Alright.As we wait for everyone to enter, I just wanna invite those of you who are here to just take a second and center to start thinking about with me how when we talk about words like diversity, equity, inclusion, what we're trying to cultivate and what that means. And also to start thinking about what are the actions of equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice that actually get us to an outcome like diversity and how perhaps we were doing that or not doing that. So just starting to think for yourself from your own perspective what that means to you. So I wanna start painting a picture that we can, I think, understand together? Over the last several years, we have seen what some would call social justice improvements, voices being raised, and changes happening. They have been around inclusion of neurodiversity, talking about the anti blackness and the violence against black bodies that exists around the world.

We have focused on how to start thinking about gender from the non binary in the western societies specifically. And also the violence that is often still happening to women and girls throughout the world and how we can start to empower each other and give each other a voice. All of this is incorporating of DEI. But what we go to work in every day is not necessarily excited about any of that or even centered on it. So when we think about what work culture is or what it has been, I invite you to start thinking about the industrialized revolution and how much that has added and grown our societies throughout the world. But what we don't often talk about is what the values it is founded on. So when we think about work culture that comes from industrialized work, we are then setting ourself with the intention of the values that come from how that work was schemed.

And it has been centered on the ideas of division, exploitation, and competition. So I think as we start from that perspective and then we start to think about how the division of labor, a term that only existed when when the industrial revolution started, how this has created separation within our understanding of how all things work, where resources come from, who it impacts when we take those resources, or we go and look for them.

And in the middle of all of this is a centering of very specific identities that were welcome within these spaces. This is also where we started to center the idea of management, needing managers who had a larger picture and could direct all the moving parts that were individualized and necessarily didn't need training to have people do them. Additionally, we were talking about cultures that were specifically made to support white men. Men who had other people to take care of daily tasks to help them think about questions and define answers. And those broadly come across as slaves, servants, assistants, wives, mothers, and the list goes on of people who are supporting this management schema within the way that you and I continue to work today. So as we think about this, I want to recognize that what this has given us is a very homogenized idea of what working is.

And I think it's frankly no wonder that the experience most of us have every day when we go to work is traumatizing, is harmful, is actually pushing against the identities, the experiences that we bring men into that space. As a woman of color, I've experienced that in multiple spaces and what I think we have to start naming is that when we think about the acceleration of women, of LGBTQ communities, and trans communities, of embracing neurodiversity and starting to recognize how oppressive we are to blackness within the world.

We have to start to think about then what do we want work to actually be because it was founded on a lot of those ideals that we still have to push against every day when we go to work or when we go into specifically homogeneous spaces. And tech is one of the most homogeneous spaces within the world at this time when it comes to working. So thinking about this kind of archaic model of work, I ask you to think a little broader. Right? To step outside of the office and to think about what it is we're actually wanting to start removing from. The way that we work, the way we show up together, the way we make decisions and think about ourself within the world. And if you look at the spectrum of domination, what it is basically getting at is that on one side we have these ideas that are oppressive and build hierarchies.

Not that hierarchy is wrong, but these hierarchies are not based on skill, best ability, or best intentions. These hierarchies are based on violence, harm, and creating that homogeneous elite that we were talking about that shows up as management within the industrialized revolution. So if you and I want work to be different, we want the decisions made within the tech world to be different. We want the spaces we're in to feel safe and excited to engage us in our experiences. We have to realize that we need to design something different. Stepping into the shoes and the roles of our brothers and our fathers, of the mentors that many of us have had and the role models isn't wrong, but it's not gonna get us anywhere different. And so what I'm inviting you today to start thinking about is what is the design of partnership? How does that show up in spaces?

And how does that actually create communal healing? When you continue to think from that domination to partnership schema, and then we consider how much money, time, you know, processing has gone into larger discussions internationally around issues of oppression and domination. We unfortunately are seeing that a lot of the efforts are falling short, right? The numbers that we are seeing in the tech industries of women leaders across the world, of black women leading, of Latino women, we are not seeing a lot of changes, and we are more predominantly saying that a lot of the people we say were there to support or to try to include.

