Services
Solving Wicked Problems One Conversation at a Time
Inclusion Consultancy
Inclusion is where people from different personal, social, professional and cultural backgrounds feel welcomed, valued, participate in decision making, and share responsibility for the group’s wellbeing. The group can mean two people or two thousand. When this happens research evidence has repeatedly shown that organisations increase recruitment, retention, innovation and growth.
The problem is that inclusion, in the absence of a practical pathway, is often reduced to one of two things. The first is flags in the foyer and multicultural morning teas. Flags and morning teas can’t possibly deliver on the scientific benefits of inclusion because there’s no guaranteed link between flags and morning teas and wellbeing, innovation and growth.
The second is the 'Encyclopedia Approach'. That's where we try to gain 'awareness' about all the different ethnic, sexuality, disability, age, class and religious differences. But this is an impossible ask! There are literally hundreds of ethnic and language groups alone and millions of intersections between all of these differences. On top of that people's behaviour changes according to the local situation! No wonder we collapse back into flags and morning teas!
Including Us remedies this by embracing the obvious fact that people who have a different background to you don't expect you to have a degree in their background. Instead, when they front up for a conversation they hope that they can have a conversation based on respect, care and mutual recognition of the value that each brings to the relationship. When that happens over time we get good relationships where we naturally learn and can appreciate each other's differences, and the sum of these good relationships, plus the organisational policies that support them, equals inclusion. Including Us can show you how to intentionally have the kind of conversations that produce good relationships and the kinds of policies that support good relationships. By adopting this innovative bottom up approach Including Us can support your organisation to intentionally increase diversity, retain diversity and thrive with diversity.
Inclusive Listening for Individuals
By drawing on the social science of understanding 'inclusive listening' offers practical thinking tools and practices aimed at strengthening your ability to:
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Stop arguing and start understanding
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Understand others across cultural differences
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Become more aware of your own non-conscious cultural and emotional biases
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Listen to collaborate rather than compete
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Recognise when you are listening and understanding and when you're not - despite nonconscious personal, cultural or social barriers
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Be a better leader
With real understanding you can intentionally produce cultural safety, psychological safety and strengthened assessments for action and intervention. All of this based on a real, rather than an imagined, understanding of where 'people are coming from'.
Inclusive listening workshops are offered in person and online.
Inclusive Listening for Teams
Inclusion is often thought about in very warm and fuzzy ways as something that's good to have because it helps with retention and service. But the fuzziness gets in the way of mastering the practical logic of inclusion. Imagine what would happen if your team had conscious control over the kind of listening that produced inclusion, cultural safety and psychological safety? Not just for the people you serve but for each other?
Inclusive listening translates a fuzzy idea of inclusion into concrete and achievable practices that give your team the practical means to intentionally produce psychological and cultural safety and therefore inspiration, innovation and growth.
Collaborative Problem Solving
In any social service setting the people providing the service and the people receiving the service are the real experts in identifying real problems and practical solutions. This is not just because your organisation or team has already carefully recruited experts in the field and works with stakeholders with lived experience based expertise. It is also because the complexity of contemporary organisational contexts demands a highly nuanced appreciation of those contexts that you can only get from embedded experience. The kind of experience that allows you to grasp the 'devil in the detail' of problems, realistic solutions and how to apply those solutions in your local circumstances. Our role is to provide a resource to inform that problem solving with research and create a safe space to scientifically codesign real and practical solutions from within.
Younger People Participation
Social services organisations, providing services to younger people, have become increasingly aware of the importance of younger people participation in service decision making. The problem is that younger people participation rarely goes beyond giving younger people a 'voice' by setting up a 'youth advisory group' or having a 'youth survey'. While these strategies can represent a first step they are a long way from the cutting edge that translates younger people participation from 'giving younger people a voice' to driving innovation through codesign and transparent accountability embedded into the very fabric of organisational policy and procedures. Including Us can guide you to genuine participation as a science-based innovation and service quality engine room through training, facilitation and systems design.
Stakeholder Participation
Diversity and Inclusion is commonly thought of in ethical terms of social justice, human rights and reflecting the demographics of the people we serve within the teams providing the service. Of course ethically speaking these concerns are of fundamental importance. However, diversity and inclusion have another critically important scientific function. That's because diversity and inclusion with real stakeholder participation in decision making drives scientific discovery and therefore innovation and growth. It works like this. First, scientific discovery arises from looking at some problem from a different perspective. For example, everyone in a particular culture believes the earth is flat until someone, often from another culture, says, "Hey. Maybe its round!". Second, if you want honest feedback about the effects of any particular service the best place to go is to the recipients because their views are usually not filtered by a desire to look good. We will support you to build real stakeholder participation strategies, including First Nations, LGBTIQA+, CALD, people living with a disability, carers, and younger people, to drive discovery, innovation and learning.
