Neuroscience of Inclusion: New Skills for New Times

Wer immer sich mit Diversität und Inkusion beschäftigt, sollte sich dieses Buch kaufen. Es erläutert nicht nur die ‚fiesen Tricks‘ des Stammhirns und den Grund, wieso wir Menschen nicht per se auf Offenheit angelegt sind, sondern zeigt leicht umsetzbare Übungen und Wege auf, wie Inklusion dennoch funktionieren kann.

A fascinating and revealing book that nicely balances scholarship and practical application. Nearly every page provided me with new insights. The book has significantly altered the way that I look at the topic of intergroup and interpersonal relations. Carlos E. Cortes, author of “Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time” and “The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach about Diversity.”

You will best profit from this book if you read with careful attention to your own experiences and to what goes on in your mind and your feelings as you move from page to page. The objective here is to recognize how you function and take better charge of improving your ability to see how your use of the history and culture stored in your unconscious can be either an essential asset or a terminal liability.Research into how we function neurologically and as a result, mentally, emotionally and behaviorally is a critical area that is and will be determining the nature of our human future both individually and socially. It is beyond question now that our relationships with each other are critical to either constructing or destroying the human and ecological environments in which we live and move.Homo sapiens’ survival reflexes were not programmed for the present age, so we must take responsibility for rebuilding ourselves and our social context in this global world where plurality, industry and technology can bless or curse us, nourish us or poison us, serve us or control us. Today, abetted by communications technology previously unimagined, greed for power and political propaganda can seduce our own unconscious functions to encourage us to dismiss and destroy one another. However, these pages show how we are capable of turning us versus them into we. We can transform primordial fear into a habit of curiosity and a passion for discovery. It is up to us to decide who will control our stories and our story and thus control our world. This book offers both the why and a good dose of know-how enabling us do this on a day to day basis. Are we willing?Sure, we automatically like those who are like us and even those who just look like us. On the other hand, when the unfamiliar pops up in our perception, it gets a nuisance if not a threat rating from our brain, automatically prompting flight or fight. We can either reinforce the automatic stories we have been and are being fed that blind us to empathy and solidarity, or we can mindfully put them into perspectives that allow us to safely undertake to know each other and enrich each other. This is what the Neuroscience of Inclusion is teaching us to do.After a long siege of positivism, neuroscience, despite being its offspring, is even making us aware that a number of our “unscientific” spiritual disciplines, some of them age-old, intuited our natural integrity and empowered us to swim upstream against the currents of personal fears and social pressures. They built what the authors of this book call a “larger circle of we”, despite the cost inflicted by seemingly inescapable entrapment in narrow meta-narratives whose tapestry was spun so well that they posed as reality in so many areas of life. Now, the route to such enlightenment is openly mapped and made widely available in pages such as these. Spirit and matter are no longer at war but have discovered their inseparable identity in ourselves.Brain science and artificial intelligence pose enormous opportunity as well as threaten total enslavement. Such works as this offer us the former in such a way that avoiding the latter becomes possible. We are called to manage our individual narrative and construct humane common narratives. There is no other viable future for our humankind.

As a professional who has been working in the diversity and inclusion field for decades, I believed that there was nothing new to learn and share with clients. Then a friend recommended this book. I was thrilled to discover this book. It links bias with how our brains work using real science and proven research data that people can’t dispute. The book is also practical and easy to read. For example, the Brain States Management Model is an easy to use tool I now implement to facilitate conversations about the hard topics of bias and prejudice. The book is full of other easy to use models and processes and tools like the S.A.V.E. Communication model that can all be used in many types of training and coaching. It is a great tool for any trainer, facilitator, manager, human resources profession or parent.

I just completed the book this morning. It is a treasure trove of information and delivers that information is a highly readable fashion. Examples offered to illustrate the more complex concepts and the research referenced demonstrate to the reader not only the work put into creating the book, but also convey the authors’ passion for the topic. I think the book should be required reading for anyone doing work in the Diversity & Inclusion space or curious about this important subject!Lindy Williams, Talent Dimensions