Web of Inclusion:

Origin Story I

Frances Hesselbein– who would later become a great mentor and friend– was the first person I interviewed for The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership. We met in 1988 on New York’s Upper East Side at the Cosmopolitan Club, which had been founded “for women of accomplishment” early in the century. At the time, women were barred from all the city’s major social clubs, a policy that for the most part persisted into the early 1990s. 

Like other clubs, the Cosmopolitan had a rule against “visible paper.” The idea was to encourage conversation as opposed to work. Since I could neither openly jot notes nor set up a recorder, it was tough to conduct an interview. But I hid my notebook beneath the table and, keeping my eyes glued on Frances, scribbled away.

At one point, she was trying to describe how she’d restructured The Girl Scouts, which she was then leading with remarkable success. “I want the opposite of a hierarchy,” she told me. “So I put myself at the center rather than the top. My direct reports form a circle around me and their direct reports form a circle around them. And so on, expanding out rather than down.”

Because she could not draw the image on paper, Frances illustrated as she spoke by arranging our dishes into concentric circles. Then she used our silverware to connect them. “The plates show the shape,” she explained, “and the knives and forks show how we’re linked across levels. Having so many connections helps information flow to where it’s needed, rather than always funneling it up and down a chain of command. Plus it helps everyone feels included, like they’re a part, no matter what their job or ‘level’.”

“It looks like a web,” I said, studying the shape she had made on the table. “You could call it a web of inclusion.”

“Yes!” Frances exclaimed. “That’s the idea. Exactly.”

By the time I left the Cosmopolitan Club, I had the title for my next book, the one that would follow The Female Advantage. But more than a title, I had an idea. I knew that the structure Frances had laid out in flowered china and hotel silver could be useful for all the organizations looking for ways to respond to the challenges posed by then-new networked technologies.

I decided to profile five companies that were using inclusive webs to solve specific business issues: engaging an entirely new customer base, building outside alliances, leveraging the skills and experience of front-line people, integrating training into the work of every day, making the organization more fair. My goal was to show webs of inclusion in operation, demonstrating how they worked in the real world, rather than simply describing their structure and building a case. 

The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations was published in 1995. It got some great reviews and the phrase ended up as a front-page headline in the New York Times Sunday business section, which was a very big deal. I did the usual round of interviews, and my speaking business expanded. On the face of it, things were going great.

Yet readers and audiences were almost entirely focused on the structure of the web, not how it operated or what it required of leaders. For example, I was constantly being asked to redraw corporate org charts in the shape of a web, despite having zero knowledge about how the company in question worked, how information flowed, or who was connected with whom. 

In other words, the web part landed, but inclusion got overlooked.

Since my biggest takeaway from the publication of The Female Advantage had been that timing plays an outsized role in determining success, I speculated that this time around my timing might be off. 

I was right. Within two years, companies across the US and later around the world began organizing diversity initiatives, which threw the spotlight on inclusion. As the workforce began to grow more diverse- a trend that continues to this day– companies recognized that they needed to become more skilled at attracting, retaining, developing, and engaging employees they might previously have assumed were outsiders. Or in the language of the day, “leadership timber.”  

This could not happen if companies did not learn how to become more inclusive for the simple reason that those who have been considered outsiders are more likely to feel excluded and to be sensitive behaviors and assumptions that question their right to belong.  By 1997, these initiatives were routinely being referred to as Diversity & Inclusion, or D&I. Since The Web marked the first time the language of inclusion had been used in the context of business and organizations, it became a go-to resource and found an audience. 

As with women’s leadership, inclusion turned out to be an idea whose time had finally come for a host of demographic, technological, and economic reasons. This gave The Web a place in the larger narrative about the changing nature of leadership and culture. Once again, timing worked its magic, though in a way I had never anticipated. 

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