I am a senior project manager at Morningstar. I work on a lot of strategic technology projects, but my passion has always been for bringing diversity, equity inclusion and belonging into the corporate space. And so that I don't continue to give myself a tongue twister.I'm going to call that de I from now on because that's a lot. So a little bit about my background. This is me when I was told by my father that the gender equality problem had been solved. He explained that he remembers when there were no women in his meetings in the Silicon Valley. And then he remembers when there was the token woman in the meetings and then he had attended some meetings where he was the token guy. So clearly, this meant that the problem had been solved. We could go on with business as usual and not have this looming over us anymore. And I remember the, the blend of pride and relief that when he was telling me this because he, it meant that he was part of the historic moment that meant that I, his daughter wouldn't have to face discrimination because of my gender. So I know some of the women that he worked with at the time. And when I tell them this story, they just sigh and roll their eyes and marvel at all the things that he didn't see. Uh So it's back then. He was one of the good ones.

Now in today's vernacular, he's an ally, but he still didn't see a lot of the things that his friends and colleagues were experiencing at the time. So, and that has stuck with me for a while. But fast forward, about 20 years, I went to a gender equity conference. This is when equality switched from equality to equity. And I was at a gender equity conference and Karen Gordon, the woman who runs this, these workshops pointed out that employee resource groups or er GS uh have been touted as the solution to the diversity problem for 50 years.

And she very rightly said, if you've got a product on the shelves for 50 years and nobody buys it, it's time to take it off the shelves and come up with something new because the metrics aren't changing. We're not really seeing enough of a difference from when I was 14 to now. So I'm gonna leave this up because this was such a pivotal moment for me if anybody wants to take a screenshot of it. Um It's one of those quotes that has stuck with me for years. So last year, we all got an opportunity to revisit our thoughts on DE I with the murder of George Floyd reminding us uh many of us what we hadn't been seeing and Morningstar was fortunate enough to be working with black women in science and engineering, also known as B Wise on some of our DE I goals for the year.

And we decided that it would be a good idea to highlight something with a June 10th event. And Juneteenth for those who aren't aware of this holiday is the celebration of the day that the last of the black enslaved people in America were finally told that they had been freed over 2.5 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. So again, wanting to celebrate the history and understand uh what the what diversity really means. We had a number of our amazing black women from the software development team, join this June 10th event and talk about what it was like to be the only person that looks like them on their teams in their offices or in their companies. And it was a really powerful event and the chat window of the Zoom webinar was filled with. I had no idea and we got a whole bunch of emails later, thanking us for putting on this event because people had no idea that it was this bad for people that they knew and worked with.

And every time I got one of those emails, I thought about my father who thought we were done who didn't know he didn't know what he didn't know. And I really didn't want to repeat that same sense of false accomplishment when we had just gotten such good traction and good momentum from that event. So it was time to put a new product on the shelves. Something that people would buy into as ad E I champion for global technology here at Morningstar. I'm kind of in a unique position to, to start to make change. And the first thing I did was talk to our CTO James Rhodes and ask that he turn de I work into a requirement. I asked for 5% of everyone in technology's time be dedicated to diversity work two hours a week is all I asked for. And he immediately agreed. The next challenge was coming up with a way for to make those two hours a week impactful and not just a linkedin learning to have pay attention to or a book club to silently multitask through. After not reading the book, I wanted to make sure that it was something that could appeal to everyone. A problem with DE I, it is by its very nature, a diverse and personal topic.

So there's no way that I from where, you know, my background, what the country I live in, all of those. There's no way that I could know how to appeal to everyone. So I had to come up with something that was fluid enough, but yet structured enough for everyone to have to know what to, what they could do. So, before I get into that, let me explain a little bit about Morningstar. Morningstar has a weekly game nights, uh, where pre pandemic folks would gather around a table and play board games. Every Thursday. We actually have resident game masters who run certain games and pretty much a population that self identifies as geek or nerd. And we even have someone in our Australia office that flies all the way to the US just to go to a board game convention. So it wasn't too much of a stretch to align de I work to an RPG or a role playing game. So when I was coming up with this script, someone uh who was helping me work on it, asked that I define what an RPG is a role playing game and I had no idea because it's, it's a role playing game, there's dice and pencils and you have fun. Uh So I worked with one of my favorite collaborators who is an actual professional game master. And he gave me a script. So I'm gonna read that now because I don't want to mess it up. All right.

