The Colorado Digital Service in partnership with the Office of Information Technology recognizes the importance of making and supporting significant shifts in mindset and practice to provide and sustain equitable outcomes for all individuals. Focusing on equity in decision making processes is reflected in Colorado State Executive Order D2020 175. Government employees and community leaders must take action to create equitable outcomes for individuals of all identities and abilities.
Ensuring equitable outcomes for all individuals requires people at every level of the organization to commit to being a leader for equity. If senior managers, supervisors and front line workers lead initiatives that infuse equity into everyday decision making processes, then individuals throughout Colorado will experience significant positive shifts related to our commitment to the principle that government services are for everyone.
This playbook features key exercises that anyone can use to initiate equity into everyday decisions. These exercises are provided to assist individuals in the implementation, monitoring, and regular exercise of practices that further our shared work to eliminate opportunity and access gaps in the delivery of government services.
Government services are for everyone. Government products or services should not exclude a person from use based on any of the following characteristics: race, color, religion, sex (includes pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity), national origin, age, disability and genetic information (including family medical history).
There are also many other permanent or situational characteristics that should be considered in order to not hinder access to a public service such as: spoken or written language ability, access to internet or internet-enabled devices, access to time, income, geographic location, and more. In order to create products and services that are inclusive to all of the people that they are meant to serve, it’s imperative to build considerations for equity throughout the decision-making process.
Equity is not the same as equality. Equity is the means by which individuals are treated fairly based on individual need, equality is providing the same treatment to all.
Imagine two people- Ramone and Dakota- that both qualify for a government service.The government service can only be accessed by visiting an office in person between the hours of 9AM - 4PM. Ramone lives in Denver and works from home in a job that allows them to take calls flexibly and adjustments to commitments throughout the day. Dakota lives in Fruita in a job that requires they be on-site from 8AM - 5PM. Though Ramone and Dakota both have equal access to a government office, they do not have the same ability to physically visit during open hours. In order to create equitable access to government services, Dakota would need different options.
Attribution: Image created by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
A ‘with’ not ‘for’ mentality is essential to collaboration and inclusion. Infusing equity into decision making processes requires a commitment to inclusivity and diverse representation. Decisions regarding the design, implementation, and/or administration of services must be informed by members of our community including those most affected by inequity.
The Colorado Equity Alliance defines community participation as “the open and inclusive process by which organizations and individuals build ongoing partnerships so the people affected by each organization's policies and programs are involved in decision-making activities.”
Pursuing community participation requires more than just asking for it. There are many barriers to participation including travel, socioeconomic condition, employment limitations, and family care. These should be considered and addressed via practices (e.g. payment for participation, flexible scheduling, dynamic attendance options, etc.) that will diminish exclusivity.
To learn more about methods and best practice approaches to engaging in community participation, check out the State of Colorado’s Community Participation Guide.
Building equity into a decision-making process can take many different forms, some of which are documented here in the form of exercises (otherwise known as plays). These plays can be used for inspiration before, during, and after a decision-making process. Some ways in which you might use these exercises are when creating a new government service or improving an existing service, recruiting and hiring, building a technology product or creating a communication or marketing strategy. Some things to keep in mind when using this playbook:
- The plays should be used to address new and existing challenges as appropriate. This playbook is a flexible support tool and does not cover holistically all efforts that should be considered when pursuing our commitments to equity.
- Committing to infusing equity in decision making processes requires developing shared understanding and creating a common language. Conversations about shared definitions, misconceptions, and bias are important when pursuing any particular play.
- These particular plays yield reflections that need corresponding actions. In order to achieve our commitments to equity, a team should always be driving towards action. The reflection is useful only if it enables actions that result in the creation of more inclusive experiences and spaces.
If you have questions or suggestions, or are interested in having a facilitator run one of these exercises for your team, reach out to the Colorado Digital Service.
Before you get started, it is important to connect with each participant to fully understand how they can best participate and utilize the artifacts that may be developed after each play you run with your team. You should think about the accessibility of the tools and spaces you will be using to facilitate these conversations and activities to make sure that both will allow for all participants, regardless of ability, to be fully engaged. For facilitators, it is key to know your audience so that both the play and the potential artifacts are accessible to them.
Shalini Agrawal is an architect, designer, facilitator, teacher and mother who published a list of equity questions that was used as inspiration for the list below.
An equity pause is an intentional moment to gather all decision-makers to pause and reflect on the ways in which process, decisions, products or services, and more, may impact people that are not represented in the room.
In order to run this play, a team should dedicate a one-hour meeting to answer the following questions together. For the first 10 minutes of the meeting, ask every person to respond individually to these questions. Use the remainder of the time for discussion. Aim to end the meeting with action-oriented next steps that have dedicated owners or leads.
- Inclusion: What perspectives are we missing in the make-up of our team or amongst decision makers and stakeholders?
- Biases: What are our oversights or biases?
- Biases: What assumptions are we making with our decisions? What have we evaluated to be true thus far? What has not yet been evaluated?
- People Impacted: Who might be impacted by this project/program/service?
- People Impacted: What permanent or situational circumstances may impact a person’s ability to engage with this project/program/service?
- People Impacted: Are we acknowledging the history of this project/program/service and the impact it may have previously had on different communities?
