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The Future of D&I with Demographics Changing & Mitigating Bias in the organization
40 Plays3 years ago
This week, for episode 12 of “The 3D Podcast” Cedric Chambers sits down with an amazing diversity leader in a real masterclass, Paul Gimenez. During this interview, Paul shared great insight about The Future of D&I with Demographics Changing & Mitigating Bias in the organization that you work for. This is a great episode packed with a ton of gems, so get your notepads ready as we dive deep and “Discuss the Dimensions of Diversity”.
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Takeaway Sheet for the episode: https://bit.ly/3vQPj7J
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Transcript
Introduction to the 3D Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hey, I'm Cedric Chambers, and I would like to welcome you to another episode of the 3D Podcast, a masterclass where we share with you everything you need to know about how to transform diversity and inclusion in your organization as well as in your community. We're on a mission to amplify the voices of leaders that are making an impact in the world today so that we can have a better tomorrow.
00:00:34
Speaker
Our goal every episode is to keep it simple, honest, and transparently by uncovering the truths in diversity and inclusion with the hope of creating behavioral change all while presenting it from a unique perspective. So look, if you're ready, get your notepad out, pour you a drink, and let's dive deep as we discuss the dimensions of diversity.
Paul Jimenez's Career Journey and DEI Challenges
00:01:05
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the 3D Podcast, where we speak to real practitioners who are making real change in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space. I'm excited for our show today. Look, we are about to dive deep into historical challenges professionals face in diversity, equity, and inclusion space. And my co-pilot for today's discussion is Paul Jimenez. So check this out.
00:01:26
Speaker
Paul is the head of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the Guitar Center. Prior to the Guitar Center, Paul served as the head of Learning Innovation at Mentor Institute and worked for the NeuroLeadership Institute in Corporate Consulting and research that centered around diversity and inclusion, performance management, and learning and change.
00:01:43
Speaker
In addition to his work in people science, Paul also co-founded and currently runs the nonprofit 100 for All, a charity dedicated to helping people build healthier environmentally conscious communities. So get comfortable, get your notepads ready because we are about to dive deep as we discuss the dimensions of diversity. So Paul, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Very happy to be here, Cedric.
00:02:05
Speaker
Awesome, awesome. We're excited for the discussion today. Look, I'm excited to just jump straight into our discussion and kind of the topics that we're going to go through today. But first, you know, just to give our audience some background to kind of set the foundation on you, who you are, your career, give us some more information outside of your background from the introduction. Can you just provide us some insights of your background, your career journey, how you got into the work that you do today, and just give us a little bit of who Paul is.
00:02:31
Speaker
Sure. So I'm a mixed race Cuban-American who was born in Iowa and later went to school at UC Berkeley studying psychology and neuroscience and then got into neuroscience research at the Laboratory for Educational Neurosciences and the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Research both at Stanford and UCSF.
00:02:51
Speaker
And then I went to graduate school Columbia where I kind of continued this journey of really trying to understand the brain basis of various aspects of human nature. Anything from learning and development, creativity, motivation, emotional regulation. I actually spent an ample amount of time on the brain basis of human morality. So basically what's going on when humans are evaluating morally elating content.
00:03:13
Speaker
And it was in graduate school that for me, I realized that I was never going to be a lifelong
Applying Neuroscience and Psychology to DEI
00:03:20
Speaker
researcher. As much as I enjoy discovering new things, the part of the research that I cared most about is the degree to which it could meaningfully improve human flourishing today. What do we currently understand in and across the sciences that look into human nature that is meaningful in solving many of these
00:03:42
Speaker
divisive aspects in our nature that have really been rising to the surface in recent years. And that led me to look outside of academia to see where organizations were actually starting to apply things that we were discovering in these fields. And the first organization that I stumbled across was an organization known as the Neuro leadership Institute.
00:04:04
Speaker
And there they work to make work better through neuroscience. They work to, with the hope and aspiration essentially, is that if we follow the science and the evidence that perhaps we can invite and introduce new ways of thinking that can actually make a dent in some of these
00:04:22
Speaker
social issues that show up at work and impact our ability to thrive and impact our ability to rise to our highest potential. And so that was the goal of the organization. And it was a beautiful first kind of look at what happens when you kind of move from academia into the kind of for profit applied side of the sciences. And there we looked at everything from things like diversity and inclusion to leadership to learning and change.
00:04:50
Speaker
And that's when I first really started seeing diversity and inclusion as a particularly salient challenge for our world today. And that's where I kind of oriented most of my time and attention from that point on. So a lot of the research I did spoke to it in different ways. Morality is very, very tethered to everything we're doing in DNI, as is learning, as is change, as is so many aspects that I have been studying in a research setting, and then getting opportunities to work with corporate
00:05:19
Speaker
clients in an applied setting and seeing, okay, neuroscience really can speak in a different language that can drive a different kind of change, a different kind of willingness to embrace new learning. And eventually I kind of moved away from the NeuroLeadership Institute, mostly because
Complexities and Holistic View of DEI
00:05:37
Speaker
there are certain limitations that come when you need to earn money to keep your business alive in terms of the depth that you can typically go. And so I was introduced to this really wonderful organization. At the time, it was called the Institute for Personal Leadership, but it later renamed to Mentora Institute.
00:05:56
Speaker
And it worked in collaboration with a professor named Tindra Wadwa, who's a mathematician from MIT who then became a management consultant at McKinsey, and then realized that for him, what he really cared most about, similar to myself, was trying to figure out objective truths in human nature in the same way that a physicist is able to describe the nature of the universe in concrete mathematical terms. Shouldn't there be aspects of
00:06:22
Speaker
a human being that we can similarly describe with that degree of precision that cuts across our differences. And so he really did try to draw from interdisciplinary science and find where is all of these discrete dimensions of science converging to say the same thing, albeit from a different lens. And it allowed for a much deeper dive into what's going on. It was much more willing to go to places that
00:06:50
Speaker
We're traditionally avoided in the workplace because you can't go there. It's too deep. And this idea that this idea that is unfortunately really, really popular is that if it's not simple, it's useless. We have we've moved toward the attention economy. Simple is better.
00:07:10
Speaker
Fewer words is better. If it's long, no one's going to read it. No one's going to make time for it. No one cares. And so it has to be simple. Otherwise, it's useless. And that's just simply not true when it comes to aspects of diversity and inclusion, aspects of a human being. There are aspects of us that are just so complex that to oversimplify it can just invite all sorts of problems later. And so that was just a tremendous opportunity to go even deeper, to have even more to say about DNI, and to look at it
00:07:39
Speaker
not just from the vantage point of neuroscience, but from the vantage point of interdisciplinary science, from the vantage point of just the human experience, the imperfectable nature of the human being. Be really honest about it. And then the other interesting thing that we did is we actually studied the lives of the world's greatest leaders. Trying to see, both past and present, trying to see where does the science align with the conduct that we see in the people that we most admire.
00:08:07
Speaker
That led to a lot of really interesting work and a lot of really interesting findings and a lot of just beautiful change journeys with organizations that I'm deeply proud of. Then finally, that led me to recognize, you know what? I want to go in-house. I want to prove to myself that if an organization truly commits to following the science, following the evidence, and making the long view, the priority, not the short-term,
00:08:36
Speaker
thinking that human beings have a tendency to overweight the significance of current events. And that makes us really emotionally driven. It makes us really focused on the reaction of the here and now. But if we take the long view, what sort of decisions would we make if we're trying to advance DNI?
00:08:52
Speaker
If we contextualize where we are at in the journey that is trying to approach this fair society where everybody feels like this system is in their service, not designed favorably for one group or another, if that's what we're after, what decisions might we make now that will get us closer to that later, knowing that it's an imperfect journey where we're going to constantly need to evolve and learn as new things come about?
Practical Applications and Challenges in DEI
00:09:21
Speaker
So that's the journey I'm on with the Guitar Center. You know, coming from that research side and actually going into kind of this practical side, I love that transition because sometimes people who stay in the research side only, you know, we kind of, you can miss sometimes what's actually happened inside of these companies, the corporate environments, however that may be, and like what can really get done, right? So I like that you've kind of made that transition there. As you think about your career, as you've navigated through, like what's been one of the biggest learnings for you personally as you've gone through your career?
00:09:51
Speaker
Well, specifically, if we're talking about DNI, the biggest learning for me is that this space is so tethered to who we see ourselves to be at our core, that you can't ignore the deeper aspects of our nature and expect to make progress. And also, there are countless agendas at play in this space. It's highly profitable.
