Shifting perspectives leads to shifting the narrative
Trabian Shorters
CEO/Founder
BME Community
Key Takeaways
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DEI communications work goes far beyond conscious external messaging to the fundamental and subconscious ways that we frame the people who are most affected and our role in solutions.
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Asset framing and narrative change properly identifies protagonists, helpers, and obstacles and focuses our work on removing systemic obstacles to people’s worthy aspirations.
Overview
“I think the biggest challenge with diversity, equity, and inclusion work in communications is that people think of it as a communications challenge; a messaging challenge; or a campaign challenge. This issue isn’t about what you say about people, it’s about what you think of people,” says Trabian Shorters, author and CEO/Founder of BMe Community, a network of innovators, leaders, and champions who invest in aspiring communities through fellowships for Black leaders and providing training and consulting in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
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“The fundamental issue is that the country operates from a narrative that assumes that the nation’s story is essentially about straight wealthy able-bodied white men,” explains Shorters.
“The fact is that we pretty much all subscribe to this narrative that has been called white supremacy – though it is more accurately a belief in straight wealthy able-bodied white male supremacy. So, the right place to start is not at messaging, but really, literally at thought.” He adds that if organizations start tackling DEI as merely a communications challenge, they will only get superficial results.
BMe Community’s pioneering focus on asset framing focuses on defining all people by their aspirations and contributions before noting their challenges. He says that this framing triggers a whole different set of associations in our minds than the at-risk label does.
“In asset framing for instance, we teach that instead of branding a young person in a high crime community as an ‘at-risk youth’, we define them as a student - because they typically are.”
He adds that the way that the social good sector has most often communicated about people – as disadvantaged, underprivileged, and at-risk – has “subconsciously vilified” and stigmatized those most affected.
As a former foundation executive, Shorters points to philanthropy sector communications as a multi-billion dollar contributor to this issue. “Philanthropy’s biggest challenge is its self-narrative as a savior and a transformer,” says Shorters, adding that the very act of asking for a ‘problem statement’ on grant applications primes this narrative. Instead, he says that philanthropy as a sector needs to recognize that there are many different members of society who have aspirations that are constantly being assaulted by racism, sexism, classism, and other ‘isms.’ “If you recognize people have worthy aspirations, then you figure out how instead of being the hero, maybe you're actually the sidekick, maybe you're the support,” Shorters says. “At best philanthropy should see itself in the role of opening the heroes to greater possibilities on their own journeys.”
Shorters mentions that one of BMe Community’s clients recently changed its grant application, removing the problem statement and instead asking the question: ‘What is your aspiration?’ “With that type of question, applicants will still end up explaining what the problem is but they will also explain something even more important,” notes Shorters. “Where are we trying to go? What is it that the people really want?” He says that in a problem statement, the applicant has to take the role of problem-solver/hero and the peoples they affect become objects they work on, divorced from aspirations of their own. This type of institutional dehumanization literally starts with the assumptions built into grant-making systems. “Once you acknowledge human beings’ aspirations, they get recorded in your brain entirely different than something that is inherently threatening.”
This change in thinking – triggered in part by how fundamental aspects of our work are framed and communicated – is essential to the mission of social good organizations. “If you’re doing DEI work and you still operate by deficit-framing people, then you’re going to sabotage whatever you’re trying to do,” Shorters emphasizes. “You have to fundamentally define whomever you serve as a protagonist, as someone who aspires to achieve something worth doing. And then it becomes easier to see what obstacles stand in the way and to welcome them into the human family as meaningful contributors who are obstructed right now, rather than labeling them as social problems who must be solved.”
Q&A: TRABIAN SHORTERS
Ask Questions, Get Answers.
What DEI problem is most pervasive in communications practices?
The biggest problem is that too few foundations, social impact funds, funder collaborations, and communications firms with social impact clients actually want DEI, they just know that they are supposed to want it. Too many firms arrived at this change because societal circumstance forced them to, not because they independently wanted to. When you authentically want something, you don’t need a rising trend to make you seek it. So, problem one, lack of interest. And I do recognize that you can be late to the diversity game but through a genuine conversion experience you might genuinely care about it. So, if you are blessed by the miracle of revelatory conversion, then feel free to excuse yourself from these observations.
Why is it a problem, and how do communications practitioners identify it?
It’s a problem because this semi-conscious “necessary evil” approach to DEI means that organizations want it for the same reasons they wanted web pages when that was still new. The future was clearly arriving, and they had to comply, not that they wanted to. In 1999, when I started a technology integration company, I learned that successful technology adoption depends upon culture (not money, a ‘chief technology officer’, tech committee, or some nebulous commitment to ‘technology as a core value’). If your organization has a culture that views technology as either ‘unnecessary’ or a ‘necessary evil’ then you will ALWAYS accomplish dramatically less with it than those firms that have a ‘necessary good’ or ‘strategic advantage’ tech culture. The same is true with DEI.
