Curiousity and why there is such an emotional cost of not discussing issues around Equality and Diversity.

The viel of the Politically correct!

Politically correct or not, these questions reflect natural and honest human curiosity about the lives and experiences of other people. Today’s politically correct culture often stifles our natural curiosity about people who are different from ourselves and keeps us from asking the questions that are really on our mind. As a trainer and speaker, we need to give people effective tools, real-life examples, and maybe even a web space that will help us better relate and respond to, as well as respect the differences that make up the many cultures of the United Kingdom. We have shown participants how to get real about asking and answering questions, and learning about themselves and each other. The result is a greater understanding and appreciation of differences as well as the tools to tackle sensitive subjects in the future.

The “What, Why, Do” Solution

The world in the 21st century is more connected, yet more diverse than ever before.

This presents a significant challenge, especially in the workforce where unified teamwork is a critical part of organisational structures. We all understand that men, women, race/ethnicity, gay, straight, disabled person, the young and the older person, bring a variety of different experiences to the work place. Many of these groups may differ in their values, attitudes, behaviours and the manner in which they perceive situations and solve problems, but our challenge is to learn from this. Learn how to communicate using cultural competency. Learn how to remove barriers so that we can enhance understanding and appreciation and establish a sense of unification in our jobs and in our lives.

What ambition has the organisation got so the vision of equality and diversity can be fulfilled?

How has your organisation’s action done this?

What achievement has the organisation done around equality and diversity?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

ASK, LEARN and APPRECIATE each other and our differences.

How do we do this when we talk about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion?

Equality is not a matter of ‘political correctness’ it is a foundation that we need so we can build successful working relationships with those people we interact with and who we seek to help.
What hidden handbrake stops us as people from moving forward in Equality and Diversity and Inclusion (yes, everybody’s got one).

How we can release it and start moving forward effortlessly?

What are the unwritten values that make people cling onto patterns they don’t actually want, and how can you get it to work for you rather that against you?

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for me is about Life, chance and opportunity.

The level of opportunity may influence the level of life quality.

Thompson (1997) proposes a model to understand the different levels on which discrimination operates, known as PCS model. The letter 'P' refers to the personal level, that of thoughts and feelings. This level interacts with and is influenced by the others. 'C' level is culture, which operates within structure of society, the 'S' level. Each level is interlinked and interacts. This is a useful model to examine how discrimination against disabled people occurs not simply at a personal level, but that discrimination is institutionalised within our society.

1. How is my behaviour affecting the behaviour of the other people involved?
2. How is their behaviour affecting me?
3. How are the behaviours of others affecting each other?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

What habit patterns have got around Equality and Diversity?

Every person who has had even a slight opportunity to observe children will have noticed the one great fact about the pattern of habit. The thousand things that you do during a single day, from the time you dress yourself to the time you brush your teeth at night, are mostly acts of habit. If each act were not customary, it would require so much thought and attention that you could hardly do much more than get past your breakfast and make it through to bedtime. Habits enable us to do the necessary everyday things without conscious effort, thus leaving the mind free to do the new things, to attend to the really interesting things, to solve the new problems that constantly arise.

A great thinker has said that habit is nine-tenths of life. Whatever the exact proportion may be, the importance of habit is so great that we cannot afford to neglect the habits that our children and we as adult are acquiring. Let’s be thankful for how far the habits of ourselves shape our children. Most of the habits that we have learned to deal with everyday things become fixed in childhood. When children get to the school age, they acquire new sets of habits as a result of their thinking about life and character. That is, they develop ideals and try to live up to them. It is therefore the first duty of the parent, to see that their young child acquires the fundamental habits that are necessary for his/her welfare and for his/her happy association with others. The parent’s next duty is to see to it that as the child approaches teenage years, he or she has the opportunity and motivation to acquire lofty ideals.

Can you think of other habit patterns that you have formed within your daily life of activities?

Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form. That's because the behavioural behavioural patterns we repeat most often are literally etched in our brains pathways.

The good news is that through repetition, it's possible to form new habits.

So what habit patterns have we picked up about Equality and Diversity and what behaviours are associated with them?

Is it positive or negative around equality and diversity?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Equality Body Language and Social Background

Does your body language tell people your social status around equality ? Well according to this piece I came across from the Association for Psychological Science it does.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is determined by a number of factors such as wealth, occupation and schools attended. Socioeconomic status (SES) influences the food we eat, hobbies we participate in and can even have an impact on our health. People with an upper socioeconomic status (SES) background can often be accused of flaunting their status, for example, the types of cars they drive or how many pairs of Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, Bruno Magli, they have in their closet. It is easy to guess someone's Socioeconomic status (SES) based on their clothing and the size of their home, but what about more subtle clues?

Psychologists Michael W. Kraus and Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley wanted to see if non-verbal cues (that is, body language) can indicate our socioeconomic status (SES).

To test this idea, the researchers videotaped participants as they got to know one another in one-on-one interview sessions. During these taped sessions, the researchers looked for two types of behaviours: disengagement behaviours (including fidgeting with personal objects and doodling) and engagement behaviours (including head nodding, laughing and eye contact).

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that nonverbal cues can give away a person's socioeconomic status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviours compared to participants from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60 second clips of the videos, they were able to correctly guess the participants' socioeconomic status (SES) background, based on their body language.

The researchers note that this is the first study to show a relation between SES and social engagement behaviour. They surmise that people from upper socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds that are wealthy and have access to prestigious institutions tend to be less dependent on others. "This lack of dependence among upper socioeconomic status (SES) people is displayed in their nonverbal behaviours during social interactions," the psychologists conclude.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Equality Body Language

Equality Body Language is also known as Nonverbal Communication, even though that's technically not correct, it gives you a lot of extra information beyond the spoken words that you can use to recognise people's emotions, and discover their real intentions.

Have you ever been speaking with someone and had a gut feeling or hunch, that they are not telling the truth?

