[Applause]
recently I was watching a cooking
competition program now this is a
program to bring amateur cooks so people
probably like us here who have a passion
for cooking and to find out who would be
the best over the many weeks of this
cooking competition I was really amazed
by all the candidates but one stuck out
for me and her name is Sally huh she did
amazing things with food and she was so
calm under the pressure so relaxed and
focused clearly in my mind Sally had was
the best but fortunately the judges
agreed with me and she was one of the
three finalists now television is
television and in that last program they
were portraying the three finalists in
giving us a bit of information about
them and I watched with interest because
up to that point I was only focused on
their performance how good were they as
a cook through television I going into
that listening in to those final pieces
about who these three people were I was
quite interested in so as I talked about
the black first candidate and who she
was they had a little video clip and
they showed her at her home in Cambridge
and she was playing classical music on
the piano
now I don’t know how that lands in your
mind but in my mind in a split second I
thought privileged
okay they went on to the second
candidate and they were talking about
him in his background and that he was
raised by a single mother and he had a
hard time in school really difficult
time but he managed to turn it around
and he has things you know doing well
now in his life so in my mind how I
heard that was the third finalist with
Sally ha now remember that’s the one I
was rooting for and thinking was the
best the clear best when they learned
about Sally ‘has she’s a doctor not only
is she a doctor her parents are doctors
her siblings are doctors you guess what
her partner’s a doctor and she has a
young child and on top of the many weeks
of this cooking competition she was
working full-time as a doctor had full
home life and in that split second I
thought hey she clearly doesn’t need any
help she’s got her life all sorted out
and in a split second I switched and
said candidate number two he should win
he’s had a hard time of it he deserves
this
what just happened here how did I go
from judging what I thought was clear
competition I’m cooking to all of a
sudden being influenced by some small
details well fortunately that didn’t
happen with the judges and Sully who was
declared the winner but there we have it
my biased thinking revealed my goals of
assessing who was the best talent
quickly shifted and my decision did not
match up to my goal so if this happened
to me me of all people so when he loves
cooking and someone who’s been working
in the field of inclusion and gender
inequality and diversity for over 20
years
well what hope do we have in the
workplace what does this mean for
managers and employees when they’re
selecting who would be the best talent
we know the success of organizations
rest on its people and hiring good
talent is critical
yet bias comes up researchers at Harvard
University ask the question have you
ever been treated unfairly at work
because of someone else’s bias and over
eighty-nine percent said yes this
included men women white people and
non-white people clearly bias is all
around us and bias is impacting all of
us so what do we need to do differently
to mitigate to lessen the impact of bias
in our thinking and decision making
well one of the first steps is to
understand how this is happening as we
know from the work done by Daniel
Kahneman and many other researchers that
we have two systems of thinking the
first part of our brain is something’s
called the fast brain or the unconscious
brain that early primitive part of our
brain and thank goodness we have that
that’s allowing us to regulate our
breathing – you’re automatically many of
you here fanning yourselves to cool off
and it ensured our survival as a species
so we’re here today thankfully because
of our fast brain but the challenge is
also we like to think that our slow
brain is the one in control
that’s what’s sometimes referred to as
the rational brain and that’s where we
use when we’re learning something new or
we’re doing very concentrated focus the
vast majority of our thinking however is
in that automatic fast brain it
processes more than eleven million bits
of information per second whereas the
slow brain only 40 bits of information
per second and that significantly
decreases when we’re multitasking so our
brain develops shortcuts to enable it to
be able to cope with these two systems
of thinking and really try to speed
things along
automatically fast with shortcuts but
our shortcuts helpful
I have never met anyone who said I want
to discriminate I want to treat people
unfairly I just want to hire people like
me intentions yet we know that this
happens and what’s happening is that
fast brain is getting in the way of our
intentions of being fair of making
objective decisions and good decisions
so looking in at the workplace let’s
take gender equity as an example or a
case study most organizations if they’re
doing work on diversity and inclusion
are doing work on gender equity it is
one of the one common themes that’s true
around the world for a focus here in
this space so much work has been done
decades of work certainly in the span of
my career and what we are finding is
that the vast amount of resources that
have been dedicated to gender parity in
achieving it are not actually living up
to what we hope for so for example in
the top three actions that most
organizations are doing when they’re
addressing gender parity bringing in
