SEVEN
Cultivating Community
The Spectrum of Belonging
Imagine a world
in which robust diversity is expected and rewarded. Traditional diversity programs sought to bring “others” into an established order. Future diversity programs for offices and officing will create a culture of belonging for all varieties of difference. Those who win in this world will be those who can present themselves as having fluid identities that engage positively with differences. Moving among cultures and styles will be a crucial everyday skill in this ever-changing world of mixing and matching. The most successful people will be mindfully aware of their roots and the routes they have pursued to get to where they are.
Celebrating Uniqueness
Illustration by Analia Iglesias from Argentina.
After reading this chapter, consider how you might illustrate your story about the Spectrum of Belonging.
In 2018, Greta Thunberg stood outside the Swedish Parliament building to protest the lack of legislation to fight climate change. As the days and months and eventually years passed, her peers around the world organized in support of Greta Thunberg’s cause—but now there are many more young people from around the world with similar concerns about climate emergencies. For example, Global Citizen identified “6 Young Activists in Africa Working to Save the World,”1 and there are many more. Others include Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, Ayakha Melithafa of South Africa, and Makenna Muigai of Kenya.
Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, the founder of Fridays for Future Uganda, is a leader of this “generation of scared people” who are “very good at action.”2 Young people who were on the verge of becoming adults during the 2010 Threshold, when the internet shifted from separate tools to a media ecology, are different. As they matured, they developed with the sense of frustration and urgency that we see today. Young people on the verge of becoming adults during the turbulent crisis of COVID-19 share similar values and a sense of urgency—what we call the 2020 Threshold3 for digitally amplified change.
For the first time in human history, young people ages twenty-four and under make up the largest portion of the global population. Many of these young people are angry, and they are becoming politically and socially active in meaningful ways. Many young people don’t feel like they belong in the world they are inheriting. Hope is fleeting.
Their anger derives from the many social issues we face, such as economic inequality, changing climate impacts, institutional racism, gender inequality, and questionable corporate practices. Oxfam, a respected global relief organization, titled its latest report “Inequality Kills: The Unparalleled Action Needed to Combat Unprecedented Inequality in the Wake of COVID-19”:
Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities—as well as the inequality that exists between countries—are tearing our world apart.4
We are optimistic about young people if they have hope.
Most offices we see are not ready for the influx of digitally savvy young people. The concerns they bring will be explosive, and they will not be easy to integrate with offices and officing. Their differences are powerful, and they will demand change. They will increasingly expect organizations to be both purposely and usefully different. Thriving offices in the future will need more sense of belonging.
FIGURE 11: Spectrum of Belonging
As illustrated in figure 11, the Spectrum of Belonging starts with our natural bias toward people who are familiar. However, as mixed teams of workers flourish, the spectrum encourages reaching out to those who are different. The opportunity of office shock is to move, seek out, accept, and reward full-spectrum diversity—diversity that moves beyond simplistic labels, categories, and buckets—in an outside world dominated by differences.
Our identity—how we define ourselves—is shaped by personal roots, the routes we have taken in our lives, and the aspirations that we have for the future. If we can understand our history, we have the potential to right the wrongs and build on the positives. Office shock can spark a new sense of belonging, with the power and potential of community.
The Diversity Dilemma
As office shock punctures the boundaries of the past, it is becoming clear that there will be no mainstream, no dominant category of people. Today’s understanding of diversity is based on integrating the other, those different from the mainstream. Diversity is everywhere already and growing rapidly. Diversity will become more important in the future—and harder to measure, label, or categorize. We will need to embrace what makes others different as well as what we have in common with others. Thinking futureback sheds new light on the diversity dilemma and opens a path to real change.
By expressing and appreciating our differences, without deference, impossible futures will become possible. Thinking futureback will open opportunities based on contribution rather than categories. Thinking futureback will inform how to redress injustice and empower an inclusive future.
In the future, people who can express their differences authentically will have an advantage. Neurologically, this future will require embracing the discomforts of difference. This future will require us to resist the temptation to conform. Stress receptors will fire in our brains from fear of the unknown. But we can grow new synaptic connections to prepare our brains for future offices and officing. We can teach ourselves to celebrate our otherness from each other—as well as our common ground. Knowing your roots and routes is the starting point to navigating the diversity dilemma of the present.
