Join author Kenji Yoshino and NLI co-founder and CEO Dr. David Rock for an illuminating discussion on effectively navigating delicate conversations around identity in the workplace inspired by Yoshino's book, Say The Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice. Topics include common conversational pitfalls, engaging in respectful disagreement, offering authentic apologies, and better supporting people in our lives who experience bias.
Dr. Kenji Yoshino
U1
0:00
Join author Kinji Yoshino and NLI cofounder and CEO Dr. David Rock for an illuminating discussion on effectively navigating delicate conversations around identity in the workplace. Inspired by Yoshino's book, Say the Right Thing How to Talk About Identity, Diversity and justice. Topics include common conversational, pitfalls, engaging in respectful disagreements, offering authentic apologies, and better supporting people in our lives who experience bias. I'm Shelby Wilburn, and you're listening to your brain at work from the NeuroLeadership Institute. We continue to draw episodes from our weekly Friday webinar series. This week. Our show is a conversation between Kinji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren, professor of Constitutional Law and Director of Melter Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, and author at New York University and Dr. David Rock, co founder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute. Enjoy.
U2
0:59
Kenji, it's so great to see you and a huge congratulations on the book. I know how much work it takes to pull this kind of work together. How many years did you work on this?
U3
1:10
This is a four year project, David, and thank you so much for having
U2
1:13
me. It's great to have you. Four years is a long time. Firstly, most importantly, how's the family?
U3
1:17
They're great. The kind of newest addition is driving us all to distraction because she's a Great Dane and she dots on my ten year old son and eleven year old daughter. But we're living in kind of a Marmadu cartoon right now.
U2
1:30
Fantastic. I love that. 2s That's what areas so, yeah, four years, it's a labor of love. I remember my last book, your brain at work was similar and it's incredibly intense. So this is literally your launch week and congratulations on getting it out. 1s First of all, actually, before we get in, let me just for those new to NLI, just give you a little bit of context about who we are and then we're going to get into your first book for a couple of minutes and then we'll dig really into this one, which is really exciting. Those of you new to us, we're 25 years old this year at NLI. I feel really old. You probably know us as embedding. Neuroscience in leadership. We started with that way back and we've also been central in reinventing performance management from well over a decade ago. One of the leading providers of growth mindset work in organizations. And with over a decade of working with some of the largest organizations and doing a huge amount of research, we've brought critical new science to Dei, which is where we intersect with Kenji's work and have intersected for a number of years with him. And what you may not know about us was we've really cracked the code for culture change at scale. And you're going to see some amazing case studies coming out this year, one of which shows that the habits we put in place in an organization were even more embedded a year later at over 100,000 people. So we're really getting to somewhere there. But enough about us, let's focus on Kenji. We're all here to learn about his incredible work. So Kenji, I learned about you through your earlier book covering and it was a fascinating piece of work and I know this was many years of research as well. And one of the things I love about your work is how research based it really is. 2s I remember the couple of things that stood out. One is that covering even a little bit has an effect on your overall cognitive resources, that it was just making it harder to think, well, like reducing IQ fundamentally when you're covering, which was really interesting. And then the second thing was that even, and I'll use some poor language, straight white men is probably a better technical term, but even that category of people, a big percentage of those people also cover.
U3
3:51
Absolutely 1s not something
U2
3:53
that yeah, dig into that. Tell me about those two things a little bit more. Yeah, of
U3
3:58
course. So just to back up a moment, I think you and I, because we're such old friends, suffer from the curse of knowledge. So some of our listeners might not even know what covering is. So covering, as I describe it in the book is a strategy through which you downplay or edit or mute aspects of your identity to blend into the mainstream of the organization. And as you might expect, this is something that nondominant groups have to do more than dominant groups in the organization because the organization was structured around the people who are dominant in the society or in the organization in the first place. So this is a person with a disability who's kind of sort of nudged to use a cane rather than a wheelchair because wheeling into a room makes other people uncomfortable. This is the gay person who's told not to put photographs of his same sex partner on his desk. This is the woman who's told to be as aggressive or tearless or analytical as the stereotypical man is. And as you say David, covering is a really kind of universal phenomenon and it really imposes a tax on the entire workplace. So a follow on study to this book that I did with Deloitte and I'll break some news here and say that original Deloitte study was in 2013 and we're coming out with a second iteration later on this year as a kind of double click on that study. But that study gave me the huge boon of data. So unlike you David, I'm not trained sort of empiricist or social scientist and so I really need to rely on partners to do this work. But one of the things that the Deloitte study found was that 83% of LGBT individuals, 79% of black respondents, 66% of women reported covering. And that when individuals covered. Of the 61% of people overall who reported covering, 60% to 73% said this was somewhat to extremely detrimental to their sense of self. And of the 53% who said their leaders expected them to cover, 50% said that this somewhat to extremely diminished their commitment to the organization. So you're absolutely right that when you ask people to work their identities alongside their jobs, that makes them less effective at their jobs because there's kind of a cognitive tax being placed on them. The other point that you made is also a marquee finding of our study which is that we found that 45% of straight white men reported covering. And that was kind of a job dropping statistic for me at the time because I still was kind of laboring under this impression of straight white men as a privileged cohort, at least in the United States, which is where the study occurred, would not report high degrees of covering. And so obviously I wanted to dig in and what we found was that. 2s Covering was occurring even among this cohort with regard to things like age, socioeconomic status, veteran status, religion, mental, physical disability. And I'm a bit embarrassed and abashed to have to report this, but when the study came out in 2013, it really shifted my thinking. I'm embarrassed because it took me so long to saying this is really a human project. Right. This is not just about particular cohorts, because no cohort is immune from the covering demand. So this new work on Allyship is really an attempt to follow on in that vein, to say, like, no matter who you are as a human being, you're going to have some advantages and some disadvantages, and where you have those advantages, you can offer Allyship, and where you lack them, you can receive Allyship. But this is truly something that is reciprocal, non, zero sum, and that benefits everybody in the workplace.
