Charities are started because people want to do things differently. They want to change the status quo and challenge the orthodoxy. This is true for so many well-known charities and social movements.
Oxfam began because a group of people in Oxford wanted to help Greeks suffering from the Allied blockade during the Second World War. Dame Cicely Saunders founded the hospice movement because she wanted to change the inhuman way in which people with terminal diseases were left to die. Extinction Rebellion was started because people decided they’d had enough of society’s approach to tackling the climate crisis. Charities do things differently.
As a teenager I read a science fiction story. 200 years from now humans discovered that arithmetic wasn’t just done in calculators or computers. It could be done in people’s heads. Mental arithmetic was possible. The charity sector feels a little like that. The drive for equity, diversity and inclusion feels new, when it should be the writing in the stick of rock that runs throughout everything.
So where did it all go wrong? How did a sector that is founded on being diverse need to rediscover diversity? I think there are (at least) three reasons.
1. A human tendency to orthodoxy
There is something innate in human nature to tend towards orthodoxy, to say there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. Many religions are based on common approaches to services of worship, much of our education system is based on people learning things the same way, and many people’s upbringing by their parents instils in them a sense of a common set of values.
Many of these commonly held values are a good thing. We don’t want every generation to have to discover again that violence is bad and neighbourliness is good.
The danger is that it means organisations and individuals are often encouraged not to try and do things differently.
2. Failing to see diversity of approach and demographic diversity are two sides of the same coin
One of the ironies in the charity sector’s failure to diversify its people is this: the very same organisations that are poor at human diversity claim to want to innovate, to be good at trailblazing and breaking the mould. Yet the two are inextricably interlinked. Charities do things differently: but charities are made up of people who want to be good at doing things differently.
A diversity of ideas comes from people with a diversity of experience, upbringing, culture, and views on the world. I remember being told about an overseas development charity having a suggestion scheme but only for senior staff. They also talked about how important diversity was to it. What on earth is the point of wanting a diverse staff team, and then not listening to their ideas?
3. The growth of professionalisation in charities
The growth of professionalisation in charities is a good thing in my view. It has made charities better run and more effective. A side-effect of that professionalisation is that there is a growing tendency to say there is ‘a right way’ to do things. In addition, charities have often mistaken processes for outcomes. Over the years I have seen many charities proudly claim to have ‘equal opportunities’ schemes, while never appearing to worry that they remained a hideously homogeneous organisation.
Having an equal opportunities scheme seemed to be a substitute for actually being a diverse organisation. All these professionalising processes can lead to an organisation that is more streamlined. However, group-think is unhelpful for any kind of diversity. Anybody who read Tom Peters’ excellent books in the 80s and 90s will recall how even commercial organisations need to do something radically different to get their organisations to come up with new ideas.
In the second part of this blog I look at the implications of this tendency to homogeneity for charity governance. Charities need to let ‘a hundred flowers bloom’, and become institutionally diverse.
This blog was originally published in Governance & Leadership magazine.
