Diversity: Circling the Lake Together

Last week I flew to Portland to meet the project team for the Civil Rights & Diversity Systems Mapping project. The project team includes Laurie Thorpe, the Executive Officer for Independent Resources (a Forest Service Enterprise Team) and Heidi Bigler Cole, who holds PhD in Social Sciences. We held a three hour meeting and invited employees from the region to meet the project team and join us in framing the project. There were probably 25 people in total.

During the session we shared a definition of systems thinking and together explored why it might be valuable to take a systems approach to understanding the Civil Rights program in the Pacific Northwest Region of the US Forest Service.

In my last blog post I compared exploring the way that a system pervades our subconscious mind as going on a deep dive. To further the metaphor, last week's brief session was about becoming acquainted with my fellow divers. Our small project team will be as a stone dropped into the center of the lake with a design and intention to go deeper into the collective subconscious and perhaps even brush the unconscious expression of diversity, or lack thereof, in the region.

Laurie, Heidi, and I will meet weekly and form the core container - the stone which is to be dropped in the lake. The first ripple circle beyond the point where the stone splashes into the water will be our guidance. This circle includes the Civil Rights Director, a Dialogos consultant, and a Diversity consultant, Audrey Peterman. The work itself consists of convening a number of focus groups - circles of people who'll be invited to the lake and coaxed to go for a swim.

It will be up to each individual whether they dive in or splash around in the shallow edges of the lake. Even if an individual chooses to simply watch from the shore she will discover that the surface of the water is changing and the reflections which are mirrored back will gently raise questions for the observer.

Today I'm feeling ready and would love to jump right in to the water. But I recognize that we need a few more weeks to plan several dives. We will let a number of people know where we plan to go. We will attempt to pre-sense just what might be lurking down there. We will design methods and schedule focus groups and discover more fellow swimmers.