Giving Compass' Take:

• Jessica Friesen and Alicia Agnew share five lessons that B Lab learned when engaging in the Inclusive Economy Challenge.

• How can other organizations use this challenge to push progress forward? 

• Read about trends of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. 

To kick us off, here are the five most important things we learned as participants in the Inclusive Economy Challenge.

  1. Simple questions don’t have simple answers: We designed the One goal we selected from the Metric Set in 2016 was to increase representation for women and other underrepresented populations on B Lab’s Board of Directors. As soon as we set our goal, we had to start asking ourselves a series of questions. What counts as “underrepresented” for an organization that operates in a global context? How should we think about race and ethnicity beyond the borders of the United States?
  2. You can’t know what you’ve never asked about: B Lab leadership hadn’t anticipated the day-to-day disparity in how B Lab’s culture was experienced by white staff and staff members of color, nor how that was connected to a mostly-white management and executive team.
  3. Transparency is easier in theory than in practice: Transparency is hard, because there’s never only one story to tell. This goes double for work around equity, diversity, and inclusion, where personal experiences vary widely and inform the work itself.
  4. Leaders can’t wait to be ready: We weren’t ready for the IEC in 2016. Despite launching the program, we weren’t prepared to take on all the goals we had set for ourselves. But we did it anyway.
  5. All the lessons that come next: We’ve made a lot of progress, but we’re not done. We’ve got a lot more left to learn.

Read the full article about the Inclusive Economy Challenge by Jessica Friesen and Alicia Agnew at Medium.