We're a full stack inclusion agency - here’s what that means
If you’ve checked out the QuakeLab website, you’ve probably noticed the term ‘full stack inclusion agency’.
Totally fair if you’ve thought, “that doesn’t sound like a real thing!”
Traditionally, the term ‘full stack’ is used in tech to describe developers who are able to build for both the front end and the back end. Marketing and communications agencies also use the term to describe the ability to provide a wide range of services from social media content to branding and designing.
But we are neither a marketing or tech agency, so -- what does it mean for us?
We thought we’d break it down a little!
When QuakeLab was formed, it was a struggle to find the language that described our approach and method. We essentially wanted to articulate four key ideas:
DEI is about more than HR. If you only focus on HR (which, in practice, is often limited specifically to recruitment), you're tackling just one small aspect of an organization-wide challenge. We don’t just assess and tackle “diversity” challenges that live in your Human Resources functions, but help you find real ways to tackle inequity and exclusion in your finance department, communications and marketing, programs and projects, client relations, curriculum design, investing, and so much more.
DEI work cannot just be ‘front end’ work. The kinds of interventions and activities organizations lean on when entering this work focuses on the front end. This usually includes reputation building, branding, meeting legal requirements, and ensuring their team looks diverse. We wanted to put an emphasis on the importance of the ‘back end’ work, which is essentially the nuts and bolts of who you really are as an organization and how that hurts your stakeholders, or gives them room to thrive. This is what makes our approach so different! We work on assessing, and rebuilding the very structure of your organization. And that gives you space to educate, build knowledge and explore topics of race, discrimination, privilege, etc. with your team.This happens after an environment has been built where being equitable and inclusive isn’t an option and your knowledge about diversity and inclusion is a personal journey, not an institutional one.
Structural change requires cross-functional thinking. We know that the DEI challenges are structural, and therefore require structural solutions. There is no way we can address each critical part of an organization with just DEI expertise -- especially using traditional methods of doing this work. So we intentionally work with folks who have functional expertise from a range of different areas! We’ve brought on lawyers, finance folks, strategy folks, comms folks etc.
To do it right, we need to be agile. We apply a design thinking lens that allows us to truly understand our challenges, continuously dig deeper and adjust our approach based on what we learn. It’s a process that spans an entire value chain from assessment and research, to ideating and prototyping, and iterating on what we create.
It would be disingenuous to describe it as anything but full stack!
So, why does this matter?
As an agency, we are working to support organizations to move through a process that dismantles and redesigns traditional ways of working.
But on a larger scale, what we are also trying to do is change the culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion that demands we continue to work and live in the structures and systems that we know are inherently inequitable. We are working to give folks the space, tools, and permission to assess the ways we build our organization - and then shake things up (QUAKELab, get it :)).
These three key pieces are how we try to make this happen:
1. Asses, use data, analyze
As a hard and fast rule, we always start our engagements by figuring out where an organization is at. This means assessing every part of the organization. From their mission and vision, to their financial processes. We work to get a sense of who is being served, who is not being served, and who is being actively disenfranchised.
We use general research about equity-deserving groups and how they navigate the world and their work spaces to understand where an organization is at.
These two bodies of information help us get a clear picture of an organization and where their inclusion challenges actually lives.
So often, we see organizations commit to blanket statements like “be more inclusive”, “be diverse” without any clear understanding about:
what the challenge is,
where it lives and thrives,
and who is most affected.
This process of assessing the organization, collecting primary and secondary data, and analyzing everything helps us understand those three questions.
2. Build back better
Knowing your problem is just half the battle, you’ve got to actually address it to go all the way! Once we are able to name the inclusion challenges in an organization, we spend a painstaking amount of time becoming as intimately familiar with it as possible with it. We work to understand exactly why it exists so that we can better figure out how to design for it.
Once we have what we need, we get into a process of collaborating to design some prototypes. We hesitate to call them solutions because we know that inclusion and equity challenges hundreds of years in the making cannot be solved by one design process. What we work to do is create an answer to the current iteration of the challenge, understanding that things may change and evolve in time. This leaves room for iteration, as well as space to be flexible and adapt to new information and feedback.
We use design thinking frameworks to create environments that are conducive for brainstorming and rapid problem solving. We do know, however, that design thinking is not perfect and has some serious pitfalls for folks who work and think differently.
3. Are we thriving yet?
No party is really over until the clean up is completed. Building systems and processes for ownership, iteration, and measurement are our clean-ups.
A sorely overlooked aspect of this work is a system by which you hold specific folks accountable for making change happen, give them the resources they need to make it happen, and the metrics to help communicate what's going well and what needs a little more help. These three key pieces should always make up the final stage of this process.
It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Go back to your initial challenge and think about what you have committed to doing. In the simplest words, how are you going to know if you’ve done the thing? Is it a number or percentage you meet? Is it the feedback from your team? Whatever it is, figure it out, write it down, and stick to it.
Stick with us, next in the QuakeLab method series, we'll be talking about "tough conversation", or as we call them: trauma mining.