U2
7:28
Yeah, I know. That's really interesting. Thanks for taking us through that. And it's some really fascinating work. And it really parallels with our own research on inclusion that when inclusion focuses on kind of there's an irony. It's a difficult irony to talk about because there's some inherent challenges in this whole issue. But when inclusion efforts focus on kind of celebrating differences and talking about specific audiences, it ends up making that audience a little uncomfortable and other audiences kind of feeling left out. And it ironically creates a bit of exclusion to kind of celebrate differences as opposed to really finding what we have in common and building that commonality. And I see some similar themes in your research that actually covering is something that certainly underrepresented minorities, deal with more. 1s And it's a human problem, not just a dei problem. It's a human problem. And I think the more we can look at these as human problems and address them, as problematic as that statement is, I think from a scientific perspective, it helps us develop strategies that really work versus creating isolation. But Digmore, you sort of hinted at it, but why this book? What prompted you to work on this book? What was sort of drive for you personally?
U3
8:44
Yeah, so the drive was a project that we did with Microsoft originally, and I say this obviously with their permission, and they were amazing partners and saying, like, we want to pair the Uncovering Talent work with work that we're doing in Allyship, so let's build out these modules together. And at the time, we thought, well, Allyship is really relevant to covering, so we're all in on this. But as we worked together on it, the more we began to feel that Allyship is a standalone idea, was really a broad spectrum antibiotic for DNI, that it would help with covering, but it would help with a multitude of other DNI issues. What was really interesting to us is that we didn't find that people lacked a desire to be allies. I think that immediately we saw that everyone could see in the way that you just described the value proposition of having people have your back. Right. So interestingly, unlike the work that I've done, uncovering an authenticity, I don't receive any pushback when I travel the world talking about Allyship. So whether you're an APAC or an EMEA, even in jurisdictions that might say, oh, this DNI initiative sounds really American or Western to me, when we're talking about authenticity or bringing your whole self to work, when you're talking about Allyship, there's kind of immediate uptake of this seamless immediate uptake of it. And also, regardless of context, people understand the value of allyship. So I've had the privilege of talking to Major League Baseball and the NFL about this, and they just refract it through their language of being a good teammate. I've talked to farmers in the Midwest about it, and they refract it through the lens of being a good neighbor to the farm up the street. So Allyship is immediately kind of evident as a useful idea to people. And where we found people tripping up is in between the desire to be an ally and offering effective allyship. And we found that people through dead ended in one of two directions. So one was we're so terrified of saying the wrong thing and hurting someone we care about or getting canceled ourselves, that we freeze and we do nothing. And that can often be for risk averse professional people. In particular, our kind of default factory setting. And then the other way in which we can sort of dead end is that we feel like, oh, well, wait a minute, I can't sort of be a bystander. I have to be an upstander science is no longer neutrality. It's complicity and an unjust status quo. So I have to speak up. But then we go to the other extreme of barreling in uninformed and then we have that sinking realization of, oh, I've raised my hand to be an ally to the trans community or to the neurodiverse community. But as the conversation moves on, I begin to realize that I don't quite know enough to be an effective ally. And I do feel kind of burned and penalized for being ineffective as an ally. So we found that people could get stuck in these doom loops where they were passive, they were galvanized into action, then they got burned, and then they went back to passivity again. And so we said what we really need to do is to offer that middle course where people feel they're equipped with the proper tools to close a gap between the desire to be an ally, which most people have of, and effective allyship, which was actually kind of much more rare. And this book is. Totally shame free, eminently practical succinct. I hope that you could read it on a long plane ride, certainly in one or two sittings. And it's really an attempt to say, here are seven principles that will allow you to put guardrails around these conversations so that they feel less scary, so that you can actually step in and feel confident that you're going to be able to close the gap between the desire to be an ally and living up to those ideals.
U2
12:06
Yeah, that's fantastic. We actually, I think we collaborated on the Microsoft project with Allyship, and we both inputted IP in different ways and helped them scale it. It also had a big effect on us, that project. Microsoft have been central in our kind of R and D journey as well over the years in different ways. And we launched an Allyship solution around a similar time. I was actually blown away. We measured the first three really rigorously. I mean, we always measure, but we were looking very closely at the data and it actually had one of the highest, what we call BCP numbers. BCP is the percentage of people who now apply a desired habit weekly. We call it the behavior change percentage. Right. So we measure this across every program, every solution, every client, and we find so many fascinating things in the data. But the Allyship solution, surprisingly, had one of the highest BCPS. It was like 95% of people who went through it said about a month later they were doing something weekly, now they weren't doing before, and they were doing it every week. And that's one of the highest. The only one we've had in that realm was Growth Mindset, which is a relatively straightforward thing to kind of apply. With mitigating bias, it's more like 78% even including. 2s Applications like 85 but this was like practically everyone took this on. So I do think it's true. I think there's an innate human desire to be helpful and I think people want to be helpful but I think there's a gap between wanting to do it and knowing how to do it well. And as you said, you said so eloquently you either don't do it or you do. What I often do is weigh in and make a terrible mess of it. That's probably my 1s way in that realm so far, so so let's dig in a little bit more and just for everyone I'll share screen for a second. I'll show you the book just so we know what we're talking about and people my team can put a link in the chat. Is that coming up? Kenji say the Right Thing on screen you can see that beautiful. So Say The Right Thing is the book how to Talk About Identity Diversity Injustice Simon and Schuster is just out literally this week. My team will put a link in the chat if you want to that out on Amazon I guess is the place to do it. We haven't set up an affiliate or anything like that, we're not trying to make anything on that. But just there's the link for you. Let's take that down, have a conversation about it. What kinds of dialogues is the book relevant to? Like you say, identity diverse justice. Break it down a bit more. What kinds of conversations would this help you have in the workplace or outside the workplace?