We are actually pushing away and having run away from our occupations, from our spaces. So there are several things that have not been addressed. I think that we have created a lot of employee resource groups and support. We have created a lot of dynamic discourse to really think about history and roles, some of the systems of power that are around us. But what we aren't doing is then addressing how that power and position is showing up within our actual industry or the space that we work in, how that equals out in pay and accountability within those spaces, and how to start building more accountability in a social schema.

We also are not then committing very specifically to understanding removing the barriers of the people closest to us and around us. Right? So we might recognize that we need to center diversity, but we are not recognizing that we are then going to have to change the way we are structured and start to support those who have not been supported before. Additionally, we are not then working with employees and working with communities. The huge push that we see around the world, happening very strongly and predominantly in America specifically, we see this push to go back to working in offices. And while this isn't wrong or bad, it is not lining up with the needs of people today. They're the new normal is not exactly what it was before in many instances.

And so we see then that all of these pressures are pushing people away because the culture is still toxic and unwelcoming and is not reflective of who they are and also not reflective of necessarily what they need, want, or feeling passionate about in the world anymore. So what we would like to talk about and kind of engage in the space around is how do you actually redesign what is happening around you? What is the process of rethinking, moving into action, understanding in a different way, taking in qualitative narrative as important as quantitative, and moving through a process. So what I'm going to share with you today are a few important aspects of that kind of change that we look for. 1 is starting with proactive process and inclusive culture, so understanding how to be restorative and trauma informed and how we are building culture which invites all aspects of people and recognizes their behavior as communication. We then are gonna talk about how do we what are we designing for? Right? What is all the burnout? What is all the, hostility and violence?

What is the economic pressure causing? It's causing dysregulation. So how when we are designing, are we designing past inclusion to get towards resiliency and to actually support ourselves and others in a way that makes them feel that they belong, that makes them want to be a part of that work culture, that gives them the space to be creative.

And then we're gonna talk about how actually implementing design thinking and using an actual process of design thinking is allyship. That is a way that we can take our position, our power, our experience, our, witnessing of what's happening and put it into action with others to make changes that actually support all of us. When we consider what this means, I want to then tell you a little bit more about who I am. So, I come to this work with a multicultural, multiracial background growing up in the Southwest of America. And my entire life I wanted to celebrate as well as bring together the differences and bridge the needs of people and to look at what communal healing really means when we think about the diversity of the people within our spaces now as the world becomes closer and more integrated.

I think that this really centers on us working together to heal in community to do different, to design the world that actually reflects all of us and includes all of us. And so through my company, Intersectional Innovations, we do just that. We work on helping people to start rethinking, to look at discovery processes that are qualitative and quantitative, and that are, discovery processes that are qualitative and quantitative and that are then really centered on healing emotional issues, understanding why they're there, and actually starting to integrate the needs, wants, desires, outcomes of the entire company and all of the people in it to start shaping how you move forward together.

I'm really happy to be here with you today. And I hope that as we walk through this discussion, you walk away with an understanding and even just some contemplation for yourself around what is the design of a DEI culture. How again are we enacting the action steps of equity, belonging, inclusion, and justice to get to diversity and start to re thinking what we're doing within these spaces and how we're addressing this. What is so different if you were to compare industrialized work culture to DEI design culture is that the values, number 1, start in a completely different space. We are also then looking at how to incorporate, honor, and integrate the experience that are diverse and innovative around us instead of putting people back in boxes and telling them to do a specific line of work. Which again I think is how, many of us work today. Right? We have a lot of intelligence. We have a lot of tools. We have a lot of experience.

And so we want to

put those together collaboratively to be innovative rather than siloing how we work. And then ultimately, what we're trying to do is create spaces that actually engage everyone, that they're actually psychologically, emotionally safe, and physically safe for everyone, that honor and celebrate the differences that come into the space of innovation and that propel things forward faster and also, propel them in a way that is moving with everyone.