00:10:19
Speaker
where there is honey look for the bees heard Connie let's say that once but it's a really true sentiment and we need to recognize that there are agendas at play that there are incentive structures that aren't all necessarily designed to actually allow us to make progress with the least resistance right it seems that we're operating from this this place of
00:10:44
Speaker
entitlement in this place of we've already won the argument, so hop on the ship or get lost. And when we dig into the details, we see that, wow, this is not the best path we could be taking if we were doing a better job of
00:11:02
Speaker
actually contextualizing why we're where we are first and then designing for that. Instead, we're trying to start from the place of where you should be, right? We're starting from this place of this is where you should be. And if you're not there, shame on you. And that's not a
00:11:19
Speaker
approach that's going to be inclusive of dissenting points of view. Diversity and inclusion is about all voices, including those that do not currently align with your perspective and may never align with your perspective. How do they also get to be a part of this ship as it sails? And so that's the biggest learning. I was honestly discouraged after a point when I looked under the hood of so many of these organizations at the content that they were putting out there, the sense of certainty that they were describing.
00:11:48
Speaker
And the fact that this sense of certainty that organizations have and individuals have is so often unearned, so often the intentions are often in the right place, but the actual efficacy of what they are putting forth simply does not have credibility underneath the surface. And so that made me realize that we need to
00:12:10
Speaker
amplify the signal and start to address the noise and start to acknowledge that there is noise, not pretend that it doesn't exist, not pretend that everybody that's pro-diversity has good solutions because it's not the case. Just like any individual, we all have
00:12:28
Speaker
ways of thinking based on our experience where we have come with come up with certain conclusions that we probably haven't tested as well as we should have before we started spreading them around. And so just recognizing that if we slow down long enough to frame this problem accurately and to respect its complexity that we can probably reach much more sound long lasting solutions. That's the dream I'm chasing. Yeah, no, that's that's awesome. And I think about
00:12:56
Speaker
just the leaders that I engage with in variety of different kind of journeys and aspects. Not many actually take that path to really understand, like, how do we get here? Like, what's the research? Like, what is being said about this? How do we dive deeper than surface level training, surface level awareness? Like, how do we really go deep into really understanding this so that we can bring this information forward and use it? How do we make change moving forward?
00:13:23
Speaker
which is all about the 3D podcast, right? How do we go into that third dimension, that third level? And so, you know, I'm excited because, you know, knowing your background and kind of knowing kind of your approach and your thoughts on this to kind of start it off for the audience. Can you just kind of set the foundation by providing just some background around diversity and inclusion? You know, how did this come about? And with so many people working on this, like how the work they're doing today, like how did that come about? What did it start and how did it come about?
00:13:52
Speaker
Every time that I am introducing someone to DNI, always start.
00:13:56
Speaker
with kind of the three whys of diversity. That's what I affectionately call it. And so that first dimension is perhaps the most obvious, and it's also the one that's been with us the longest, likely since the dawn of civilization. And that speaks to the ethical imperatives of diversity. And that's about fairness, equity, equality, balancing who has access to opportunities, who is unfairly exposed to increased risk or harm.
00:14:22
Speaker
And that shapes our laws and that shapes EOE compliance. And for many, it creates this sense that making progress actually makes the world a better place. And so that's one dimension of diversity. The second dimension is the one that's been gaining steam and kind of public attention much more recently, especially over the last couple of decades. And that's the notion that diversity is good for business.
00:14:47
Speaker
So converging research suggests that diverse teams outperform homogenous teams, diverse organizations outperform homogenous organizations. And just to make sure I'm being clear, when we say diversity in this context, the research is talking about diversity in terms of race, culture, gender, not diversity of thought, which some people lean into. This is really about what happens when you mix people from completely different origin stories and ways of thinking and doing what happens when you bring them together.
00:15:13
Speaker
And it turns out that there are a lot of benefits for things like productivity, profitability, collaboration, also risk management and the fact that diverse teams and companies can better communicate to diverse customers and people, you know, it's easier to communicate with cross-functionally when you have more diverse people because there's going to be
00:15:32
Speaker
disproportionate concentration of group X in tech and group Y in HR. So when you have more diversity, you actually have more flexibility in breaking down the silos and making sure that everybody, you're starting from a place of, we already have the ingredients, the recipe for really, really advanced collaboration and understanding and compassion and respecting differences in all of those things.
00:16:01
Speaker
Now, these two dimensions combined to create the emerging field of diversity and inclusion. So the business cases and the ethical imperatives combined to make this a major priority for organizations. And so for at least the last several decades, DNI as a field has been trying to make a dent in the distribution of access to opportunity and power and leadership.
00:16:27
Speaker
And putting billions of dollars into diversity and inclusion related efforts and awareness and attention and deliberate intervention is literally never been higher. And like I said, pretty much every vendor in the professional services space now offers a cutting edge science back solution to improve representation and more fairly show up for our talent.
00:16:49
Speaker
Despite all that effort, true improvement remains elusive. Indeed, there are these infamous meta-analyses that reveal that diversity training has often either had no change or in some cases actually made things worse, reducing the representation of underrepresented groups.
The Inevitability and Importance of Diversity
00:17:06
Speaker
And that portrait is what made me convinced that the dimension that we need to attune our attention to is the one that is so often too easily glanced over, and that speaks to the practical necessity of diversity. That speaks to the fact that diversity itself
00:17:26
Speaker
is inevitable, that nature itself favors diversity. Nature seeks to create new things, and that reduces us all back into a single celled organism. Every single time two humans meet, they create a brand new thing that never existed before. And in the biosphere, when we don't have diversity, take the cheetahs, for example, we recognize that that's a huge threat to the viability of the species itself. So nature has built in diversity, and diversity has
00:17:54
Speaker
whether you like it or not. So the current trends suggest that in America by 2055, there will be no majority group, right? The mixing of races will continue as it has ever since we opened the floodgates, excuse me, the floodgates of
00:18:11
Speaker
Globalization technology the internet where where intergroup contact has never been higher and so we are going to constantly Get increasingly diverse what it even means to be diverse is going to be constantly redefined and so if we focus there We're no longer dealing with ethics and when you deal with ethics you get signs you get my side or your side
00:18:30
Speaker
or business is good, when you deal with business is good, you get instances where homogeny is actually favorable over diversity. You can ignore it, which is what's the consensus right now is let's put out all of the evidence that suggests that diversity is good and any evidence that suggests it's bad. Let's kind of not raise that to the service of awareness because that's not helpful for our business case. But there are plenty of instances where homogeny is actually going to outperform diversity, instances where you want to move really, really fast.
00:18:59
Speaker
If you want to move really, really, really fast, maybe you don't want too many cooks in the kitchen. And we all know what happens when you get too many cooks in the kitchen. You get all these counterweights, all these counterbalances, all these things that make it so that things are moving too slow. So there are instances that speak to diversity isn't always good. But the case that you're being sold right now is diversity is always good.
00:19:20
Speaker
It doesn't matter if diversity is good for business. What really matters is that diversity is inevitable, that people are going to be calm, increasingly diverse, and that we simply have to figure out a way to make a cohesive culture both within our workplaces and within our society, despite rapidly rising changes in terms of our biology, rapidly rising changes in the presentation of a human.
00:19:47
Speaker
We're going to get a lot more diverse. We need to get to a place where this world feels fair for as many people as possible, because until it does, those people that are experiencing increased unfairness are obviously going to be discontent, and it's going to create this toxic element in our culture. And it's not going to go away until we create a system that feels like it's actually fair, independent of variables that fall entirely outside of one's control.
00:20:15
Speaker
And so those are things like race, those are things like gender and sexual identity, those are things like gender, or like culture. Excuse me.
00:20:26
Speaker
Awesome. Awesome. And so let me ask you this. So thinking about that, I like the second point that you touched on what it says. It's kind of where we're at today as far as like the good for business, right? And that's like, you know, when you think about those studies that's been put out and so many things are looking at this from a dollar amount, right? How much productivity, how much increase in revenue, all these things that are happening, which
00:20:47
Speaker
When you get that information, it then has the leaders, as DNI practitioners, they operate a certain way. They approach diversity and inclusion in a certain way because they're trying to get that result that these reports are saying versus really getting to the core of what the issues are and how do we really solve for those.