What you are actually taking notice of in both situations is the body language, assuming they’ve not actually expressed it.

Is what people are saying (i.e. the words they speak) and what they are really saying, their intentions, emotions and hidden agendas, very different?

• Some people lie.
• Some people unconsciously oppose what they say
• Some people pretend to be what they're not
• Some people don't talk at all but their body speaks volumes!

What hidden body language have we got around equality and diversity? What are the unconscious gestures that we don’t want to show, and how can we get it to work for you rather than against you?

When we’re children we’re taught to be Polite! Decoded in everyday speak means tell a nice sounding lie.

Equality body language is so obvious most people just don’t see it, especially around Equality and Diversity.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Building Character

The trending of water so to speak of social mobility has been caused by bad parenting in working-class families, where the adults fail to instil self-discipline in their children, a study has found.

The research by Demos, the left-leaning think tank, finds that the richest in society are nearly three times as likely as the poorest to foster the character traits necessary for a person to get on in life.

The study reveals the gulf has widened because of the absence of “tough love” upbringing in too many working-class households.

This has been made worse by the collapse of marriage among the poorest families, the children of married parents are twice as likely as those from single parents to have the most important characteristics for success.

The Demos report, called Building Character, finds that social mobility, children doing better economically than their parents relative to the rest of society, rose from the second world war to the 1970s and then trend water, although it might have improved a little since 2000.

In families where parents are disengaged, children are three times more likely to develop negative characteristics. In the most extreme cases, the researchers found children could become emotionally insensitive or “callous”.

The report states: “Callous children grow up lacking a sense of empathy and guilt, and learn to see others in a purely instrumental way. There is a level of disengagement in a small minority of parents that would be considered neglectful.”

The researchers found that children in low-income families where their parents adopted a “tough love” parenting style were just as likely to develop positive characteristics as those in richer families.

Is it as easy as that for all our woe’s to place’s this at the core of social mobility and life chances.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

How Discriminative Are We?

Are we more discriminative than we realise or would like to admit?

We don’t necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people.

How is it, that we can remain comfortable whilst knowing we continue to gain from the suffering of another?

It gets deeper, when we ask, ‘can anyone truly be human under the forces of such oppression, when they are condemned to a life where injustice is at the core, where their free will is exhausted and they are too eager to obey, because it is a precondition for survival?’ If this is true then why do we accept it? Perhaps it is because we really are subhuman.

We as individuals have a habit of using ignorance to construct our world, based around concepts that make us feel good about ourselves. This of course impacts on how we perceive an ‘ism’. It should therefore come as no surprise that many people shut down when they are confronted with the word ‘racist’ ‘sexist’, ‘disablist’ or ‘ageist’.

Sometimes this is due to fear of other people’s reactions. On the flip side it may also be the case that for those who are affected by the ‘ism’, that they feel too vulnerable and too disempowered to address it.

Prejudice or Discrimination?

In simplistic terms, discrimination refers to a persistent inequality where individuals in a society inherit an inferior social status on the basis of ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender,’ ‘age’ ‘disability’ and/or ‘transgender’. The results can manifest themselves in many forms but in essence it is the exclusion of people from full and equal participation in a lifestyle we all collectively perceive as being valuable, important, personally worthwhile and socially desirable.

Discrimination and prejudice are so easily intertwined that many people confuse the terms. This can lead to the erroneous assumption that overt ‘ism’ no longer exists.

Discrimination cuts both ways.

Many who have experienced oppression inherit prejudices borne from their experiences. These prejudices can be represented as a form of hatred or intense dislike towards all those who are thought to be part of the collective group that responsible for their social disadvantages.
To identify the act of an ‘ism’ in all of its subtle and persistent forms can be extremely challenging. However, it is important not to forget the history of ‘ism’. We are wired to like people that are similar to us. It is this history of ‘ism’ that cannot be dealt with immediately.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Thinking and Feeling our relationship on Equality, Diversity and Human Rights

Developing our understanding of equality, diversity and human rights and the important part they play in our lives through conversation an age-old tradition bridging and bonding within our communities. The conversation could cover a wide range of issues around cooperation and competition and co existing demonstrating the meaning of this in a personal way.

They are a devastating impact and their is evidence that in Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett book The Spirit level: Why more Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better are not upheld or are violated. The gap of persist inequalities are growing it is very important that we uphold the principles of Equality, Diversity and Human rights to secure our social economic and personal wellbeing within society or the crumbling fabric of societies will mass destruct on its self. A powerful argument within the book.

Equality, Diversity and Human rights are the cornerstone of a fair society. Everybody should have the right to live with dignity and respect, and everyone should be treated fairness, regardless of ethnicity, disability, age, religion, wealth, nationality and sexual orientation and other personal characteristic their may uphold. Equality, Diversity and Human rights affect every human being on earth, and in order to ensure our lives are not blighted by injustice, every human being on earth should be aware of their own and of other’s relationship of what do we mean by respect and dignity.

What is it to you?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

The emotional fall out of Equality and Diversity belief

To describe a belief on our training course we use the metaphor of R.S.I. Not as repetitive strain injury, but as Repetitive statement injury. It is a statement or a series of statements which can have a detrimental effect on you and your life. It can stop you from achieving your potential and decreases your performance.

These beliefs play big roles throughout childhood and into our adult lives, so realizing how much they affect us can lead to an even bigger opportunity to change them.

An example of this could be a parent who does not want their child to be disappointed and therefore protects them by telling them not to do something. It could also be a teacher telling you that you are not good enough or you can’t draw or sing etc. There are many more of these RSI’s, and they live with us forever and become part of who we are and form the values that we live by. This, in turn, forms part of the map we live with.

This can affect anyone, as we are all part of equality strands, for example, a woman in the work place. Her R.S.I’s may be stopping her fulfilling her own potential, but the interactions of others reinforce her own lowered self esteem. It’s like a viscous circle.

We are not always rational beings; we are often under the influence of others. Our R.S.I’s work because of this, and so our actions come about because of our beliefs and our experiences.

