COVID + CLIMATE = OVERWHELM

The challenge of holding two existential threats in mind at the same time

Today, my news feed is utterly packed with virus news – the rate of spread, city-by-city, state-by-state, country-by country, with accounts of medical system overwhelm, government response, and public cooperative efforts contrasted with heedless gatherings.  We are in a global state of health and social emergency.

One month ago, my news feed was dominated by climate news – the rate of warming, local, regional, national and global effects, with stories of loss of biodiversity, innovative responses, youth-led activism and utterly critical timelines for action.

Both streams speak to direct existential threats.  COVID-19 imperils us individually and millions around the world right now, today, and in the coming year.  At the same time, the human-driven changes in our climate are a menace to the survival of species of innumerable species of life, and bid to flood our cities, burn our countrysides, and create hundreds of millions of climate refugees in the next few decades.    We are faced with unprecedented challenges to our survival, and we are called to attend to both at the same time, a nearly Herculean trial of our ability to focus and act.

Our in-the-moment focus on the novel virus is understandable and actually imperative.  We are facing potential meltdown of many of our social systems and, with that, our ability to deal with anything beyond our immediate survival.  Accordingly, our capacity to address the disruption of the biosphere requires sufficient social stability to organize our collective response to global warming, in spite of how we have struggled to act effectively thus far.  However, much like the vitally important “flatten the curve” model for infection, we also must act immediately to reduce the speed of climate disruption or reap ever-redoubling effects of ocean rise, extreme heat, violent weather, and species extinction.  To hesitate now, on either, is to doom ourselves to exponentially worse outcomes.

Thus we are tasked with holding both crises fully in mind, no small feat.  In truth, humans are ill-equipped to attend to two threats simultaneously.  Multitasking is a neurophysiological myth. Instead, we are going to have to become skilled at switching up, bringing our attention and intention to bear on one, then the other, and back again, for the foreseeable future.  Yes, it feels like double work.  It is double work.  That being said, we have little choice.

Here’s what we can do:

First, name it and tame it.  Allow yourself to recognize and feel the sense of overwhelm.  Identify it, sense it, accept that it is part of life right now, and then mentally place it on a nearby shelf where it can be known but not in charge.  You can tell that feeling that you won’t forget or deny it, and it is not in charge right now.  This frees you up to do your work.

Next, set a specific amount of time that you will commit to each of these two mental marathons in a day, and make those allocations of time and energy reasonable for your mental, physical and spiritual well-being.  Allow as how it could be as little as ten minutes or as much as several hours – whatever you honestly sense is healthy for you and explicitly forgive yourself for maintaining self-care boundaries.  Within those time frames, read or listen to a limited amount of news, opinion and research.  Take action for a defined period of time (contributing to social media, writing or calling government officials, informing family and friends, etc.).  Choose actions that have the greatest return on your investment.  Not all action is equal, and when we are tired, we tend to lose effectiveness quickly.

Thus, equally important is to dedicate a separate measure of time, every day, to self-care.  Each of us responds to different mixtures of regenerative inputs.   Among those can be exercise, meditation, fun or inspiring reading and video consumption, gazing on absorbing images of nature, or getting outside to take in the healing bounty of the earth around us – trees, clouds, flowers, birds and more.  Whatever works for us, our self-care should be non-negotiable in our overall allocation of time.  Without it, we undermine our short-term and long-term capacity for service.  With it, we are rejuvenated, our innovative thinking expands, our compassion deepens.  In this, we enhance our potential to see new answers, ones that will address the sources, and generate the solutions, to both crises.  And so the loop closes, from recognizing and forgiving our sense of overwhelm, to strengthening our ability to work in spite of it.

This is our time.  We did not aspire to it, we would dearly love for it to be different, and nonetheless, in this moment, we are called to action.  Finding our way forward with a measure of wisdom, grace, and inspiration in both of these stories is the task that falls to us.

Kit Tennis

Unconscious Bias Training That Actually Makes a Difference

Unconscious bias training is rapidly finding a place in training menus across the country and beyond.  The reasoning behind this trend is perfectly sound, grounded in a commitment to foster workplace environments that succeed in efforts to embrace the advantages of workforce diversity, including fostering increased creativity, improving decision-making, enhancing teamwork, achieving exemplary customer service and community relations, with improved financial performance.  However, as we shall see, this training all too often falls far short of its potential as an organizational intervention.

Why Unconscious Bias Training?

What is the purpose of unconscious bias training? We’ve come to understand that humans are enormously subject to unconscious bias in our thinking, attitudes, and resulting behaviors.  With the human brain encountering as much as 11 million bits of data per second, we reflexively rely on enormous data reduction and simplification tricks to simply function, moment to moment.  Sounds good, except, it turns out the non-conscious mental shortcuts we end up using in problem-solving and decision-making (often called heuristics) are greatly subject to bias, influenced by the worldview we are exposed to in our environment.  The attitudes, beliefs and storylines transmitted to us by family, schools, community, and media provide a template that we naturally employ in making sense of what we encounter in the world.

Those mental frameworks are socially inherited from prior generations, including the fears and biases about others that were prevalent in the past and are tied to the neurophysiological programming of our earliest species survival models.  Thus, we inherit data processing algorithms that are centuries, even millennia out of date.  It is no wonder, then, that we are apt to make split-second negative judgements about people who are different from us, without ever consciously considering our response or how we came to that conclusion.  This is unconscious bias in action, and it interferes directly with our interpersonal, leadership and organizational competence.

Why Does It Fall Short?

