In Organizations

dr. prabhdeep kehal reflects on lessons from the HEAL project for organizational change.

How can a focus on practices, pedagogy, and anti-racism influence the implementation of organizational change work?

A focus on practices, pedagogy, and anti-racism in organizational change initiatives brings heightened attention to materially accounting for lived experiences andrecognizing any organizational change is political.

Materially Accounting for Lived Experience

An explicit focus in organizational change work can mean that the following elements are critical to success. Lacking their presence, change efforts associated with anti-racist organizational change can result in failures, struggles, and/or harms.

  • Communication efforts require intentional investment as a key aspect of anti-racist work.
  • Intentional outlets, channels, and/or positions must exist that focus on team members' differing developmental needs that occur while designing and implementing anti-racist organizational change work. 
  • There must be greater discussion and clarity among team members working together around boundaries for relational work. 
  • Organizational change initiatives must proactively address the structural barriers to success and create/enhance on-ramps for success. 

Recognizing Any Organizational Change is Political

An explicit focus in organizational change work highlights that keeping an environment as is (status quo) is as political of a decision as changing an environment into something else. This can be clearer when we understand politics as about creating societies and not only electoral partisanship.

  • Organizational change work must have intentional plans around addressing any incidental consequences (unintentional or intentional) because this work results in different types of successes and failures. 
  • Organizational change initiatives must have a dynamic orientation to change, by balancing a level of intentionality to lead efforts with an awareness of different types of constraints occurring at different organizational levels.

What lessons about organizational change and anti-racism can be learned when implementing an anti-racist change project? 

Implementing anti-racist approaches brings heightened organizational considerations, relationship building with community partners, taking account of incidental consequences arising from implementation, and rewarding and recognizing the details of implementation.

Organizational considerations (college, university, funding agencies)

  • Create a preparatory period for relationship-building for grants.
    • Create a preparation period that is not narrowly defined to one grant or foundation cycle and enables interdisciplinary collaborations to form before calls are announced.
  • Prioritize transparency of organizational processes and practices, as early as possible.
    • Campus bureaucracy must be navigated, but when working with community partners, campus-affiliated individuals should not put the burden of the bureaucracy on the community partners.

Relationship building with community partners

  • Form a communication strategy. 
    • Create a communication strategy for the anti-racist project that addresses internal and external partners and team members.
  • Explicitly define the terms of a community partnership. 
    • Clarify what type of partnership the anti-racist project team is making with community-based organizations and (on- or off-campus) groups.
  • Accounting for existing social and material relations in partnerships. 
    • These relations are important for any collaborative work, and working with some organizations and not others within a confined geographical context has additional implications for an anti-racist project because the project could exacerbate existing resource inequalities in that geographical context.
  • Rewards and recognition for relational work. 
    • Relational work refers to the various activities, methods, and decisions people undertake to build relationships. Relational work is present in any type of collaborative activity and should be valued beyond words; it is not unique to an anti-racist project.

Considering incidental consequences of change work

  • Create guidelines for experimentation and unintentional harm. 
    • The anti-racist project team should create preventative, precautionary guidelines that explicitly discuss the anti-racist  project's boundary line between (1) experimentation and (2) the incidental consequences of implementation.
  • Prioritize developmental needs. 
    • The project should prioritize responding to developmental needs among its team members. These refer to project members' changing needs based on what they experience while working on an anti-racist project and with the others.

Rewarding and recognizing the details of implementation

  • Labor in all its diversity. 
    • The anti-racist project team should work to identify the various forms of labor that are necessary for the project to succeed and ensure that these forms are recognized and rewarded, and not only the labor that is easily identifiable or recognized by prestige.
  • Inclusion and participation. 
    • When it comes to representation â€" speaking for, speaking about, or making decisions about the project â€" members should remember they are speaking for themselves and limitedly can speak for those who are not in decision-making spaces.
  • Organizational change, at scale(s). 
    • Because organizational change occurs as a dynamic process that can have effects beyond the intended contexts and audiences, efforts at change in one context can have positive, negative, or neutral effects in another context.

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