What our purpose is, is decided by how helpful are our beliefs are. Do there hinder us in our interactions with people or not? This is a core principle of community cohesion and the bridging and the bonding of communities. It is also a big influence on Equality and Diversity beliefs.
There is an old Chinese adage, that is half threat, half prophecy, “May you live in interesting times’’.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Our Past, Our Future, Our Aspirations for Equality

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them and that a new dawn has broken, political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not that our society should want to pursue the values and beliefs of sharing equality. We need to pursue the values of equality; the values that help families find jobs at a decent wage, care that can be afforded and a retirement that is dignified.

We should indeed make this a reality. If not, progress will end. Those of you who manage the public's finance will be held to account and to spend these finances wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business with dignity and respect. Only then can we restore the vital trust between people and government.

Now is the question before us whether that equality is a force for good or ill? Its power is to generate co-operation and competition for us as people and communities, but this tension has reminded us that without a watchful eye, people in society can spin out of control and also that society cannot prosper long when it favours only a “them’’ and ‘’ us’’ culture. The success of equality will depend not just on Government, but on all of us in society; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart. Not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

The source of my confidence is the knowledge that Equality calls on us to shape our destiny. It does so with good relationships amongst people within our society.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Have we come to a crossroad when we talk about Equality?

What emotion does it bring forward?

The rich developed societies have reached turning points in human history.

Politics should now be about the quality of social relations and how we can develop harmonious and sustainable societies.

It’s about balancing cooperation and competition, how do we reconcile these when we talk about equality.

The vision that the Government and the Equality and Human Rights Commission has of the UK society: An equal society protects and promotes equal, real freedom and substantive opportunity to live in the ways people value and would choose, so that everyone can flourish.
An equal society recognises people’s different needs, situations and goals and removes the barriers that limit what people can do and can be.

Are we all in pursuit of this? Or are we feeding the co-operation versus competition debate? In doing this, are we cementing the “Them and US” culture of fear? Where are we on the Barometer of Equality? Are we closer to “Great words of good Intentions” or the discriminatory society of the BNP and other extremists?

Remember, people will judge us by our actions, not our intentions. We may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg.

Is this vision of the United Kingdom a need or is it a want in the history of our time, as a generation, we will be held to account for our actions or inactions, on achieving equality.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Last night I was watching the movie the Pursuit of Happyness

It made me think about my work around Equality and Diversity and Inclusion!

Plot goes something like this!

In 1981, in San Francisco, the smart salesman and family man Chris Gardner invests the family savings in Osteo National bone-density scanners, an apparatus twice as expensive as an x-ray machine but with a slightly clearer image. This White elephant financially breaks the family, bringing troubles to his relationship with his wife Linda, who leaves him and moves to New York where she has received a job in a pizza parlor. She wishes to take their son Christopher with her, but Chris refuses because they both know that Linda will be unable to take care of him. Without money or a wife, but totally committed to his son Christopher, Chris sees the chance to fight for a stockbroker internship position at Dean Witter Reynolds, offering a more promising career at the end of a six month unpaid training period. There are nineteen other candidates for the one position. Meanwhile, he encounters many challenges and difficulties, including a period of homelessness and troubles with the IRS (Tax issues).

Using the movie as a metaphor for broadening our horizons.

The Pursuit of Equality

What do YOU stand for? What are YOUR values and YOUR principles?

What if l am promising you everything and nothing simultaneously?

What kind of country, neighborhood, and community do you want to see and what are YOU going to do to get it?

If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

The emotional fall out of BNP Nick Griffin’s

Yes Good morning back to blogging had some time off!

Watching in disbelief at Nick Griffins performance on the BBC question time five days ago has given me food for thought as to think about as people, how we really understand what respect and dignity is, when it means broadening our horizon on equality and diversity and inclusion issues.

Watching question time I was very surprised that I was glad that Nick Griffin had the chance to use free speech and to capture his opinions and the ideology of his party. These can be summed up in the themes of the 3I’s of Ignorance, Indifference, and Inaction. His performance on question time was given away by his body language that he was not at all congruent with his answers.

The British people can make up their minds, with eyes open that as a society we cannot hide behind the 3I’s of Ignorance, Indifference, and Inaction. To marginalise minority groups, it reminds me of X men the movie. The plot is centred on the conflict between the X-Men ­­ mutants who have learned to control their powers for the greater good of mankind ­­ and a group of evil mutants, fighting each other and the world that fears them.

The Nick Griffins of this world are the political leader’s of extremist parties, in this case the BNP. Are creating fear and panic.

The political background in the movie consisted of the government pushing to enforce "mutant registration," which would label mutants and strip them of the right to attend public schools or lead normal lives. According to the movie's circumstances, it wouldn't be a far stretch to replace the label mutant with that of any other group discriminated against during the history of mankind.

Beware of the BNP.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

The nature of human moral judgment.

How do human beings decide what is right and wrong?

How do we hope to gain insight into the similarities and differences between the moral judgments of people of different ages, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds and religious beliefs, involved in different occupations and exposed to very different circumstances.

Nothing captures human attention more than a moral dilemma. Whether we are soap opera fanatics or not, we can’t help sticking our noses in other peoples affairs, pronouncing our views on right and wrong, justified or not. For millennia, philosophers have speculated about how people make moral decisions, what decisions they make, and what decisions they ought to make.

What are our moral judgment on Equality and Diversity and what understanding of this have we.

Question

• You are driving on a deserted road at night and are confident no one else is around. You come to a stop sign. Do you stop?
• Prior to an election, reliable polls have shown that there will be a clear winner in the party political race in the UK. Do you vote?
• If the majority of citizens believe in something, should that become law?
  
  
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

What is are emotion around Equality and Diversity

The proverbs tell us that there's a fine line between love and hate, and new scans of the brain's "hate circuit" have confirmed similarities between the two powerful emotions.

But whereas loved-up partners are likely to be less rational, the new scans show hate to be colder and more calculating.