U3
14:33
Yes. Great. So, I mean, this is really addressing the Ally side of the conversation, right? So we're looking for people who belong to dominant groups with regard to that particular conversation. So if it's a conversation about race, it would be the white individual or the dominant group individual. In that context. If we're talking about gender, it would be directed towards men. If you're talking about LGBTQ plus issues, it would be the straight or gender person. You're talking about disability, then it would be the able bodied person. And it's basically saying there's a lot of attention that's been drawn to how individuals who belong to the disadvantaged side of the conversation should comport themselves in these conversations to be heard most effectively. But in some sense they're the least empowered in these exchanges. And so what we want to do is to direct our attention to coaching and guiding individuals in the dominant group for how to have these conversations. And again, I just want to underscore because this is a theme that you and I have built our careers on, right, that we say dominant group, but like, everyone can be in the dominant group depending on context, right? So that if we're having a conversation about sex orientation or about Asian identity, I will be in the minority in those conversations as a gay Asian man. But if we're having a conversation about gender, then it's actually my place to be the ally towards a woman in my life because I have to acknowledge that I have advantages there. So the book is really directed towards the advantage side of the conversation, but then it sort of opens up to any diversity and inclusion conversation. So that could be you're sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table and your 1s great uncle sort of says something disparaging about immigrants. Or you could be in a workplace conversation and see that women are getting interrupted or having their ideas appropriated and you feel like you need to raise your hand and step in, in those contexts. So it's very ecumenical in its reach, but it does direct itself towards a more advantaged side of the conversation. Because I think that's where the gap in the discourse and the market is. Like, people have done a lot of coaching to the minorities themselves through ERGs and the like, but have focused less on the individuals who ironically have the most power to change the terms of the conversation. 2s This is giving skills to the people who have the advantage to close that gap. It's helping them actually do that. Sorry to interrupt you there. It's really interesting. When we started working on Allyship, when we first kind of did it, I was like, all right, I don't know much about this. I better actually start researching and reading widely. And I did. And one of the things that jumped out to me that was very kind of surprising and I had insight about this is firstly the concept of. 4s Advantage is a much I think it's a much healthier concept to talk about versus privilege. When you talk about privilege, you get kind of more of a reaction from people. It's more charged, it's more political, and it's sort of pretty clear who has privilege and who doesn't. But with advantage, it's much more nuanced like. As you're saying, you can have advantage in one context, not in another, and just about everyone has an advantage somewhere. So I think it's a more nuanced, less charged framework. It's really helpful framework to think about allyship through, and we found the same thing and anchor very much on advantage. But as I was digging in and researched advantage, I came up with this thing of the wheel of advantage that's out there. I came across it. I didn't come up with it. I came across the wheel of advantage, and I looked at it, and I was like, oh, wow, I have every single one of those. Which 1s the reason I bring that up is it was surprising because it's not how I feel, right? And then some people might throw things at me right now. I apologize, but I'm being honest here. I saw it, I was like, wow, that's really fascinating, because, yes, children and successful and male and all those things. But the way I feel is. 2s Actually, there's a lot more people with a lot more advantage than me. And I was thinking about it and I was tracking back, like, what's that about? And I realized we burn our personality in a lot in kind of middle school ages when we're young teens. And I remember feeling 2s actually in danger when I was like 1213, 1415, I went from a sort of loving, smaller school to a huge school with 200 kids in my year, all boys. I was picked on, beaten up, and I was Jewish, and Jewish was a minority in the school. We were saying like Christian prayers, singing psalms, all this stuff. And I remember being picked on and bullied and all sorts of things for being Jewish and actually having to hide that and all sorts of stuff. And it dawned on me, and I remember walking the path from the train from the subway to school when I was back there a couple of years ago and actually refelt the terror of just walking to school every day. And I'm like, wow, wonder. I sort of can connect with 1s inclusion and diversity because I do have a lived experience of actually being in fear for my life for like four or five years from being different. So you wouldn't see that on the surface necessarily.
U2
19:44
Necessarily looking at me, but I definitely felt that we were also 1s fairly happy, fairly well off, but we were definitely like sort of lower middle class, and there were lots of people with a ton more resources who were doing lots of things I wanted to be doing as kids again. So I never felt like I was one of those abandoned people. I always saw that over there anyway. So just to say what you see on the surface might not be what's really going on underneath. And I think it helped me understand kind of why I've been passionate about Allyship and related things for a long time as well. Anyway, back to you. So let's begin. We talked about the kinds of conversations, what are sort of the traps that people fall into, and you started to touch on this, but I think you've outlined like, four traps. Just give us a click down into that a little more about the sort of conversational traps people fall into when they try to approach all our ship.