00:21:04
Speaker
And so when you think about, you know, what you've seen in your research, the organization that you've, you kind of looked at and delve into, when you think about those leaders coming into those organizations and their approach to diversity and inclusion from a corporate perspective, like what
00:21:19
Speaker
is wrong in the way that they're approaching it, right? Whether that's training, whether that's how they're, you know, looking at what needs to happen, like what's actually happening to where, you know, we've been talking about this for how many years and we still haven't seen the progress, you know, that we probably would like to see or that we think we should. And based off of what's happened thus far, you know, it could seem sometimes them
00:21:42
Speaker
that we would see it come anytime soon. So what's the approach that's happening right now and how is that misguided, I would say? So there's a couple facets to that. One, when it just comes to the angle, right? So the reason that the diversity is good for business, the whole bottom line argument became a thing was out of necessity.
00:22:08
Speaker
putting that simply, diversity practitioners were unable to move leadership to give these programs sufficient budget to actually generate any sort of change. So they relied on, how can I prove to you that it's worth doing? Well, I need to show you that you'll actually get business results, financial results as a consequence of making this a priority.
00:22:30
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, it's not about ethics anymore. It's actually going to hit you in your wallet. And if I can make you feel like it's going to hit you in your wallet, maybe you'll actually put some money and attention on this in a real way instead of in a lip service way. And so the intention is coming from the right place. And in some cases, you do need to make those arguments. And even I will make those arguments as part of the puzzle, right? I do want the management committee at the Guitar Center Company to recognize
00:22:58
Speaker
that if we make true progress here, there will be business benefits. Because simply speaking, there will be. Like if we do a better job at getting a more diverse representative workforce at all levels of the organization, it follows that the reputationally that'll impact the Guitar Center enterprise positively
00:23:17
Speaker
that'll make our stores more welcoming for more people, that'll make us think differently about the products that we put into the stores. So there are all of these really tangible business benefits that are born out of getting diversity into your organization. And so it's not that the argument itself is flawed, it's that it's absolute
00:23:36
Speaker
It's presented as absolute when of course it is not. It's presented as though diversity is always good. And if we take the long view, what happens when that argument breaks down? What happens when you have diversity, but it's not resulting in demonstrable productivity or demonstrable improvements in your profits?
00:23:55
Speaker
Then do we have to close up the shop? Are we done? Goodbye this, right? And if we look at, sorry, Deanna, you turned out to not be profitable, so now we're going right back to business as usual. And that will devastate us in the long view because that's what's going to happen most likely in many instances.
00:24:16
Speaker
Why? Well, take a 2007 New York Times article that came out kind of well before all of the kind of modern zeitgeist. And it was an article entitled The Downside of Diversity. Large 30,000 person study that look across areas that were diverse versus areas that were homogenous. And it found all of these kind of problems in diverse cultures. It's never held up today because it's not convenient for the narrative. But what did it reveal?
00:24:46
Speaker
Well, it revealed some interesting patterns about community involvement and engagement, likelihood of voting. It turned out that diverse areas actually underperformed across all those things that we know contribute to society.
00:25:00
Speaker
And why? Well, could be things like diffusion of responsibility, could be things like, you know, the population density is higher and that's driving for us. We don't know the precise why, right? But we know that fundamentally we will find evidence, instances where diversity isn't good. The best example is the Olympics.
00:25:22
Speaker
if you're doing a relay, right? 100 meter dash relay. Do you want a bunch of diverse people or do you want someone of roughly equivalent physique and athletic ability? And it turns out when you look at those people genetically, they turn out to come from the very same place, almost all have roots in Western Africa.
00:25:40
Speaker
And that is an instance where obviously that genetic advantage, that selective advantage is highly preferable and highly overrepresented in the case of the Olympics because there is a clear advantage to that homogeny in that particular context. But why does the United States outperform almost every other nation when it comes to the overall acquisition of gold medals?
00:26:05
Speaker
because we have diversity, because we have all of those selective advantages for every single sport. And so we always have way more people. Despite our much smaller population compared to places like India and China, we are always overrepresented in the Olympics because we have diversity. So if you focus in on a very specific thing, you might find that this person or that group is better, probabilistically.
00:26:29
Speaker
And so that will also start to break down the diversity is good for business argument, because you're going to find examples where that's not the case. And instead of having to be afraid of that, let's just focus on, biologically speaking, diversity is inevitable. The best we can say at the level of, you know, genes and probability when it comes to skills and talent is that probabilistically certain groups will have selective advantages for certain things.
00:26:58
Speaker
But it's probabilistic, which means there's always going to be outliers. So within every single group, there are going to be those outliers who outperform the probability. And that's why we have to come back to we're all individuals.
00:27:14
Speaker
We have to show up and talk to individuals. We can't rely on these observable differences because those observable differences are misleading oftentimes. They can tell you probabilities. They can sometimes be predictive. But most of the time, the individual's experiences and their unique composition come together to create a brand new thing that never existed before and can't be easily quantified into this box or that.
00:27:42
Speaker
And if we could see through these arguably primitive differences that put us in the boxes, straight to our essence, we'd recognize that each of us is fundamentally unique. And that each of us, if we can get to that place where we show up as individuals, we can start to combat against this in a much more holistic way. A much less kind of, it's good, it's righteous, it's the right thing to do, more, it's necessary to do because we're all so different.
00:28:07
Speaker
We still want a cohesive company. We still want a cohesive working environment. We still want people to feel like this is a safe, respectful place.
Evolving Understanding of Diversity
00:28:15
Speaker
And so if we go about it from that perspective, we teach people about their biology, about the variety that is available when it comes to things like the LGBTQ plus movement, right? This is pride.
00:28:29
Speaker
The counterpoint to that, right? What's going on? Well, it started off as lesbians and gays, and then bi's and trans and queers, and it keeps adding. Now it's IA, intersex androgynous. And some use that. They use that as fodder for saying, this is all hoopla. Ignore this stuff. These people are out of their minds. But what is it really? What it really is is an indication that these things are dynamic.
00:28:54
Speaker
that these things are complex and that our attempts to simplify into concrete boxes is constantly putting us in a situation where, oops, left one more out. Oops, left one more out.
00:29:10
Speaker
My hope is that we can move to a place where we don't so much try to, you know, tell everybody self-righteously where they should be, but rather illuminate the complexity so that they can obtain a sense of uncertainty, a virtuous sense of uncertainty about the person sitting in front of you.
00:29:32
Speaker
so that you kind of take in like, wow, there are so many degrees of complexity across what this person has been through, where they grew up, what ideas they were exposed to, what faiths and traditions they were exposed to, what they decided to probe when they were learning those things, what questions did they happen to decide to ask? What statements within their religious traditions did they decide to reject?
00:29:57
Speaker
so many individual components that comprise who you became and also inform who you can become. And if we can get to that place, we can talk to people as humans, right? The only reason that our identities are so salient right now
00:30:14
Speaker
is fundamentally because it feels unfair, I feel judged as a consequence of who I am. And it makes it really salient. It makes my identity become something that defines me. But why did we not see that in white culture for a very long time? Well, because no one ever had a bunch of negative things to say about white folks for a very long time in America.
00:30:37
Speaker
So they didn't feel ostracized or marginalized or silenced in the same degree that blacks and Asians and females have. And so naturally, they didn't have this strong sense of the majority. Obviously, we have KKK and all that, but the majority did not overexpress their whiteness in a way like, I'm white pride. That wasn't really a big
00:31:03
Speaker
thing in the recent decades. But Black Lives Matter and the women's rights movement and all these things that are taking place, well, the common denominator across anybody who is really allowing their identity, those identifiers to rise to the surface, is that they're experiencing unfairness.
00:31:25
Speaker
Judgment, you know, they're experiencing some degree of of societal Unfairness and in a way that's really impacting, you know, their everyday lives or their sense of self-efficacy and that is making that identity salient
00:31:42
Speaker
create a fair society and we can recognize the limits of these labels. Our labels are a limiting view of humanity. They're important when our system is reinforcing their importance, when our system is designed in a manner that makes it disproportionately unfair for certain groups of people.
00:32:03
Speaker
All of those labels matter. So in the short view, they matter. In the long view, we of course want to reach a world where things are fair for everybody, independent of these variables. That's the long view. So if we hold that in view as we are trying to design what we're doing today, we might make different choices.
00:32:22
Speaker
And so that was a long winded way of getting to this next point. Sorry. But the other point that is really salient is that diversity trainings in the workplace are absolutely missing the target.