So ultimately, what we're trying to get to and what we do within intersectional innovations is center on social efficiency. So social efficiency is multilayered. And as you can see, it starts with restorative process. It then centers creating a trauma informed workplace. We then are going to center relationship which is really going to build trust and allow us to have safety and empowerment with each other, and empowerment individually as a person as well as being able to empower each other. Ultimately, when you build a space like this where people want to engage, they feel safe to ask questions to try and to fail, we actually start to build equity, belonging, and inclusion. We build that healthy culture that engages and embraces and utilizes all aspects of who is there. So this is what I want you to walk away with today is some of these ideas of how to think about social efficiency across your company or organization.

So we're gonna start with proactive process and talk about how this starts to build an inclusive culture. Specifically, when we think about being proactive, this word is also coinciding with the word restorative. We are thinking about how to address things before they happen, right, instead of being reactive and putting out fires, and maybe trying to nullify the harm that's happened. We're thinking ahead by engaging people to avoid the harm in the first place and we're engaging the measures, policies, protocols, relationship space that keep us away from that problem in which we see could happen down the line. So this is where we start if we want to actually start to redesign work culture and we want to think about work and engaging people differently. But to do that is to take into the reality of how we're all feeling, what we're dealing with.

I have said this a few times

in the last few years.

I believe that we are living through abnormal adult behavior in the last few years as far as seeing people break down, not have the emotional stamina to deal with things they could deal with before, being triggered by things they hadn't been triggered by in years. All of this, myself included, has come up for us, right, as we've had continual change and unknowns. So I wanna share with you this diagram very quickly that comes to, excuse me, comes to us from the neuro sequential network. And this is an old idea that explains how stress affects us and why it affects us differently depending on what kind of stress it is. So to recognize what we continue to deal with as change continues to happen and pressure continues to build is we have this regular cycle of unpredictable stress that's been created for us over the last 3 to 4 years. So as we think about this stress, I'm sure you can think about some conversations or situations for yourself or just witnessing other people that maybe just didn't go the way you expected them to or became much more volatile than you expected.

This is explained through this system. Right? Predictable, moderated, controllable stress, these are the things that we get used to. Right? Getting up at a certain time and making sure you get in your car and drive to work so you're not late. Paying your bills. Recognizing you have to have health care or going and doing, the good work of feeding yourself well and getting exercise. Right? These can still be stressful, but they can be tolerated and build resilience when they are predictable. We can schedule them. We can plan them. We can interact with them. When we become sensitized and vulnerable is when we are living through regular unpredicted stress, right? This is why the stress of poverty is one of the most intense stresses that can be experienced because the unknown is constant.

The lack of safety and thriving is constant. So this is what creates vulnerability in all of us, and it's something that as a culture, as work teams, as communities, we are all experiencing together in different ways. So how do we move forward? There's multiple facets to this and ways to think about it. There's obviously so many systemic issues involved in this kind of discussion. But when we think about again the spaces that we are in and the people that we we work with, we wanna start from this proactive, restorative continuum perspective. Centering trust within relationships so that people actually can speak up and engage. They can say what they need or ask questions without being ridiculed or without fear of losing their job or losing an opportunity. And again meaning sharing themselves.

We then want to figure out how to maintain that community and build on that, right? Like how are we systemically building in relationship and trust development within our culture? How are we centering that relationship and those conversations to understand more needs? And then where there is harm, we have to repair it and address it. When we have had, unwitting or unknowing events happen between people that have caused harm, we need to still come to some resolution and move forward. Sometimes the harm is organization to person. And that has to be addressed differently but still needs to be addressed because otherwise people walk around with that harm and it continues to be resistance and to impede this change that we all desire within the spaces that we are sharing and working in. So, really, what we're focused on here is starting from curiosity, wanting to understand what's happening and why, engaging in relationship, and then being willing to repair harm, working to avoid future harm as it might show up for us.