U3
20:34
Absolutely. But first of all, I want to thank you for sharing that story, which is incredibly powerful. And I always find it so helpful to understand what drives people into the work and the crucial point that many of the disadvantages that we have are not visible right to others, particularly when we grow into powerful adults, as you have. So in terms of the four conversational traps, we say these are avoid deflective and I an attack. So when you're having what we call an identity conversation, you're likely to be kind of flooded with self threat. So to make this really kind of brass tax, let me just begin with the anecdote that we tell in the book, which is you host a Christmas party as a white person, and then your friend Amir keeps saying, I'm not going to go. And initially you say, oh, this is just like calendar scheduling difficulties. But it becomes so systematic over a period of time that you finally sit them down and say, is something going on? And by you, I obviously mean not you, David, but this hypothetical that we constructed in the book. And so then Amir says, to your shock, I don't come to your parties, even though I love hanging out with you one on one because your parties are so racially home genius. And I feel, as a person of color that I simply don't belong there. So what do you do in that circumstance? It's just like a horrific kind of conversation that we all dread, but it's clearly something important is being said there. And unfortunately, what we find, and I'd love to throw it to you in a minute about self threats. I know you've studied this, but what we found was that people reacted in one of four ways, all of which were, in our view, unproductive for these conversations, but very, very natural and human in that condition of self threat. So the first one is avoid that's, oh, look at the time, I have a meeting to go to thing of just avoiding a conversation altogether. The second one is deflect, right. So you could deflect to a lot of different things. But one very common one that we're all familiar with, I think, is tone policing. Deflecting to tone, saying, oh, I hear you on the substance, but I kind of don't appreciate the way you brought this up. Like, you brought this up in a cafe or there was an edge to your tone. It was overly aggressive. And so you kind of gear shift over from the substance of the complaint to the way in which it was couched. Right. But there are many other ways of deflecting as well. Like deflecting to your own credentials, deflecting to your good intentions and things like that. Then denying is just saying, this doesn't happen. So coming back and saying, well, wait a minute. When I do a kind of analysis in my head of my holiday parties, I can tell you that these five people of color have been at every single one of those parties. And so just sort of denying the legitimacy of the claim. And then attack is bringing war into the enemy's camp. You're so flooded with self threat that you decide that it's better to go into kind of attack dog mode and say, like, well, you're kind of moralizing here, but how diverse are your social gatherings? I felt uncomfortable at your social gatherings as well because I find them to be homogeneous either in the same way or in a different way. Right. And the problem with all four of these, David, is that it prevents a real conversation from occurring about the substance of it. And it takes a lot of resilience and curiosity to kind of sit in your discomfort when you're taking all of that in the face. But we just want to warn people at the outset that they're quite like to react in one of these four ways. And getting past those unproductive behaviors is like the table stakes for having a productive conversation. But over to you on the self threat, because I know that you thought about this a lot.
U2
24:02
I really love the clarity of the labeling that you've done there. Avoid Deflect, Deny, Attack and Evan and our teams put it in the chat. It's really helpful to be able to label those things and see them. It gives you language for kind of seeing them in real life later. I think you call it a D DA to remember it, which is great to have a simple mnemonic to recall it. All of these come back to people protecting what you think of as their status, their sense of themselves. And there's this whole mechanism in the brain, a big set of mechanisms for detecting and managing our status. So status is how you 2s feel compared to either other people or to your perception of yourself. And in the brain, the network for thinking about yourself and for thinking about other people is actually the same network. It's the same exact region of the brain for imagining other people, imagining you. And what happens is when you feel better than other people or yourself, like when you beat your time in a run or you beat someone else in a run, the same thing happens. You feel this positive emotion, 1s this release of dopamine and other positive neurochemicals that comes from feeling basically better than right. And it's a huge driver of social behavior. I mean, this drives 1s brand sales. It's why people would prefer driver Mercedes than a Ford. 2s Status is woven into advertising, marketing, commercial, organizational structure. Your higher status in a company, you feel or rewarded. But it turns out in the brain, status is very rewarding, and it even improves immune function, makes you think more creatively. And it's actually one of the few rewards that keeps on giving. Like it kind of doesn't get. 2s Old in some ways. So it's a fascinating thing. Even the research showing that higher status, controlling for income and education makes you live longer literally like Academy Award winning actors live longer than non Academy Award winning actors just for that alone. It's fascinating. So we really protect our status because it's an asset. But the flip side of it is a status drop is very, very painful and feels like it's an actual threat to our life. And we react really reflexively. And there's that Seinfeld joke, those of us old enough to remember seinfeld that 2s people would rather die than do some public speaking. Like a lot of people would say they'd rather die than public speak. And that's like kind of bizarre until you think about just how intense the status threat can actually be. So I think what's happening here is you're getting into these conversations, someone's saying something about you personally and they're dropping your status in your perspective, right? And so you're finding a way to feel better because it's painful, right? You're avoiding, you're deflecting, you're denying, you're attacking because you're experiencing pain. Now what you'll try and do is actually turn down your pain by putting pain on them. And it's going to be very hard for that person not to then also feel pain and put it back on you. And now you started a downward spiral, right? And this is really difficult. So it's a very real phenomena and 2s can talk for hours about just that whole. 3s Mechanism. There's a couple of really fascinating scientists who've spent their life's work on this stuff, but it's a very real thing. And anytime you attack someone's status, you're going to probably have some unhelpful conflict. And I always think about if you're trying to have any kind of conversation or trying to move someone in any way, how do you do it with the least possible status attack? Even when we do leadership development with top leaders, we don't say, hey, we think you're broken, we want to train you. It's like, hey, we want to give you some tools to help your people be better. And then, of course, they're much more likely to engage. Right. So in any intervention at home, 1s perhaps even with your new mama, Duke, don't make the mammal feel worse than they are expecting to feel, and you'll get much better results. Anyway, let's back to you. You outlined 1s these different kinds of conversations. You've outlined the four traps. Give me a sense in the workplace of the frequency that the average, say, manager, frontline manager, middle manager, maybe the average manager, how often do you think they should be having these kinds of conversations? Is this once a year? Is this once a quarter? Is it once a month? Is it once an hour? What kind of frequency do you think they should be having this kind of conversation in the workplace on average? I don't know if you've thought about that, but that's always relevant to us. Yeah, that's a really