Know Your Roots and Your Routes
Connections between people have always been an essential ingredient in seeding social identities. In an era of identity politics, legacy categories are in a constant state of flux, rendering them meaningless for some.5 Despite this fluidity, identity is still an important psychological need. When our IFTF colleague Gabe Cervantes, a major contributor to this chapter, was a student at Williams College, he was introduced to the notion of roots and routes as integral to understanding diaspora studies and the nature of identity:
One of the most important shifts in diaspora studies is to de-emphasize group solidarity and cohesiveness in favor of recognizing internal complexities—including multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-lingual, multi-cohort, multi-mobile and hybrid diasporas.6
Multihyphenated people, connected via digital media, will create digital diasporas to form what are becoming cohort groups that, while harder to categorize, are increasingly important. These connected networks of people communicate and work together to allow diversity to be a new tool for solving complex problems. This emerging officeverse will introduce new ways to engage with the continuing challenges of diversity and inclusion at work.
Journalist/writer Alex Haley introduced the concept of roots to a very wide audience by telling very personal stories about his own family history. Roots are your lineage. How far back can you trace yourself in terms of race, age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other categories that contribute to your identity? Your roots are all about your ancestors; their legacy and their dreams empower your future. Calling on ancestors reveals generational change. Knowing your roots helps you and the outside world understand what experiences, cultural expressions, stories, and other elements inform who you are in the present.
A deep understanding of roots also helps to illuminate the route, the walk of life, that people have taken.
Poisoned by Collective Trauma
Social injustice has created a sense of collective trauma for so many people in the world today. Roots can be painful. Roots can be political. Roots may be influenced by events and experiences of local, national, and global communities. Knowing your roots gives you historical context. Understanding someone else’s roots can give you the basis for empathy, even if full understanding is not possible.
Organizations have roots too. For example, what is the history of your office buildings? How have your offices contributed to—or taken away from—the neighborhoods around the buildings? What management policies defined your purpose and the overall philosophy of your organization? Does your organization provide psychological safety for those who have experienced collective trauma? COVID-19 provided its own kind of collective trauma, but it is often mixed with traumas of racial injustice, climate emergencies, or forced disruptions of family life.
Collective trauma is part of life for many people.7 In the case of Black Americans, Martin Luther King Jr. said:
White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. That is one thing that other immigrant groups haven’t had to face.8
Bob attended the same divinity school as Martin Luther King Jr., and he was there in Upland, Pennsylvania, when Dr. King was killed. Bob got to work with Dr. Kenneth Smith, Martin Luther King Jr.’s professor of Christian Ethics, and he was a student in a course designed to recreate the intellectual influences Dr. King was moved by while at Crozer Theological Seminary. One of Bob’s strongest memories of that course was how Martin Luther King Jr.’s clarity was focused on social justice, not just civil rights. Because of his concern about social justice, he was very active in the antipoverty movement, protesting the Vietnam War, and advocating for the environmental movement. In his last years, Dr. King was often criticized for not focusing on civil rights alone, but his response was always that the more profound issue was social justice.
Your route defines your life trajectory, including cognitive ways of thinking, preferences, and future planning for you and possibly your family. Your route is your path forward for the future, although it is influenced by your past roots. Roots, however, don’t determine a person’s future route. Neither your roots nor routes are static. Roots can become routes.
The dreams and aspirations that arise from your roots and routes will shape your futureback thinking and the kind of futures you are able to imagine. For individuals to rise, organizations must honor roots and routes. What are the paths to the future, for what people? What glass ceilings or constraints must be broken?
In Search of Belonging
Looking futureback from ten years ahead, the world will be more diverse, and that diversity will be harder to categorize. The multitude of diversity programs in many organizations will most likely contribute to better futures for working and living.
However, thinking futureback also reveals that diversity is much deeper than what is revealed by merely measuring it by checking off boxes. Each of us is more than the categories we represent, the boxes we check off. The future will blur demographic diversity labels beyond recognition. Simple diversity filters just won’t work well as people who are mixed category “multi’s” and “hypenated’s” grow in number. Everyone will be an “other” in some sense.
In traditional diversity programs, the marginalized “others” have been given priority status with a goal of diversifying workforces, boardrooms, and the office in general. It has been a just cause to find those missing, prioritize getting them in the door, and including them.
Diversity isn’t just about “others” that don’t fit the established order. As belonging catalyst and consultant Ibrahim Jackson says, diversity is the easy part. The hard part is inclusion, belonging, and equity. Thinking futureback, it is easy to imagine that the word diversity won’t be necessary in ten years because it will be so obvious. Everything and everyone will be diverse.
