With A Lever - Six Steps to Institutional Change - Step One (Part 3/9)

A DIY Guide to Institutional Change for Racial Equity

​Step 1 - Evaluate starting conditions
To change an institution, you must understand it. It's hard to plan for something different without knowing how the institution currently functions. Let's talk about the necessary information and how to get it.

1 - A. Decide whether the institution is worth saving. 
It won't always be. Sometimes the only way for an institution to be truly anti-racist is for it to cease to exist.

As a corollary, is there critical mass? While a big part of the work of creating institutional change is convincing people of the necessity for change, protect yourself by honestly evaluating whether there are enough people to share responsibility.

2 - B. Understand the power structure. 
This is more involved than finding the org chart or reading the official bylaws. Always be aware of the important difference between formal authority and actual authority. The person signing checks may not decide what amount goes on the line. Misunderstanding who holds power (and therefore who can enact change), risks misdirecting energy. The person who announces a policy change may not be the one who has control over it. Organizations tend to scapegoat its least powerful members. It is far easier for an institution to punish the person implementing policies than to restructure itself or for leadership to examine their own culpability. For instance, consider a case in which a group of workers bring attention to racially coded HR policies. Institutional leadership might respond by firing or otherwise sanctioning the HR department even though the policies originated higher in the organizational structure and reflect deeper structural issues. Some tips:

• Diagram the power dynamics as you discover them. Visualization is a powerful tool.
  • Guide to mapping your workplace
  • Power mapping
• Pay attention to who sets agendas and who has the power to deviate from them.
• Notice who makes decisions but also note who places people into position to make those decisions. For instance, picking the members of a committee is just as powerful as sitting on the committee.
• Veto power or its equivalent has a deterrent effect. People will go out of their way to avoid being told “no” so don’t ignore someone's veto authority just because they don't seem to use it.
• Consider if authority at a given institution comes from formal powers or from informal channels. Personal relationships are a good example of the latter. People who have been at an institution for a long time may have personal connections that circumvent regular decision-making channels. This might give them more power to influence events, to block change or accelerate it, than would be apparent from their official title or position within the institution.
• Keep an eye out for dysfunction, which is often a feature of the system rather than a flaw. If a practice or policy  makes no sense, it's probably working well for someone. Figure out who. For instance, consider a situation where work assignments are handed out haphazardly, resulting in unequal workload. It may be that the haphazardness hides patterns in who receives larger workloads. Or perhaps the person or group who manages the assignment system gains some benefit through an inefficient system. In any case, remember that dysfunction creates chokepoints and people derive power from controlling them.

1- C. Develop a clear problem statement. 
Having a clear problem statement is important for convincing others and for organizing advocacy. The solution becomes easier to imagine if the problem is stated clearly. Of course, the root cause of racial inequity is racism. But it is good to have a problem statement specific to the organization. This will help guide decision making on what changes to push for. Specificity can also help convince people to join the effort. Even if someone is not committed to the project of racial equity, a good problem statement should still ring true. The work you did to understand the power structure should be helpful. In almost all occasions, you'll find mal-distribution of power is part of the problem.

Take, as an example, an organization doing a poor job recruiting people of color. After examining how the organization recruits, the problem statement might be something like, "We fail to hire candidates of color because our informal recruitment procedures prioritize pre-existing networks that exclude underrepresented populations." This is a simplified example but notice how the problem statement suggests a solution. Though problem statements shouldn't necessarily be tailored to engage this population, note that even people who are not primarily interested in racial equity might agree that an informal recruitment process based on pre-existing networks is exclusionary. One note of caution is that multiple problem statements may be needed. In this case, though the recruitment process is the most direct cause, perhaps it has remained informal despite past opposition due to deeper flaws, such as a leadership team that ignores feedback, particularly from people of color.

1 - D. Strategies for understanding your institution:

• Talk to senior members of the organization. They can help identify power structures and help refine your goals. But be careful of self-selection. A long tenure at an institution often involves becoming desensitized to its flaws. Trust their knowledge but perhaps not their instincts. Take their opinion about how to create change with a grain of salt. The fact that change remains necessary is in part because their attempts failed, even if through no fault of their own.
• Talk to new members of the institution. They have a fresh perspective and can help identify areas of dysfunction. New members are a mirror to senior people. They may not have specific knowledge about a given organization, they probably have good instincts about what is strange or incongruent with past experiences.
• Seek out those with the least power and listen to them. The burdens of inequity fall most heavily upon those at the bottom of a hierarchy, which means anyone with little to no authority probably has a good guess where the problems lie. This probably means talking to the people who are paid least but don’t overlook interns, temp workers, etc. If you are not part of these groups, make sure to invite them to be partners rather than reproducing existing hierarchies. Also be sensitive to the fact that they may not feel able to speak freely.
• Compare the institution with its analogues. Take a look at how similar institutions are organized. What do they do differently, and why? Sometimes it will be an accident of circumstance, but it could also reveal something important about how an institution functions.
  • For example, an institution may promote internally by seniority whereas its analogues promote internally based on a review process. Without more details about how each method is carried out, it is impossible to say which is more equitable. The point is that identifying these disparate promotion procedures offers a focus for further research in understanding how an organization functions. In this case, it would be worth exploring when the institution implemented promotion by seniority, whether this has any influence on the length of individual’s tenure, whether members of underrepresented groups stay long enough to be promoted.
• Find the bylaws, formal procedures, employee handbooks, anything that is written down. Be careful not to take these documents at face value. In fact, when reading through these documents, pay close attention to which aspects are surprising, which procedures are ignored because this can reveal who has the authority to make changes.

Part 2

Part 4