History of the NW Diversity Learning Series
The Northwest Diversity Learning Series is beginning its 10th annual year!
This bimonthly morning seminar series has become a popular diversity education resource in the Seattle area. Every other month, managers and employees from many companies and organizations come together for a 3.5-hour session to learn about diversity and inclusion in the organizational environment. Each annual Series focuses on a theme; the six sessions during the year explore the theme.
All the past themes of the NW Diversity Learning Series:
- First year: Foundations of Diversity Work in Organizations
- Second year: Developing Intercultural Communication Skills
- Third year: Resolving Diversity Conflicts
- Fourth Year: Dialogue on Diversity
- Fifth Year: Becoming Diversity Champions
- Sixth Year: Personal Accountability for Diversity in a Team Context
- Seventh Year: Architects of inclusion: Designing the Blueprint for Competitive Advantage
- Eighth Year: Navigating Organizational Opportunities as if They Were a Subway System
- Ninth Year: Life Theater About Inclusion and Engagement: Challenging and Expanding My Diversity Competency: Moving Beyond My Comfort Zone
- Tenth Year: Igniting Sparks of Opportunity: Leveraging the Tensions of Diversity
First Year
Progressive Northwest employers decided in early 1998 to collaborate and sponsor a two-year Diversity Learning Series in the Seattle area. The goal was to leverage diversity education inside their organizations. With the help of the Series' organizers, Cultural Diversity at Work, a journal published by The GilDeane Group, Inc., in Seattle, and The Diversity Difference, a local consulting and research firm, the first year's seminar series (1999) was launched. The first Series focused on the Foundations of Diversity Work in Organizations, some of basic components of a diversity initiative.
Second Year
The second year of the Series (2000) focused on developing intercultural skills and how they applied to coaching and giving feedback, resolving conflicts, leading and leveraging multicultural teams, and serving diverse customers and clients.
Third Year
The third year of the Series (2001) emphasized resolving diversity conflicts; each session tackled the conflicts associated with a specific diversity topic: the generation gap, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, white male culture, and language and cultural differences.
Fourth Year
For the fourth year (2002), the sponsoring employers decided to continue the communication focus of the third year. Instead of focusing on conflict, however, the fourth year focused on dialogue. The series began by exploring value differences and the rest of the sessions focused on dialogue related to specific diversity dimensions or issues: religious differences, sexual orientation, people with disabilities, white privilege and racism.
Fifth Year
The Fifth Annual Series (2003) explored how change occurs and the facilitators of organizational change, the Diversity Champions. The theme of change was built around a "flight" metaphor to symbolize the journey a Diversity Champion and the organization undertake. Transforming organizational culture for effective performance in the 21st century is not easy, but a Diversity Champion who is prepared and capable has a better chance of accomplishing it. The topics were: assessing the organizational change agent, the role of a diversity champion, coaching and partnering to improve diversity performance, navigating resistance and difficulties and how to find continual inspiration for leading change.
Sixth Year
The theme for the Sixth Annual NW Diversity Learning Series (2004) was personal accountability for diversity and inclusion in a team context. The title of this Series, Shifting performance into high gear: Accelerating team effectiveness with personal accountability for diversity and inclusion, relied on the metaphor of auto racing. Experts study auto racing because of its ability to deliver high performance teams.
The goal for the 2004 Series was to enhance team performance by ensuring that team members knew how to create inclusive climates and unleash the talent of their diverse teams! The topics included: new types of team work, on boarding new team members, partnering across differences, making decisions and solving problems, making the most of conflicts and disagreements, and unleashing innovation and creativity.
Seventh Year
The title of the Seventh NW Diversity Learning Series (2005) was Architects of inclusion: Designing the Blueprint for Competitive Advantage.
The premise of this Series was that diversity and inclusion contribute to organizational effectiveness and hence, competitive advantage. Using the metaphor of architecture helped us understand that inclusion has to be consciously built. The "blueprint" for our inclusion design addressed the following: How organizations and people change, how to include diverse styles (direct and indirect); how to counter micro-inequities, how to build the capacity of all employees so everyone contributes; how to build relationships across differences, and how to infuse innovation into customer satisfaction.
Eighth Year
The title of the Eighth NW Diversity Learning Series (2006) was Building capacity: Navigating organizational opportunities as if they were a subway system.
We believed employees would find many comparisons between the metaphor of a subway system and their organization's system of opportunities. They know the system is there, it's just hard to find! The goal of this Series was to help both managers and employees figure out what keeps an organization's system of developmental opportunities hidden, then find ways to open it up so that valuable talent is retained, and not wasted or lost. Retaining talent, today, is critical to sustaining competitive advantage.
Ninth Year
The title of the ninth NW Diversity Learning Series (2007) was, Life Theater About Inclusion and Engagement: Challenging and Expanding My Diversity Competency: Moving Beyond My Comfort Zone. This Series played with the metaphor of "live theater" to explore comfort and challenge involved in its six topics. The first session explored what gets in the way of inclusion; each of the succeeding five sessions focused on comfort and challenge involved in the inclusion and engagement of five population groups: people with disabilities, people of different socio-economic class levels, people who are transgender and/or bisexual, people with body modifications and women of color. Some say the theater is all about Inclusion and Engagement!
Tenth Year
The title of the 2008 Series is, Igniting Sparks of Opportunity: Leveraging the Tensions of Diversity. This Series will explore six areas of tension in the workplace that, through knowledge and dialogue skills, may be turned into opportunities. Throughout each of the sessions, we will focus on how the issue has reached the point it is now, and where the opportunities exist from there. If we can transform some of the most strident diversity tensions we face in our organizations and our society through more constructive dialogue, then we have a better chance of igniting "sparks" of opportunity, creativity and innovative thinking that both our organizations and employees strive for!