- People Impacted: Have any of our previous decisions intentionally or unintentionally excluded or otherwise harmed certain communities?
Even if you don’t have enough time to cover all these questions, even choosing one or two questions to start with is great.
In order to run this play, a team should dedicate 30 - 45 minutes. Use this exercise at a pivotal moment in the decision-making process in order to create a shared understanding across the team of the people that are impacted.
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Individual brainstorm
For the first 10 minutes of the meeting, ask every person to individually brainstorm answers to the following question, “Who will be impacted by this project/problem/opportunity?” As participants brainstorm, they should do so in a space where one another’s answers can be shared (eg. digital or physical whiteboard, collaborative document, etc.). Reminder to be aware of your audience and choose a tool that is inclusive of every participant's abilities. Encourage participants to generate as many ideas as they can and not to self-edit as they go - no idea is a bad idea. Prompt them to think about internal stakeholders as well as people outside of government and consider demographics or communities who are structurally marginalized. -
Group and Sort
In the next 10 minutes, ask participants to collaboratively clean up the responses by grouping similar ideas together. For example, if a participant wrote, “A person who primarily speaks Spanish,” and another wrote, “Spanish-speaker” those two ideas should be grouped together. -
Impact Mapping
Once the ideas have been organized, ask the participants to collaboratively map the groupings from “least impacted” to “most impacted.” -
Barriers Mapping
Next, ask the participants to collaboratively map the groupings from “most barriers” to “least barriers.” See below for an example of this mapping. -
Goal
Finish the meeting by agreeing as a team to a process that enables you to regularly consider and/or engage with all of the people that are impacted. One way to do this is by creating archetypes (Creating and Using Archetypes).
In order to run this play, a team should dedicate at least two hours and commit to doing homework before and after the meeting. Use this exercise to create a holistic understanding of an experience that captures multiple perspectives.This is the most effective when participants include decision-makers and people that are impacted by the project/product/service.
It is important to include a diverse range of perspectives when creating a holistic understanding of that experience. For example, if the goal is to map the experience of a government benefit, you should include
- Government employees who run administer and/or support the program
- Government employees who are both directly and indirectly impacted by the program
- Community participants including but not limited to:
- living experts (people outside of government who have utilized the benefit)
- Historically excluded and disenfranchised members of the community
- Members of community organizations that support people in the use of the benefit.
When pursuing community participation, consider if there are any barriers to being able to participate. See the Community Partnership Principles Guide from the Colorado Equity Alliance for more information and ideas for compensation.
- Beforehand
Before bringing the participants together, the facilitator(s) should work to create a basic timeline of events that cover all aspects of the experience. The facilitator(s) should rely on subject matter experts to inform the timeline. With the example above, the timeline might look something like this:
| Triggering Event ➡️ | Discovering the Benefit ➡️ | Applying ➡️ | Waiting ➡️ | Decision |
|---|
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Introductions
At the beginning of the exercise, share the agenda and communicate the goals for the meeting. Indicate that everyone present has different relevant expertise they bring to today’s exercise in the form of their individual lived and day to day experiences. Acknowledging this definition of expertise, then ask everyone to introduce themselves and what expertise they are bringing to the meeting. -
Split into groups and map the experience
Split the participants into meaningful groups where people with similar expertise can work together. Ask each group to map their own experience along the timeline (generated in step one). Each step should be represented as a single idea. For example, if using a whiteboard with post-it notes, each step should be represented as a single post-it note. In addition to capturing each step, encourage participants to capture pain-points they have experienced along the way. -
Share
Once each group has completed their timeline, they should present to the larger group. As groups are presenting, encourage the rest of the participants to take note of questions, feedback, and things that surprised or interested them. -
Discuss
After the presentations, ask participants to share the notes they took with one another. Did the exercise prompt any new ideas for improving the experience? -
Combine
After the meeting, the facilitator(s) should take the time to combine all of the timelines into one artifact and share back with the group. From here, the team could use this mapping to identify new approaches to improving the experience.
In order to run this play, a team should dedicate at least one hour. Use this exercise to create a focus for the team during an implementation phase.
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Before
This exercise is appropriate if the team has a clear sense of shared strategy. Before the meeting, the team should have already worked to create a vision and/or roadmap. They should be aware of what is important to achieving that strategy in the near future. -
Generate Ideas
Remind participants of the larger strategy and ask them to brainstorm ideas that represent work that the team could do in order to achieve that strategy in the near term. Give everyone 10 minutes to individually brainstorm as many ideas as possible. -
Group and Sort
In the next 10 minutes, ask participants to collaboratively clean up the responses by grouping similar ideas together. -
Order by Impact
Order the groupings of ideas by order of impact.
Remind participants that impact should not be measured by the number of people, but rather by the quality of experience for all impacted directly or indirectly by the service. For example, if weighing an idea to “make a website accessible by screen reader” against an idea to “add a new FAQ section to the website,” the first idea is higher impact because it enables access for people with limited or no ability to see.
This document is a labor of love created by the Colorado Digital Service. The intent is for this to be a living document modified by continuous feedback from its use. We encourage others to utilize these practices and, more importantly, help us improve them.
Interested in following along with the work of the Colorado Digital Service? Submit an interest form to stay connected. You can also check out our work at our Colorado Digital Service website, GitHub, Linkedin, or Twitter.