Pretty much every consulting bid now has a requirement to demonstrate that it is fulfilling the target client's diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals. Which is all well and good, but requires considerable contortions on the part of the bidding team to make this work.
Why contortions?
Because the reason D&I goals exist is that the 2020's corporate world isn't very diverse or inclusive. And that extends to management consultancy firms too.
Have a look at the leadership team presented in fancy tables in your average proposal and it's basically a smorgasbord of middle-aged men. If it's an IT proposal, then good luck finding anyone with hair. It's incredible how many bald men end up in technology consulting, and with the world moving towards Cloud computing, proposals are stacked to the brim with these glabrous wonders.
So what tricks do we pull to fulfil a requirement that basically requires a decade of recruitment to fix it, which isn't much use when you've usually only got a week to submit the bid?
We cheat.
We find people who aren't bald, and who aren't men, with a preference for non-white ones, and stick them prominently in the team sheet, even if they have been dead for several months, or are on maternity leave, or will absolutely not be working on the job because they're doing something else.
And now with GenAI, perhaps we can even make someone up completely, post a deep-fake photo, and then when we've won the job, say they left the firm.
It's a controversial topic.
And difficult to joke about because an emerging tenet of Diversity and Inclusion is that you have to speak about it with the same sense of deference and sensitivity as though somebody's recently died and you might be talking to one of their relatives.
And when you create a process to promote good ideas like encouraging diversity of mind to solve complicated problems and giving everyone an equal opportunity to progress, well, if you're not careful you can often just end up with a weird process and not the outcomes you intended.
But I would say that. I'm a 50 something year old white man.
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