00:32:39
Speaker
One, the funniest one, the funniest thing that's happening, and it's enough to drive most people bonkers if you're a participant in it, but the funniest thing that's happening is that diversity training is being treated just like any other training, like any other technical expertise. You put people into a workshop or a Zoom session,
00:32:57
Speaker
And you expose them to some content. Usually the content is around, hey, guess what? Some people have racist beliefs. And you can share some data that shows the majority of Americans believe racism remains a major problem. And then they move on, in some cases, to describe reverse racism, that some people harbor reverse racism beliefs. And there's data that shows that over 50% of white America believe that reverse racism is a major problem.
00:33:22
Speaker
And then for the rest of us, and sometimes they don't even go into those two dimensions, sometimes they just zoom straight into this one. The rest of us have unconscious bias. There we go.
Addressing Unconscious Bias in DEI
00:33:31
Speaker
Subtle unconscious preferences, usually for our own groups that result in us making choices that favor our own groups.
00:33:40
Speaker
white people exhibiting preferences for white people, black people for black people, so on and so forth. And the problem is that even though it is true that we all do have these biases, we all do have unconscious biases that are informing our decisions in ways that we don't consciously detect. Even though it's true, these trainings are fundamentally not working because they are dramatically oversimplifying the complexity of the unconscious bias system.
00:34:04
Speaker
So to lay it out for you, typically what these programs look like, they focus on A, teaching you that people have unconscious bias and it exists and it affects you without your knowing. And then B, they'll give you a language to describe those unconscious biases. And then sometimes if you get really lucky in the best solutions that exist, they'll give you a C, asking people to remember a specific set of behaviors or processes to enact whenever they spot each bias.
00:34:31
Speaker
Now, it's not to say that these are worthless, raising awareness, offering mitigation tools. These things can be helpful and enlightening in some cases, and some companies definitely do meaningful work in the space. But the reality is that these all target conscious processes. So if you're targeting conscious processes in the brain, you're not going to change the output coming from the unconscious bias system. Therefore, none can meaningfully change the way the unconscious bias system in the brain is actually affecting behaviors or decisions.
00:35:00
Speaker
Take that piece of information, right? None can meaningfully change the way the unconscious bias system in the brain affects behaviors or decisions. So you're telling people about this thing. You're giving them some tool to define it concretely, usually simplifying it down to a model. But that model, to use it, requires conscious attention.
00:35:28
Speaker
Right. And so what's wrong with that? Well, only two things happen when it comes to unconscious bias training. Either one, it becomes so big that it feels disempowering, or two, you're given a tool that gives you a false sense of control in your ability to overcome your unconscious. Right.
00:35:50
Speaker
The fact is that we've been making progress on these issues all across the United States history and we've never had control over our unconscious. Therefore, this assumption that we must combat unconscious bias in order to make progress on diversity is fundamentally flawed because we've already been making progress. We've never had that control.
00:36:10
Speaker
And so once you compound, there have been hundreds of biases that have been studied and then add in the ways in which they interact and the fact that bias itself is but one of many different forms of cognitive distortion. So there's things like just categorical thinking in general. Why do humans put things in boxes in the first place? It's an attempt to fabricate
00:36:30
Speaker
A way of organizing complexity, right? Let's put everything in the boxes. But nature doesn't need things in boxes. That's just the human's way of organizing information. But that creates all sorts of things that are inconsistent with reality. Sleep and satiation also affect decision making. Also kind of result in us making less than decisions.
00:36:48
Speaker
reducing our ability to make sound decisions. Stress, mood, and arousal, all of these different things are interfering with our ability to make objectively good decisions, and then there's bias, and then there's the various environment that you're in. And so once you add in all that complexity, you realize that the problem that they're trying to solve is infinitely complex, and thus is not where we should be focusing most of our attention.
00:37:13
Speaker
The thing that definitely seems to actually work, actually change our bias in favor of diversity is exposure.
00:37:24
Speaker
is dramatically increasing intergroup contact. The more exposure that we have, the more positive associations we build with diverse people, the more that diverse people become part of our inner circles and our in groups, the more likely the biases that we're originally preventing them from making progress will start to lessen. And when you look at the brain, it's really transparent what's happening. We're categorizing people.
00:37:51
Speaker
and based on a very kind of limited system. The way I talk about it usually is just like your brain is constantly trying to evaluate and make good decisions on the basis of new information by using previous information. But it's already made a bunch of decisions that have either been informed and decided on and or unconsciously derived. And so it's constantly putting things in buckets of good or bad.
00:38:15
Speaker
When you look at it probabilistically, every single person has their own little map, their own little, these are the things that are familiar good, familiar goods like home, that's all the things I already know I love, and these are all the things that are familiar bad. I've had, you know, a dog bit my hand when I was a child, I developed a permanent fear of dogs.
00:38:31
Speaker
Similarly, I had one bad experience. I grew up in a very, very homogenous place. I had one bad experience with a person of color, and now that person induces threat. And then it was reinforced by shows like Cops and the ways in which blacks were represented on entertainment. So I have all these inputs that tell me that this culture is familiar bad. I don't want anything to do with them.
00:38:58
Speaker
If I don't start to compete against them by introducing positive experiences with diversity, that feeling feels valid, literally biologically valid. So what's happening when a person experiences this extreme fear, threat, or anger at another race? What's actually happening physiologically?
00:39:22
Speaker
Well, you have formed certain beliefs on the basis of your experience that solidified your values in your mind and in your heart in a way that whenever you misalign with your values, that's when you feel pain. That's what that is. You make a choice that you regret, you feel pain. That's a signal saying, hey, you did something inconsistent with your values.
00:39:44
Speaker
So when a person is expressing that, that anger, that rage at another race, it's because they've internalized some degree of that's familiar bad and a value of mine is to not associate with that threat, to keep that throw away from me. And so it's triggering this internal sense of rage that we have to be able to lessen in some way or another. Well, what would you do if we made this a phobia?
00:40:12
Speaker
Well, if it's arachnophobia, what would a cognitive behavioral therapist do? How would they address it? Well, they would create low risk experiments and experiences with threat so that over time the threat response gets lessened. You keep on putting them in situations where first you tell them some basic stats on spiders. Less than one tenth of one percent of all spiders are actually poisonous.
00:40:34
Speaker
When you kind of put them in situations where they're really safe maybe it's a zoo where the spiders are safely behind glass or a toy spider that you're holding your hand and you work their way up to a house spider and then realize okay this isn't really that scary after all and you've effectively treated the phobia.
00:40:52
Speaker
If we look at it more like that, we look at it more as something that's deeply rooted in one's lifelong experience and exposure, things that variables that may have fallen entirely outside of their control as well. No one chooses their race. No one chooses where they grew up either. You're born someplace. And whatever the norms of that place happen to be are going to inform aspects of your
00:41:15
Speaker
identity aspects of what you think is right and wrong. It doesn't matter that it's that it's once you get into the bigger world that it's telling like, yeah, that place you came from is wrong. Well, all that makes you feel is like, well, hey, you don't know us. That just that just triggers defensiveness. That just makes us resist. It makes us feel like you have no interest in understanding. If we begin with an assumption that people are actually trying to operate on the basis of their values,
00:41:45
Speaker
And therefore, we actually need to empathize with where they are now, not shame and blame them until they are where we tell them they need to be.
00:41:55
Speaker
then maybe we can actually be persuasive and win people over. So I alluded to earlier that the diversity movement has been operating with this kind of era of entitlement, right? What I really mean is that it's operating as though it's already won the argument, as though it doesn't need to persuade and win over people's hearts and minds.
00:42:15
Speaker
And by behaving in that way, it is fueling a counter movement, a counter culture. What is happening is books like the diversity delusion, the parasitic mind. There are books and speakers that are coming out and flooding the news and media with counterpoints to diversity with
00:42:37
Speaker
all of the noise that we are failing to address, making it so loud that it just fuels outrage, anger, hate. And if we fail to validate these counterpoints and listen to them, then we're going to have a much longer fight. It's going to be a much more painful fight. It's going to be a lot more toxic the whole way through.
00:42:59
Speaker
because we are not making a sound long view argument. We're making a short term, need this now, want to show results. This isn't like your stereotypical quarterly report. This isn't something that you're going to have in one year. This is something where you literally have to approach it with the long view in mind, recognizing that repeated positive experiences with one another starts to reduce the impact of the first impressions that we had based on very limited sample size.
00:43:29
Speaker
Right? Conversely, if you've had a few bad experiences with people who fall outside of your natural and selective in groups, like whenever someone attacks you, you actually compress your comfort zone. We know this. We know that whenever someone attacks your sense of self in any way or your beliefs, you compress your comfort zone. You don't become more inclusive. You don't become more expansive. You don't become more curious about the other ideas of other people.