Building communities with belonging will be complex. Diversity is about attracting people with different roots and who have followed different routes to get to where they are. Inclusion and belonging are about giving the space to aspire, rise, and grow—no matter the roots or routes you have followed to be where you are now.
As Ibrahim Jackson says, “Diversity is the person, Inclusion is an invitation to the party, Belonging is being asked to dance, hearing a genre of music that you enjoy and food you love to consume.”9 Equity weaves through all three concepts of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Jackson proposes a framework that is illustrated by three overlapping circles within an overarching context of equity (figure 12).
Diversity is about understanding that every person brings something unique to an organization. To truly connect with employees at all levels, diversity needs to be a focus. The more you have, the broader your reach in ideas, inventions, and innovation.
Inclusion fosters an environment where everyone has a voice and is a part of a team or community. An inclusive culture is best achieved by celebrating individual diversity and unique contributions in the workplace.
Belonging sets the stage for people to know they are accepted, valued, and have the freedom to contribute without hesitation.
Equity interweaves among diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Although not the endgame, equity shapes the playing field. Equity is all about fairness and accessibility—not necessarily equality. Not everyone is the same, nor should they be treated in the same manner. Equity allows for differences, while equality alone does not. Equity is very much a part of social justice.
FIGURE 12: The Belonging Organization (adapted from Ibrahim Jackson). A framework to integrate diversity, inclusion, and belonging, built on an underlying foundation of equitable practices.
Office shock provides an opportunity for a fresh start, and many diversity programs need a fresh start. Office shock will disrupt identities and puncture diversity categories. Identities will be constantly changing and increasingly difficult to label. The Spectrum of Belonging spans from the comfort of familiar people to the excitement of working with people who are purposely different. Finding harmony for your personal journey within the spectrum will help build better futures.
Dignity is an important aspect of belonging. Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a poet, playwright, musician, and actor, and currently serves as the vice president and artistic director of social impact at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. In a passionate spoken-word video, he advocates for the importance of dignity and its role as a moral compass for collective healing.10
Understanding the role of dignity is essential in growing diversity and empathy. To thrive, organizations in the future will seek purposely different people whose combined talents and experience will accomplish an organization’s purpose. Officing will be about an artful blending of dynamic digital diasporas, not just checking off a box when we have all the categories of others represented in the room. Technology will support the formation of communities of people, regardless of location or organizational affiliation. These digital diasporas in the emerging officeverse will be powerful agents of change and contribute to valuable solutions for organizations.
Impossible futures for belonging will become possible, but this won’t be easy. We are all hardwired to reinforce our identity among those who are familiar. The boundaries of belonging can be deep and wide. Full-spectrum thinking will be needed to span this spectrum, because the questions cut across who we are, how we connect with others, and the ways we can come together for collective action. Also, many excluded groups are impatient or angry.
Purposely Different
Office shock is an opportunity to look at those we office with and provide a spectrum of choices. On the one hand, we maintain the ability to keep our office connections with those who are familiar to us in their routes—their journey to the future aligns with our values, our contributions, and our experiences. On the other hand, looking at officing with those who are purposefully different from us allows us to bring in individuals with diverse roots so that we may leverage their communities’ experiences in innovative ways.
There is value in working with people who know each other well: they have shared context, they know language shortcuts, and they have shared experiences. New digital diasporas popularized by office shock are increasing and providing access to raw, unfiltered talent from varied roots and routes. This will not only help us value and embrace those who are different, it will reveal who we are by highlighting who we are not.
Beyond Labels
Instead of merely presenting ourselves as a list of categorical designations around age, race, gender, ethnicity, and more, we will first ask, “What experiences, information, and perspectives are missing?” The relationships we form in future offices will be centered on finding those who represent diasporas unique to our own. This will happen in both physical office spaces and through networked workplaces.
Thinking futureback, anything that can be distributed will be distributed. The in-person office will still be important for activities like orientation, on-boarding, trust building, and renewal. But digitally enhanced diasporas will be a critical part of your office of the future.
The role of policy makers in responding to office shock encourages us to consider the spectrum of choices of whom we work with, and it is varied and complex. At the policy level, choices about zoning, public transportation, equitable access, availability of free networking, the rights of individuals, health benefits, and child-care options are just a few of the areas where policies can influence with whom we work.