This is how we prevent issues. This is how we prevent conflict. I talked a little bit with you or I mentioned, I should say, about having a trauma informed space. And so trauma informed space has the 6 guiding principles present happening all the time. So, you know, when we say that we wanna have psychological safety, but we don't work on building peer support relationships and collaboration, We usually don't get very far in our trust and safety because we don't know each other. We don't know the strengths and weaknesses of each other. We don't know, follow through and ability. And so it changes the way we react and work with each other. As we build safety and psychological safety, we build trust and transparency, then we can, again, continue to create peer support and through the products, the projects that you do together, as well as intentionally creating accountability or relationship in other ways.

We are centering the empowerment of voice and choice for every individual. So this is where often we say we want diversity, but then when we have different needs, different opinions, and different experiences in the room, we shut them down. We go back to how things were. So if we actually want diversity, equity, and inclusion, we have to actually empower all of the voices, start to include these differences, and realize that there's gonna be a momentum of shifting as we have more of that within our space. If we are doing all this, we will start to engage with, understand, bridge culture. We will start to understand context and connection to history and think about that in our future decisions.

And we will address the power dynamics that are specifically hinged on gender which we find in all spaces and shows up in many ways whether it is around homophobia and transphobia or whether it is specifically oppressing the female roles of the females within spaces. Again, the points of this or the takeaways are to really be centered on that understanding behavior and moving forward together so that we can start to think about designing for resilience. So we talked a little bit before about, what has happened. Right? The turmoil has created vulnerability. So what I want us to kind of swing the pendulum towards is what offsets vulnerability And what shifts vulnerability which creates anxiety, it creates burnout, it creates disengagement and distrust is resiliency. And resiliency always starts with the individual but is also something that we can build within our spaces collaboratively with each other. So that is where I would like to kind of jump us to thinking about 1 for ourself, but 2 in community.

What is it we're trying to actually create when we talk about DEI and we talk about justice and social shifts within the way that we work? So resilience. When we look at it from this, pillar set, we are looking at it from an individual perspective. What has to be present for an present for an individual to become resilient? So each of these 5 pillars has to be present for someone to become resilient. And what I think is most important about this is that hopefully you can see that where we have to start within these discussions of changing is to think about self. How are you doing in resilience? How are those around you showing up within these perspectives? Starting with self judgment and pod positive view of self. Right? Self talk. How are you doing with that? How you speak internally, those patterns of discussion that you have, those turn into your feelings and thoughts about others as well. Right?

So it's very hard to even bridge sometimes with others when we aren't feeling well about ourself. And so this is where we have to start. Having goals, which again can be great when done in community or on projects within your teams and organizations. This is also it moves us towards resiliency, realizing there's something that we can accomplish, we decided we're going to, and we're gonna work towards. Making connections is not just about relationship. It's actually also about, like, the connections of idea and context, universality between people. It's about building context of things within yourself to have greater understanding. And then I think, you know, it's it goes without saying when we think about the vulnerability made by constant change, that part of how we become resilient is accepting that change will happen.

It does happen and will continue to happen, but that we will be okay. We have the ability to make new goals and then eventually to take decisive action towards those goals and towards the things that are most important to us in life. So this is thinking about resiliency on an interpersonal individual way. I wanna take you back to this idea of social efficiency because social efficiency gives us these pillars in way to think about what is resiliency in an organization. We are in a group. We are working together. Our goals and outcomes are tied to each other. How do we become resilient? And so, again, starting from what we just talked about, we are looking at these proactive processes that have the pillars of trauma informed practice throughout them that allow everyone to engage, everyone to ask for what they need and also to step up and to loudly proclaim what they have to offer and how to engage within the work.

From there, we are centering again that trust and safety, psychological safety that empowers individuals to actually not just know that they're allowed to be there, but to actually believe they are welcome and invited and will continue to be respected and engaged no matter what they say or what they share.