00:43:58
Speaker
become more rigid in your thinking. You become more sure they're wrong. And when you look at this in research terms, so one of the colleagues of mine is, our friend of mine rather, is a researcher out of NYU who studies decision making and politics. And he shared this study recently where
00:44:16
Speaker
was looking at people who were heavy, heavy, heavy liberals versus heavy, heavy, heavy conservatives. And the way that they viewed the other side was actually predicted by the basis of the degree to which they were married to their own side. So the more in love with their own side, there were. The more they saw their side as objective and the other side as completely driven by falsehoods and artificial facts.
00:44:43
Speaker
And so it's this strange tendency to orient ourselves into groups. And then if we become so convinced that our group is the group that's right, then we actually become incapable of seeing the flaws in our argument and our side of things. And we over exaggerate the flaws in the other side of the argument. We actually create the perfect storm for social division.
00:45:12
Speaker
And we don't want to fuel that anymore than it already has been fueled. And so we have to kind of return to a place of, hey, I am not certain about what is true about certain aspects of existence itself, of what we need to do to make us a better species.
00:45:33
Speaker
I know that there are certain ideas that you espouse that rub me the wrong way, that make me feel like it's actually really, really bad. And I need you to be able to hear me in a way that makes it so that my side and your side can be shared in a way that we can actually find that truth.
00:45:52
Speaker
right? Because there's some aspect of your perspective that's valid and some aspect of mine. And if we can share our ideas in a way that allows both of them to rise to the surface of validation, then we can weigh them and find that compromise, that sort of thing. So, and it's amplified in so many ways, right? So, you know, I'm sure you've seen... Well, I'll slow down. Do you have any questions? Because I know...
00:46:16
Speaker
No, no, no, man. Look, I'm over here writing notes. I'm sitting here like, hey, look, this is a this is a masterclass. First of all, you just don't hear practitioners. You don't hear people speak like this. Right. And so when you think about just how it's all connected, how you're putting these pieces together and how you're diving into these different topics and then you look at kind of how it was actually happening in the practical sense today and you see the differences in what you're explaining versus what you're seeing.
00:46:44
Speaker
Right now, my mind is just like, I'm seeing these vivid pictures of what you're saying and how it's happening in corporate America, how it's happening in our world, and then listening to how we can better move this forward and the way we need to approach it. This thing in my mind is just like,
00:47:02
Speaker
It's an aspect of, you know, I'm just thinking like, well, a lot of times you see practitioners are trying to one move too fast thinking that, you know, they can chop this in one hit right and be done with it right. I just want to do the training to say I did the training but not really address
00:47:19
Speaker
because this is a process, this is a journey for every individual in addition to the company, which means that it's something that you gotta intentionally work in, you gotta potentially put the time in to make the change. This other piece that I was thinking about was, in a way in which unconscious bias training is delivered in a lot of organizations, the question then in my mind that popped up when you were talking about the interactions, which, and I got a whole nother comment on that, but,
00:47:47
Speaker
When we think about how the actual training is approached, it then seems as if the way that you're saying it is, you almost have to less focus on the work, or I would say this way, focus on the person, the individual as a individual personally, and then as an individual professionally in the workplace. Because when you think about these different interactions that there have been, they can have one set of interactions in the workplace and then have another set of interactions when they go home.
00:48:15
Speaker
and when they deal with their community, who they're around on a day-to-day basis. And so when we think about the tools and resources that we're putting out there for people to be able to use information that they're able to use to really make this change, you have to address the individual holistically and not just when they step into the doors of your workplace, knowing that there's elements of interaction that need to happen.
00:48:39
Speaker
personally and professionally to really get those different those frequent interactions you know with different groups in right and so that that's a piece i guess a question you know as far as like is the approach to narrow when it comes to that unconscious bias training like it's just inside the organization you with other coworkers and should be brought in.
00:49:00
Speaker
into how they address it? I think because we have to deal with what is not what we wish it was, right? Got it. And that applies to all things. So what is the case? The case is that unconscious bias is in the zeitgeist. Unconscious bias training is part of the equation. So you can't not address it because people within your organization have heard of it. Maybe they're doing something on it. Maybe they've taken the IAT and found it enlightening.
00:49:29
Speaker
Maybe they have tools offered from vendors that they feel are powerful for them. And so I always bring up unconscious bias, but I bring it up.
00:49:41
Speaker
only to share the degree of complexity that we're dealing with because I want to be honest about it. Everybody told me, I swear, it was the funniest thing when I was in professional services. Everyone kept telling me, you know, don't make it academic. Don't, you know, you got to simplify it. You can't, you can't go to clients with this. It's above their heads.
00:50:03
Speaker
It's not been my experience at all. What people really want to know is what do we actually understand and what don't we? What's true? What's accurate? What's actually true? And what's true is that the models that currently exist oversimplify unconscious bias in a manner that likely gives you a false sense of control of your unconsciousness.
00:50:21
Speaker
Not only that, they usually try to categorize biases into major categories. And those categories are imperfect. So take something like similarity bias, which is a very common one. It's true. We all have a preference for people that seem similar to us in some meaningful way. Oftentimes based on observable differences, but also just based on selective differences. I like art. You like art. I like you more. That's a real thing.
00:50:47
Speaker
But there's also a dissimilarity bias. There's also a tendency to favor the exotic and the novel experience. And so in any given moment in real time, you don't know which bias is operating and which one's more salient. Is it the similarity bias that's out competing or is it the novelty bias that's out competing? Is it neither? Is it both? In real time, you only ever know that unconscious biases may be operating on your decision. Never precisely that they are.
00:51:16
Speaker
If we can acknowledge that, then we realize like, okay, unconscious bias is more like a symptom and not a causal agent that we need to address in the way that we've been thinking about it. What we really need to address is why did these unconscious biases emerge in the first place? Why did we end up
00:51:34
Speaker
feeling certain preferences for certain groups in the first place. And when we ask ourselves that question, it becomes pretty obvious that when we just think about humanity from an evolutionary perspective, the observable differences served as reliable indicators of friend or foe
00:51:53
Speaker
for most of our human history. Most of the time, you look like that, I look like this, my culture is like this, your culture is like that, and we're enemies, and we're tribal, and we're competing for resources, and we're competing for power in a manner that makes it so that I can use those visual cues to tell me you're not on my side.
00:52:13
Speaker
If we see that, then we can probably assume with a reasonable degree of certainty that we're actually more biologically set up for tribal aspects than we are for these more inclusive, bringing everybody together aspects. And so the way that I talk about this, I simply say, look, there are aspects of your biology.
00:52:38
Speaker
that are going to be out competed in the service of our ideals. That's what we're chasing. We're trying to legitimately over correct for aspects of our biology that
00:52:54
Speaker
deliberately put us in a tribal state of consciousness to inaccurately detect you as a foe or you as a friend on the basis of these very primitive differences. It's in us. It's in our nature. It's why we constantly reduce things to yes, no, good, evil, bad, good. That aspect of us is there. Our brain wants to make a simple, clear decision.
00:53:20
Speaker
and wants to reduce the complexity down to a simple yes, no, and it's going to use patterns in the environment to do so. And unfortunately, some aspects of our nature are driven to see those differences as threatening before we see them as good. And so if we can reduce that threat experience, if we can actually demonstrate that that threat experience is misinformed,
00:53:43
Speaker
and that what our society has become has actually managed to transcend our biology in this really powerful, meaningful way, and that's why we all prop up America whenever we see it at its best. Whenever we see America being America, which is when it's diverse, and we see it in the Olympics, and we just see this rich diversity of people who all call themselves Americans, and it makes our hair stand up.
00:54:08
Speaker
Why is that happening? It's happening because we recognize that this is phenomenal. This has never been done before. And so if we contextualize it and recognize that we are in the midst of an experiment that had never been tried before to bring a whole bunch of different cultures, different races, different ethnicities, and over time, include ever more people into our society so that they could meaningfully contribute, participate, and have access to our wealth and opportunity,
00:54:35
Speaker
that this experiment is still in the middle of that. We're still somewhere in the middle. It's still a new experiment. There's still work to do, but it's an experiment worth investing in because it's a phenomenal experience when we get it right. And in the instances where we get it right, we all know it. We all feel it. It feels great.
00:54:52
Speaker
Unfortunately, right now, we're in a different place. We're in a place right now, politically, where every aspect of our society is divisive. It's politicization of everything. Why is that happening?