U3
28:40
good question. And I have to say I haven't really thought about the frequency, the kind of optimal frequency I think about this much more in terms of, like Amy Edmondson's psychological safety model. Right. Which is to say, I think workplaces are going to differ based on who populates them and how much they want have the conversation. So the desire here would be more to have the managers create the psychological safety where as many conversations as necessary from their people would be had. But even when the conversations aren't occurring to your earlier point, the kind of fear of having those conversations is so acute that I think we engage in these behaviors and it can drive us out of allyship behavior. 2s So one of the key solutions I never ever show up, as I hope those of you who have heard me before know, with a problem without adding a solution, right? So I just want to say that and it directly flows from what you just said, David. So I hope you'll forgive me for going on a little bit about this, but when we think about how to avoid adda behaviors, which is a million dollar question that is raised by someone pointing out that people engage and avoid deflect an eye attack, the key kind of resource that we think about here is resilience, right? That we need to build up your own resilience so that when you feel that self threat, you're not dealing with it at the level of, oh, I'm going to think about these four behaviors. But more fundamentally, you're saying these four behaviors that I want to engage in are symptoms of the fact that I need to build up my resilience. So how do we do that? And one of the ways we have five different ways of doing it. I don't need to rehearse all of them, but one of the ways is exactly what you were talking about with the growth mindset, right? So one of the really weird things about diversity and inclusion is that even people who are diehard believers as I am in the growth mindset this idea again, forgive me if you already know all of this. Those of you who are listening in. But this is Carol Dwack's distinction between a growth mindset, where you believe that your capabilities are susceptible to constant expansion, and the fixed mindset, which says you either have it or you don't. And you either know it or you don't. And if you don't know it now, you'll never know it. And what she has shown is that over domains as disparate as athletics, business, academia, the growth mindset will always beat out the fixed mindset. So all of that is just for most of you, just review. What I hope is a value add here is that when it gets to diversity and inclusion, the scholar Dolly Chug, my wonderful colleague here at the Stern School at NYU, who's a psychologist, says everything goes out the window, right? That we believe in the growth mindset until we get to DNI and then we go right back into the fixed mindset. So she says, Why is this? And what she says is, it's because we are so flooded with self threat that we're kicked into the fixed mindset. Because if you make a mistake in constitutional law if I make a mistake in neurosciences, I'm trying to learn it from David. It's kind of like big deal, right? If David makes a mistake in constitutional law, he'll just read the next case on the dormant commerce clause and then he'll get it, right? And he may learn more from the mistake than he would learn from a success. Conversely, if I make a mistake. It's just I'm not a neuroscientist, so of course I'm going to make some mistakes. It'd be ridiculous for him to say, I'm going to teach you neuroscience under the one condition that you never make a mistake. Not much learning would. Don. Right. So it's a little bit strange that in the DNI context, people feel like they're not allowed to make mistakes and that if you make a mistake in the diversity inclusion context, suddenly it's not just that you've made a mistake with regard to your conduct, it's that you've revealed yourself as a certain kind of person. That you're a racist, a sexist, a homophob, a transphobe, an ableist right. An ageist right. And that, you know. Brand of being a bigot is so threatening. Chug says that even people who would otherwise be able to believe in and indeed sustain a growth mindset fall back into the fixed mindset. So one of the big solutions here is to just apply the growth mindset back into the DNI context to understand that we fail in this way, and to say, I believe in the growth mindset and I'm going to make this domain of learning and diversity inclusion consistent with all other domains of learning. So what might that look like? Just a couple of thoughts, right? One is the comma yet strategy, right? So my son, who's ten, is not allowed to say to school, I'm not good at math. He has to say, I'm not good at math, comma yet. In order to stimulate the growth mindset, chug similarly says if I misgender somebody, which I have, full disclosure, I should not say to myself, as I have, Kenji, you're not good at pronouns, I should say to myself, Kenji, you're not good at pronouns. Comma yet. Right? And so that will actually kick me into the growth mindset, even when I'm flooded with that identity threat. Similarly, and this is almost too delicious, we didn't plan this beforehand, folks, but David, you said you get that kind of jolt of self esteem either when you beat other people or when you beat yourself, and it's the same region of the brain, if I understood that correctly. Right, and I think that that's a really important insight because what we say in our book is to say, engage in comparisons to yourself over time rather than comparisons to others. Because again, sticking with the misgendering example, if I misgender somebody and I feel that self threat, I could sort of say, well, oh gosh, David would never have done that. He's so much better at the pronouns than I am, and I'll always be able to find someone who's better at this than I am and I can beat myself up with that. Or alternatively and more productive, I can say, am I better at this than I was a year ago? Right? And usually the answer to that will be yes, as a person of goodwill is trying to learn in this domain. And that's a way of maintaining my status even when I feel like it's under threat. Because I have just misgendered somebody, my status is under threat. But I can correct for that by adopting the growth mindset. Final point, right, which is to say, Chug says there are general growth mindset principles that simply need to be applied to a new context, the DNI context that we've somehow kind of sequestered away from the growth mindset. But the other one is very specific to diversity and inclusion, where she says, let's let go this idea that they're good and bad people in the world and instead think of all of us as good ish people, right? So we have the natural tendency to divide the world into sheep and goats and say, like, I'm one of the good people, right? But the danger of that is that if you don't make a mistake, you're complacent. If you do make a mistake, which frankly, all of us will at some point in diversity inclusion, we will all fear getting canceled because we've said something really inappropriate or laughed at an inappropriate joke or confused two people of the same social group for each other and called them by each other's names. I have done all of these things just to put my own cards on the table, right? So in those circumstances, what she says is if you divide the world into good and bad and you make that mistake, then you're going to fight your corner tooth and nail because you're so scared of being pushed back into that bad person category. To translate it into your argue, David, you're so worried about the loss of status, right? But if you think of yourself as like, a good ish person, you're much less likely to get buffeted around by these wins because you think, I'm a good ish, and of course I'm going to make mistakes. One mistake does not make me a bad person. And then I can continue to sustain the growth mindset. I wonder if any of that resonates. David.
