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

I was driving down the interstate the other day when I came up behind a truck and I saw a large sign on the truck that said if you cannot see my mirrors I cannot see you and we all know that when we have a car in our blind spot that 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 perhaps we're not as inclusive as others

of others as we think we are so I'll talk a little bit about inclusion today and about the inclusion paradox that it is true that we are all human beings and that we are all alike we share a human experience paradoxically however we are all uniquely different we all have different DNA different fingerprints different patterns in our eyes and we all have different stories and different experiences and different frames of reference in the world but I think the issue of inclusion is actually in this bullet point is we are like some people more than others

that we have a propensity for affinity bias we have a preference to surround ourselves with people who are like us however it is nevertheless a part of the human experience that we all have a deep need to feel included so you would think that if we all have a deep need to feel included that the path to inclusion would be smooth flat and completely without obstacles and yet I'd like to suggest to you today that not only is it not flat and smooth it actually filled with visible and invisible obstacles that stop us even when

we think we're being inclusive from being fully inclusive it will not surprise you to know that our in-group is smaller than our out group but it may surprise you that in recent years in the field of neuropsychology has been able to demonstrate that the neural pathways that we use when we think about ourselves and the neural pathways we use when we think about members of our in-group are the same neural pathways causing us to be much more empathetic and much more sympathetic to people in our in group we use different neural pathways for people in

our out group causing us to be somewhat indifferent to their success or failure I was in dallas-fort Worth Airport a few years ago and it was pre 9/11 and I had an unconscious habit that I didn't realize I had until that particular evening when I boarded the plane I would always look to the left and look into the cockpit and on this particular evening there was a woman sitting behind the pilot seat now she smiled at me and I smiled at her and then I sat down and my stomach began to churn and then my

inner voice started to run like a ticker-tape that said oh my goodness perhaps I need to change my flight I really a woman flying this plane to Fort Lauderdale tonight a 757 a woman pilot now I'm a diversity consultant and I am NOT meant to think like that so I then began to examine what is happening why am I 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's tall he's male he's white he preferably has silver gray hair and

he looks like he's ex-military now he could fly the plane I wasn't sure that she could I'd like to share with you some of the data from cognizant my unconscious bias assessment tool this is aggregate data from quite a large number of people from different client systems and what you're looking at is 70 percent of this group we're men and 30 percent were women and what you can see in these results is that the man said that men exhibit leadership qualities greater than women do that men are more assertive than women and that men are

more serious about their careers and women however they also said that men and women were valued equally for the revenue generation skills and were equally likely to be allocated major projects but let's look at what the women said the 30 percent of the group that were women I may surprise you to see that the women also said that men exhibit greater leadership skills the women also said that men are slightly more serious about their careers than men and the women also said that men are more assertive than women they did however disagree with the man

on the issue of being valued for their revenue-generating skills and being valued or likely to be allocated major projects and clients now how can this be because consciously we believe that we are actually striving for equity that we have a meritocracy in our organizations and that we're being fair and they were conscious of the gender differences and yet not just a man but the women were colluding in this process so implicit biases are very pervasive in fact of the 15 million people who have taken Harvard University's IAT test 80% of that group cannot both men

and women cannot resist the tendency to associate men with careers and women with home I had a professor once who said there's no such thing as the innocent eye and that we really are not always seeing as clearly as we think we are the brain distorts the mess which in fact we actually do physically have a blind spot in the retina of each eye and it wouldn't stretch the imagination to think that perhaps this giraffe is looking himself and saying oh my I look a little bit small and fat today because the brain distorts the

reflection and if it's distorting the reflection of ourselves what is it doing in terms of your reflection or patterns for other people Deepak Chopra said that our ideal body weight is hiding inside of us waiting to be discovered just like Michelangelo discovered the David in that piece of rock but what I'd like to suggest to us today is that there's a better self hiding inside each of us there's a better self who's capable of being more inclusive than we really are because despite the fact that we're well-intentioned were not always as inclusive of other human

beings particularly if they're not like us now David's face is carved in marble in perpetuity however as part of our human experience we have many faces I'd like to talk about a couple of them today first of all we have what I call our professional face that's the face that we take out of the car in the morning as we go to work that's the face that we use when we're doing business with other people but we also have our politically correct face that's the fish you use when you're seeing one thing and thinking another

but then I believe we have what I call your curious tourists space your curious tourists face is is when you go overseas 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 even buy some touristy things to take home to remind you of the trip but just so long as they don't all move 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 perhaps it gets you lost and you get a little irritated one of the blind spots that I've noticed is that we are willing to express more irritation towards people from a different culture than we are towards people from our own culture and so that's something that I like to pay attention to is when I'm when I'm dealing with people who are different from me so in terms of language language is one of the areas that I do think language accent pesos speech tone of

voice are all areas that we can actually imperceptibly cause us to have blind spots and to treat people differently I was in Publix once and I asked the woman for 6 bagels and she said oh my you sound so intelligent and I said well the fact that she's right isn't really the issue the issue is what was she projecting onto me and what she was projecting was intelligence whereas it made me question what does she project onto other people I'd like to share with you also some data from my unconscious bias tool and this time

comparing Anglo to non-english speaking background where you can see that in every instance people from non-english speaking backgrounds were rated lower than people of Anglo descent and what this is suggesting that there is a real issue 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'd like to ask you to choose two colors that you really like the most just shout out a couple of colors I had blue and yellow okay so now I'd like

you to choose two colors that you like the least so what happened because what I noticed there is you were very quick when I asked you the first time but the second time there was a silence fell over the room let me tell you what happened is 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 seeks congruence the brain is lazy the brain is habitual it seeks congruence the first slides were easy because they were congruent the color matched

the swatch the second slides the color and the words do not match so it causes us to have an imperceptible hesitation it is in that hesitation that we can exclude people so this time I'd like to ask you to pick two people that you would least like to have on your team one in four I hear one and four okay interestingly one and four on every single time I do this exercise either 1 & 4 or 3 & 4 are picked as the people that would be least welcome on someone's team the ensuing discussion is

always about the issue of appearance and height and weight and so these are also issues in which we can exclude others I was on a flight from Canberra to Sydney just last year and it was a 30-30 seater commuter flight when a female voice the female flight attendant was in the aisle serving the orange juice when I heard a female voice come over the intercom and she said ladies and gentlemen we're at 27,000 feet we'll be landing in Sydney shortly I hope you've enjoyed your flight I looked at the flight attendant and I thought her

mouth isn't moving how can this be and then I realized oh my goodness there's a female pilot and I forgot to check and at 27,000 feet I was not exercising the option to get off the plane Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living but I would like to suggest to you today that the unchallenged brain is not worth trusting and I would like to invite you to think about what it is you do to exclude others what is it you do that might be a blind spot for you that may cause you

if you paid attention to it to widen the size of your in-group thank you