Podcast 24: Inclusive by design series – inclusion is an attitude

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. This week I want to start a bit of a series around inclusion and design. In fact, I want to name it inclusive by design, because it's scenario that we basically focus on quite a bit. And actually I as a woman in the gamification space specifically wanted to join the gamification space to make it more inclusive, because when I looked at the industry of gamification back in the mid 2000s, I saw a lot of young white men and the odd Asian man and they didn't necessarily relate to me. They didn't necessarily speak my language. And some of the designs that I saw also didn't quite appeal to me. At first I said, "Oh, this is maybe just me personally. Maybe it's just not my thing." But then I asked around. I also went looking for research and actually found that a lot of the time it was very one track focused, very much focused on their experience of life, their experience of the world and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not 100% inclusive because you're only coming with one worldview. Just like if I design something just by myself, it would only have my own worldview in it. So that was not an indication of their masculinity or anything else. But I also felt that we were missing a trick. And actually I was really quite passionate about it. We were missing a trick in a sense that gamification was becoming this big buzzword, especially in the corporate learning space, and it wasn't actually working. And I could see clearly why because it wasn't appealing. It was a lot of the time, very competitive. It was a lot of the time, very superficial. And I went, "No, there's more to this." I knew from my work up to that point where I had been using games, gamification and game elements for all sorts of things throughout change management, throughout leadership throughout training, I knew it worked and I said, "No, no, there has to be another way. There has to be a way that we can be inclusive by design, but we need to change our approach." So basically I wanted to bring that voice and bring that perspective of let's be inclusive by design. Now, just recently I gave a keynote speech at an event, pretty much focused around people in the academic world. And I have to say I was personally challenged a little bit from a confidence perspective I think as well to say that, "Look, I'm not a scientist. I'm a field worker. I'm a practitioner. I work with my clients to the best of my ability." I read a lot of research and I do my best to integrate what people find in it insofar that I can understand it because I also admit some of the scientific papers out there on games, gamification, diversity, inclusion, differences between age, culture, gender, abilities, some of them are seriously hard to make sense of if they're written for scientific purposes. So anything I can read, I will and anything I can't read, I will have to [inaudible 00:02:58] just purely out of practical reasons. What occurred to me is that when we talk about inclusion and diversity or inclusion by design better, it is in fact a conscious action. It is first and foremost an attitude because we all have our preferences. We all have maybe things we get a bit fearful about that make us feel threatened. Just like the academics made me feel threatened like, "Oh gosh, what can I possibly offer? I'm merely a mere mortal living in the world of the corporate sector doing my business the best I can." But you know what? I haven't written a paper about it. I haven't actually proven my theory left right and center. If somebody wants to take on my theory and prove it, absolutely love it. Do talk to me. That bias in my head even was preventing me from delivering the best possible talk. So from an inclusive by design perspective, I also needed to make sure that I could not only engage to myself to the best of my ability,