But then next we have to do something actionable to think about how to make change together. Right? If we're going to move beyond the model of 1 manager knowing how everything works and getting people to work together, the next step is to think about how does everyone work together. And we need a mode. We need a system to do that so that we all understand how to do it together. But when we use that mode and we have a system, which we'll talk about shortly, we even actually start to create well, equity, belonging, and inclusion because we are going to address the different issues in the pockets of oppression, the pockets of silencing, the pockets of otherness that have shown up in the way we've been working for generation upon generation.

And often, a lot of that is microaggressions. It's, silencing through policy. It is just removing people really quietly when we don't like what they have to say. So let's think about the actions. Right? How do we create change together in community? I want you to think about it even further to think of to consider, excuse me, what is allyship? How do you actively engage in allyship to empower someone else to remove barriers, and also to recognize and take care of yourself within situations. And so what I propose is that ally in action means that you are actually taking a process that you can use with others in a trauma informed and proactive way that gets you to a new conclusion that everyone has engaged in, right? That it's not just the few, it's the many can process and do together. So this is where design thinking comes in for us.

So again starting from the idea of allyship, what I would just ask you to do in this moment and to consider as you move out of this space is how this starts with you, right? How do you start to assess where you are disempowered and maybe need an ally yourself but also where you have position and power? And, just to clarify, when we talk about position and power, we're talking about the power we have that shifts from space to space, from situation to situation. So, you know, in one space, like today, I might be seen as someone worth listening to at a webinar, and yet I can leave the space and go to a grocery store and get followed around by an older white person that's worried on stealing. So in each space, my power and position changes. How I'm treated, what I have access to changes. And so how we start as allies is first assessing that. What is our power and position? What do we have in relation to supporting others to so that they can then empower and support themself?

So if we start from there and we're leading towards, designing together, another thought we just have to always keep in our back pocket is that when we think about empowering others, it's not about doing for them. This is not a savior complex. It's about recognizing they need someone to move barriers out of the way and create space for them to do for themself. So if we think from that perspective, designing with our colleagues, designing with the people around us makes a lot of sense. Right? Because empowerment is actually them creating for themself and asking for what they need and having that become reality. So, some of you may be familiar with the human centered design model. I really like this visual, so I wanted to share it with you because I think it explains it in a simplistic way.

When we think about design, what we're actually really thinking about is what is the pot process of creation? What is the actual process of collaboration? And how do you do that from a best practice perspective, which is to understand the actual needs of the constituent, the consumer, the client, and then create from that need. Right? Design whatever it is, a chair, a process, a speech from the need of that actual person. It makes a lot of sense. It's how we become equitable. It's how we become universal in what we design in the world. So what this process shows us is that to do this, we start from empathy. We start from that curiosity of what did the person need, what do they want, and how can I understand that best? How can I ask them and get that information?

Once you have that, you can start to define and make sense of what the problem actually is, what all of the possibilities are for fixing that problem, and how to start honing in on solution. From there, you start to ideate what are all the solutions. How do these function? What is best about them? What is weakest about them? And what should we focus on that again is centering the human need, the ask from the person in what we're creating. Once we decided that, we're gonna prototype it. We're gonna test it. And I think what's powerful about prototyping is that it gives us a space to not think about every decision is final. Every product is final. It creates this option in reality that we live in, which is that the context around us continually changes. Right? So the needs, what it offers us will change. This is why engineers make well, they also do it for money. But this is why we have so many versions of every cell phone that exists and every laptop.

They're iterating that prototype, testing it, and then making it better. So the last part of testing includes that iteration process, right, where we are thinking about how did the solution work, what was great about it, what do we need to continue to define and make better. What I would, like to say is I think the next leveling up is human centered design is this concept of liberatory design. And liberatory design starts with identifying as a group what your equity commitment is. So instead of just looking at a problem and going through this process, which is very similar of designing a solution, we start from recognizing what do we actually wanna achieve when we talk about equity. What are we working towards? What is that outcome? What do we see happening around us?

