Kaya Reader

Last week I did something that took me right to the edge of my comfort zone.

I publicly announced that I intend to write a book based on the body of work I've been developing around Inclusive Business Leadership.

I've been quietly building and refining this work for the past five months, so the announcement wasn't exactly impulsive.

But saying it out loud made it feel very real.

And suddenly, all the questions arrived.

• What if I don't finish it?
• What if I put all this work into it and people don't care?
• What if I get it wrong?
• What if I fail publicly?

I've written a book before, but I co-authored that one. I've also been invited to contribute to two others.

This is different.

This time, I'm stepping into something I've never done alone before.

And I've been noticing something about the fear that comes with that.

• I can't get certainty before I begin.
• I can't know exactly how it will unfold.
• I can't measure the outcome in advance and guarantee that I've made the right decision.

At some point, I have to be willing to move into the unknown and pay attention to what happens next.

That last part has had me thinking about this week's theme:

Measuring Inclusion

Because there's a similar tension when we're trying to create more inclusive businesses.

We can make thoughtful decisions.
We can change our language.
We can improve accessibility.
We can redesign parts of the client experience.
We can say, quite genuinely, “Inclusion matters to me.”

But how do we know what those decisions are actually creating for the people experiencing our businesses?

And that question is much harder than simply asking whether we've done something.

And this is where it becomes relevant to the businesses we are actually building.

You might already have a few ways you measure your business.

Numbers are often the easiest place to start.

• How many people are in your audience?
• How many people bought?
• How many people attended?
• Who is engaging?
• How many people completed the programme?

Those things are useful.

But imagine someone asks you:

And suddenly the answer becomes much harder.

Because now we're not just measuring who is there.

We're trying to understand what it is like to be there.

What most business owners don't see

Part of the difficulty is that we naturally measure what is easiest for us to interpret.

Numbers can feel clean.
But inclusion often contains information that is much messier.

• Someone might attend your programme without feeling comfortable speaking.
• Someone might remain silent after having a poor experience.
• Someone might never tell you that something was inaccessible.
• Someone might not feel safe enough to report discrimination.
• Someone might leave without ever explaining why.

So the absence of negative feedback isn't necessarily evidence that everything was fine.

And having diverse people in your audience isn't necessarily evidence that those people are experiencing genuine inclusion.

Presence isn't the same thing as experience.

The Leadership Shift

This is where measuring inclusion becomes much more interesting.

Instead of only asking:

we can ask:

And that might mean looking beyond quantitative data like:

• Feedback forms.
• Anonymous feedback loops.
• Client conversations.
• Patterns in responses.
• Things people tell you privately.
• Who is participating, and who isn't.
• Who is coming into your audience.
• Who seems to be missing.
• What happens when someone raises a concern.
• What happens when something goes wrong.

And even what you're not hearing.
Because if you're serious about inclusion, measurement isn't just about proving that you've done something.

It's about creating ways for the business to learn from the people experiencing it.

This week's Inclusive Business Leadership Principle

Louise's weekly Leadership Question

This week I'd love you to sit with this question:

What evidence do I have that people actually experience the inclusion I say I value?

Not what evidence do I have that I intended to be inclusive.

Not what evidence do I have that I included something.

What evidence do I have about the experience?

That question changes what you look for.

Explore your business through this lens

This is the kind of capability we're developing inside the Inclusion Creators Collective.

The ICC isn't about learning a list of inclusive things to do.

It's about becoming better at looking at real business situations and asking:

That's why our conversations move across things like marketing, pricing, accessibility, policies, client experience, feedback, systems, and decision-making.

The topic changes.

The leadership capability remains.

A little complimentary invitation from me

This week's theme has made me wonder how many business owners are sitting with a very real problem around measurement.

• Maybe you know you need feedback but don't know what to ask.
• Maybe you've collected feedback but aren't sure what it actually tells you.
• Maybe you're looking at your audience and wondering why particular communities aren't there.
• Maybe you've never created a process for someone to tell you they've experienced discrimination or exclusion.

Or maybe you're doing lots of things you believe are inclusive, but you don't actually know whether they're changing the experience people have.

Reply to this email and tell me about one real problem or decision you're wrestling with.

I'll give you my practical perspective on how I'd approach it.

No cost.
No obligation.
No sales pitch.

Just a chance to look at one thing in your business a little differently.

Until next time, don't just measure what your business is doing. Pay attention to what people are experiencing. 🦋

P.S. You might know another service-based business owner who is thinking seriously about inclusion in their business. Feel free to forward this to them. Sometimes the most useful conversations are the ones we share.