awareness training or unconscious bias
training is in those top three in the US
alone it’s estimated that more than
eight billion dollars a year is spent on
diversity inclusion awareness programs
or unconscious bias awareness programs
yet the studies and research are showing
actually these are not as effective as
we would hope not having the outcomes
that we would hope and in many cases
backfiring we’re getting the opposite
behavior if we look at the World
Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap
report we see that progress is happening
on women’s education levels increasing
however in the workplace we find that is
still not more than 30 percent women on
average in leadership roles and it’s
estimated it will take more than a
hundred and seventy years to reach
global gender economic parity clearly
something has to shift we need to rock
the boat and challenge the status quo
we’re in a stuck pattern of doing a lot
of activities but something is not going
in the way that we wanted to go well
this is what brought my partner Tina
Nielsen and I together in 2013 at that
time we were both working in
multinationals different multinationals
and a mutual friend introduced us and
said you to think differently I think
you should talk and indeed we did we
found that we were applying different
ways of doing the work on inclusion and
diversity for Social Psychology from
anthropology and in particular
behavioral economics Tina and I in that
phone call and shortly thereafter said
let’s start a global movement and change
the way the gender equality and
inclusion and diversity work is taking
place and so we launched our nonprofit
inclusion lunches to be able to share
what we do to help work with the fast
brain to make decision-making more
aligned to our intentions to be fair to
have equality and make good decisions
inclusion ledges are based on behavioral
economics and it is about how to make
this simpler to do we have seen so much
in the space of inclusion adversity not
working
blaming shaming those aren’t effective
having massive goals and targets that
are unrealistic or not driving change
instead we really need to take what we
know about human motivation how we make
decisions and apply that to how we work
for inclusion inside organizations to
try and help close this gap of our good
intentions let’s be fair and our actual
decision-making a behavior let’s do
three examples I’ll share with you so
one thing to round our movement on
inclusion matrices are real life proven
examples that have been applied inside
organizations and we share to inspire
others to take that back to their
workplace and we want to hear from you
so I hope this sparks for you some ideas
of how you could apply this in your
organization as individuals we tend to
gravitate to people who are like us as
what we do it’s safety we feel
comfortable and we actually like them
more because they’re like us we trust
them more and when we have opportunities
we turn to them with those opportunities
the challenge is that if we want to have
a wide range of talent in our
organizations we need to look beyond the
in-group we need to challenge the status
quo so one example of an inclusion nudge
which we call a feel the need inclusion
that that is designed for an
organization on this topic was I pulled
together the photographs of all the
people in the talent pool for senior
executive roles and we had him up on a
slide similar to this in an executive
meeting and I asked the leaders
so how many of these people do you know
and they started shouting out the names
and competition who knew more and I
faded to the next slide after two-three
minutes and the next slide actually were
the same photographs but the male
colleagues pictures had been faded out
so what remained were only the female
and there was a lot less of them in that
pipeline and what the leaders learned
when I asked the question on that slide
so how many of these people do you know
they realize they actually didn’t have a
wide visibility of that pipeline and
they certainly didn’t know them at the
level they knew the male colleagues that
nudge was a aha moment where they
realized they didn’t have full
visibility and they needed to do
something differently the second example
is fairly easy its framing it’s how we
see things and it works on perception
when we think about leaders oftentimes
we have an anchor or a thought point of
what our leader looks like and it tends
to be what is already in place and so
we’re stuck in a pattern of replicating
leadership in the same models so many
organizations are doing nudges such as
changing conference rooms or changing
the artwork in the building to try and
show a wider perspective of who leaders
could be and changing that thought
anchor point and lastly one example that
we have in terms of process nudges so if
we accept that in our organizations we
have systems and processes and they were
designed by us and we are biased it’s
not far to assume that we can have
potentially unintentional bias built
into our systems and processes and blind
Seavey’s is an excellent example of a
process nudge where you remove all
identifying details from the CV and when
organizations do this they find they
bring in much more diverse talent
so as we go forward and think about how
to have the benefits that equality can
bring to our workplaces in society
let’s try and work with our whole brain
not just the rationale the we also need
to work with the fast or automatic part
of the brain and design interventions to
help steer our decision-making and our
behaviors to be aligned to where true
intentions thank you
[Applause]
recently I was watching a cooking
