Inclusion, Exclusion, Illusion and Collusion : Helen Turnbull at TEDxDelrayBeach

I was driving down the interstate the other day when I found myself behind a truck and I saw a big sign on the truck that said if you can't see my mirrors I can't see you and we all know that when we have a car in the blinds. I realized that's not a very good thing, in fact, it could be dangerous, but it made me think about our blind spots. It made me think about what our blind spots can do to us as well-intentioned people and that sometimes maybe we aren't as inclusive. as others of others as we think we are so today I will talk a little about

inclusion

and about the paradox of

inclusion

that it is true that we are all human beings and that we are all equal we share a human experience paradoxically as we are all uniquely different, we all We have different DNA, different fingerprints, different patterns in our eyes and we all have different stories, different experiences and different frames of reference in the world, but I think the issue of inclusion is really at this point: we are like some.

People more than others have a propensity for affinity bias, we have a preference for surrounding ourselves with people who are like us, however, it is part of the human experience that we all have a deep need to feel included, so you might think that if we all have a deep need to feel included, the path to inclusion would be smooth and completely free of obstacles and yet I would like to suggest to you today that not only is it not flat and smooth, but it is actually full of visible and invisible. Obstacles that prevent us from being fully inclusive Even when we think we are being inclusive You won't be surprised to learn that our in-group is smaller than our out-group, but it may surprise you that in recent years in the field of neuropsychology we have been able to show that the pathways neural pathways that we use when we think about ourselves and the neural pathways that we use when we think about the members of our group are the same neural pathways that make us much more empathetic and much more understanding of people.

In our in-group we use different neural pathways to the people in our out-group, which makes us somewhat indifferent to their success or failure. I was at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport a few years ago, it was before 9/11 and I was in an unconscious state. habit that I didn't realize I had until that particular night when I boarded the plane, I always looked to the left and looked into the cabin and on that particular night there was a woman sitting behind the pilot's seat and now she smiled at me and Le I smiled and then I sat down and my stomach started churning and then my inner voice started running like a ticker tape saying, "Oh my God, maybe I need to change my flight." I'm actually a woman flying this plane to Fort Lauderdale. tonight a 757 a female pilot I am now a diversity consultant and I should NOT think like that so I started to examine what was happening, why I am thinking like that and I realized that I had a blind spot that for me The image of a Competent airline pilot looks like this.

He is tall, he is male, he is white, preferably has silver gray hair and looks like an ex-military man. He now he can fly the plane. He wasn't sure she could. I would like to share it with some of the data from my unconscious bias assessment tool is aggregated data from a fairly large number of people from different client systems and what you are seeing is that 70 percent of this group are men and 30 percent were women and What can be seen in these results is that the man said that men exhibit greater leadership qualities than women, that men are more assertive than women, and that men take their careers more seriously. and women, however, also said that men and women were valued equally. for income-generating skills and were equally likely to be assigned major projects, but let's look at what the women said, 30 percent of the group who were women.

You may be surprised to see that women also said that men exhibit greater leadership skills than women. He also said that men are a little more serious than men about their careers and women also said that men are more assertive than women; However, they disagreed with the man on the issue of being valued for his ability to generate income and being valued or likely to do so. We will be assigned important projects and clients now, how can this be? Because we consciously believe that we are actually fighting for equity, that we have a meritocracy in our organizations and that we are being fair and that we were aware of gender differences and yet, not only a man, but women were colluding in this process, so implicit biases are very widespread.