00:55:08
Speaker
I personally, just opining that personal opinion is that we, and you can find evidence for this in things like Hate, Inc., which was written by Matt Taibbi.
Media's Role in DEI and Division
00:55:19
Speaker
He's an investigative journalist whose father was a journalist, and he just kind of chronicles how media has moved from a public source and a public service to a for-profit entertainment enterprise.
00:55:31
Speaker
and also how the social media engines and their algorithms are not designed to necessarily favor our best interests. They're just designed to capture as much attention as possible and what captures most of our attention in both contexts, in the context of media and in the context of social media, our mainstream media and social media. What captures our attention the most predictably turns out to be negative information that confirms our point of view.
00:56:01
Speaker
We love that sense of validation that comes from confirming our outrage. It comes from this strange aspect of our brains, what is referred to as the negativity bias. But basically, it's more important to detect threats in your environment than to marvel at the dandelions. And so human beings tend to overweight and over-attune our attention to negative events and circumstances. Those are just more salient. And so when the algorithm on YouTube
00:56:29
Speaker
is trying to predict what's more likely gonna hold your attention. What video should I feed you next? It's gonna learn over time that, oh, if I just keep feeding you things that make you angry, that make you mad at the other side, that's gonna keep your attention. You're gonna be here all night.
00:56:43
Speaker
And the same thing when CNN or MSNBC or Fox News are trying to decide what content should I put in front of you. Should I put content in front of you that makes you feel warm and fuzzy? No, I won't hold your attention for a few moments. But if I put an outrageous story about the other side,
00:57:01
Speaker
that really drives up that anger in you and makes you mad at the injustice of this country and so that's creating the illusion of immense division.
00:57:14
Speaker
But it's an illusion because when you go outside and I go into Central Park in New York City or go home to my hometown in Iowa, I don't feel the overwhelming sense that everyone hates me because I'm brown. I don't feel that. I don't feel like I have any strong opinion as to whether my cashier should be any particular race or gender.
00:57:35
Speaker
And the way we actually are behaving on, not at least of course there's outliers, but on the whole, we're just treating each other like people, but it feels like there's nothing but hate. It feels like hate is everywhere and division is everywhere. And it's because that's what you're seeing. That's what
00:57:55
Speaker
we're all seeing and unfortunately when you rise that to the surface all of a sudden the labels and the identities and all that stuff it all just floods into the political atmosphere and it loses sight of like no look we've been making progress we are the best society we've ever been we need a lot of
00:58:14
Speaker
us to kind of keep working. There's still a whole lot of things that are wrong. There's still a whole lot to fix. There probably always will be. But if we don't at least recognize that we have made progress, if we don't allow ourselves to celebrate what we have achieved, and we don't allow ourselves to kind of feel that sense of this is possible, then it feels hopeless. So the narrative that's
00:58:39
Speaker
been created as a consequence of over weighting the ethical argument is that it became just another thing to get politicized. And so now if you're in favor of DNI, it's very likely that you're liberal. And if you're opposed to DNI, it's very likely that you're conservative. And it's just another political thing. And it's just like with COVID. COVID was supposed to be a uniter. But how quickly did it fall right into the same trap of political division?
00:59:06
Speaker
There's more money in it. More money in our outrage. More money in our outrage. If I want to be upset at conservatives, then I'm going to go to CNN and I'm going to dig into some of these other places that I know that they're going down one path, one message that I know I can once again confirm what you already believe. Same thing for Fox News, same thing for these other media outlets, right? And the algorithm, that's a whole other.
00:59:35
Speaker
I read a book around the algorithm of oppression and just how it works and how it's looking at certain things, society, people, races, and that right there is just a whole other aspect and knowing that we're in this digital space all the time.
00:59:52
Speaker
It's continuously feeding us, right? And it's like, like you said, if we don't have those those moments, right, to where you look at progress, to where you look at, you know, the the how how good or great the progress and things that we've made, then you're going to always be in this negative me against you. Yeah, you know, exactly that. Right. No, this is not. Yeah. I mean, that's where we are. Where are we? Yeah. Where are you? Yeah. OK.
01:00:19
Speaker
Let's look at it really objectively. If you zoom out just a little bit and you appreciate the fact that the Civil War, 1861 to 1865, not that long ago, women's right to vote, 1920.
Progress and Challenges in Gender and Race Representation
01:00:33
Speaker
1920 just happened. Black women getting the right to vote in 1965. Women introduced to the workforce.
01:00:39
Speaker
literally within our lifetimes in terms of actually reaching gender equity or equality when it comes to representation in the workforce. So for the first time in America's history, we have roughly 50.4% of all workers are women. First time ever.
01:00:56
Speaker
Think about that. Right to vote, 1920, 100 years later, equal representation in work. Now we have to work on equal representation at levels of leadership. But that is extraordinary progress over a very short amount of time when you think about the long arc of humanity. And if we can recognize that, wow, that is really extraordinary progress, and that it took a lot of effort, it took a lot of concentration, it took sustained
01:01:25
Speaker
multifaceted effort across the board, not just in terms of the legislature, not just in terms of governance and politics, not just in terms of corporate responsibility and corporate social responsibility took all of it. Working collaboratively toward the same end, which is a more fair society for women. And we're in the middle of it, right? We're a hundred years or so in to that journey and
01:01:53
Speaker
Now we're at that final leg. The final leg is we've gotten to a place where, by and large, people believe that women belong in the workplace at an equal way to men. There's nothing that we should be doing that is preventative of women's opportunities for success in their careers.
01:02:16
Speaker
That particular argument seems uncontroversial in comparison to race and in comparison. So there's much less affirmative action, for instance, for women in schools, but there is affirmative action for people of color. And so that creates a lot more controversy.
01:02:32
Speaker
Yeah. But we've made all that progress. We've made all this progress. You can't even look at a photo from the 80s of the government and hold it up to a photo of today's government. And it is markedly different. It is markedly more diverse. It is in the same thing with most of our organizations, not all of them, but most of them.
01:02:57
Speaker
across levels of leadership have much richer diversity than they used to have, there's still a long way to go. And that's okay. That doesn't have to be something that causes threat or fear or triggers a sense of you're coming for our jobs. It's not that. But if we frame it, but that's what it feels like if you just silence the opposing viewpoints. That's what it feels like for the white Americans who
01:03:20
Speaker
are not at the tops of leadership. There's plenty of white Americans who are struggling to earn a living, who are struggling to find an opportunity, who are suffering much more similarly to what we traditionally think of as our black and brown communities. There is white poverty, and there's a reason why white males are
01:03:41
Speaker
Disproportionately likely right now to have opioid addictions. There's a reason because they're being excluded They're feeling that same sense of exclusion and we might say to ourselves. Well, it's your turn Yeah, is that the path of least resistance to say hey, it's your turn deal with it or should we try to be slightly better than past presentations of in these moments past
01:04:08
Speaker
What I'm trying to get across is that should we try to go about this in a way that isn't as quick to mind but is much more likely to bring us closer to a healthy society. And that approach requires empathy and patience and compassion for what it feels like. We have to respect what is the ask of diversity.
01:04:35
Speaker
Well, the ask of the diversity movement is coming at the cost of the white majority feeling like everything that they value is under threat and is being required to change in a manner that either deal with it or not. Well, that would feel hard for anybody.
01:04:53
Speaker
You could go into the projects and say, I want to replace the projects with this beautiful high rise and I'm going to give you all houses here. And they would still, even though it would give them a better home with washer dryer and all that stuff, that would still make them feel threatened because it doesn't matter that it's better or worse. It matters that change induces threat.
01:05:13
Speaker
Change induces this sense of, hmm, but I like, I got used to this. This is, this is, this is, this is home and you're trying to change home. And that's, that's not my culture, right? So it's, it's, it's this really complicated way that we normalize to the conditions of our lives and they make us comfortable. And then anytime we introduce a big change, it makes us uncomfortable.
01:05:39
Speaker
And so how do we show up for that discomfort? How do we empathize with that discomfort? How do we pull people along rather than push them to where we want them to be so that we are actually respecting the fact that this isn't a small ask, right? This is a big ask. We're asking you to radically redefine what you think of when it comes to a cohesive community, radically redefine what normal looks like and feels like.
