Active inclusion practices in meetings and discussions
To ensure diverse perspectives are heard, counteracting patterns where a few voices dominate. Multiple techniques can increase participation breadth: • Round-robin contributions…
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Inclusive Mindset and Intercultural Competence
Willingness and competence to embrace diversity and include people and communities with different perspectives and backgrounds.
Tools for this skill (18)
Addressing cultural differences constructively
To turn cultural differences into resources for learning rather than sources of friction. Create explicit opportunities to discuss cultural differences and their implications fo…
Constellations of Concern
Someone names a context alive in the room — age disparity, political difference, that everyone here could afford this event, or 'I'm aware of my age' — and people move closer to…
Creating genuinely inclusive engagement with external actors
To model inclusive practice in how the team reaches out and collaborates. When planning engagement with external actors, consider who is being included and who might be left out…
Cultural Awareness
Builds the ability to communicate across national, ethnic, organisational and generational cultures — the guide treats all four as culture, not just the first two. Participants…
Cultural Dimensions Reflection
A structured group reflection for interculturally mixed teams: learn the main dimensions along which working cultures differ (power distance, individualism/collectivism, uncerta…
Deep Democracy (Facilitated Group Process)
Facilitation approach built on the premise that the minority voice carries information the group needs: decisions are made only after the "no" has been genuinely heard, dissent…
Empathy Walk
Choose a person significantly different from you — across a boundary of politics, faith, class, life experience — invite them for a walk, and practice holding space across that…
Ensuring diverse perspectives shape decisions
Inclusion is not merely about participation but about influence. Diverse perspectives must actually shape decisions. Examine how decisions actually get made. Who has voice in si…
Exclusion
Four to six people play a scene in which one of them is left outside the group — not included in whatever the others are doing. The players have to sense who the group is exclud…
Inclusive Decision-Making
Group decision-making built on the Lewis Method of Deep Democracy: every voice is actively sought, the minority "no" is heard and its wisdom added to the proposal before decidin…
Inclusive Listening Round
Effective sustainability work requires hearing diverse perspectives. This practice ensures quieter voices are included, strengthening the quality of decisions and building colle…
One Too Many
Three to seven players, and as the name says, one actor is surplus — one player has to be excluded from the group. Naturally everyone wants to belong and not be the one left out…
Socially Inclusive Research
Using the Wheel of Power and embodied exercises, participants examine power, privilege, and intersectionality in community research — locating themselves on the wheel, feeling w…
The Assumption Suspension
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Inclusive Mindset and Intercultural Competence (VCoL collection): When you notice yourself making an assumption about someone based on t…
The Comfort Zone Stretch
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Inclusive Mindset and Intercultural Competence (VCoL collection): Notice your patterns: Whom do you usually sit with, talk to, or seek o…
The Map
The room becomes a world map — the leader points out north, south, east and west — and people stand where they were born. The page's own guidance is the substance: the host coun…
The Missing Voice
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Inclusive Mindset and Intercultural Competence (VCoL collection): During discussions, ask yourself: 'Whose perspective is not represente…
Also develops it (16)
Agency and Communion
Groups of four or five each design a gift for the whole room — an experience, an appreciation, anything — by first saying what each wants people to feel, then brainstorming with…
Analyzing and addressing power dynamics in collaboration
Power dynamics inevitably shape collaboration. Unexamined dynamics can make 'collaboration' into disguised hierarchy. Before significant collaborative work (especially with exte…
Building capability for co-creation with external actors
Co-creating with external actors involves challenges beyond internal collaboration. Before significant external co-creation, clarify the nature of the collaboration. Is this gen…
Building perspective awareness into ongoing practice
To cultivate perspective awareness as an ongoing team capability. Integrate perspective awareness into regular team practices: In decision-making: 'Whose perspective have we not…
Collaborative working sessions
Most team meetings are for coordination. Teams need dedicated time for actually creating together. Create working sessions specifically designed for collaborative creation. The…
Communication across organizational and cultural boundaries
Effective cross-boundary communication requires attention to different contexts, norms, and needs. Develop awareness of how communication norms differ across boundaries. Differe…
Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)
A facilitated dialogue built on positive deviance: through seven fixed questions, a group discovers who among them is already solving a chronic problem against the odds, what th…
Enabling Co-Creation
Participants learn to facilitate co-creation sessions themselves: framing a real-life case, designing for inclusion and safety, hosting diverse stakeholders, and reflecting on w…
Exchanging Perspectives
Structured rounds — inspired by Liberating Structures' Troika Consulting — in which participants voice and inhabit each other's perspectives on a complex or contested challenge,…
Facilitation for generative collaboration
Skilled facilitation helps collaborative sessions be generative rather than frustrating. Develop facilitation capability within the team. Key facilitation skills include: • Stru…
Finding Your Story of Climate Justice
A writing exercise for connecting yourself to climate justice rather than holding it at arm's length: choose the Global South region and weather event you most relate to, write…
Folding Spectrogram
The room becomes the scale: people stand along a line according to their position on a real question, hear voices from different points, then the line folds — bringing the most…
Manage Your Inner Drivers
A self-reflection for coaches before they ever sit down with a politician: interrogate your own opinions and assumptions about people in public office — where they came from, wh…
Perspective mapping dialogues
To surface and explore the structure of different perspectives on a shared issue. When facing a significant decision where different views exist, use a structured mapping proces…
Social Identity
Surfaces the implicit assumptions driving your actions and responses, and how they assemble into a social identity — age, life context, the groups you belong to and the ones you…
Spectrum
People place themselves along a line from most to least in answer to a prompt — how engaged they feel, whether they consider themselves lonely or privileged, how much they earn…