Interview
Anthropologist Tinna Nielsen is the founder of the non-profit organisation Move the Elephant for Inclusiveness, based in Denmark. Together with Lisa Kepinski, she co-founded the Inclusion Nudges global initiative and co-authors the annual Inclusion Nudges Guidebook, with examples of applied behavioural science to influence the unconscious mind for inclusiveness.
Global statistics, collected by global analytics group Gallup, say that only 13% of people worldwide are engaged in their jobs, that the majority of people who resign from their position do so because they don’t feel their skills are required and used, and only 2% feel like their workplace supports them. We have two or three decades of research showing that if groups apply diverse perspectives, knowledge and insights to a challenge, then those groups always outperform the other groups. But we’re not doing it. Right now, the majority of organisations worldwide are acting as if they strategically prefer to miss out on the majority of their people’s potential and skills. That norm is excluding ideas that are not familiar to us, excluding new knowledge because it doesn’t resonate in our minds, and excluding a brilliant idea because it comes from somebody we don’t like, don’t trust or who is not from our own tribe.