An RPG is a collaborative and competitive game that people play together to achieve certain fictional goals. An RPG can take place in any world or setting. And the most popular setting for many RPGS is a fantasy adventure game in these games, players choose certain personas such as warriors, wizards, Rangers, Bards, Clerics or Paladins to form an adventure party together. Each persona is a certain set of, has a certain set of skills and characteristics usually augmented by dice rolls. 20 is best a game master uses a predefined set of game mechanics to coordinate the goals and objectives for the adventure party. Sometimes that goal is finding an object, other times it's fighting monsters while playing the adventure party works together to figure out the best way to use their specific skill sets to achieve the objectives and deal with obstacles along the way. So in other words, an RPG is a game where people come together and use their different skill sets to work together and save the world. Sound familiar. So welcome to the, choose your own to start your uh the choose your DE I adventure program. I named it and I can't remember the name. I'm doing great friends. So the first step in this game is choosing your guild or your persona and that helps people determine uh what paths are best suited to their unique skills.

When people think of de I work, they think of warriors excited to be out in the fray, fighting injustice and socio-economic problems. Head on warriors are our er G leads our committee leaders, community volunteers, event planners and DE I program leads that keep things moving forward towards continued progress, but they can't do that alone. Remaining outside the fray but just as engaged in the cause. Scribes are the ones who track the themes, report on logistics as they head towards the k as the warriors head towards the chaos. And while our scribes may not always be seen without them, we wouldn't have any of these awards. Our rising star awards are notable executives, our best workplaces, our best places to work or our de I dashboards, none of them would exist without our scribes and they're the ones that make sure that we are actually tracking and making a lasting impact with our DE I work. What about the things we don't know about yet? Our wizards are accumulators of knowledge and builders of tools, wizards accumulate knowledge via books, articles, podcasts, videos, and linkedin learning courses which help drive and inform future adventures. And because everything is easier when you have the right tools our wizards are, are uh they build what we need to add DE I to our products and services.

Last, but not least we have our storytellers who would know about the adventures unfolding without someone sharing the heroic deeds of our fellow adventurers by sharing calendar, invites posting stuff on social media or just talking to people who will listen or not. They just keep talking uh storytellers help us maintain our momentum and excitement as we continue to make lasting change. And yes, I am the leader of the Storytellers Guild, but I also do a lot of work in the other guilds because multi, multi guild participation is not only allowed, it's encouraged. Once a guild is chosen, adventurers can look for specific tasks that align to their guild. Skill set. In this A la carte menu, each person has their freedom to choose their favored cause and do the kind of work that they are comfortable doing with the confidence that they're making an impact and they get experience points which RPG players know is XP. And for each of their de I actions, for example, the person who found women tech got wizard points, anyone who helped with the script or the slides, uh got scribe points and anyone who shared the links on social media got storyteller points and I am earning storyteller points right now for talking to all of you see how fun this is, but it's not always easy to come up with something impactful just from this a la carte menu, which is why we asked our employee resource groups to put their goals for the year into quests.

So we have a number of adventurers on our team working with the recruitment office and at the booth here at Women tech who are working towards our uh women and technology recruitment goals for gen um to get more women into our, into our technology team, otherwise known as wits warriors quest to achieve gender equity and technology.

So it's easy to get carried away with this. But what we're seeing is we launched this in late February. And what we've seen is that people have changed the way they talk about DE I in the last couple of months. Uh This one picture, uh someone was able to share that their 13 year old daughter had self published a book about being different. Uh People are adding their pronouns to their emails and zoom names. Uh bringing out more awareness about, you know, trends, awareness and belonging.

We have people paying attention to who's speaking on our panels, making sure we have proper representation. And one of our technology teams actually dedicated an entire day to removing problematic terms from their code base. The team in India started and started removing, I think it was the word master, right? Brad. Yep. So they removed the word master from the code base starting in India. And then when India's Day was done, they transitioned to the US team, they called it their DE I day and that would not have happened if we had not let them choose that adventure as their DE I adventure. So it's really fun to see how people turn this into their own thing with their own goals and their own flavor. Uh As they play this game, our wizards are currently building a tracking web app. It's not beautiful yet, but it will be uh this is where we are allowed where we are having our folks track what they're doing and as part of de I, this is how we're going to one see who's participating. And two let people track their experience points as they do more things. There's a little bit of, there are other uh pages where you can see who else is in your guild.

