Hey, Laurie. Hi, we can hear you well and see you. Well, here you go. Voila.Have fun and enjoy, talk

to you later. Great. Thank you so much. Well, thank you everyone for being here. I am so excited at the global nature of this conference and given all that's going on. I think it's a really critical time for us to pause to imagine that. What if everything we've built until this time has only been a foundation for the deep work that we're going to embark on going forward. Sometimes people reflect on when their journey began. Um Mine really began when I was about six years old. I loved the library and I was walking with my mom to the library and uh it was the sun was shining and I was happy and a car drove by a slowed down and these men hung out of the window and made fake Chinese noises at me. And I was shocked and my mother gave them the bird. And this is a mother who was very gentle. I learned two really important things at that moment. The first thing I learned was just based on the way I looked that some people were not going to see me. I also learned from my mother is that you can stand up against the people who are discriminating against you. And what we've seen in our society today is that although I learned it at six years old, people in our black community learn it much younger.

And if you didn't learn this um at six or, or earlier, maybe you learned it the first time you wanted to raise your hand and answer a math question and the teacher didn't call on you. So this talk is about collecting all of that as the foundation for the deep work we're going to do. Going forward the question I'm going to ask is what will it take for us to re imagine inclusion? I thought I'd do this talk by debunking three myths, the three myths of inclusion that prevent us from looking deeper into the real work we need to do. I'll often speak from the level of what organizations can do. But in each point, I'm also gonna say what we as individuals can do again to create organizations that unleash the power of our collective. Now, the first myth about inclusion is that inclusion equals ease that we all get along. That we all jump to the same perspective. I'm gonna show you a really interesting article. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it by Katherine Phillips who unfortunately passed away. She said diversity isn't just about bringing good ideas to the table. It's about unleashing the smartness, the intelligence of everyone in the group.

Here's one of the studies she looked at that helped her see this. They looked at jury deliberations. Now in the United States, juries are not selected by the judge, but selected by the people trying the case. And sometimes they end up being very homogeneous and sometimes there are elements of diversity. So the researchers wanted to understand whether there was any difference in the way these two kinds of juries deliberated what they discovered was, as you would imagine, the jury that wasn't homogeneous took a little bit more time. But that doesn't mean they unleashed the power of that diversity.

So the researchers had asked additional questions, they said, did they make any mistakes? And what they mean by that is they read the case and then when they were deliberating on it, they made mistakes, it turns out the group with more diversity in it made fewer mistakes. Then they asked a last piece of, of data, did they notice that important information was missing? For example, if there were three eyewitnesses, they only heard testimonies from two. And then they had to say, gosh, where's the testimony from the third eyewitness? The juries that had more diversity in them asked for the missing data. So they took a little longer, made fewer mistakes, caught important missing data. And a question I often ask after sharing this research is well, which jury would you want? And one very intelligent person said to me, well, it depends on if you're guilty or not. Now, did the jury that was diverse have inside information? Did that last person know about the crime and therefore brought a different perspective in no, the power of that jury was dissent.

That person asked questions. And it turns out when we hear questions, when we hear dissent from people who are not like us, it sparks more thinking. We work harder, we come to better outcomes. So the sec one of the secret sauces of inclusion is an ease in coming together necessarily, it's a certain kind of descent. It's hearing from voices who are not normally at the table who ask us questions and when they ask us, we think harder. So the new idea is that inclusion could include dissent as one of its secret sauces. Now, this doesn't mean arguing for the sake of arguing, but it means going there making space for discomfort, out of discomfort growing. What are two things you can do to deliver on this new definition of inclusion that includes dissent. Well, the first thing you can do is think about the value of norms. What are norms, norms are guidelines that help people understand the rules of engagement. A lot of our rules of engagement are pretty much things like we're gonna use an agenda or not. What if we designed norms that talked about how we include voices, including the voices that don't agree if everyone always aligns around consensus. For example, are you also carefully asking for anyone who could think of? One reason why we shouldn't go forward by creating space for dissent. Respectful descent. We might actually be creating space for inclusion to unleash what Cathy Phillips calls the power to make all of us smarter.

And the second new idea for inclusion is to make space for listening. Often we go to meetings, there's a competition for using the air time to make your point of view valuable. And what research shows is that in a group of 863 people will speak 67% of the time three people out of eight, there's often a value in speaking. What if instead inclusion also made room for listening, listening for voices that are usually not included, listening for dissent in a positive way that makes me question why we're going to a certain decision. So these are two ideas. I'm hoping that we can reflect upon and incorporate into inclusion as re re redesign and reimagine what it could be going forward. The second myth I'd like to debunk is what I'm going to call professionalism. Professionalism is a term I'm using to mean the people we think who are most qualified to contribute to our organizations, the ones with the right professional skills, pers professional perspectives. I want to debunk the myth that professionalism is empirical that we can define it.

Now, let me show you one study that will help me debunk this myth. Now, what this research wanted to do was to see if people could really, I evaluate work products. Now, a work product should be a work product regardless of who authors it, right? A work product should stand on its own merits. It's either highly professional or not. So what this researcher did was she created one version of a legal brief, but she put different cover letters on the same legal brief and sent this legal brief to law partners and said to them, would you please help this third year law associate write a better legal brief? So she sent it out and in one version of the cover letter, she said that he was African American and another one that he was white. Well, it's a work product, shouldn't it stand on its own merit? Here's what she discovered when the readers thought that the writer was african-american, they found a lot more of the mistakes. Remember both both versions had mistakes and not only that it caused them to score the legal brief written by the african-american in the cover letter, lower this finding.

