Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bytes podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people as they've had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co. dot UK. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places.

So plug any headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 100. Yay. 100. With the title power reimagined. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Jason Patent. Jason describes himself as a Global Leadership and DEI consultant and coach. When I asked Jason to describe his superpower, he said, persistence, finding solutions, growing in partnership with others.

Wow. Hello, Jason. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Joanne, I'm really happy to be here with you and have the chance to talk about some topics that I know you and I both care deeply about. So thank you so much for inviting me.

Absolute pleasure. And it's really great for Suzanne to introduce us as well, and that's really good. Thank you. So, Jason, power reimagined. Tell me about power.

I feel like any conversation about making the world better for more people has to start and end with power. And I also feel like, and I'll speak really now, I think this does apply beyond the borders of the United States, but I don't want to overstate the case. And I was born and raised in the United States and while I've spent about ten years of my career also living and working in China, really, I mean, the United States and American Us american culture and language and all of that is what I'm most familiar with and what I live and breathe every day. So that's sort of a caveat to what I'm about to say, which is that I think that we don't have that many tools for meaningfully discussing power and having it be front and centre in conversations. And there's a couple of reasons for that. I think. One is generally the people who have the power set the conversation topics, and when we have power, we generally have a harder time recognising that we have it. And when we do, we don't want to talk about it because we're afraid someone's going to come and take it from us.

And then also, and this, I think, is very much not unique to the United States but a huge part of our culture here is we like to think of ourselves as really egalitarian and equality minded. I don't think that the behaviour of the nation state really bears that out. I don't think that the structures in the way that systemic oppression still happens every single day in the United States really bears that out behaviorally. But we don't like talking about power here because there are these myths that we've built up around meritocracy. To the extent that we have merit and ability, we can create the future that we want for ourselves, irrespective of our membership in identity groups, irrespective of history, et cetera, et cetera. So all of that to say, in answer to your question, we have to talk about power because it is the central reality of humanity and we're really not good at talking about power.

Yeah, power, privilege, these are all words that Dei professionals like ourselves talk about all the time. Yet when you try and bring them into the conversation with people who maybe are not HR dei orientated, they feel there's a threat. I think you mentioned it. People feel that you're taking something away from them. You mentioned egalitarian and this belief of meritocracy. If people believe in the meritocracy, then they believe that everybody has a fair chance. But what they don't often see is the power and privilege imbalance in the meritocracy that they swim in all the time.