U2
35:39
So much to comment on. So much to comment on. It's phenomenal. I'm so happy we're having this conversation. I love the goodish concept and the way it kind of helps you deal with the mistakes you make. I mean, I think I make more mistakes than most people I know in every domain, because I'm just always trying lots of things, and I'm willing to take risks. I'm willing to experiment a lot. I've always been an experimenter all the way back. I just ran into some friends I haven't seen for 25 years, and they were remarking on how I haven't changed a bit. And I think the goodish concept is really helpful in kind of getting you to see that you don't have to protect yourself. You make small mistakes because I know I make them a lot, lots, lots of things to say. First of all, when I was looking at kind of your seven the seven things you can do differently, I definitely saw, like, Growth Mindset and psych safety and similar things sort of as the foundational pieces and then some specific kind of practices. Now, I'll dig into those practices in a minute, but I just want to make some connections to sort of those foundations. I absolutely agree. Growth Mindset is a really critical foundation for Dei work overall. And when we work with organizations who are really committed to seriously moving the needle on Dei, we say, let's start with Growth Mindset. Let's put a Growth Mindset set of habits right across the whole organization. Like every single employee having the power of yet and having the three habits underneath that, that really you operationalize. So there's sort of like a base layer if you think of a terrible metaphor, but going skiing, it's appropriate. Right now there's a base so that the next things can stick. Right? There's a sort of base of Growth Mindset so that the next things will stay and 1s super, super important. But then there's a lot of insights from psychological safety as well around kind of creating safety for people to speak up and for you to speak up. There's a whole lot of work. Those of you who don't know, we've actually partnered with Amy Edmondson. You may not know we formed 2s a partnership with her. We've actually just put a solution out into the world that takes her framework that we pressure tested. We tried to actually improve on it. We couldn't. She absolutely had the research right, but we took her framework and have built the neuroscience based habits under that. And that's now starting to scale out there that'll go to probably millions of millions of people now spreading her impact in the next few years. So I think Growth Mindset and psychological safety are super relevant. Um, foundations. But then on top of that are these like, specific tactical skills. And I love how, you know, dug into those. So talk to us about those. Maybe start with kind of the hardest one that people sort of have to master and maybe start with the easiest one. And then tell us the hardest one of those sort of three really tactical skills. What's the easiest one? People seem to get intuitively. Then what's the
U3
38:26
hardest? Yeah, I would say that it depends on the person, but in general, I would say that the easiest one is the one that we call self affirmation. So you said that you might be dating yourself with Seinfeld. I will see you and raise you by dating myself with Saturday Night Live skit of Stuart Smally. Right. So self affirmation gets a bad name. And initially we're a little bit embarrassed to even talk about it because it did invoke this silent live skit where this gentleman, played by Al Franken, with a giant boofon hairdo and a kind of pastel cardigan, was a talk show host. And before every show, before he went on, he would look into a mirror and say, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dug on at people like me. Right. And that would be his self affirmation. But in some ways, this is obviously like a laugh line, but he may be getting the last laugh because there's now robust social science as I understand it. David, I look to you for confirmation of this that Robert Livingston has articulated, saying, like, self affirmation really works, and that he says, in the context of having race conversations, that the best thing that you can do for yourself is to just jot down or think about if writing down is even too hokey for you. Three things that you like about yourself. And he says, what's so strange about this is that it sounds so hokey, but it works like a charm because what is threatening in these situations is your self esteem. So if you can actually build some kind of bulwark against those threats before you go into the conversation, or even during the conversation, then it will allow you to keep those higher values in mind. And I think the proof of the pudding is that those three things don't even have to be diversity inclusion related. So it doesn't need to be like, I gave money to the LDF last year for civil rights. It can just be like, I think of myself as like, a good husband or a good father or I'm a strong professional at my job and those kinds of things. In the same way that we wouldn't ask you to kind of run a marathon without feeding you first. If you're going into a difficult conversation, the psychic food that you can feed yourself are those self affirmations. So please try this, even if you're skeptical of it. Sounds too touchy feely. Please try it. Because what I found is that it just works like a charm. So that's, in some ways, the easiest thing to get people to adopt the hardest thing in my experience, David, and this actually reflects really well, actually, on humanity, right. The hardest thing, I think, to adopt is to not be a superhero. Right. So most of the strategies under resilience we talk about are ways in which you can engage in self talk that helps you even growth mindset is a form of self talk. Right. But what we found is that people really need allies. As allies, right? And that people are often loath to reach out to other people when they themselves are going to be called on to be allies because they feel like, I'm supposed to be the superhero in this situation. I'm supposed to take all these punches on the chin, and I'm not allowed to show weakness. And of course, I'm certainly not allowed to ask the affected person in the situation to educate me. So we've all learned, right, after many, many painful experiences, right, that you're not supposed to, after the murder of George Floyd, go to your closest black friend and say, give me a syllabus because I want to learn about the black experience. Because your friend is in trauma, the last thing he needs to do is to do the work of educating you. Similarly, we know that we're not supposed to burden those individuals emotionally by bursting into tears or having an emotional reaction when we're showing up as an ally, because even with the best of intentions, with the most empathetic heart, we're still siphoning emotional energy away from that person. So that's a correct premise, but we often reason from that to the false conclusion that because we're not allowed to look to the affected person for help, we're not allowed to look for help at all. And that's really the hardest hill for us to climb, but it is such an important one to climb. So we looked at this through the work of the psychologist Susan Silk, who has this theory called the ring theory. And this theory comes about not from her work as a psychologist academically, but actually from her personal experience. She had cancer and she was in the hospital and her best friend called her up and said, susan, I want to come visit you in the hospital. And Silk said, I don't like hospital visits. I really appreciate the call, but can you wait until I'm released and then mark this equal? David? The friend says, like, I have a right to come visit you, susan, this isn't just about you. I need to make sure that you're okay. Right? And Silk was kind of a GOG and aghast at this because she said, wait a minute, I have cancer and this is not about me, it's somehow about you. But then she had a kind of remarkably compassionate response as she kept thinking about this exchange where she said, my friend was suffering and deserved help. It's just that she shouldn't have turned to me for help. And so she said, let me construct a series of concentric rings. The person who is the most affected is in the center ring. So that's the person with cancer, that's black colleague who's suffering after the murder of George Floyd, right? One ring out is you as the ally trying to support that person. And obviously you should not sort of look inward for support, so you should only be directing comfort to the people who are closer to the epicenter of the crisis than you. But then you should draw other rings, she says, and, like, the next ring out can be like, close friends and family. The next ring out can be supportive work colleagues. And her rule is, is comfort in dump out. Right? So once you actually have those rings and you populate them with the proper names of actual people, when you go into one of these situations and you have an adda response or you have some kind of kind of self threat, you can actually. 1s Know that you're not alone in this, that you as an ally have allies. And the reason I think that it speaks really well that this is hard for people to internalize is that I think people do have this really lovely sense of I'm not supposed to burden the affected person, and I'm really supposed to be strong. I'm here to be the strong person for the other person to lean on, and therefore I can't be weak myself. But in reality, that's none of us, right, like all of us, when we're trying to be allied eyes have allyship fatigue. And I know that that often gets ridiculed by people of allyship fatigue isn't really a thing. And I think that's wrong. I think compared to the affected person, of course your suffering is likely to be less, but that doesn't mean that your suffering isn't meaningful or can't be alleviated by you leaning on other people. So I know in many, many situations where I've been called on to be an ally, I've needed at a certain point to go to my husband, right, to go to my friends, to go to my own colleagues who are friends in the DNI space and to say, I'm here as an ally in this situation. But, wow, I really need some kind of emotional or cognitive support here because I've been trying to go it for too long. So that is the hardest, but in some ways the most important thing, where you can do all the self talk that you want, but at a certain point, you're going to get so tired and you're going to need other people. And so we want to build that ecosystem system with the concentric rings and the kind of paradigm rule of comfort and dumpout.