01:06:05
Speaker
We're asking you to normalize diversity, something that you have had very limited exposure to perhaps, something that for your entire life you haven't had to worry about because you were insulated from it in some meaningful way. And now, sorry, that's about to change. So that's big. It's huge. That's a monumental shift in what we're asking. And so if we meet people where they are, then I feel like we can
01:06:35
Speaker
give them the right information, not polarized information, not ethical information, not do this because it's the best for the business, but rather do this because we are going to keep getting diverse. It's not something that we can control. Every time that we've tried to control it, every time we've tried to limit diversity, bad things
Biological Diversity and Societal Norms
01:06:55
Speaker
happen. Just look at the royal families of Europe.
01:06:57
Speaker
and the inbreeding and all the bad things that happen when you try to compress diversity. It's almost always a negative thing when it comes to nature. It doesn't want it. It doesn't want to limit diversity. It wants to explode diversity. All indications point to that. So if we can just recognize that and accept that, then we're having a different conversation with the LGBTQ plus, right?
01:07:19
Speaker
It is interesting that some people, 2% of our population are born intersex, roughly, right? XXY, XXXY, these chromosomal anomalies that produce a completely different version of a human, categorically speaking, that don't fit into our binary descriptions of male-female. Well, what are you going to do with that information? You're going to say that person doesn't deserve to exist? Or are you going to say, wow, biology, biology is inviting this.
01:07:49
Speaker
Our nature is designed to allow this. Maybe, maybe I should show up with compassion. Maybe I should recognize that they didn't choose that composition. That's just what they are and who they are. And that's okay. That's just like you're okay. They didn't choose that anymore than you chose that.
01:08:09
Speaker
If we can get to that place where the things that we're not choosing are any longer things that radically define our opportunities or radically predict whether or not I can become successful, the wider that net is cast, the more the society feels fair, the more we can move beyond our labels, the more we can finally reach that zenith, which is when we've created a society that is fair
01:08:38
Speaker
for people independent of the group to which they belong such that you can be more than the group to which you belong. You can freely expand. I'm not walking around thinking of myself as a cisgender mixed-race male, right? I don't do that. But I will if I, you know, like in the same way that like, you know, what he's talking about earlier were white Americans, you know, they don't, they didn't have to like make that a really salient thing in the way that Blacks and Latins and Asians have because of the, they haven't had that same level of discrimination.
01:09:08
Speaker
but then take an American and put them in France. And all of a sudden, because of the norms, the stereotypical ways that French people are thought to perceive Americans, all of a sudden, the American identity becomes salient because they recognize how I'm perceived
01:09:24
Speaker
And many Americans are either scoff at it or they're on their best behavior to prove the French wrong. They're wrong about Americans. But that identity is only super salient in that context. You feel the weight of being American in a place that doesn't like Americans. Just like if I am in a group
01:09:44
Speaker
Like if I'm a black American and across every level of our economy and infrastructure, there are disparities that disproportionately impact me negatively. I'm less likely to go to college, more likely to have college debt. I'm more likely to get arrested, much more likely to be represented in prison. I have much less earning potential, much less access to leadership.
Language, Identity, and Inequality
01:10:07
Speaker
Across every aspect of our society, I can see these disparities. Do you think for a second, I don't recognize I'm black? Yeah.
01:10:15
Speaker
That makes it extraordinarily palpable. And not only that, not only does it make it palpable, that also makes it so that your words matter a lot more. Why is it so outrageous when you see someone say something racist? Why are we so triggered by it right now? Because of the root of the problem, the societal unfairness.
01:10:38
Speaker
Society is fair and all of a sudden you say something about my culture, I can laugh with you. Nobody can laugh with each, we can't laugh with each other about our, there are differences between my culture and yours and between women and men. There are very, very concrete differences that we should be able to celebrate and perhaps laugh with and at like we used to when we are a little bit more ignorant as to just how unequal things happen to be.
01:11:03
Speaker
But if we accept that, the reason that these things are outraging us so much is actually driven not by wokeism or political correctness, but by just how unfair it really is. And that the words have power because of that, not because the words themselves are the problem. Problem is actually the source of the inequality that is rampant when it comes to black and brown America.
01:11:28
Speaker
And so the faster that we deal with that, the faster that we make this world fair, the faster we can get back to being able to laugh with each other about our differences and celebrate those differences and acknowledge those unique aspects of our cultures. Because diversity is not about making everything the same.
01:11:47
Speaker
Diversity is about celebrating our differences. And so we're not trying to treat everybody the same. We're trying to reach a place where we can actually celebrate the fact that, wow, look at all the different people, different types of thinking, different ways of being, different ways of looking, and deciding to direct one's life that are available to us. And look what happens when you actually make them all come together and collaborate with one another. It creates this really beautiful portrait that is infinitely more capable than one that is only using one color.
01:12:17
Speaker
You know what I mean? It's very obvious. Take a paint brush. Use only green. Is that going to be as dynamic? Is that going to have as much depth as something that has the full rainbow available to it? Of course not.
01:12:31
Speaker
And so that's what I'm chasing. And that's the philosophy concretely. It's really concretely in terms of making this meaningful for how do organizations actually do this? Well, there's lots of helpful things. Cross training is pretty useful. So having your IT team train, your marketing team, because they're going to have different compositions within those things and giving people access to different
01:12:56
Speaker
skill sets, different ways of thinking, different cultures, just as a consequence of the representation differences that you do have currently. That starts to increase intergroup contact. You can use things like reverse mentoring or just mentoring in general, where you deliberately pair people who historically lack access to leadership and make sure that they have opportunity to make sure that that person is deliberately paired.
01:13:18
Speaker
that people at your entry level are deliberately paired with leadership so they can receive mentorship. All sorts of things that you can do to dramatically lift intergroup contact, including leveraging technology, creating Zoom experiences where you put people in randomized pairs, and just basically try to create conversations with different people from different places of your organization, from different backgrounds, from different cultures, different ethnicities, different everything.
01:13:46
Speaker
the more intergroup contact you have, the more diversity feels interesting, right? It's one of those things that the second that you go from, in terms of my experience, when I went from Iowa to San Francisco, it was like, whoa, okay, this is much, much different than I expected, right? I got there and I was like, okay, wait a second. All of a sudden, me being brown doesn't feel as important as it once did.
01:14:11
Speaker
When I was in Iowa, I noticed I was different. I felt different. And maybe I was manifesting it myself. But the fact is that when you are an outlier in a visual way, you feel it. And you feel like it's having consequences. And some of them are real, and some of them you're actually making. But in either case, it's something that you viscerally sense.
01:14:33
Speaker
When you get to a place that's extraordinarily diverse, all of a sudden it just ceases to matter nearly as much as it did before. And that's what you're chasing in the organizational context. You're trying to create that same sense of
01:14:49
Speaker
Wow, diversity, having diverse group of friends, this makes my life really interesting. I keep learning different things that I never even thought about because I'm talking to this person from Zimbabwe and I'm talking to this person from Nigeria and I'm talking to this person from Sweden. And now I just frankly think of the world differently and added so much nuance to my worldview. So I think that if we can get there, then we're going to be able to create a much more cohesive
01:15:15
Speaker
kind of foundation for diversity to thrive. And that's why so many organizations have moved toward belonging. Just focus on belonging, focus on making it so that anybody who gets through your doors, once they arrive,
01:15:26
Speaker
They're welcomed. Welcome home. This place is for you. You will be respected. You will be able to feel a sense of psychological safety. You will be able to be yourself. You can show up as who you are, and we will accept you for who you are. Obviously, excluding the extreme cases, you can't be Hitler. In general, that's it.
01:15:50
Speaker
In general, that's the aspiration for belonging. And as long as belonging is anchored in the right values, so obviously Hitler had values. They weren't great values, but they were values and he was able to manifest belonging, as was the mafia, as was the
01:16:15
Speaker
You know, Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, with that character that Leonardo DiCaprio played, like all of these different things, they are able to create a culture of belonging. So it just has to be said that belonging in and of itself is not sufficient to create a good culture that will be welcoming of diversity. You actually have to make sure it's anchored in the right values. And those values speak to trying to get people to see deeper aspects of our nature in a much more curious fashion and trying to get people to recognize that the
01:16:45
Speaker
kind of ways in which we try to categorize people. It's almost always wrong. So just that's what you're competing is. You're not competing against bias so much as you're competing against the tendency to categorize in general.
Transcending Group Categorizations in DEI
01:16:54
Speaker
Try to treat individual at the individual level. Try to recognize that whatever your preconditioned familiar is, you're going to have a preconditioned familiar good. And that's most likely going to be comprised of people who are inside your biologic or selected in group.
