Article
The stories in our photos
Using photography to better understand diversity at Busara
By Amy Shipow and Linda Kimaru
In an attempt to baffle his enemies, a hare was once told to have woven himself a coat that had two perfect halves, one dyed perfectly red and the other blue. He then walked right between the jackal and the hyena, such that each only saw one side of the coat. The jackal turned to the hyena and said “once we catch that hare, I’m going to take that lovely red coat all for myself.” The hyena responded “you can have the coat — but only if you admit its blue.” In this way the quarrel escalated, distracting each from pursuing the hare, who quickly made it to his destination unharmed.
Perspective is a funny thing. Depending on your upbringing and how you see the world, the same situation could have thousands of interpretations. This is why diversity in the workplace is not just difficult to implement, it is difficult to talk about.
So where should anyone begin?
At Busara, we are keen to continually keep issues of inclusivity at the fore, and town halls and employee services were just not giving us the data we needed to get it right. So we decided to do some qualitative research to get to the bottom of what “diversity and inclusion” means to people, and how it is experienced at Busara.
The question itself was deceptively simple — how do we create an environment where people can be included, represented and enabled to thrive at work? We planned to go about this by addressing two things, namely:
- Create a safe space and moments of honesty for staff to highlight and thoughtfully discuss the issues around diversity and inclusion
- Begin to address structural issues that are proving to be barriers in making our organization more sensitive to diversity and inclusion
In an attempt to show different colors of our coat, rather than just a singular view, we turned to Photovoice. As part of Participatory Action Research, Photovoice is a methodology that uses photography as an elicitation tool for engaging communities in identifying concerns and potential targets for change. We used two concurrent focus groups — one where people volunteered and one where we randomly selected participants within divisions — to see if they independently arrived at the same conclusions. Over three weeks, they each covered topics and took pictures on hiring and promotions, team communications, and authenticity.
Perspective is a funny thing. Depending on your upbringing and how you see the world, the same situation could have thousands of interpretations.
Here are some lessons we learned while using this process to understand diversity and inclusion:
1. Pictures are a great starting point for a discussion but avoid getting lost in the metaphor
When we initially asked “How do you think Busara works between and within departments?,” we never anticipated getting pictures of a Scrabble board or a bowl of fruit salad. Such metaphors made topics easier to talk about it, and allowed people the time to feel comfortable discussing their personal experiences in a safe way. However, we noticed two shortcomings with this approach:
I. Sometimes the conversations went too far down an obscure visual. For example, people became tethered to the analogy and struggled to talk about aspects of diversity that did not relate to the fruit salad, or they got a bit too literal as evidenced by comments like: “pineapple is just a few days or months older than the apple or different types of pineapple — at the end, it tastes good.”
II. The metaphors gave more weight to the idea that diversity is difficult to talk about, even when we were trying to normalize these conversations. It’s easy to say something about diversity like “[When you] put people from different backgrounds on the same team, suggestions are richer. Just like the salad of fruit, we are a mix of many things.” However, this only speaks to the idea of diversity — which is easily seen as important. Only after frequent probing and more regular sessions did people actually set the metaphor aside and talk about what was happening in their daily lives.
2. Balance being a participant and a facilitator
Each of our focus groups had facilitators and notetakers who were also Busara employees — making it impossible to be purely objective. So, we decided to leverage and lean into this dynamic. When participants were hesitant to respond, we shared a personal anecdote to open the floor.
If people were concerned about offending a facilitator, the facilitator would offer to either leave the room without judgment, but also would acknowledge their own positionality to diffuse awkwardness. Just stating that we understood where our colleagues were coming from, having experienced and perpetuated norms ourselves, helped foster empathy.
3. Using jargon contributes to impostor syndrome
During our focus groups, our colleagues shared that the language we use in our organizational meetings can be very jargon heavy. This often made people feel uncomfortable to join in as they might have felt exposed about being unable to engage or understand the conversation. One of our personal “ah-ha” moments was that even during these focus groups, we as facilitators fell into this eloquence trap. Once this was pointed out, we changed our language for the next focus group to be more informal. Almost immediately, we felt the atmosphere shift — more people spoke up — and they sounded more at ease. This showed us that not only what we say, but how we say it, sets the tone.
4. Everyone has different understandings of diversity, and all of these definitions are valid and relevant
Just like the two sided coat, everyone sees diversity differently., We arrived at definitions of diversity through our photographic prompts, which clearly showed that diversity has more than two sides. It encapsulates nationality, age, gender, ethnicity (religion tribe and castes), parenthood, location of education and mental health — that’s a large number of colors and infinite standpoints.
Photovoice was really useful in illustrating that a nuanced definition of diversity was at the forefront of our staff’s minds. The vast differences in how everyone saw diversity were clearly articulated by the wide array of photos we had. For example, our fruit salad photographer explained that just as each piece of fruit serves a different role, the different divisions within Busara each have a unique function in the organization’s cohesion. One participant related the ripened fruit to older Busarian’s who share their matured emotional intelligence with others. Another considered the hidden costs to sourcing and creating the fruit salad. The participant compared this effort to management’s strides — that perhaps the whole organization is not yet aware of- in addressing diversity-related issues.
“Normally these fruits are incorporated when they are super ripe. I don’t like them when they are alone, but when they are mixed, it is more palatable. That is the message of diversity.” We at Busara thrive as the sum of our individual parts.
The overconfident hare, now completely sure of himself, took the same route back. As soon as he had passed between the two animals the Jackal turned to the Hyena and said “I apologise, the coat is definitely blue.” The hyena was puzzled, for he had seen that the coat was actually red. It only took a few moments for the two to realize that the hare had tricked them, chase him down and have a delightful dinner, each wearing one half of a splendid coat! Similarly, participatory methods — hearing different people’s points of view — allows us to hear a more complete story behind a picture, enabling us to tackle the full problem, and not what just meets the eye.
Ultimately, we could not have arrived at these conclusions and definitions of diversity without the photographic prompts. Photovoice catalyzed a visual into how people conceive and experience their world, fostering a deeper empathy than a standard focus group discussion.
At Busara, we are beginning to pilot an online Photovoice tool that will walk researchers through how to adapt this method for remote research. Just as our research styles will shift in this period, so too will our perceptions and experiences of inclusivity. We are committed to continuing our understanding of and response to organizational diversity during COVID-19. If you are interested in keeping the conversation going, or sharing a picture about what diversity means to you during COVID-19, leave us a comment below.