Office diversity in the future will look and feel very different from the present. Instead of offering advantages, special privileges, or unique spaces for those who are in the minority, everyone’s difference can be recognized and valued. In a future where differences are made visible and distinguished, people will be valued by the skills and experience they contribute.
But what is often called code-switching behavior (adapting your language, appearance, or behavior so you can interact successfully with people who come from different roots or routes) will still be a factor. A recent Harvard Business Review issue contributed to by five diverse researchers reached this conclusion:
Based on our research and the work of others, we argue that code-switching is one of the key dilemmas that black employees face around race at work. While it is frequently seen as crucial for professional advancement, code-switching often comes at a great psychological cost. If leaders are truly seeking to promote inclusion and address social inequality, they must begin by understanding why a segment of their workforce believes that they cannot truly be themselves in the office. Then they should address what everyone at the company needs to do to change this.11
This article was written just before the COVID-19 office closures. If someone feels that they “cannot truly be themselves in the office,” how do they feel when their office colleagues are present in their homes via Zoom? Their lifestyle and personal preferences become visible to all. Some describe how they rearrange the backgrounds for their calls, a version of code-switching with furniture.
Stories of Work in the Future
The best offices have been places where people gathered, worked toward a common purpose, found connections, built relationships, and thrived. The office and office work of the future will seek the same purpose, but in different ways. Where office work of the past tended to help you find people like you and your background, the office and office work of the future will allow you to work with those who are purposefully different. Meeting the challenges of an increasingly complex world and unlocking innovation will require a thoughtful mixing and matching of roots and routes. The most successful teams will be those that are diverse and distinct.
Belonging communities bring together identities, aspirations, and rituals. Science fiction and epic fantasy spark our imaginations about many things and, in some instances, about more belonging. For example, authors in the genre of Afrofuturism are adding to and updating the mule-like concepts of stubbornly breaking from the past and the constraints of history:
“Afrofuturism, like post blackness, destabilizes previous analyses of blackness,” says Reynaldo Anderson, assistant professor of humanities at Harris-Stowe State University and a writer of Afrofuturist critical theory. “What I like about Afrofuturism is it helps us create our own space in the future; it allows us to control our imagination. An Afrofuturist is not ignorant of history, but they don’t let history restrain their creative impulses either.”12
In addition to Afrofuturism, futures genres can be found everywhere, and for everyone, including Latinfuturism,13 Chicanafuturism,14 Sinofuturism,15 Arab Futurism,16 and Gulf Futurism.17 This mixing and matching will accelerate creating better futures for working and living, for all.
Fantasy came to life on the subtropical island of Madeira, called “Zoom Island” by residents of the Digital Nomad Villages who moved there to live and work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many cities and countries are trying to lure digital nomads to come work and live, but Digital Nomads Madeira is focused on providing a sense of belonging and community. “Community is the key. It’s why everybody else is completely failing at attracting digital nomads. They miss the most important thing, which is that nomads travel between communities, not between places.”18 As the tourists come back to Madeira, what will happen to these communities of digital nomads? Zoom Island is a fascinating prototype, but will concepts like this be sustainable over time?
Throughout this book we have related the concepts of each spectrum of choice to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In this area of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, three of the goals apply:
Goal #3: “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.” This goal focuses on all, but also on age diversity.
Goal #8: “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.” The key words here are productive, inclusive, and sustainable.
Goal #16: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” The application of diversity and inclusion is ramped up to society as a whole and ties into justice, which is also a key issue in diversity.
Your Choices on the Spectrum of Belonging
In the VUCA world, who we office with may be in constant flux. Although we may belong to and work for the same company, organization, or goal, the teams that help us accomplish our work may change. Although we lose some comfortable familiarity, purposefully mixing and matching will provoke new approaches to the challenges of the future.
As you think about your own personal story across this spectrum, consider these questions:
1. How might you illustrate your story about a future with more belonging?
2. What makes you different, and how can you celebrate your otherness authentically while still engaging with others?
3. In your present moment, in your present community, what are the aspects of every member that can contribute to a vibrant organization?
4. How can you use the concepts of roots and routes to bring a purposely different mix of talent into your organization?
5. How will you address the diversity dilemma in your office?
6. The digital natives will likely have very different expectations for offices and officing. They are likely to be less loyal and more critical of current ways of working. How are you preparing for their arrival? How will you benefit from cross-generational communication now?