could be good at this game and you can do a bit of performance coaching as well as participation coaching”, and they ask about this policy and I say yeah you know at the moment the guidance is as far as possible everything is to accept self identified gender. And then they say, “Well why would I put 10 years of 10,000 hours of effort into my daughter as a sport person if during that and towards the end of that we have this we have this biological male can then go and beat them”. So, I can understand there’s a whole range of arguments but for that individual father and for that individual family and what I was faced with is, “Well they said we’re not going to bother with your sport because of this”. So this is kind of like one of those unseen, indirect effects of a policy which looks sensitive and caring on the surface. Now I’m not giving answers to it, but what I am saying is that while we can look at a headline policy we can also have a lot of unintended consequences which will only grow if they are immune to criticism. So, we’ve got to open this up and got to have these conversations so that we can get to good answers.

Microaggressions and Rule of Law

47:07
Another one that I had was…I questioned a diversity and inclusion policy which I felt was a little bit strong and kind of left the door open for people to be punished ‘after the event’ for things they didn’t know they’d done wrong. I said, you know, this needs to be just kind of liberalised a little. And it was quite interesting that the response was really that they didn’t quite understand what I was talking about and as a result I felt psychologically unsafe. I felt excluded. Indeed I’m sure at a small level that’s absolutely the case, so I understand how people can feel that way from traditional situations. I can also see how traditional and new power can reverse itself and the seesaw can go beyond the middle. So again inclusion doesn’t exactly mean inclusion. Diversity doesn’t exactly mean diversity. And that’s part of this subjective language that we need to be careful about and just need to clarify when we’re having conversations so that the conversation can stay bounded. But I’ve loved the table tennis coaching and I hope to keep doing it for years to come.

The Terms ‘Diversity’ and ‘Inclusion’

Colin:
Well. Yeah. Let’s have that chat. They can be useful terms and they can become unhelpful terms if different people have different ideas about what they mean by them. So, no, I’m the first to say that a word doesn’t need to be perfect to be used, but yeah I can see that you’ve had that conversation in-house at Counterweight in advance of identifying the title of the conference and these issues. But yeah I think the difference between the critical and liberal traditions would be that ‘diversity of thought and tolerance of more right wing market style views’ are included within this concept of diversity and inclusion – and are less so within the critical modern tradition. And there you get your kind of right-left political leanings. It’s fine to use terms, but yeah we need to take ownership of language and we need to clarify what we mean by those things. But that’s how I’d identify the difference and that’s how I’d start a conversation to say, “Well what kind of diversity? What definition of diversity do you have?” When people say, you know “everyone’s included”, I say well okay, I’ve got a bit of a critique for you. And then at the end I say, “But thank you for listening because you say you believe in ‘inclusion’ and ‘belonging’ so I know you’ll tolerate my view”! And that’s perhaps a self-defence mechanism! I’m not sure it’s quite seen the same way on the other side always!

Laura:
Yeah, definitely I agree with you I think that it’s really important to clarify terms and make sure that when you’re having a conversation especially about tricky topics that you’re all on the same page about what you mean when you use these words and when you talk about these ideas.

Colin:
Sure and I think people will not necessarily agree to the same definition.

Laura:
Yeah that’s true. Indeed. Great. Well, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us today.
52:46

Ends