Diversity training is so 20^th century. We hear that from organizations on a regular basis. They have conducted the training; they have held “diversity and inclusion” programs. And although they understand that diverse perspectives are critical for business success, they often have no idea how to create the interactions that will enable people to bring their differences—differences of perspective, background, and experience—to solve problems more rapidly, create innovation, and achieve higher performance.

The problem is that diversity training can only get you so far.

The diversity training of the 1990s was an essential first step for most organizations. It opened individuals’ eyes to the ever-growing diversity of the world around them—and the need to embrace and leverage that diversity if they were to thrive in the next century. It sparked many efforts to develop workforces that spanned differences of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, background, nationality, age, and experience.

As a result, many of today’s organizations have a more diverse workforce, but no effective way to leverage it. The key to that leverage is to shift our mindset about diversity and inclusion to the how—the how of unleashing the creativity of the whole workforce.

This is where Inclusion as the HOW^SM comes in.

As a mindset for addressing today’s marketplace, Inclusion as the HOW^SM considers how people connect and interact with one another. By utilizing inclusive behaviors—forming new partnerships of people who hold a range of perspectives, urging them to speak up and be bold, honoring each person’s background as a contributor to organizational capability—Inclusion as the HOW^SM fosters a safe environment in which to fully leverage the ideas and experiences of all people in the organization. This, in turn, creates a wide bandwidth for problem solving and innovation. For any given issue, it brings together the greatest number of the “right” people (i.e., the people affected by the issue) doing the right work at the right time, to solve problems more rapidly and accelerate results.

Inclusion as the HOW^SM builds trust, and that trust is essential to speed. All too often, co-workers do not share information at all, or share only bits and pieces, due to mistrust. As people come together through Inclusion as the HOW^SM, they discover how knowledge from one unit might help other units achieve their objectives. They see the potential that collaboration has for the whole organization. Motivated by such benefits, they begin to align with the new way of interacting. Cohesion grows across the organization, and that enables the flow of information and knowledge transfer that empowers the who1le organization to move more nimbly.

Diversity and inclusion has come a long way from the 1990s, when it was seen as a program peripheral to core business objectives. Now it ranks among the most important drivers of organizational performance. Inclusion as the HOW^SM is the bridge from the old mindset to the new way of doing things, and one of the new means that organizations must adopt in order to succeed today.

We talk a lot about interaction at KJCG. I have my own spin on the idea. When I say interaction, I do not mean email, I do not mean texting, I do not mean Facebook. I mean the “old-fashioned” kind of interaction: face to face, complete with eye contact, listening, and a healthy amount of give and take. So when human interaction kept coming up at the recent 99% Conference, I perked up and paid attention.

The conference gets its name from Thomas Edison’s quote that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Everything in this conference focuses on the 99%: executing plans, making ideas happen, turning visions into reality. This year the speaker lineup included people like the director of Google Ideas, GE’s chief marketing officer, authors, trendsetters, even filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman.

Through it all, I kept hearing about our common humanity, and how it can move us forward. Here’s what I heard and what I thought:

Simon Sinek, the author of Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, talked about developing trust and creating a spirit of generosity within people, so they see that their work is about everyone moving forward, not just themselves. Our very survival requires this trust, he said—and face-to-face interaction is very important to building it.

Developing generosity is a radical idea…and a challenge. It’s not easy to do good for people without expecting anything in return. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “I helped you out last week, so can you help me now?” So the challenge of generosity is my challenge too.

Scott Belsky, the founder and CEO of Behance (which sponsors the conference), mentioned a similar line of thought during his three-hour master class on “Making Ideas Happen.” Great ideas, he said, have a way of plateauing somewhere in the middle of implementation. Energy sags; the task begins to look intimidating. How do you move off that plateau to bring the idea to fruition? It came back to the face to face, to being intentional in one’s communication.

I know this one firsthand. Because of today’s time pressures, I am always tempted to sacrifice clarity for speed. So I throw a few words into an email, send it off, and find later that I didn’t communicate my point at all. The email may have seemed faster, but it ended up adding waste to the process—and not moving anything forward.

Then there was Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, who is taking face-to-face interaction to a level I never imagined. Jared was curious about why young people in the Middle East joined al-Qaeda—so he traveled there and spent time talking with them. At the end of June, he is convening a meeting of former terrorists and gang leaders to learn how we can discourage people from becoming future terrorists and gang leaders. Talk about face to face.

I want to follow the lead of these speakers. More than that, I’ve already started: developing new ideas and ways to execute them, rekindling my long-cherished desire to travel, fostering my ability to give without thought of return. While inspiring me to do all this, the conference has also reminded me of the single best way to make good things happen: face to face.