It’s hard to learn when your needs aren’t being met
Remember the age-old saying: “Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.” This witty aphorism is often a lesson in self-reliance but often overlooks the nuance innate to everyday life. NCXT’s philosophy reframes this overly-individualistic approach and asks: Maybe the issue isn’t an individual’s lack of angling ability; perhaps the problem is the fence surrounding the fishing hole.
“Strategic Planning is usually so academic and reserved for leadership that staff dismisses or ignores it until it becomes important to them. Working with NCXT is different. Their process and consultants engage everyone in the organization, creating a strategic plan and doing something I think is much more valuable than any strategic plan. They transform individuals. They help us think differently because they show us that our actions matter and how we play a critical role in turning strategy into action.”
If your workplace is applying DEI band-aid after DEI band-aid, the root inequalities will never be addressed; harm reduction is important but proactively addressing reoccurring issues will stop harm before it occurs. To sustain lasting change, individuals cannot distance themselves from DEI issues within their workplace, especially those in leadership positions. That distance creates solutions plagued with rigidity and assumption and fails to address honor the humans who exist within your company space and their needs.
Embracing an overly individual DEI is destined to flop. A company can seek out and define all the steps they will take and still see little to no improvement – sustainable change cannot succeed when the primary change-motivator is marking a box with a big, bold green checkmark. Enterprises with complete buy-in and a hungry desire for DEI change need to be future-oriented to avoid this mistake.
At NCXT, DEI is foundational to all of our work. Individuals and companies do not exist in a vacuum, so workplace inequality can’t be treated as something created far away. The NCXT philosophy transforms the ‘teach a person to fish’ adage to address individual and community needs and teaches our work partners how to sustain that change once our collaboration has ended. To learn more about how we equip our partners with the knowledge and ability to turn DEI desire into a tangible reality, schedule a conversation with us!