U2
45:19
Yeah, so much in there. I mean, I'm hearing a lot about resilience foundation. I know you have a whole chapter on that in the book that kind of managing your resilience lots of different ways so that you can be in these conversations. Tell me a little more about disagree, respectfully, apologize authentically. 1s There's a lot in there, whichever one you'd like to dig into most. I think the ring concept is phenomenal, super helpful. But take us through some of the solutions a little bit. Like, what do you think has been the most sort of meaningful habit people need to build to be more effective?
U3
45:54
Yeah. I'd love to take up both apologies and disagreements if time allows, and I'll try to be more succinct 2s both of these strategies. Right. So apologies is one of the things where we see a lot of unforced errors is that people sort of want to apologize. But again, apologies themselves can trigger self threat. Right. If I apologize to you, then I might worry, like, okay, I've admitted that I've done some wrong. David might pile on, david might ask more of me than I'm willing to give, or I might never be out of the doghouse. Right. And so I try to protect myself by hedging my apology in various ways. But in doing that, what we found is you neither protect yourself nor do you comfort the other person. Right. And so you sort of succeed at neither goal of either protecting yourself or repairing the relationship. 1s We're very like you, David, in that we like kind of models and we like mnemonics. Right. So we call these the four R's of a successful apology of recognition, responsibility, remorse, and redress. So making sure that you give proper recognition of the harm means that you avoid locations. Like, if I did something, I'm sorry, or whatever I did, I'm sorry. If you're genuinely unsure about what you've done wrong, then you should ask, and that should be a moment for curiosity. But if you know you've done something wrong, then don't hedge with an if. Right. We call these if apologies in terms of responsibility. The kind of key word here to look out for is but. Right? So I'm sorry to take Roseanne Barr's example, comma, that I made that racist comment comma, but I was ambient tweeting it was 02:00 A.m. In the morning. Or I could say to you, David, I'm sorry, but I was tired. I was having a miserable day. And then you're left wondering, what happens the next time Kenji has a miserable day? Am I to expect a repeat of this bad behavior? Right. So make sure that you don't use the comma but strategy. It doesn't protect you, it doesn't repair the relationship, because it doesn't assume responsibility. Perfectly adequate and sometimes really wonderful to say, I'm sorry, period. There is no excuse, period. Then the next one is remorse. So this is usually signaled less by particular forms of words than it is by context factor. So my go to example here is Mario Batali, who's accused of sexual assault. He gave a not great but passable apology until he entered a postscript to that apology. That said, for those of you who are interested in holiday recipes, here's a great one for cinnamon rolls. I'm like, I'm out, right? Like, I'm not going to accept that you feel remorseful about this at all if you're going to add a cinnamon roll recipe. To the end of your apology. And finally redress is you have to actually make it right going forward. So we often think like, oh, I've apologized, I'm done. And apologies do close the book in some sense. They afford closure, but they also actually open a book, right? They open a book about a promise, about a future course of conduct, so I can't sort of talk my way out of something I've acted my way into. And so therefore, you're going to be looking very closely at me, David, if I say I'm sorry to make sure that I commit myself to a future course of conduct where I can't be perfect, but I can commit myself to best efforts to not repeating that behavior. So if you hit those four R's, even though, again, this seems like such an amorphous field, if you hit sort of recognition, responsibility, remorse, and redress, you're well on your way right, to offering an authentic apology.
U2
49:05
That's fantastic. That's super, super crisp. Thanks again for your hard work. I know how hard it is to make things simple. Four years. Often you're coming up with Scarf took three and a half years. Seeds took more than four years to define a model for bias. It's really, really intense to simplify things and maintain their integrity as well. I know what that's like. I love that model. It's really powerful. So tell me briefly, in one or two minutes, tell me about disagree respectfully.