I’ve observed that whether it’s tech or DEI, when a group views it essentially as a ‘necessary evil’ they approach it anxiously, somewhat begrudgingly and they try to figure out the simplest, fastest, least-effortful way that they can integrate it (as little as necessary). So, curiosities like “diversity managers” and “diversity committees” and “chief equity officers” make sense the same way that their parallels in technology made sense. Those are easily identifiable necessary evil responses to questions of fundamental change.
If you are lucky enough to have one of those officers or committees that has enough power, social-emotional intelligence and functional expertise to make technology or DEI deeply ingrained in your culture then this Magic DEI Unicorn Strategy works because you found an actual magic unicorn, but it usually results in surface-level solutions because it’s a surface-level response. That’s not a knock on the officer or committee, by the way, because they are usually sincerely beating their brains out against the organization’s ‘necessary evil’ culture.
That said, if you are trying to bridge from necessary evil to necessary good then I’d recommend that your senior leadership team become the de facto committee and that they commit to acquiring the cultural competencies, asset-framing, and solution-oriented skills necessary to lead cultural change. If this were any other fundamental strategic undertaking, it would be a no-brainer to have this group lead it, so of course they should on this one too.
I’d also suggest that you hire people at all levels of the organization for whom valuing other members of the human family is important to their personal sense of identity and worth.
What are the best strategies to address it?
As you can see, I don’t believe this is a “communications problem.” So, to address it as such is tail wagging the dog. That said, I’ve observed that groups that actually want diversity and view it as a necessary good or strategic advantage tend to do at least the top seven of these 10 things:
The leadership team is very diverse.
They require their contractors, fund managers, communications firms, headhunters, etc. to have diverse leadership teams too and/or that they be owned by people of color.
Their firms are active members of diverse communities.
Because they are known and trusted in diverse communities, they have very diverse job applicant pools to draw from.
Their chief executives have personal friends of many different ethnicities, classes, etc.
They treat relationships within the organization as positional but not hierarchical.
They enjoy learning about cultures and cultural competencies.
Curiosity is a stronger value than correctness.
They organically see and speak of people from multiple different communities as “our people.”
They don’t have any DEI committees, managers, officers, etc. because it’s not a project, program, or department. When it is fundamental to the culture it shows up throughout the culture. La June Tabron of W.K. Kellogg Foundation offers her foundation as an example of this. Before becoming president, she was put in charge of a DEI committee. Her first major act was to dissolve it. Years later Kellogg hired its first black person and first woman to head the foundation: La June Tabron. They have a very diverse board, leadership team, staff, partners, communications firms, and every program has a commitment to equity in it. But they have no diversity committee or managers. They don’t claim to be perfect on this because no one is. But they are sincere, and that’s a big difference between them and firms that are searching for quick fixes and unicorns to do as little as necessary rather than the most good.
What obstacles do practitioners face in approaching the issue?
They want topical solutions to structural problems. Your leg is broken but you want to know if you can have pain relievers and cosmetics, so that no one notices, and you experience no discomfort. In most cases the cultural change necessary to do DEI requires leadership change. Not always that you change leaders but always that your leaders change. If they’ve approached this reluctantly as a necessary evil, then they need to evolve to see it as both genuinely necessary and genuinely good. Then it won’t feel like an extra chore but like an extra shot at innovation, insight, value adding, improvement, excellence, and so on. Like healing a broken leg, this is all very doable; it’s just never going to be quick and easy.
What specific things should they do to shift their communications process?
It’s more about shifting thinking process than communications process. BMe Community teaches asset-framing because it changes the ways we think about people. I’ve found other approaches like the ‘people first’ movement or ‘narrative power’ taught by the Color of Change to be useful. Probably the best bang for the buck though is to actual study cultural axiologies, epistemologies, and logics because the combination gives you root awareness of fundamental cultural biases, culturally influenced ways of knowing, and culturally influenced ways of reasoning. The three form a foundation for genuine cultural competence rather than remaining at the topical/surface levels of these questions and trying to microwave solutions without any actual appreciation of the people with whom we say we want to have a relationship.
What will they learn from this shift?
Understanding cultural competence allows us to appreciate difference as deeply functional and gives us a rich tool set to draw from for communicating, motivating, celebrating, and engaging. For instance, western culture favors linear and dichotomous logics whereas African cultures favor critical path and diunital logics. When communications team are ignorant of these biases, they tend to default to whichever bias is their own.
Having asset-framing skills will make it easier to genuinely value all people concerned, thus reducing colonial habits of defining white heterosexual able-bodied male landowners as the first among equals. As I said, these are not communications problems really. It’s not about what we say about people, it is much more about what we actually think about people, what do we actually know about people, and who do we actually believe are members of our human family.
What other advice can you give to communications teams?
Don’t let your firms put DEI on you as though it’s a communications issue. Do push for comms teams to be seen as part of the strategic planning team, not as ‘messengers’.