competition program now this is a
program to bring amateur cooks so people
probably like us here who have a passion
for cooking and to find out who would be
the best over the many weeks of this
cooking competition I was really amazed
by all the candidates but one stuck out
for me and her name is Sally huh she did
amazing things with food and she was so
calm under the pressure so relaxed and
focused clearly in my mind Sally had was
the best but fortunately the judges
agreed with me and she was one of the
three finalists now television is
television and in that last program they
were portraying the three finalists in
giving us a bit of information about
them and I watched with interest because
up to that point I was only focused on
their performance how good were they as
a cook through television I going into
that listening in to those final pieces
about who these three people were I was
quite interested in so as I talked about
the black first candidate and who she
was they had a little video clip and
they showed her at her home in Cambridge
and she was playing classical music on
the piano
now I don’t know how that lands in your
mind but in my mind in a split second I
thought privileged
okay they went on to the second
candidate and they were talking about
him in his background and that he was
raised by a single mother and he had a
hard time in school really difficult
time but he managed to turn it around
and he has things you know doing well
now in his life so in my mind how I
heard that was the third finalist with
Sally ha now remember that’s the one I
was rooting for and thinking was the
best the clear best when they learned
about Sally ‘has she’s a doctor not only
is she a doctor her parents are doctors
her siblings are doctors you guess what
her partner’s a doctor and she has a
young child and on top of the many weeks
of this cooking competition she was
working full-time as a doctor had full
home life and in that split second I
thought hey she clearly doesn’t need any
help she’s got her life all sorted out
and in a split second I switched and
said candidate number two he should win
he’s had a hard time of it he deserves
this
what just happened here how did I go
from judging what I thought was clear
competition I’m cooking to all of a
sudden being influenced by some small
details well fortunately that didn’t
happen with the judges and Sully who was
declared the winner but there we have it
my biased thinking revealed my goals of
assessing who was the best talent
quickly shifted and my decision did not
match up to my goal so if this happened
to me me of all people so when he loves
cooking and someone who’s been working
in the field of inclusion and gender
inequality and diversity for over 20
years
well what hope do we have in the
workplace what does this mean for
managers and employees when they’re
selecting who would be the best talent
we know the success of organizations
rest on its people and hiring good
talent is critical
yet bias comes up researchers at Harvard
University ask the question have you
ever been treated unfairly at work
because of someone else’s bias and over
eighty-nine percent said yes this
included men women white people and
non-white people clearly bias is all
around us and bias is impacting all of
us so what do we need to do differently
to mitigate to lessen the impact of bias
in our thinking and decision making
well one of the first steps is to
understand how this is happening as we
know from the work done by Daniel
Kahneman and many other researchers that
we have two systems of thinking the
first part of our brain is something’s
called the fast brain or the unconscious
brain that early primitive part of our
brain and thank goodness we have that
that’s allowing us to regulate our
breathing – you’re automatically many of
you here fanning yourselves to cool off
and it ensured our survival as a species
so we’re here today thankfully because
of our fast brain but the challenge is
also we like to think that our slow
brain is the one in control
that’s what’s sometimes referred to as
the rational brain and that’s where we
use when we’re learning something new or
we’re doing very concentrated focus the
vast majority of our thinking however is
in that automatic fast brain it
processes more than eleven million bits
of information per second whereas the
slow brain only 40 bits of information
per second and that significantly
decreases when we’re multitasking so our
brain develops shortcuts to enable it to
be able to cope with these two systems
of thinking and really try to speed
things along
automatically fast with shortcuts but
our shortcuts helpful
I have never met anyone who said I want
to discriminate I want to treat people
unfairly I just want to hire people like
me intentions yet we know that this
happens and what’s happening is that
fast brain is getting in the way of our
intentions of being fair of making
objective decisions and good decisions
so looking in at the workplace let’s
take gender equity as an example or a
case study most organizations if they’re
doing work on diversity and inclusion
are doing work on gender equity it is
one of the one common themes that’s true
around the world for a focus here in
this space so much work has been done
decades of work certainly in the span of
my career and what we are finding is
that the vast amount of resources that
have been dedicated to gender parity in
achieving it are not actually living up
to what we hope for so for example in
the top three actions that most
organizations are doing when they’re
addressing gender parity bringing in
awareness training or unconscious bias