U3
49:34
Yes. So oftentimes people say, am I even allowed to disagree in a diversity inclusion conversation? And we will die in the hill of saying, absolutely, yes. Just do it as respectfully as you can. Right. Because if people feel like they can't disagree and their only sort of options are to acquiesce or to apologize, then they're not going to really enter into these conversations. Right. So disagreement is critical, but again, we haven't been taught about how to do it effectively. So the 1 minute version of this, this is actually my co author David Glasgow's incredible work, where he says there's actually a controversy spectrum that allows you to figure out what kind of disagreement you're having with the other person. So if you and I disagree about which is our favorite Netflix show or sports team or what have you, then we're quite likely to have that enhance our intimacy, right? We can trash talk vanilla versus chocolate ice cream or what have you, and it's no big deal, right? If anything, it sort of enhances our friendship if we move over to facts. And here, I don't mean like values by proxy, like alternative facts, but really journalistic facts of who did what, when, where and why. Again, it's a little bit hotter than simple tastes or preferences, but it's not going to be that hot. Once you move over to policies and then to values, it gets hotter. And where it gets hottest is where one of the two parties feels like their equal humanity is called into question. So what we want people to recognize is that two people can be having the same conversation about the same issue, but they're at different points on that controversy spectrum. An example that I always give is that prior to 2015, I was touring the kind of country as a Constitutional law professor talking about why I believe that it was a constitutional right to have same sex marriage be recognized. And my party's opposite would often say, we know you're in a same sex relationship, so you have a personal sort of stake in this. We ask that you not kind of make emotional pleas or talk about your family because we feel like that's not fair, right? And so we want you to keep this as like an intellectual constitutional law debate. And I would say, of course, absolutely, that was my intention and that's what I'm going to do on the public stage, right? But I kept thinking throughout this, you could have done yourself so much good party opposite in this debate. If you just acknowledge to me in the green room of saying, for us this is an issue of policy, for you, this is an issue of equal humanity, like whether or not your relationship is just as valuable, whether or not you belong in the society just as much as a heterosexual person would. You would not have to surrender any of your arguments, but you could have made the interaction between us so much better. So I try to remember that now being oftentimes on the other side of these conversations where I'm arguing in terms of policies and values to say I don't need to go over. And in fact, I shouldn't presume to be able to understand where the other person is feeling the argument, but I should at least acknowledge that that person feels a particular way. So now, just to give a real example, and I'll close on this the shoe is on the other foot, right? Same sex marriage is now the law of the land. And the people who are now suing in court and having these public debates with me are people of faith who are trying to get exemptions from those laws of general applicability. I will again argue to the death that they should not get those exemptions. But when I have those debates with them, I in the green room say this is an issue of policy. For me, as a Constitutional law scholar, I have reasons that I believe that laws of general applicability should not have religious exemptions when they pertain to civil rights, right? But I acknowledge that for you this is a matter of equal humanity. This is about your capacity to live out your faith in the public sphere. So you don't need to go to the other person's place. But you do need to acknowledge that there's a controversy spectrum and that if you can acknowledge that you're at a different point than the other person on that scale, it can actually make the debate much more respectful than it otherwise would have been.
U2
53:08
Fascinating. I look forward to never being on the other side of an argument with you because I'm going to lose 1s your mind is incredible and your ability to see through complexity and create clarity is phenomenal. Folks, don't jump off. We're going to wrap up in about two minutes. We're actually going to give away some of Kenji's books in a minute to a bunch of folks. So stay with us for a minute. So much in here and it's it's fascinating the sort of similar paths we've been on obsessed about data and science and trying to make a difference in the dei space and kind of also both connecting to Microsoft who are a fantastic company and I look forward to digging in further. It feels like we're just scratching the surface. Amazing book. And there are seven different elements, such as the ones that we've talked about. So I really encourage people to dig in if my team can put the link back in the chat to the book. And I think there was a bookstore.org chat or something. For those who don't want to make Amazon any richer than they are, there's an alternative to that which is lovely, which be allies to other retailers. But folks, don't jump off, we'll let Kenji go in a minute. I'll have a closing question but if you're interested in some of the things we've. 2s I talked about. I'll give you a way to kind of follow up. If you're interested in our work on growth mindset, just put the word grow in the chat. Just gro someone will follow up with you. If you're interested in our work on psychological safety, put the word Team and you can do this more than once. So we have a solution called Team the Neuroscience for psychological safety. And if you're interested in our work on Allyship, we have an Allyship solution called Ally. We're very literal minimizing cognitive loads. We've got grow team and ally. We weave these together into pathways in some really fascinating organizations these days so that people can so the whole company can learn a skill like the whole company can learn growth mindset one quarter and then the next quarter the whole company do something else. But anyway, we'll put up a poll and the poll just tells us kind of how to support you, including a nothing for now. So if you put nothing for now, no one will follow up with you. The bottom link there, but click one of those polls, even if you put something in the chat, it helps us know how to follow up. And Kenji, while people do that, just 1s my closing question for you is what's next for you, aside from maybe a vacation? 1s Or is the guy from California, Caishian, said he always has, what, a cigar and a bottle of scotch and a joint or something when he finishes a book? I won't ask you about any of those three this week, but aside from a vacation, what's next for you in your career and your
U3
55:38
work? Yeah, the next thing for me and David, I'd love to talk to you more offline about this, but one of the things that we have our eye on at the center is a way in which law is getting kind of involved again, right, in diversity and inclusion. So I'm expecting some terrible cases on affirmative action to come down in the educational context from the Supreme Court this term, which ends in June. And so the next piece of work that my center is going to do is to try and think about the threats to diversity and inclusion programming. These cases pertain not directly to the employment context, but we all know that the next domino to fall is going to be a case that's going to be brought under title seven. And so this weird experience because I thought I left the law in part to move into DNI, but now DNI is coming back into the legal sphere. And I think that they're going to be real legal kind of guardrails or constraints that are going to be placed on how we do DNI. And one of the things I like about your work and my work, frankly, is that we've already kind of weatherproofed it through this kind of appeal to the universal human. But I think more work needs to be done to make sure that we don't run afoul of this movement against DNI from a legal perspective, not just in the United States, but in other jurisdictions around the world.
U2
56:50
I honor you as an ally to the entire Dei movement and an ally who's probably one of the best educated and the best position to really make a difference at the system level. I mean, I think your impact and influence is going to grow and grow and grow in coming years because you've got such an educated voice. So thank you for everything that you do for the space. It's been absolutely phenomenal and what a great session. I'll let you jump off. Folks, I've got one more quick announcement. If you can stay for another 30 seconds, otherwise, great to see you. Kenji, great conversation. My brain's buzzing with ideas and insights and things I want to dig into more. We look forward to connecting again. We'll let you get back to that. Mama Duke, all the best. All right, Kenji. Thanks so much.
U3
57:29
David,
U1
57:31
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