If you want to get something together or if you need help from another guild, you know who to reach out to. Uh but the first thing you have to do is pick your name. Mine is Cicada the fables because I am loud like a Cicada and I tell fables. So again, like I said, I'm, I'm the leader of the uh Storytellers Guild, but I have the most points as a scribe because writing scripts takes a lot of time. So this is going to continue to grow and continue to expand and continue to help us empower our employees to come up with new ways to choose their adventure and de I and build new ways to, to make a difference. So as I said, it's easy to get away with a role playing game aspect of this program. But if you strip all that away, what we've created is a mechanism for people to self direct their contributions to de I uh basically creating a more diverse equitable and inclusive workplace in a way that makes sense to them. Uh They have a reason to share the book or article they just read, they have uh or the TED talk, they just watched because sharing is caring and it also gets you wizard points.

So if your team is struggling to get engaged in dei, I highly recommend you adopt this program. We may get some pushback on the sheer nerdiness of it. But the fact is Gamification works, people enjoy getting gold stars for doing the right thing. And as people grow their XP, they get more excited, they talk about it more and more people get engaged. So as the creator of this game, I don't care what cause you choose or what tasks you do, choose your guild, choose your adventure and join us as we save the world. Who's with me? Oh Damn for those with the microphone. All right. So I do wanna give some time for Q and A. I think I've got about five minutes. So do we have any questions in the chat? I can't see because I'm in an audit. Are there any questions?

Uh One question that was coming in? Uh What is the uh what's the level of adoption that you're seeing across the company and specifically globally? Um When it comes to this,

so specifically globally, I think it's different in each office and, and the things that people choose to get engaged in is different globally. Uh The overwhelming challenge that we have that we've always had forever with de I is people don't have time uh which is specifically why I asked for uh 5% of time to be dedicated to DE I um our Shenzhen office, for example, has put a real focus on uh recruiting women uh in India.

That's also kind of one of their goals is we want to increase our gender equity in, in China and India in the U SI. Think our focus is more on updating code base and LG TB Q um causes. So it's interesting to see uh the different causes that people choose and the level of engagement is very different team to team, not necessarily region to region.

Uh Another question that just came in uh are the wizard points also linked to growth framework? Um And in term payment, so compensation as well

are the wizard points tied to compensation? Not direct framework? Yeah. Uh not directly. Um There is, you know, it is if one of your goals is to uh spend 5% of your time or complete a certain quest that does go into your goals and objectives from an hr perspective that's between the employees and the managers. But um I do think that it should uh but I don't know that we're there yet. Any other questions? We got a minute and a half or we could let every everyone in the audience, you know, take a bio break between things. I have a

question. There's actually a question, you have

a question coming in from the moderator.

Yeah, this is the same question. Ah You promote this program at your company to ensure employees and managers are,

it is the company so that all the managers and all the employees kind of understand what it is, know where to find uh different opportunities to get involved and just generally kind of how to take part.

Uh Well, luckily Morningstar already has a really great er G program uh or series of programs and I'm very tied into the Technology Council. So it, we, we took a number of different avenues to, to promote this across the company. Uh One since it is a technology program of talking to the Technology Council about that and asking them to cascade it. That's one way we announced it in the Technology Town Hall which uh all technology employees should be attending. Uh And then I also went on a series of meetings with individual teams to kind of talk through their individual questions. I also partnered with uh the employee resource groups to help them have a mechanism to spread the word about the things that they're trying to do. So, trying to communicate this one way and only one way was never gonna work. You kind of have to get it top down, bottom, up and sideways. Um But I, and I don't know that one way was more effective than another. I think it was very, the combination is what worked. OK. Any other questions or am I out of time? I think I'm out of time. Ok. Well, thank you, everyone.

And I have just one last question. Where can we find the program? People loved it here.

Uh Scott, can you turn that up so I can hear, where can you find the program? Um Let me get back to, uh, so the program exists in my head and on this spreadsheet right now, um, we are working on, uh making it more widely available a after we finish the app. Um, but if anyone wants to take a screenshot of uh these, uh, of the A la carte menu, I'm happy to let you take it and run with it. Um I'm also happy to talk with anyone you can find me on linkedin. Um, and I can answer any questions that you have if you wanna start this

fantastic. Make the most of your time right now. Take a screenshot. Be fast. Thanks Abby for sharing that. And I just want to say, keep Shining Abby. And if you want to work with school companies like Abby, make sure to draw by the booth of the morning star and say hi to the,

everyone that's gonna be there is awesome. I don't think I'm gonna be at the booth because we have too many awesome people that are gonna take those seats. So, but uh, around if, if I have

so much a booth was

thank you.