In fact, of the 15 million people who have taken the Harvard University IAT exam, 80% of that group cannot resist the tendency to associate men with careers and women with careers. At home I once had a teacher who said that there is no such thing as an innocent eye and that in reality we do not always see as clearly as we think, the brain distorts the disorder, that in fact we do physically, we have a blind spot in the retina of each Be careful and it wouldn't be stretching the imagination to think that maybe this giraffe is looking at itself and saying oh God, I look a little small and fat today because the brain distorts the reflection and if it is distorting the reflection of ourselves, what is? do it in terms of your reflection or patterns for other people Deepak Chopra said that our ideal body weight is hidden within us waiting to be discovered just like Michelangelo discovered the David in that piece of rock, but what I would like to suggest to us today is that there is a better self hidden within each of us, there is a better self that is capable of being more inclusive than we really are because even though we have good intentions, we were not always so inclusive of other human beings, especially if They're not like us now, David's face is carved in marble in perpetuity, yet as part of our human experience we have many faces.

I would like to talk about a couple of them today, first of all, we have what I call our professional face, that is the face. that we take out of the car in the morning when we go to work that's the face we use when we do business with other people but we also have our politically correct face which is the fish that you use when you see one thing and thinking about something else, but then I think we have what I call the curious tourist space that what curious tourists face is when you go abroad and you visit another country and you meet the people and you love the locals and you love their food and their music and their tradition and maybe You might even buy some touristy stuff to take home and remind you of the trip, but until everyone moves into your neighborhood, we also have what I call an irritated customer face and I'm sure you can relate to the idea of ​​being in a taxi somewhere and the taxi driver doesn't speak your language and maybe you get lost and a little irritated.

One of the blind spots I've noticed is that we are willing to express more. irritation towards people from a different culture than our own towards people from our own culture and that's something I like to pay attention to when dealing with people who are different from me, in terms of language. It's one of the areas where I think language, accent, weight, speech, tone of voice, are areas where we can imperceptibly cause us to have blind spots and treat people differently. different way. I was in Publix one time and I asked the woman for 6 bagels and she said oh god you sound so smart and I said well the fact that she's right isn't really the problem, the problem is what she was projecting onto me and what she was projecting was intelligence, while it made me wonder what she projects onto other people.

I would like to share with you also some data from my unconscious bias tool and this time comparing Anglos with non-English speaking backgrounds, where you can see that in all cases people with non-English speaking backgrounds scored lower than people of Anglo-Saxon descent. and what this suggests is that there is a real problem around the talent pipeline and around how people's careers can progress when we have these blind spots and these unconscious biases that are impacting our decisions about people's competence. , so I would like to ask you to choose. two colors that you really like just shout out a couple of colors, I had blue and yellow, okay, now I would like you to choose two colors that you like less, so what happened?

What I noticed is that you were very fast. When I asked you the first time but the second time there was silence in the room let me tell you what happened it's called the Stroop effect, it was developed by a man called John Ridley Stroupe in 1935, an Englishman, and what he discovered was that the brain searches for congruence the brain is lazy the brain is habitual it looks for congruence the first slides were easy because they were congruent the color matched the sample the second slide the color and the words do not match so it causes us an imperceptible hesitation It is in this doubt that we can exclude people, so this time I would like to ask you to choose two people you would least like to have on your team, one in four.

I hear one and four. Okay, funnily enough, one and four each time. I do this exercise, 1 and 4 or 3 and 4 are chosen as the people who would be least welcome on someone's team. The discussion that follows is always about the question of appearance, height and weight, so these are also issues that we can exclude. others I was on a flight from Canberra to Sydney last year and it was a 30 to 30 seat flight when a female voice, the flight attendant, was in the aisle serving orange juice when I heard a female voice over the intercom and she said, ladies and gentlemen, we are at 27,000 feet, we will be landing in Sydney shortly.

I hope you enjoyed your flight. I looked at the stewardess and thought her mouth was not moving, how can this be? and then I realized. Oh my goodness, there is a female pilot and I forgot to check and at 27,000 feet she was not exercising the option to get off the plane. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living, but today I would like to suggest to you that the unquestioned brain is not worth trusting and I would like to invite you to think about what it is that you do to exclude others, what it is that you do which could be a blind spot for you that, if you pay attention to it, can cause you to expand the size of your group thanks