Semir Zeki of University College London, UK, who has previously mapped the neural circuits involved in romantic and maternal love, and colleague John Romaya selected 17 subjects who expressed a strong hatred for an individual - typically an ex-lover or colleague.

The subjects answered a questionnaire to assess the level of their hatred, and they provided the team with a photo of their nemesis, along with pictures of three other less provocative individuals.

Each subject then viewed their chosen photos for roughly 16 seconds, while an MRI scanner mapped the activity in their brain. By comparing their responses to the hated face with their reaction to the neutral photos, the team could identify the neurological circuits we use when feeling intense hatred.

The results showed two brain regions that our "hate circuit" shares with the "love circuit" - the putamen and the insular cortex or insula.

The putamen is thought to be used to prepare the body for movement - so it's possible this be active either to provide protection of the loved one, or to prepare for an aggressive or spiteful act from the hated one. The insula is associated with feelings of distress, such as jealousy.

Scheming hatred

However, there was also an important difference. The areas of the frontal cortex associated with judgement and reasoning are typically less active when viewing a lover compared to someone more neutral, meaning they are less likely to feel critical of their partner.

The hate-filled subjects, though, only showed a reduction in one small part of this area, while the rest was still active.

We may use this area to judge the consequences of our actions and to predict the behaviour of our nemesis, Zeki says. "In love, you take leave of your senses and go wild for that person, but in hatred it seems you must be all there to calculate your next move," he says.

The team found that the amount of brain activity corresponded with the level of hatred the subjects had previously admitted in the questionnaire.

Zeki suggests similar brain scans could one day be used in court - for example, to assess whether a murder suspect felt a lot of hatred towards the victim.

In the future, he hopes to investigate how brain activity would differ when experiencing hatred towards a group of people rather than a specific individual - for example, a race or nationality, sexual orientation, disability, trangender, age, religious belief, social class.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter how we engage in equality and diversity?
• What about community cohension?

Breaking Repetitive Statement Injury within Superstition, breaking the chains that hold us down.

How beliefs can harm us.

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, gaunt and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders's family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders's stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.

Great ceremony

Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful solution. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders' arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance - a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. "Look what has come out of you Vance," he cried.

"The voodoo curse is lifted."

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

The facts of this case from 80 years ago were corroborated by four medical professionals. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Vanders survived. There are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed.

With no medical records and no autopsy results, there's no way to be sure exactly how these people met their end. The common thread in these cases, however, is that a respected figure puts a curse on someone, perhaps by chanting or pointing a bone at them. Soon afterwards, the victim dies, apparently of natural causes.

Voodoo nouveau

You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."

• He didn't die from cancer but from believing he was dying of cancer – Repetitive Statement Injury (RSI)

Cases such as Shoeman's may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What's more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The nocebo effectThe idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true - that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects.

The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term "nocebo", which means "I will harm", was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It's not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.

What we do know suggests the impact of nocebo is far-reaching. "Voodoo death, if it exists, may represent an extreme form of the nocebo phenomenon," says anthropologist Robert Hahn of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, who has studied the nocebo effect.

Life threatening

In clinical trials, around a quarter of patients in control groups - those given supposedly inert therapies - experience negative side effects. The severity of these side effects sometimes matches those associated with real drugs. A retrospective study of 15 trials involving thousands of patients prescribed either beta blockers or a control showed that both groups reported comparable levels of side effects, including fatigue, depressive symptoms and sexual dysfunction.

A similar number had to withdraw from the studies because of them.

• How does RSI play out in Equality and Diversity?
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Human beings complexity and inequality moments the complex and complication for Equality and Diversity

AROUND the time of the G20 summit in London on 2 April, the streets of cities across the world were filled with people protesting against the excesses of the banking bosses, among other things. Chances are you agreed with the sentiment. Chances are too that if you had been asked to put your hand in your pocket to fund a campaign to seize their bonuses, even if you wouldn't see any of the money, you'd have been sorely tempted.

If so, congratulations: you have just confounded classical economics, which says that no rational person should ever reduce their own income just to slash someone else's. And yet that's exactly what we do. Classical economics, it turns out, is a pretty terrible predictor of how we actually behave.

But why do we inflict pain for no gain? On the face of it, it is rather a mean way of going about things. Does spitefulness stem from an upset sense of fairness? Or something altogether darker: envy, lust for revenge - or perhaps even pure aggression?

It might be all those things. Economists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been teasing out how, used with caution, spiteful behaviour can be one of our best weapons in maintaining a fair and ordered society. But intentions that are noble in one situation can be malicious in another - making spite a weapon that can all too easily backfire into persist inequality.

Human spite is a complex affair. It is not pure selfishness in the Darwinian sense, like a stag that picks a fight with another. Though it might be gored in the process, the stag is actually acting in its own best interests. If it ends up with more mates, then the chances of passing on its genes are increased, an evolutionary prize worth fighting for.

Nor is spite as we practice it true spite in the biologist's sense. That would involve diminishing our own evolutionary fitness just so we can lower that of some unrelated individual. That behaviour exists, but it is hard to come by, says Stuart West, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford. There is a particular type of freeloading wasp, for example, some of whose larvae do not develop into adults capable of reproduction, but instead kill unrelated larvae of the same species, freeing up resources for their siblings. And in several types of bacteria, spiteful cells produce chemicals that kill both themselves and other members of their kind, unless they carry a genetic marker of relatedness to the suicidal individual. That makes microbes the kings of true spite, says West.

Human spite is something altogether subtler. Psychological motivations and social contexts influence our course of action. That requires a very special set of circumstances and skills, says Marc Hauser, a biologist at Harvard University. First, it needs a stable social grouping in which unrelated individuals interact regularly, and in which costs incurred retain relevance. What's more, you must also be able to spot when you're getting a raw deal, identify the guilty party, and be willing to do something about it.

