Equitable Innovation: What It Is and What It Takes to Achieve It
At Tidal Equality, innovation isn’t just about creating something new—it’s about making meaningful changes to existing work, processes, and decision-making to ensure they are fairer, more inclusive, and equitable. This broader view of innovation prioritizes reducing bias, barriers, and inequalities to promote fairness and equal opportunity for all. But while the concept of equitable innovation is gaining attention, few organizations have a scalable method for achieving it. That's where the Equity Sequence® comes in—a practical framework designed to guide individuals and organizations in turning equitable ideas into actionable, lasting change.
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Overcoming DEI Backlash in Higher Education: How equitable innovation promises you continued impact
Colleges and universities across the U.S. are facing new challenges with the rise of anti-DEI legislation. Entire DEI offices are shutting down, and staff are being let go. But there’s hope. 🌟
At Tidal Equality, we champion ‘equitable innovation’—a strategy to ensure fairness and inclusion despite these setbacks. Equitable innovation involves making decisions that address unmet needs, reduce bias, and break down barriers.
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Alzheimer’s Society Case Study: Making Equitable Process Innovations, Inside and Out
Alzheimer’s Society, a UK charity, underwent transformative changes to enhance racial and ethnic inclusion. Fueled by Equity Sequence® training and prompted by global events like the George Floyd protests, the organization adapted its outreach processes and internal hiring strategies. Recognizing disparities in dementia-related services, they embraced innovative approaches, seeking feedback, and fostering inclusivity. This case study showcases their commitment to dismantling barriers, internally and externally, ultimately working towards a more equitable and accessible future for individuals affected by dementia.
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Advancing Equity and Inclusion for Students
Read about the impactful journey of the Mohawk Students’ Association (MSA) as they champion equity and inclusion within Mohawk College and nationwide. From their roots in unifying student activities, MSA has become a leader, fostering a sense of belonging for students. Guided by their core values, MSA embraced Equity Sequence®, driving initiatives like establishing a living wage and creating inclusive spaces. The MSA's story resonates as a testament to the transformative potential of equity and inclusion.
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Amplifying Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Los Angeles Zoo
Jess’s case study shows how Equity Sequence®, has the potential to take examples of this kind; of concrete change-making—and multiply them to an exponential degree, toward L.A. City’s goal of “bringing people together—across neighborhoods, ethnicities, generations and ages—to be part of the solution” to the City’s challenges, big and small.
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Beyond Rhetoric: Civil Servants Pilot Equitable Innovation at the City of L.A.
For Tanya, Equity Sequence® is unlocking a puzzle she's sometimes faced in her equity work:
How do you equip people with tool(s) to advance equity, while letting them lead as experts in their field? How do you truly empower others? How do you let them design their own equity interventions, without somehow taking over the reins?
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Why Ensuring Inclusive Healthcare Matters and How Equity Sequence® Can Help
Inclusive healthcare starts with an awareness that you can’t unsee inequities tied to healthcare once you know about them.
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Sizing up achievement even when it feels like a drop in the ocean: a climate equity example
Just how the balance of power gets tipped can feel like a mysterious thing, even though there are some consistent statistical patterns behind this…
Power and entrenchment of status quo interests can be intractable… until they’re not…
Change seems to stall and stall and stall until suddenly the floodgates open, often to the surprise of everyone…
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Next-level diversity-washing: whose agenda is your organization really advancing?
To democracy and social justice watchers, observing this business-as-usual behavior is like watching corporate giants sleepwalk toward the edge of a cliff, dragging with them our hopes for more a democratic, inclusive society—and for more democratic, inclusive organizations—tethered as we all are to their outsized power and influence.
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At its root, DEI work is, or should be, in my view, a moral endeavor. Its aim should be to nudge, cajole, demand, sometimes even shame an organization into acting on the basis of moral instead of business imperatives. But insofar as business is about making money, generating profit, and maximizing gain—essentially selfish endeavors—its deepest motivation is not to act morally or care about moral choices.
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From Bedtime Chats to Business Strategy: How One Leader Is Fuelling Equitable Change
“Of all the things I’ve seen,” Jeff said, “Equity Sequence™ is the most effective way of asking a group of leaders who aren’t truly representative or reflective of the customer base to try and make decisions that are.”
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Jeff Dodds, Chief Operating Officer at Virgin Media is making it his mission to accelerate equitable change with a seismic push.
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Metrics, benchmarking, and indexing, oh my!
So what will all of our questions actually give us? Beautiful graphics and visuals representing analytics that are “hit-and-miss” and rife with bias themselves? “Hit-and-miss” like the effectiveness of so many “gold standard” D&I interventions - namely, unconscious bias training, among others?
How can we prevent metrics, benchmarking, and indexing from becoming the new tick-box risk-mitigation exercise - part of the window-dressing of “woke” organizations?
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The Disability Community: organizing for voice, rights, equity and inclusion
At the end of the day, regardless of the word(s) we use to identify ourselves or the diversity of our experiences as disabled people, we need solidarity and intersectionality in a broader collective pursuit of equality hand-in-hand with others engaged in the same pursuit - women, people of colour, Indigenous folks, immigrants, the elderly, the LGBTQ community, and so on. What we’re all after is an equal opportunity to reach our full potential.
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Reckoning with inequality in the context of “diversity, inclusion & belonging”
We owe it to the world we’re designing, whether we know it or not, to finally confront the fact that the vast majority of our organizations and institutions have inequality baked in.
Inequality in the NDA.
Black folks know this. Other marginalized and underrepresented groups know this.
It f*cking sucks.
And it is the motherlode of opportunities for reform, for (r)evolution, for re-design, for co-creation.
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Stop making 'the business case' for equity, diversity and inclusion
So, if all it took was the business case. If leaders make their decisions based on ROI and fiduciary responsibility and market value and all the rest of it, why isn’t John the CEO and all the other “John-the-CEOs” pound their fist on the table and declare: “If we don’t have 50/50 gender representation across the ranks of our organization… if we don’t hire and promote all people - regardless of race, gender, etc. - at equal rates… if we don’t create a culture of anti-sexism, anti-racism and so-on… Then people at this company don’t have an equal opportunity to succeed and achieve their full potential. Then - godammit - neither can this company! And that’s not okay!”
Why don’t they?
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Ella's Lesson: Designing for All Human Potential
We just turned off the switch at some point, because the societal lens skewed and it’s brought us to a point of looking at things upside down.
Yes, humans are complex – neurobiologically we are an amazing species, and we still don’t know everything about what our hugely diverse bodies and brains can do.
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Thinking About Giving Female Founders Advice? Think Again!
The problem is, female founders are sick and tired. They’re tired of the paternalistic pat-on-the-head, and they’ve become numb to hearing bullshit advice OVER AND OVER AND OVER again.
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Women are Missing in Leadership - Women's Confidence is Not to Blame
We will only see (r)evolution in the world of work, in our communities, in our institutions, when we give ourselves the freedom to imagine new models - new business models, new economic models, new funding models, new leadership models - and stop reinforcing systems, hierarchies, policies, and programs that reinforce the status quo.
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The Status Quo is Costing You
Organizations cannot afford to leave their gender pay gap unchecked. If checks and balances are not in place to ensure employees are being compensated fairly, organizations may face the steep costs of litigation and negative brand exposure.
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