Equity by Design: Building Diverse and I

We live in an increasingly complex business world. In the not-too-distant past in the United States and around the world, most employees worked at places where there was a high level of homogeneity—or social similarity—between employees. Today, social, political, and demographic and institutional factors have led to a sharp increase in diversity within society and within workplaces. This has led to new organizational design challenges for leaders. How do leaders design organizations to get the most out of the diversity that exists in society? How are inclusive organizations created and maintained? How is belonging achieved and why does it matter? How do leaders contend with broader questions concerning justice and equity in society and their employees’ expectations (often) that they take a stand?
Given these complex questions, this class is built around the idea that organizational leaders, if they are intentional in their design of organizations, can take deliberate, successful steps to leverage the diversity that exists in the world. During this course you’ll learn tools and techniques to build more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations. A basic premise is that doing so is good for business and for employees. Research studies find that organizations focused on DE&I do not just benefit “HUGS”, or members from historically underestimated groups. Designing organizations to be inclusive and equitable improves the success and well-being of all employee groups, regardless of employees’ background.
As we unpack how to achieve greater levels of DE&I, it is important to know this course is heavily influenced by design thinking, most often used in product and service design. Yet as a broad concept, design thinking has wide applicability to organizational design. This is the approach we have taken in the “Equity by Design” Lab (which carries the same name as this course), as academic researchers interfacing with practitioners to help make their organizations better on the DE&I front. In this course we will use this same logic: to make organizations more diverse, equitable, and inclusive we will identify “pain points” in and around organizations, including from social problems that exist in society and from which workplaces are not immune—e.g., structural racism, gendered hierarchical beliefs, able-bodiedism, and others. We then will consider carefully the design of workplaces—i.e., their systems, processes, culture, and forma