That requires what Hauser has dubbed "floodlight" intelligence - the ability to see the big picture and combine many cognitive inputs over time. That, he suggests, might make both spite and reciprocity - the doing and returning of favours - uniquely human qualities. The "laser-beam" intelligence of most animals might be superb at solving individual problems, but it is simply not good enough at generalising experience to develop such complex behaviours in spite of our uniquely human qualities.

Naughty but nice

If that's true, the floodlight is switched on at an early age. At a meeting of London's Royal Society in January, Hauser reported preliminary results from experiments in which children between 4 and 8 years old were offered varying numbers of sweets for themselves and another child unknown to them. They had to pull either a lever delivering the sweets, or another that tipped the sweets out of reach. Infants of all ages almost always rejected one sweet for themselves if the other child was set to receive more. The older children often also rejected sweets if they got more than the other child. Where that kind of concern about inequality disappears to is unclear, because we adults certainly don't have it. Imagine you have four pound on your side, and there's one on the other side. It's highly unlikely that you'll dump your four pounds." But the negative, spiteful version persists: most of us would be quite prepared to sacrifice a pound to stop someone else getting four. Spite is the ugly sister of humanity.

What motivates this emotive behaviour? A clue is provided by laboratory experiments known as public goods games. In a standard public goods game, each participant is given the same amount of money, some or all of which they can pay into a common pot. What's in the pot is then multiplied by the experimenters and divided equally between the players, so that even those who put in nothing get a share of its contents. The best outcome for all is if everyone puts their cash into the pot. But that does not naturally happen. In repeated rounds of the game, some individuals hold on to their own cash and hope to leech off other people.

• What is our understanding of this for Equality and Diversity?
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?
  

What is the true understanding of Equality and Diversity within human behaviour within individuals within society?

What this could mean to organisation?

Unfairness aversion and relationship involving mutual exchange have been identified as two primary motivations underlying human decision making. However, because income and wealth inequality exist to some degree in all societies, these two key motivations can point to different decisions. In particular, when a receiver is less wealthy than a benefactor, a give and take action can lead to greater inequality.

In a study report data from a trust game variant where trustees’ responses to kind intentions generate inequality in favours of investors. In relation to a standard trust game treatment where trustees’ responses reduce inequality, the proportion of non-give and take decisions is twice as large when something done in return promotes inequality. Moreover, we find investors expect that this will be the case.

Overall, although both motives clearly play a role, their found strong evidence for inequality aversion. The results call attention to the potential importance of inequality in principal agent relationships, and have important implications for designing policies aimed at promoting cooperation. So how do we get to understand how social conditioning works and social trust work with equality and diversity how do you understand the power relationship and the dynamics of outcome and process and autonomy work within this.

• Do you think we need to understand this more?
• Does it matter for persist inequality within our society?
• What do you think?

How doe social trust work with Equality

The importance of social trust (or generalised trust) has become widely accepted in the social sciences around the issues of Equality. Social trust is important because it correlates with a number of other variables that are, for most people, normatively highly desirable. At the individual level, people who believe that most other people in their society in general can be trusted are also more inclined to have a positive view of their open institutions, to participate more in politics, and to be more active in civic organisations. They also give more to charity and they are more tolerant towards minorities and to people who are not like themselves. Trusting people also have a more optimistic view of their possibilities of having an influence over their own life chances and, not least important, of being happier with how their life is going. For societies, generalized trust seems to be an important asset, and as such it has been conceptualised as one central part of social capital (Coleman 1988; Putnam 1993). In sum, both at the individual and societal levels, many things that are formal desirable seem connected to social trust and have been attributed to social capital more generally. The issue of the principle of cause and effect is admittedly a different question from the statistical correlations, but so many correlations point in the same direction that social scientists have begun to pay a lot of attention to trust.

If we look at means-tested system we have in the UK to get benefits, in contrast, single out people because they are poor and treat them as if they were undeserving. Poverty and inequality already rip apart the social fabric. Belittling recipients of government programs leads to social strains in two ways: the poor feel isolated and feel that others deem them unworthy. The unfair criticism of welfare recipients feeds on public perceptions that the poor truly are responsible for their own poverty. Neither side sees a shared fate with the other. Universal programs do not cast a statement that attacks somebody’s character on the responsibility of benefits and thus do not destroy trust. When they work well, they can even help to create it.

• Why, then, is there so little change in levels of trust and equality?
• How does trust and inequality play?
• How do we as Individual bring trust to play around equality and diversity?
• How doe we as organisation bring trust to play around equality and diversity?
• Does it matter?
• What do you think?
  

Does Equality Matter?

Three approaches to inequality of Outcome and Process and Autonomy

To begin with equality itself and the basic question of whether inequality matters? It may be that to many people the question itself will appear unnecessary, so obvious is the answer to it. It is because of the take for granted quality of that shared thinking that I wanted to begin with a reminder of what lies behind that answer may be not at all widely shared outside our own circles.

For those on the radical right inequality also matters. It is the precondition for the sort of good society which the neo cons, as we have come to call them, envisage. For the true believers of the Thatcherite premiership and the Bush White House, inequalities mattered and matters a great deal. It is not a to be regretted or unavoidable by product of market mechanisms it is the spur which drives the lively and creative to succeed and which ensures that the undeserving obtain their just deserts. Without inequality, the dead hand of social engineering intervenes to hold back those who create the wealth on which the rest of us depend while, utterly uncooperatively, the state rewards and fosters the very behaviours which any civilized society would most wish to eliminate.

Thus it rewards those who fail to work with unemployment benefits, encourages the production of children outside wedlock by increasing state support as each new infant is created and excuses crime, and the violation of property in particular, by those whose way of life has placed them apart from the decent main-stream. The ‘idle, thieving bastards’ school of social analysis, as identified by Bagguley and Mann (1994), is alive and well, the best part of two decades after Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street.

