To me, Good D&I does not use the terms Diversity or Inclusion, since both are impossible both in practice and concept, and can become hijacked or at least steeped in misunderstanding.

See my blog called 

Why Diversity and Inclusion are impossible terms! 

I prefer that: 

·       The organisation has a clear Purpose, Values and Vision (PVV) to serve some kind of external customers. (We help a lot of organisations and projects to develop these. By all means call us. It’s part of our living). As the management guru Peter Drucker once aid, “The purpose of a company is to create a customer”. Define what customers you are serving, that adds value to them on their terms.

·       A Note on respect for private for-profit organisations: If it is a ‘private company’ and not State-owned we respect that the organisation exists in part to provide a livelihood to its owner(s). This is a social good “in and of itself”, as the owner would otherwise be unemployed and dependent upon someone else to provide employment, unless the harm done by the company in Market Failure/Externalities (eg pollution, pornography/gambling as a moral externality) exceeds that of the right of the owner to provide employment and livelihoods for themselves and/or others. Laws will account for these Market Failures/Externalities. This means that private organisations should NOT be subject to some State authority that assumes a right to provide or decline/withdraw a company ‘licence to operate’ based on the State’s own definition of a social good (eg promoting so-called ‘social justice’). Except for the above market failure/externality examples, a private company should be assumed by the State and society to be a ‘good’. The provision of a livelihood is a social good with high value in and of itself. For the State to undermine this freedom and principle would be arrogant for the State, as it then takes on responsibility for providing that livelihood – and it has no resources with which to do so, other than to tax (reduce the effectiveness of) other employers. To prevent the company from existing in the way the owner imagines value, also ignores the value provided by the company to its customers and free observers in terms of what economists call Consumer Surplus. This is defined as what the customer would pay, less the actual price. For ‘free observers’, these are non-customers who are not paying the organisation but gain value from it – like you as a reader are not paying for reading this, but you may gain free value from it – we hope! So private enterprises should not have their Purpose, Values or Vision dictated by the State in whole or part. But companies must of course act under the wider Law.

·       A good company also develops a Strategy, a Culture that fits the PVV and Strategy, and defines (with appropriate flexibility) the type of Leadership required (governance, structural, social etc) to enable the organisation to be successful and endure.

·       As an integral part of the above point, we consider three Human Resources factors that may work in parallel with what others might term D&I:

1.     A Performance-Oriented (self-interested) approach to reducing biases – both conscious and potentially unconscious biases, eg:

a.     Avoiding recruiting staff in your own image; avoiding sub-optimal hiring policies using poor heuristics (short-cuts). There are many tools for this including name-free CVs and enlightened recruitment and selection methods. Contact for more on this.

b.     Encouraging positive conversations across staff from different backgrounds. This is supported by both a positive cultural setting where tolerance and common interests are fostered; and a sensitive skill for facilitating specific (types of) conversations may be used. It is not automatic that this will work well – it needs planning with care.

c.      Ongoing bias-reduction programmes – for awareness, but not for punitive action, where possible.

There are several more areas where organisation performance can be improved by widening the range of good ideas and value offered by staff and stakeholders, without compromising the integrity of the organisation and its appropriate decision-making structures. 

These potential sub-optimal business practices are considered and solved willingly because of their self-evident limitations on organisation performance. It is in the self-interest of the company to do so. It’s simply ‘The Business Case for Widening the Pool of Good Ideas and Adding Value’. There is a business benefit to identifying and removing biased activities. We could also say that the Market pays the highest price for Discrimination. By NOT treating people fairly, the company naturally loses out, without any political interference. This is where Black American economist Dr Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities, 2019) tested carefully for the differences between incomes in different groups of people in different circumstances and summarised employer discrimination as ‘vanishingly small’, as it is not in their interests to knowingly discriminate. But ‘unknowing discrimination’ can be significant.

2.     Public Relations: The organisation’s response can be effective to what it considers as Market Failure eg unfortunate societal inequities, whether caused or perpetuated indirectly by the company or unrelated to the company’s activities. Again it is in the self-interest of the company to gain the approval of important stakeholders (customers, suppliers, owners, staff) through charitable activities paid from profits that alleviate some form of unfair suffering for persons identified by the company (Corporate Social Responsibility). Again, no compulsion by an outside authority or the State is required to achieve this. It is in the interests of the company to judge the extent and limit of this for themselves. But note it should be voluntary, not compulsory, for the organisation to do so, because the existence of the (private) company is regarded here as an intrinsic ‘good’  for the reasons above.

3.      External ‘authorities’ may want to influence organisations to operate in a certain way that promotes greater societal fairness. But this is only valid to consider once the first two points have been addressed. Assuming the company shows what it is doing in terms of contributing to societal benefit through a) simply existing, b) the two points above, and c) observing the Law eg paying taxes to provide Government spending, then we may find it is already doing a great deal and it is unfair to burden it with more ‘social justice’ requirements. Only when this company is demonstrably a ‘net societal dis-benefit’ organisation, can a case be made for them to do more – and only then when the company’s ‘excess profits‘ (another economics term) are sufficient that it has the means to do so, and remain profitable in order to remain in business – and without causing counter-productive consequences by the ‘authority’. 

The external or politically-driven internal social intervention itself also has to be set in terms of ‘net disbenefit’. The intervention has a cost to the company and to society in reducing the company’s value-creating work and hence losses to customers and lost taxes to Government. Market distortion by State or political interveners is often far more expensive than it seems to non-economists before their intervention – including to the very constituencies that the interveners purport to want to help (but pay no price themselves for being counter-productive). The ‘Market’ and the ‘Inefficiencies of Competition’ are often misunderstood. A ‘free market economy’ isn’t perfect but contrary to popular folklore indeed restricts the formation of oligarchies (by removing/reducing barriers to entry), and is characterised by free individual people freely associating with each other and making voluntary agreements. As above, discrimination against certain types of people is not in the company’s interests.

The case for Applied Critical Theory-based D&I to be applied to the company is then limited to a situation where all the ‘good’ that a company does (as above) is outweighed by direct and systemic/symbolic discriminationin that organisation and across society, that will not reduce and become moribund on its own in a reasonable timeframe using the enlightened self-interest of employers in the market. I feel this is a high bar for Applied Critical Theory (ACT) to meet if it is in order to justify its more extreme interventions of Equity (= re-distributing shares to achieve equal outcomes; Inclusion (= Exclusion of those who do not agree with ACT); and Diversity (= Employment only of people who will enact ACT in the organisation). However, on the way there are many things above that the company may choose to do voluntarily as employers enlightened by the triad of Critical Thinking, Classical Liberalism and Critical Theory Awareness. There are many ways in which voluntary action can be taken that is not counter-productive to the company and does not have unintended adverse consequences to the ‘social justice’ agenda itself.

In this way, often with specific consulting support, an organisation can ‘Do Good D&I’ while not succumbing to either polarity and rejecting the calls and appeals that it should reject. As Dr Sowell says, “There are no solutions; only trade-offs”. Our interpretation of that in this context is that both Classical Liberalism and Applied Critical Theory should be seen in relation to the Extent of their usefulness, and their Limits of usefulness. Claims for either must be bounded. The damage from ‘leftist’ or ‘neo-liberal’ polarities can then be rejected. 

Your organisation is precious to you, to many stakeholders, and probably already to society at large (with caveats that can be addressed by Good D&I). You must decide and set boundaries based on all the above. You must ‘peruse your ambit’ constantly for incursions. You must not let the wrong things past. The future of your organisation depends upon it. Achieving that is your livelihood and your moral responsibility to society.