33. Reconstructing Inclusion with Amri Johnson

In Episode 33, I am joined by Amri Johnson, CEO and Founder of Inclusion Wins, to discuss the dangers of being led only by emotion and not reason, the dangers of being led by passion and not skill, and what DEI practitioners and organisations need to do to sustain DEI efforts.

Amri’s DEI journey has spanned over two
decades and is based on his experiences as a social capitalist, epidemiologist, entrepreneur, consultant, inclusion strategist, podcaster, and author of Reconstructing Inclusion. It was his experience in management that steered him towards inclusive leadership, organisational development, and organisational effectiveness. This experience made him realise that learning and leading go hand-in-hand and that a true leader, listens, learns, and cares for their people. As such, Amri has set out to create cultures from the hearts of individuals. His goal is to engage all people as leaders, foster the opening of their minds and deepen their skill sets, enabling them to thrive and consistently contribute their best to the organisation.

Amri shares his motives for writing ‘Reconstructing Inclusion’; how this was centred on the health disparities he witnessed in his work and on his mission to create, design and develop inclusion systems that will help bridge this gap, and in doing so, build organisations that are fit for change and creating the future. To achieve this, he warns us against being emotion-driven, but rather more reason-driven. He uses the narrative after the case of George Floyd to best explain this. There was a lot of reaction and no action taken, it was more about what people were feeling in the moment and not about what they wanted to create in the future. The danger that lies here is that there were demands made on the people whom were felt to be responsible. He relates this back to the DEI work, and how there is a lot about systems orientation but not a lot about what changing the systems requires.  

As he explains in his book, rightness will never transform anything. Being right might give us a certain level of moral superiority but it is not getting us anywhere, because if we want to create and transform our societies, superiority is not what we need, unity is what we need instead. If there aren’t people with diverse backgrounds in an organisation to challenge decision-makers, it can be destructive for the company in the long run. Amri shares that we need to address these tensions affirmatively and with intention, to create something that is more sustainable. As Amri mentions, organisations tend to get things wrong when they focus solely on making DEI efforts and not on sustaining these efforts.

He offers advice on what organisations and DEI practitioners need to do to sustain these efforts:

1) Organisations: have to ensure that DEI is aligned with their organisational purpose, mission, and strategy.

2) Organisations: need to consistently and normatively create the conditions for people to thrive in.

3) Practitioners: need to understand that they can choose to use certain, new DEI terms, but this must not be imposed on others, as this will in fact get in the way of the transformational potential this work holds.

4) Both: have to be constantly learning. If we are focused on othering somebody, we are not willing to be influenced by them, and as such, we can’t all thrive because it is that openness that creates possibility.

5) Both: need to get better at getting into people’s inner worlds. Empathy alone is incomplete and won’t get us there, but perspective-taking is the gateway to us understanding each other.

It is about not jumping to conclusions but about being curious because we are multi-layered, and the more curious we are, the more we understand those layers, and as this relatedness grows, so does the possibility for empathy.

Links:

For more from Inclusion Wins, you can visit their website at: https://inclusionwins.com/