And many others say to me that our ability to truly evaluate the quality of work cannot be sep separated by the stereotypes that affect it. So here's the new idea for inclusion. What if we redefine success? Not as professionalism. But in a way that allows for us to move beyond stereotypes of what professionalism means and who qualifies for it. But to one that truly does drive inclusion. The first one I would say is around this area of growth mindset. And if you haven't read the work of Carol Dweck, I highly recommend it. Growth mindset is saying that all skills are learned. If you have a mindset of learning versus a mindset of, I either have it or I don't. One way to have success, be defined by growth mindset is to value the journey instead of the end point. Instead of saying, did you go to this university? Did you have this kind of organization before? Did you do this? Ask about what have you overcome? What barriers have you faced and dealt with by valuing the journey? We will find that our perhaps biased definitions of professionalism will not prevent us from seeing the talent. That's really there. The second big idea I'd say is this when terms like professionalism, executive presence gravitas are used often used to say that women don't have the executive presence, they need to get promoted into leadership. Interrogate those terms. Ask, what do you mean by that?

Do you think the definition of it favors certain people and disfavors others? And if so how can we value a journey that allows us to see the whole person and what they bring? The third myth? I'd like to debunk is more is better. Often there's a debate. Do we have employee resource groups? For example, for black women, for LGBT Q women, for Asian women, isn't it better if we just call everyone women and have resource groups and initiatives that cover more people? Here's the challenge with that. This is an article also if you haven't read written by some of my colleagues, what they looked at was the fact that in the era of big data, we al often ignore the small, the small percentages. Imagine this in Google's report of the technical workforce, less than half a percent of that workforce is black women, less than 1% is Latinx women. So in our mindset of more is better, we might say just incorporate their experiences into the experiences of all women and hopefully they'll be benefiting from that perspective. Well, those employees have a much different experience of the workplace than the rest of the employees.

So here's some research by Rit Anita Ratan and Carol Dweck out of the London Business School. Anita Raton is out of the London Business School. They pulled over 400 African American employees and asked them if they ever experienced racial bias. And they said actually 67 of the them had to spend part of their workdays dealing with racial comments, things like comments about how black people are lazy racial slurs and references to criminality. Well, here's what they also discovered when the organization addressed those moments, their likelihood to stay went up, think about what it would be like to be in a workplace that didn't assume that women can take comments and meetings just the same as men. But we went there and tried to understand the experience of each and every employee on our team. So here's the big idea. Number three, instead of always trying to broaden your dilde I lens. So that's diversity and inclusion inclusion lens instead of trying to broaden it to capture as many people as possible in one net. What if you focused that lens on the experience of the few in order to see where the barriers really are, two things you can do to do this instead of doing surveys that round out people like Black technical women, what if you did interviews and focus groups and really understood those experiences in order to shape them into your solutions?

What if you debunk stereotypes about people? There's a post um that, that looked at the experiences of black people being asked to clean up dishes in a cafeteria. Latin X women being asked if they're the secretary or the cleaner. What if we debunked those myths? There's a movement right now called I Am which is having a see people, not as stereotypes but for the complexity that they really are. So what is this power of our collective? What is this power of reimagining inclusion that we could bring back to our workplaces upon reentry.

I call this our ability to include more and more people, more women, more people of color in our definition of r it's an invitation for us to be bold to ask questions to allow dissent. I wanted to end with showing this picture. This is the Buddhist temple in San Jose. This temple was built by my great grandfather and his brother. It was built after World World War two when my family was sent, sent to internment camps during the war, despite being naturalized citizens because of their Japanese American heritage.

And what my great grandfather and his brother wanted to do was build a temple, a community gathering place so people could come together, find strength and rebuild their lives. This temple is still standing today. So the question I always ask myself is what temple am I building?

That will be standing far past my lifetime. Part of the answer for myself is workplaces where the are, where the value of each and every employee is known and each and every employee's voice is heard. And for me, if we leave this period and back into the workplace, bringing a bolder vision of what inclusion can be. I'll say that that would be the silver lining of the really difficult situation that we're in today. I thank you very much for your boldness for your partnership. I hope you'll share in the chat. What will you do? I know I learn from these organizations and these experiences every day. Please stay in touch. You can find me on our everything that we do and I wanna thank you for this opportunity to be with you today.

Well, thank you, Laurie. I really love the way you move from sharing some findings and tips to your personal experience and sharing your personal story. And you know, I'm also asking about myself, what temple am I building? And I love what you said that each employee voice should be heard in every organization. Thank you very much for the super interesting and informative and engaging presentation. People are commented in the chat that day. This was beautiful talk. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And they really love that you shared your personal story and it's really resonated. Susan is sharing right now and that was super powerful. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us, your slides work. You were great as on your slides. Thanks a lot for tuning in and trying out something new this platform, this conference. We were very happy to have you enjoy the rest of the day, stay with us and see you later. Thank you. Thank you.