Incubator engages leaders to talk about the risk of homogeneous teams

Recent high-profile design and marketing scandals have garnered negative public attention. From the Gucci blackface sweater to Pepsi’s Black Lives Matter advertisement, when a brand lands on the wrong side of the conversation on social justice and equity, that brand takes a big hit. 

A Toronto-based incubator wanted to engage its portfolio company marketers and leaders in a conversation - a Rising - and elevate their collective consciousness about the risks of homogeneous teams.

The Tidal Equality team (then called Women’s Work Institute) designed a Rising for their purposes.

We engaged the participants - senior organizational leaders and growth marketers - in a sequenced conversation that connected the dots between equal representation, diversity, and inclusion, and brand and marketing success (and failure).

In this provocative working discussion, we unpacked how brands can set themselves up to misjudge their markets when their teams lack diversity and when equality is not core to their strategy. These blind spots can lead to poor business decisions and unnecessary business risks - they can also alienate workforces and stakeholders.

With the leaders, we did a deep dive on a series of organizations who have made these types of mistakes. We looked at their leadership teams and their published strategic plans and values to understand the architecture of these mistakes. Together, we learned important lessons about how critical it is to evaluate an organization for inequality, so that these problems can be resolved before brands and stakeholders are at risk of a disaster. 

From the angle of growth marketing, it was abundantly clear that organizational inequality can expand organizational risk, and conversely, organizational equality can position a brand to more successfully serve a broader market. 

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