In Monday’s post, I reflected about the ASAE Annual Meeting and how some of the sub-communities seemed to be operating in separate circles. My underlying concern in that post is that we’re eliminating a critical component in our broader community by staying separate like that: diversity. And as the following quote indicates (p. 192 in Humanize, in How to Be Generative), diversity is a huge part of innovation:
To be generative, then, requires innovation, and innovation is fueled by difference. That is why generative organizations have cultures of inclusion. They walk the walk of an inclusive culture by building a strong infrastructure to support difference in the organization. They talk the talk of inclusion by making difference visible. And they embrace a key set of paradoxes in their underlying thinking and assumptions about inclusion.