01:17:14
Speaker
most likely it's going to be people who are part of your in-group from your history. So that's going to be, if, if, if, if I take myself as an example, I probably have a lot more Latin friends than people who are non Latin. That happens as a consequence of just these natural selection preferences that result, right? And so if we just see that, then just kind of recognize that you have this defined comfort zone that is, that is just going to make it so that,
01:17:43
Speaker
people that fall inside your natural and selected M group feel easier to get along with. You listen to their information with a lot more open-mindedness. You put them on your side and then you hear them differently. And so if you try to just treat individuals as though they always belong in familiar good until they prove you otherwise, then you can start to have a different conversation. Then you can start to try to find
01:18:12
Speaker
the things about that person that you relate with, because we have more common denominators than we do not when it comes to the individuals. You're going to have things like, I ask you, like, what do you really value? And you're going to say, family, you're going to say, you're going to say, I want people to remember me for being kind and compassionate and want people to know that I cared really deeply about helping human beings that were within my sphere. I really wanted to help the people that I touched in some meaningful way.
01:18:41
Speaker
There are these common denominators that transcend our differences in really meaningful, palpable ways. And if we tune into them, all of a sudden these things that put us into boxes and make us feel different, they start to become a lot less relevant to who you are at your core, who you are as a person.
01:18:58
Speaker
And so that's the long arc. And so that's the journey we're on. And it's a patient one.
Embracing DEI Complexity for Progress
01:19:04
Speaker
And it's a complex one, but it's one that I'm happy to report that people are embracing and people, to be honest, it's been really phenomenal. I actually didn't expect, and obviously with this conversation, I'm going into like, you know, we're having a conversation, so we're going in tangents and things like that. But what I've found is that when you give people the science in a palpable, palatable way,
01:19:28
Speaker
that doesn't compromise its integrity, right? The second that you're forcing things into a model that you have improved, as so many things do, the moment you're doing that, you're
01:19:41
Speaker
taking that same leap that results in so many inaccuracies and inconsistencies and just adds more noise. If you just stay true to what we currently understand and are honest about what we currently don't understand, then all of a sudden you can actually
01:19:58
Speaker
get people to understand things in a way that is relatable and is interesting and is accessible. And it doesn't matter that it's complex. It matters that you're honest. It matters that we're trying to be honest about what's at stake, honest about what's required, honest about just how complex this really is. These tribal states of consciousness do emerge with stubborn consistency.
01:20:26
Speaker
And so if we accept that, then we know what we're actually trying to do is.
01:20:34
Speaker
As I said, I'll compete aspects of our biology in the service of our ideals, and we can do it. We've done it before. We've done it many times before. First of all, this discussion, the conversation has been amazing. I knew that it was going to be good and we was going to go deep, but even just hearing it, listening to it, and seeing you kind of go through the science and the information.
01:20:57
Speaker
this has blown my mind. I'm just sitting here thinking like, I'm thinking like, man, I need to go back to the books. I need to go figure out like, how does this all connect? What do we make all these, these different connections that and so, you know, just, you know, as we cap off this discussion, we think
Resources for Further Learning in DEI
01:21:13
Speaker
about
01:21:13
Speaker
leaders who are listening to this podcast, who are going through this information. They're excited about what you're sharing. They like the information. What are a couple of different resources that you could give them from books, other research that's out there that can just allow them to go deeper and start to really get more informed in this area so they can improve how they push this journey forward.
01:21:38
Speaker
Absolutely. Happy to share. So the obvious ones are thinking fast and slow. That's Daniel Kahneman. He is the first Nobel laureate in the category of behavioral economics, but he is most famous for his research into these two systems that the brain relies on to make decisions.
01:22:03
Speaker
In understanding it, you start to recognize just how easy it is for kind of expedience and impulse to win, to basically compress our comfort zones and make us make the familiar choice instead of the more informed, more objective, more likely to produce a choice that allows for new people to come into the organization.
01:22:30
Speaker
It's a good book for that. Hate, Inc., like I mentioned earlier, Matt Taibbi, that's a good book for understanding the political atmosphere. Not saying it's perfect, just saying that it's informative. None of these books are perfect. The Righteous Mind or The Coddling of the American Mind, both by John Hates, are absolutely powerful books that I kind of wish they were mandatory reading.
01:22:55
Speaker
If you want to go really deep, you really want to get to that level of complexity where we're really talking about neurophysiology. Rob Sapolsky is one of the most famous neuroendocrinologists on the planet, probably the most well-known for researching stress. He has a book out called Behave. It really is a beautiful composition, detailed and precise in its
01:23:24
Speaker
understanding of how our behavior manifests and also very honest when there are gaps in our current understanding.
01:23:32
Speaker
And I think that those together, you'll get to a really deep place and a really much more accurate place, a much more honest accounting of where we're at in our scientific journey and a much more honest accounting about where we're at with this diversity journey. And then if you want diversity, so none of those are diversity focused books, by the way. If you want diversity focused books that have meaningful insights that might help. Biased by Jennifer Ebert Hart is a great book.
01:24:01
Speaker
Gets into the heart of bias. That one's a good one. Actually read the counter perspectives. Read the diversity of delusion. I promise you it's gonna make you really mad. But you have to understand where the other side is coming from. You have to make room in your mind for dissent. Because that's the only way you come up with a solution to solve for dissent. And it's important to do so otherwise you are not going to make progress or every time you take two steps forward you'll take one step back.
01:24:31
Speaker
And so just make that a priority to actually understand as intimately as possible the counter-perspectives and figure out ways to meaningfully address them, figure out ways to make those counter-perspectives part of the solution, part of what you strive to achieve with inclusion.
01:24:46
Speaker
I think I started The Parasitic Mind, too. And I read a little bit of, and I had to take a step back. And I was like, let me come back to this. Let me come back and try. There is also a degree of arrogance in many of these books that is, if you have a strong opinion, it's going to trigger that sense of like, oh my god. But it's OK. It's OK. You got to get through that feeling. It's good. It's necessary. You can't achieve emotional mastery if you don't experience the range.
01:25:15
Speaker
Now I'm with you, I'm with you. And so look, this has been an amazing, amazing conversation. And so look, before we go, any shout outs, any parting words, where can people find you if they want to dive deeper into your thoughts on this topic? I'm on LinkedIn. I am accessible. I like to help people think through these things in a deeper way. I genuinely believe
01:25:37
Speaker
that we have to keep our eye on the long view. The long view is that we actually do want equality, right? Equity is necessary now as a consequence of trying to compensate for disparities that were in our systems and processes that created a lot of unfairness at a systemic level. That's what equity is about. But the long view is equality. The long view is that we actually want
01:26:02
Speaker
everyone to have equal treatment in terms of our rights, in terms of our access to opportunities, in terms of our ability to make a meaningful, fulfilling life in this nation and beyond. And if we keep our eyes on the long view, if we try to make wise decisions instead of focusing on the decision that's best suited for today, we think about what's the wisest thing to do. We orient our attention toward
01:26:30
Speaker
What do we need to do, not just for my organization, not just for the music industry in the case of the Guitar Center Company, not just for our nation? What do we need to do? How do we need to frame this? How do we need to contextualize this? When information isn't necessary to create as accurate a portrait as possible?
01:26:46
Speaker
so that we have framed this thing in a manner that is persuasive and in a manner that moves hearts and minds and respects where we actually are, not just tells everybody where they should be. How do we actually bring people along instead of creating a new encampment of excluded members of our society?
01:27:07
Speaker
And if we focus there, we can create a much, much more inclusive, long lasting solution that can get us to a much healthier place as a culture. And that's my aspiration. That's my hope. And yeah, absolutely reach out any time you would like. Awesome. I love it. I love it. I love
Closing Remarks and Audience Engagement
01:27:23
Speaker
it. Well, look, that does it for us. Thank you for joining another episode of 3D Podcast. This has been Cedric and you've been listening to Paul Jimenez, Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the Guitar Center Company. Thank you very much, Cedric. This was fun.
01:27:38
Speaker
Awesome, well that does it for us. Thank you for joining us on another episode of the 3D Podcast. If you would like to connect on social media, follow me on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, at Cedric and Powers. And if you have any questions you'd like me to read or answer on the show, or just wanna know more about my thoughts around diversity and inclusion, entrepreneurship, or just overall business, you can text me. Yes, I said text me at 770-285-0404.
01:28:07
Speaker
You'll receive content straight to your phone on a regular basis, and you can message back and forth with me, not a bot or an assistant. All responses come directly from me. But look, this has been a great episode. Until next week, this has been Cedric Chambers, and you've been listening to the 3D Podcast. We out.