training is in those top three in the US
alone it’s estimated that more than
eight billion dollars a year is spent on
diversity inclusion awareness programs
or unconscious bias awareness programs
yet the studies and research are showing
actually these are not as effective as
we would hope not having the outcomes
that we would hope and in many cases
backfiring we’re getting the opposite
behavior if we look at the World
Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap
report we see that progress is happening
on women’s education levels increasing
however in the workplace we find that is
still not more than 30 percent women on
average in leadership roles and it’s
estimated it will take more than a
hundred and seventy years to reach
global gender economic parity clearly
something has to shift we need to rock
the boat and challenge the status quo
we’re in a stuck pattern of doing a lot
of activities but something is not going
in the way that we wanted to go well
this is what brought my partner Tina
Nielsen and I together in 2013 at that
time we were both working in
multinationals different multinationals
and a mutual friend introduced us and
said you to think differently I think
you should talk and indeed we did we
found that we were applying different
ways of doing the work on inclusion and
diversity for Social Psychology from
anthropology and in particular
behavioral economics Tina and I in that
phone call and shortly thereafter said
let’s start a global movement and change
the way the gender equality and
inclusion and diversity work is taking
place and so we launched our nonprofit
inclusion lunches to be able to share
what we do to help work with the fast
brain to make decision-making more
aligned to our intentions to be fair to
have equality and make good decisions
inclusion ledges are based on behavioral
economics and it is about how to make
this simpler to do we have seen so much
in the space of inclusion adversity not
working
blaming shaming those aren’t effective
having massive goals and targets that
are unrealistic or not driving change
instead we really need to take what we
know about human motivation how we make
decisions and apply that to how we work
for inclusion inside organizations to
try and help close this gap of our good
intentions let’s be fair and our actual
decision-making a behavior let’s do
three examples I’ll share with you so
one thing to round our movement on
inclusion matrices are real life proven
examples that have been applied inside
organizations and we share to inspire
others to take that back to their
workplace and we want to hear from you
so I hope this sparks for you some ideas
of how you could apply this in your
organization as individuals we tend to
gravitate to people who are like us as
what we do it’s safety we feel
comfortable and we actually like them
more because they’re like us we trust
them more and when we have opportunities
we turn to them with those opportunities
the challenge is that if we want to have
a wide range of talent in our
organizations we need to look beyond the
in-group we need to challenge the status
quo so one example of an inclusion nudge
which we call a feel the need inclusion
that that is designed for an
organization on this topic was I pulled
together the photographs of all the
people in the talent pool for senior
executive roles and we had him up on a
slide similar to this in an executive
meeting and I asked the leaders
so how many of these people do you know
and they started shouting out the names
and competition who knew more and I
faded to the next slide after two-three
minutes and the next slide actually were
the same photographs but the male
colleagues pictures had been faded out
so what remained were only the female
and there was a lot less of them in that
pipeline and what the leaders learned
when I asked the question on that slide
so how many of these people do you know
they realize they actually didn’t have a
wide visibility of that pipeline and
they certainly didn’t know them at the
level they knew the male colleagues that
nudge was a aha moment where they
realized they didn’t have full
visibility and they needed to do
something differently the second example
is fairly easy its framing it’s how we
see things and it works on perception
when we think about leaders oftentimes
we have an anchor or a thought point of
what our leader looks like and it tends
to be what is already in place and so
we’re stuck in a pattern of replicating
leadership in the same models so many
organizations are doing nudges such as
changing conference rooms or changing
the artwork in the building to try and
show a wider perspective of who leaders
could be and changing that thought
anchor point and lastly one example that
we have in terms of process nudges so if
we accept that in our organizations we
have systems and processes and they were
designed by us and we are biased it’s
not far to assume that we can have
potentially unintentional bias built
into our systems and processes and blind
Seavey’s is an excellent example of a
process nudge where you remove all
identifying details from the CV and when
organizations do this they find they
bring in much more diverse talent
so as we go forward and think about how
to have the benefits that equality can
bring to our workplaces in society
let’s try and work with our whole brain
not just the rationale the we also need
to work with the fast or automatic part
of the brain and design interventions to
help steer our decision-making and our
behaviors to be aligned to where true
intentions thank you
[Applause]
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