Let us not forget, either, that those who support these views have answers to the problems as they describe them. Lean and very mean social support, provided as much as possible by family and charity, more orphanages for children whose parents (invariably mothers and, in the USA, almost as invariably black) cannot support them and, in the one service which the radical right guru von Hayek was keen to see the state provide, larger prisons and plenty more police officers.

There is, of course, a variation on this position, in a sort of Labour middle way.

Here inequality remains an unavoidable and inevitable by product of modern globalised, marketised economies. The good news, however, is that everyone is getting better off, and as Mr Brown has said, so long as that is true, the fact that some are getting better off faster than others is nothing too much to get worried about. The worst effects of inequality are to be mitigated, but the direction of travel, with its ever growing gap between the best and the worst off in society, is once and for all set. In contrast with the first position, poverty is an enemy which governments must attack, but the achievement of a more equal society is one which is impossible and unnecessary.

Finally there is the position adopted, I would guess, by most people reading this that inequality does matter, and that the classless ambition remains one to be pursued, even in difficult times.

The case for working, deliberately, to create more equal outcomes, processes, autonomy rather than simply more equal opportunities to become ever more unequal, has two necessary rationales the practical and the moral.

The practical case for more equal societies includes the contention that such societies are more successful economically drawing on the talents of all the citizens at a society’s disposal, rather just a section of them and socially.

More equal societies have less crime, less fear of crime and, crucially as far as concerned, enjoy better health as study by Richard Wilkinson and Michael Marmot.

Morally, the case for fairness draws on all these practical benefits but does not depend on them.

To quote the classic text of R.H. Tawney, it relies on the concept of ‘equal worth’.

Equality in this sense is absolutely not, as its critics suggest, about a dull uniformity. It is entirely consistent and supportive of diversity, but a diversity in which there is similarity of esteem including a far greater similarity of economic rewards between the duke and the dustman, the brain surgeon and the bus driver and so on. This belief in the unique worth of each human being, of course, is a fundamental building block in any worthwhile society.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?
  
  

Does Rejection Hurt?

When we look at Equality and Diversity.

A neuro imaging study examined the neural correlates of social exclusion and tested the hypothesis that the brain bases of social pain are similar to those of physical pain. Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion than during inclusion and correlated positively with self-reported distress. Right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) was active during exclusion and correlated negatively with self-reported distress. ACC changes mediated the RVPFC-distress correlation, suggesting that RVPFC regulates the distress of social exclusion by disrupting ACC activity.

So what are organisations doing about the issues of social capital and social mobility within equality and diversity issues?

• What do you thinks?
• Does it matter?

What is Identity

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. – William Shakespeare

In many parts of the world, blood is shed by people who clash over identity.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, author of ‘Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny,’ destroys two fallacies about identity: the beliefs that an individual possesses one and only one identity and that this identity is merely inherited.

Multiple Identities

All individuals possess multiple identities. It is perfectly possible to be, at the same time, a father at home, a teacher at work, an amateur musician among mates, a Sunni in the mosque, a Muslim in society and a British person abroad. The same person can be a Birmingham City fan, can enjoy fast cars and prefer Pepsi to Coke. Another person can be a Christian and similar to the former in other respects. Yet another one can simply differ in gender and in the choice of soft-drinks.

The question, of course, is which of the above classifications constitute a person’s identity and which not? Clearly, one cannot seriously imagine bonding or arguing over Pepsi and Coke for long, which is why it is not an identity. On the other hand, religion, nationality, age, disability, sexual orientation, transgender, social class and language are far more important aspects of identity. Irrespective of these, one can also find common grounds with individuals of similar wealth, occupation, interest or political opinion, which adds therefore to one’s set of identities.

To be consistent in the weight we attached to our multiple identities is a difficult task. As parents of newborn babies, two individuals may find new bonds as they share joy and misfortune. But when asked to vote in an election or apply for a job promotion, they can find that their religious or ethnic differences matter much more than their parenthood.

Some identities are durable, some are only fleeting, without due consideration to their real importance. People can find solace in their shared humanity when striken by disease and natural disasters nature’s great levellers.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter ?

Human Equality

The equality of men and women is an inbuilt aspect of human nature. There are obviously some physical differences. However, the souls of men and women are identical. This does not mean that men and women cannot have separate clubs and activities and stuff, or that organizations can not set their own rules for membership. It just means that men and women are, in fact, equal, and should be treated as such.

Diversity is another natural reality that should be reflected in our culture and our laws. Every human being is equally precious. Race and gender, age, sexual orientation, religious belief, disability, transgender, social class are really irrelevant when it comes to the value of people and the dignity and respect. It is our words and deeds that determine our value. Are we helpful and harmless in our voluntary actions, or are we causing trouble and harming people and being destructive?

As human beings we have created system at the time we thought were helpful and now realise that this has hinder our growth around the social constructed systems that we operate in.

The cultural diversity of the human race is a great strength of human civilization. We complement each other very well. All human beings love and respect each other. That is the universal law taught in every religion and reflected in the constitution of every nation.

Today, a diverse assortment of ancient and more recent civilizations are coming together into one global civilization. The United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the constitutional foundation of this of our global civilization. Cooperation and Competition can coexist at peace with one another, unity in diversity, freedom, equality and justice for all, are universal principles, declare in all nations.

We do have the capacity to improve ourselves and help others. Many people choose to remain in a barbaric condition. Selfish and materialistic. Many other people choose to improve ourselves and help others. The point is, that while we are inherently equal, we are also free to choose to improve ourselves and help others, or not.

We have instincts that we have inherited from the animal kingdom. We also have the moral values and spiritual principles revealed in the Word of God. These moral values and spiritual principles are the foundation cornerstone of human nature and civilization. The Religion of God, revealed by the Manifestation of God, is the source of the moral values and spiritual principles, which are the impulse causing human nature to evolve and human civilization to advance.

• When we look at equality and diversity like that it is simplistic.
  
• What do you think?
  
• Does it matter?

Equality of what

What does this actual mean to people and to organisation?

