The Age of MultiDentity Requires a New Mindset

Moving From Diversity to MultiDentity

I have spent the last three years documenting the emergence of a new age that has arrived: the Age of MultiDentity. It’s sweeping the globe, born of the convergence of economic globalization, unbounded technology, demographic shifts, and the continuous expansion of individual and cultural freedom, and the resistance to such movements. We see evidence of this new age in Brexit as it relates to national identity within the United Kingdom and in the United States as it relates to the fragmentation of the political parties, and of white Americans into clear subgroups based on their social class, levels of education, geography, religion and other identity dimensions. More change is on the way. Moving From Diversity to MultiDentity

The Age of MultiDentity brings with it a complex new environment in which these forces:

• Erode physical and mental boundaries
• Invite and force unfiltered and unbounded ideas into your awareness
• Empower networks and their members
• Enable many more identity perspectives
• Provide new freedoms to groups of people
• Create intense counter-movements toward those who achieve new freedoms
• Fragment larger identity groups into smaller subgroups
• Unite new alliances and allies
• Intensify identity-based conflicts and polarization within and between groups
• Heighten appeals to nationalism, tribalism, sectarianism, and ethnocentrism
• Encroach on privacy
• Unearth Secrets
• Challenge and undermine traditional establishment, authority, hierarchies, and structures
• Make our identity simultaneously more powerful (capable of being effortlessly networked globally into endless opportunities) and more vulnerable (easily monitored, manipulated, and quietly stolen).

There is No New Normal

Recent research on business success factors shows that we’re well into a chaotic and unpredictable new age. Leading academics and industry experts concur that the world will always operate with speed and disruption. We’re in a new, emerging era that’s global, multichannel, multilayered, fragmented, colorful, fast- moving, impatient, tech-driven, and polarized, fragmented and exciting for the challenges and the opportunities it brings, and scary because of the anger and fear it will unleash. The impact of these forces reduces the ability of “diversity” as we have known it to serve as an effective global, community or organizational framework to help us respond to the disruptive nature of the many forces at play. Why, because diversity and inclusion are only one belief system at play in today’s world. Opposing belief systems promote the values of assimilation, unity and stability and cultural superiority. No matter how hard diversity works the concept simply cannot force resistors into a belief system they see as diminishing their power, privilege and historical dominance. Those who are counter to diversity also believe that granting so many rights to so many others has harmed the nation. To function successfully at work and in communities, we need a new mindset. A MultiDentity mindset, which accepts there will have many competing ideas about how to manage our differences. The MultiDentity mindset recognizes that some people will see invasion and others will see inclusion and that we still must work and live together.

No matter how hard diversity works the concept simply cannot force resistors into a belief system they see as diminishing their power, privilege and historical dominance. Those who are counter to diversity also believe that granting so many rights to so many others has harmed the nation. To function successfully at work and in communities, we need a new mindset. A MultiDentity mindset, which accepts there will have many competing ideas about how to manage our differences. The MultiDentity mindset recognizes that some people will see invasion and others will see inclusion and that we still must work and live together.

No matter how hard diversity works the concept simply cannot force resistors into a belief system they see as diminishing their former power and privilege. Those who are counter to diversity also believe that granting so many rights to so many others has harmed the nation.

To function successfully at work and in communities, we need a new mindset. A MultiDentity mindset, which accepts we will face many competing ideas about how to structure systems that manage our differences. The MultiDentity mindset accepts that some people will see invasion and others will see inclusion and that we still must work and live together.

Those who think we’ll go back to an earlier time, regardless of what that time is are missing the key point. The new normal is there is no new normal—at least not one on which today’s many stakeholders will ever agree. So today’s smart leaders must become more adept at dealing with constant change and identity conflict in relationships with team members and stakeholders. The changes we face so encompass that they’ve sparked the need for a new mindset.

The MultiDentity Mindset describes the leader, citizen, student, manager and team member it will take to deal with the interplay of many values, ideologies, and identity groups that hold differing agendas, social goals, and degrees of power.

Join me in an exploration of this age, join me in learning about The MultiDentity Mindset, now available at Amazon.

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