And then from there, how do we start to see and understand problems and barriers and work them through this process of solution? So here we are doing the same steps, empathizing and defining, asking questions to understand more. Then from that, we start to imagine and prototype and ideate. And once we have done that, we're able to see if it worked, Right? To come back and to iterate and to try again. Recognizing though the human experience of oppression, the human experience of being disempowered and how with our equity commitments we're working towards shifting that and changing that overall. So I invite you to think from that perspective, to engage and start for yourself. I would I would recommend printing out this diagram. You can visit, the National Equity Project or the Stanford d School to learn more about the laboratory design model, and I encourage you to.

There's also classes you can take. But what I will point out is that this only works when we are centering on using the process with others. So actually printing out this diagram, putting it on your clipboard, bringing it to your meeting, and then mapping out these steps, right, for you and your teams or you and your colleagues is exactly how the change comes about. Because within these conversations and these thinking and understanding steps, you start to gain not only understanding of a problem but of each other. You start to understand the greater context of what is happening around you, the feelings that are showing up as well as the needs. And from there you start to make decisions which I think is a 100% contradictory to what most of us have experienced, whether it's been in our families, in work, in our churches, in our community spaces. We often have someone making decisions for everyone else, hopefully, out of wisdom and compassion. But if not, everyone deals with the outfall. Right?

And so this is how we start to shift that. We make it a collaborative process. We sit down and walk through the steps together whether that takes us a couple meetings, a couple days, or a couple weeks to get our answers and to start thinking about our solutions. And then we recognize that our solutions will change, right, as your work team changes, as the employees themselves change, as the outcomes change and the goals, the funding, we will change the solutions. Right? We will actually also have more needs that start to show up or or just new and different needs. So to have space for that and interact with that, we need to engage this idea of prototyping and ideating. What I would lastly say about this is that one of the outcomes that can happen when you start to use this process, whether it again is for a product or for a team dynamic that you're trying to solve, a team problem.

One thing that comes from this when it's done genuinely and through these steps is that we start to see people having a greater understanding of the actual needs and outcomes of others and starting to be able to connect themself to others' needs and outcomes. This is really important. Right? When we are wanting to create diversity of people and to have a lot of people within a room that come from different languages, walks of life, cultural and climate experiences. When we have people in a room who are used to speaking very loudly and being listened to all the time or used to being silenced to having their ideas spoken over or taken from them. We show up with a lot of different needs that are hard to be verbalized in just an hour meeting conference where we are talking about the week's agenda. So we will create space that is separate from that, and we will walk through each of these steps, giving a commitment even to the process of starting from compassion and empathy, starting from our group and individual equity commitments.

We start to see huge shifts in our interpersonal relationships within space because now we have started to build a total different understanding of who we are. We are starting from a very different place than, trying to just meet deadlines or to make ourselves seem actionable. We're starting from a space of actually wanting to learn to work with people to actually enact the ideas of collaboration, which can be very difficult if we have never experienced before. I think often we think of collaboration as a couple people having ideas and hopefully smashing them together and then making it happen. And if not, oh well. So I think that this gives us an opportunity to really step beyond a lot of our own experiences of collaboration and to dive deeper into what are the experiences of collaboration we are creating. And if work, the space, the way we're asked to show up, the way we're told to behave, the way we're spoken to doesn't feel good. It's toxic and harmful.

There are processes we can take to change this if people are willing to. And I think one of the most powerful is this idea, design thinking and implementing that from a restorative process and trauma informed practice idea. So as we sit with these ideas, I'm interested to hear if anyone has any questions or thoughts. I do see OneNote in the chat, so I will go look. But, yeah, this is our opportunity just to answer any questions or to talk about what you've seen today. And I hope that what you will consider as you walk away is what can you do to start to create and design inclusivity around you? What are those action steps?

What can you do to engage a design process that would allow you to be able to work with people in any way and to create something very different? I thank you all for being here. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your conference. I know that I will. Thank you.