“Democratic system does not guarantee equality of conditions it only guarantees equality of opportunity.”

When we talk about equality how does organisation go about putting it into action?

And what does it gives us when we start asking question like equality to whom?

Where is our starting point for advantage and disadvantage of equality of opportunity?

Culture as emergence

According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, culture is not static ‘thing’ but something, which everyone is constantly creating, affirming and expressing. She writes about, "the admonitions, excuses, and moral judgements by which the people mutually coerce one another into conformity." (Douglas 1985: xxiii)

In this view culture is not imposed from outside but exposed from within; any programme on equality which attempts to change culture in a planned way is likely to miss the mark.

What steps are organisations actual doing to implement equality in all its glory?

What steps are you taking to have a foundation of the principles of fairness, cross the strands of age, race, gender, disability sexual orientation, religious belief.

• What is your starting point?
• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Is there emotional side to sectors within our society for example the Third sector, private sector and the Public sector is there a responsibility for

Business has become, in this last half-century, the most powerful institution on the planet. The dominant institution in any society needs to take responsibility for the whole.
Futurist Willis Harman (1918-1997)

A few principles that as all humans have basic emotional needs:

• Each of us has similar, but different emotional needs
• Emotional needs vary more in extent than in type
• Emotional needs vary more than physical needs
• Emotional needs are more basic and as important as "rights"

Negative feelings are indications of our unmet emotional needs

• Feelings are real and are not debatable.
• Invalidation damages self-esteem
• High self-esteem is needed for life’s pursuits, productivity, job satisfaction, and customer service
• Group harmony requires both shared need satisfaction and common respect of feelings.
• Importance of Emotions

Our bodies communicate with us and others to tell us what we need, the better our communication, the better we feel.

• Emotions help us establish our boundaries on certain subjects and our bonding and bridging.
• Emotions have the potential to unite and connect us on certain subjects.
• Emotions can serve as our inner moral and ethical compass on certain subjects.
• Emotions are essential for good decision making.
  

What doesn't feel good to us normally doesn't feel good to others. But to understand the importance of this, we must first be in touch with our own feelings.

So how do organisation assessed this human principles round equality and diversity, and what feelings are attached to equality and diversity within the organisation.

The key feelings you want your customers, clients or service users and citizens to have when engaging with your service is following with regard to fairness, values, beliefs. Is this a want to have or a need to have.

The following principles have to happen within the service provision:
Respected, Important, Remembered, Acknowledged, Satisfied, Helped, Understood. Basically the boils down to dignity and respected and choice and control and empowerment.

• What do you think?
• Doe’s it matter?

The emotional Leadership on Equality and diversity

Institutions that endure do not do so because of a single, charismatic leader, but because of a culture that fosters leadership throughout the system" - Max Weber, sociologist, 1864-1920

Three fundamental facts about human beings: exceptionality, essentiality, and equality.

Exceptionality means that all of us are exceptions to the rule. No two human beings are exactly alike.
Essentiality refers to everyone’s need to feel needed to feel essential, but not central.
Equality means that we each want to share our voices. People must feel that they have a right and a responsibility to lift up their visions of a better society.

How does it feel to realise that?

Is a great question to ask leadership whenever someone tells you about some ‘light bulb moment’ or a time when they made a real difference around Equality and diversity?

How many questions have been asked around how to truly embed Equality and Diversity within an organisation like the writing running through the middle of sea side rock? You can break it any way and get that theme running through it. That’s how Equality and Diversity should be.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?
  

Do we want equality or is equality need?

As John Donne had it ‘No man is an island’ or if you prefer an even older source, as Cain asks God ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ and the answer of all world religions is ‘yes’ – we are here to look after one another, and not to ‘walk by on the other side.’

Our Prime Minster Gordon Brown is said to be fond of quoting this piece of poetry which for me sums it all up:

“It's the hands of others that grow the food we eat, sew the clothes we wear, build the homes we inhabit It's the hands of others that tend us when we are sick and lift us up when we fall It's the hands of others that bring us into the world and lower us into the grave.”

So, if you accept that people are not necessarily born with the patterns of inequality, injustice, unfairness, prejudice, ignorance, indifference, inaction, if most people prefer to live peaceably with their neighbours, why and how did we get to a state were in society we have lost our way on Equality and becomes so are we cut off from ethos Fairness, Rights, Equality, Discrimination, Autonomy.

The reason why equality in Britain is seen to be failing by some is not because there is not enough interest in it. It is because we haven’t really tried it yet. Or understand it yet.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Managing diversity a growing challenge

MANAGEMENT of diversity and equality of opportunitiy already provides one of the greatest organisational challenges facing society if we look at the private sector, public sector, thrid sector.

And, with organisation increasingly watching the bottom line, is diversity simply a “need to have” rather than a “want to have”?

Where equal oportunties focuses largely on compliance with legislation, diversity is more about respecting and understanding differences while helping maximise potential.

The two are distinct issues, but neither can be looked at in isolation because one feeds the other.

From that standpoint, it is important to recognise that the incoming Equality Bill remains firmly on the UK Government’s agenda.

The three aspects of measurements that will include:

• Equality of Outcome
• Equality of Process
• Equality of Autonomy

For the most part, it is intended to simplify existing legislation, but will also extend the scope of certain discriminatory grounds.

For example, age will become a ground for challenge in the provision of goods and services, while the public-sector equality duties currently covering gender, race and disability, will be expanded to age, sexual orientation and religion or belief.

Though the private sector is not directly affected by the equality duties, they inevitably have a knock-on effect when private companies are involved in public-sector procurement processes. Organisations will increasingly be asked to produce evidence of their work on equality and diversity.

But the prospect of changes under the Equality Bill is not the only front on which organisations are coming under more pressure to improve their practices.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is about to place the financial services and construction sectors under the spotlight in two formal inquiries.

One will tackle alleged barriers to employment for ethnic minority employees in the construction industry and the other will concentrate on the apparently higher proportion of women working in some areas of financial services that are paid less than their male counterparts and suffer harassment at work.

Given the current downturn, the inquiries will examine whether redundancies are disproportionately affecting women and ethnic minorities.

The cost of getting it wrong, the Price of getting wrong are two different things as the emotional affect on diversity and equality of ingroance, indifference, inaction not only manifests itself in the potential for liagaition, but also in higher staff attrition rates, greater costs and more difficulties when trying to hire the best people.

On the other hand, investing the time to manage workplace diversity effectively can result in the creation of a more committed and loyal workforce, increased productivity and the provision of a better service to custormers and key stakeholders.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Political parties of all sides voices fear over BNP victory

Political party of all sides have warned that the UK's main parties are "complacent" about the British National Party, after the BNP won a local election.

Labour MP Peter Hain told the BBC that Labour's own supporters were being targeted by the far right.

He said the government needed to make sure local, rather than foreign, workers were prioritised for jobs.

A BNP leader said the recession had helped the party win because potential supporters were being hit hardest.

Mr Hain was speaking after the BNP won a seat at a by-election for Sevenoaks Council in Kent

A Labour councillor previously held the seat, in the Swanley St Mary’s ward.

BNP candidate Paul Golding received 408 votes, beating Labour's Mike Hogg by 86 votes.

Mr Golding said local young people has voted BNP because they found it "almost impossible" to get a council house. He blamed a policy that allocated council houses to "foreigners and asylum seekers".

Mr Hain said: "All political parties, but especially the Labour party, have got to prioritise the fight against the BNP.

He said there was a "real danger" of complacency in the Labour party.

"It is areas when Labour has traditionally been strong - like Swanley where the BNP has been making a great deal of headway and exploiting fears, ignorance, indifference, inaction and spreading their racist and fascist beliefs."

"We need to take them on at the grass roots level and as a government we need to be making sure that we address the fears the BNP are exploiting."

BNP deputy leader Simon Darby said the recession and people's fears about the economy were the main factor in its victory - which the party has hailed as a "significant breakthrough" in southeast England.

Foreign workers

He said: "The credit crunch - or the depression as it now is, is no longer a spectator sport and it is starting to hurt our people very hard."

Mr Darby said the party - which says it has about 100 council seats in Britain - was looking forward to the European parliament elections in June.

"We will do very nicely indeed," he predicted.

Mr Hain denied that Gordon Brown's speech in which he promised "British jobs for British workers" had helped the BNP to win.

Instead he blamed the controversy over foreign companies who brought their own workers into Britain, rather than employing local people.

He said he "did not believe" assurances that the companies were not undercutting local wages and ignoring nationally-agreed pay and conditions agreements.

Giving local people the first chance to apply for new jobs should be a "priority" Mr Hain added.

The Conservative MP for Sevenoaks, Michael Fallon, described the BNP's victory as "worrying".

“Question for society and people “

When times get hard this is the time when equality and diversity should be discussed more Not fear and indifference, Ignorance, inaction. Difference is a way of coming up with different solution for the times however we need that common shared social glue that binds us as a human race.

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?

Pause a bit and check our emotions

“Real knowledge knows the extent of one's ignorance." — Confucius

I would venture to say that many, perhaps most of us working in the areas of Equality field of around age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religious belief, or Human Rights field, Informal Logic and critical thinking like to think of the practice to which we are committed as progressive, as contributing to social betterment and intellectual advance.

We may prefer to imagine ourselves out toiling in those conceptual fields, boots immersed in the muddy waters, planting and grafting as well as pruning and weeding, and perhaps even harvesting a crop from time to time. I suspect that most of us, whatever our political stripe, would resist the idea that we are confined by the very nature of our disciplinary practice, to simply uphold and perhaps rearrange the status quo, either intellectually or politically.

My view of the matter, for what it is worth, is that there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of Equality process. My view may be expressed by saying that every discovery around equality contains ‘an unfounded element’, or ‘a creative insight in the process.

As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once put it: "The paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling."

·       What do you find inconsistent in your life and the activities around Equality issues?

·       What paradoxes can you share?

·       What do you think?

·       Does it matter?

Metaphors to describe what your organisation does around equality?

I love metaphors! When they're fresh, they ignite our imaginations and stimulate our creativity. One exercise we do with our workshop participants is having them make metaphors for their organisation around equality and diversity and human rights. I've found that the metaphors this exercise produces give me a lot of insight into the nature and morale of each organisation around ethos’s around equality. 

They also provide me with a pretty good sense of how well that organisation will do in the near term. Here are a few of them. You might even be able to guess their names. As you read along, ask yourself, "What's a good metaphor for my organisation to describe equality?"

• Our organisation when it looks at Equality it is like a super tanker. It's large and powerful, but moves slowly. Also, once the course is set, it's tough to change.
  
• Our organisation is like a winery on equality. We have different products and some vintages are better than others. We also have two kinds of users: on the one hand we have connoisseurs who greatly appreciate what we've done; on the other hand, there are "Ripple drinkers" who take our software and manipulate to their own ends.
  
• Our organisation on equality is like the sun shedding light on the computer world.
  
• Working within our organisation on equality is like a nightmare. You'd like to get out of it but you need the sleep.
  
• Our organisation on equality is like a galley ship without a drummer. We've got some people rowing at full beat, some at one-half beat, some at one-quarter beat, and some dead beats. Also, the captain is steering by the wake.
  
• Working here on equality is like urinating in a dark suit. It's warm and it feels good, but it doesn't show.
  
• Our organisation on equality is like a maze looking for a mouse.
  
• Our organisation on equality is like a giant human body. Administration is the guts. Sales and marketing are the mouth. Corporate management is the mind making decisions. Human Resource is the reproductive system. And the secretaries and technicians are the skeleton that supports the body.
  

Here's a challenge to you: What is your organisation like when you describe the work there do around equality? 

What metaphors would you use to describe your organisation? By all means, please share!

• What do you think?
• Does it matter?