Faced with limited success in efforts to foster a successfully inclusive environment, many organizations have identified unconscious bias as a critical obstacle to successfully employing, retaining and utilizing a diverse workforce.  Trainings have rolled out that identify the mental processes underlying unconscious bias, how it shows up, the business and human impacts, and sources of attitudes that affect our judgements about others.  In addition, this training often leads participants in self-examination of the biases they may hold and the behaviors, from micro-aggressions to adverse employment decisions, that can ensue.   And then participants are sent back to work with advice on what not to do as a result of their bias – a sort of aversive model that can have unintended consequences, such as leading people to avoid having interactions with colleagues, so as to avoid making a mistake.

Unfortunately, we now know when we simply add conscious awareness of our bias to an existing base of unconscious attitudes, we can exacerbate the negative behavior we are aiming to reduce, particularly when we are activated to avoid doing the wrong thing.   It turns out that, when we don’t provide a set of strategies or practices that can be employed by individuals to intentionally overwrite the biased mental frames they are carrying, bias can, in fact, worsen.

 Unconscious Bias Training as Skill-Building

It is possible, however, to provide robust tools for reasserting control over our thinking and making active choices about what we allow to influence our attitudes, behaviors, and decisions.  Building on the same training platform, we can go beyond basic understanding of unconscious bias to provide very accessible personal practices that have demonstrated powerful bias-reduction and that stimulate inclusive behaviors and attitudes.  In the training space, these exercises translate into easily learned and practiced skills for enhanced self-awareness, for noting how bias intercedes in our thinking, and for building alternative storylines that first counteract, then overwrite the negative interpretations embedded in the bias.

Strategies that serve this purpose engage us in building a set of habits that help old biases fade and foster new, positive beliefs and attitudes.  These exercises undertake activities such as stereotype replacement, perspective-taking, courageous conversations, micro-affirmations, goals setting, and more.  Rather than focusing on aversion to bad behavior, all of these tactics are oriented toward increasing for clear thinking about our own mental processes, explicitly recognizing our capacity for personal and professional growth and committed action.   With practice, these skills can become second nature, a continuous, self-enhancing process that includes:

• recognizing bias in our thoughts,
• considering where the bias came from,
• examining data that contradicts those negative stories,
• deepening our insight and empathy for the experiences and challenges of others,
• engaging in honest, open-ended exploration of colleagues’ experiences,
• building new internal narratives based on attention to strengths and contributions, and
• setting goals for our own learning and inclusive behavior, tied to proactive changes in the workplace environment.

These are the goals of the most effective and impactful unconscious bias training, invigorating participants’ sense of positive possibilities and self-empowered learning in service to the organization’s vision of a truly inclusive workplace that brings out the best of every employee.

Leveraging for Culture Change

One further thought. Naturally, the highest return on this investment occurs when cohorts undertake this proactive learning together.  Because the model is non-judgmental, yet focused on action-oriented personal, professional, and team development, colleagues can enroll to help each other continue the journey of self-discovery in an atmosphere of cooperative learning tied to motivation for positive results.  This, in turn, enhances individual and group emotional intelligence, generates a new shared language for naming and depowering bias.  This fosters supportive accountability for inclusiveness and stimulates a collective commitment to examining and evolving work practices that rise above the bias of the past.

This is the good news.  Rather than “flavor of the week”, unconscious bias training can really work.  When focused on skills of rewriting mental scripts and growing new personal and professional competence, unconscious bias training can be a potent cornerstone of leadership development and organizational culture change.

Christopher (Kit) Tennis, Ph.D. & Anita L. Sanchez, Ph.D.

We really do have work to do. This data [ voters more motivated by race than economic issues ]demonstrates that we are, in no way, living in a post-racial society. Yes, economic worries do heighten the fear of, and anger toward, others. Nonetheless, the proof is here. Our segregated society (as separate, across the nation as a whole as it was in the 50’s– schools, churches, housing) is not facilitating real integration of our worlds on the ground where we live. The media may sort of look like a multiracial society (if we ignore the ongoing apartheid in the Academy and elsewhere), but it’s not real in most of the country.  

We discovered, when factories and other workplaces were forced to integrate in the ’60’s that actually working with people who are different from you slowly but powerfully changed the dynamics between people, at least on the shop floor. We simply can’t hold simplistic biased ideas about people when we actually get to know them and interact with them daily. But, out here in the post-manufacturing world, the biases of those who never really rubbed shoulders across race still reign supreme. From high-tech to the kindergarten classroom, our lifetime of separation allows old, ugly mindsets and fears to lead the way in hiring, promotion, development and investment. And it’s there in the differential discipline of four-year-olds.

So, take a deep breath and look at this data, then ask yourself, as I am– What can we do to collectively discover and enjoy the full extent of our human family? How can we actively tear down the walls of old but vigorous and deeply rooted prejudice that we have inherited? What am I going to do, today, to open my own mind, just a little more, to the truth of another’s race experience that I don’t see, and how will I allow it to change me?”

My colleague, Steve Mollen, just sent me an article (below) that gathers a raft of data together to empirically underscore the argument that positive organization culture contributes to higher productivity, engagement, satisfaction AND lower health costs, lower illness, and even lower mortality.  I love this kind of research.  My own dissertation, 30 years ago, demonstrated the connection between ugly workplace culture and burnout in healthcare.

I actually found the whole topic depressing, but it was motivated by a belief that we can, and should, foster workplace cultures that are uplifting, fulfilling, and human-centric in ways that generate high performance, creativity, and social cohesion.  We certainly need all the help we can get these days, when miserable work satisfaction and engagement scores are symptomatic of a deeper malaise in the world of work.

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I just finished reading an advance copy of the deeply touching and brilliantly insightful “Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family.”  Penned by Bob Chapman, CEO of the Barry-Wehmiller Companies and Raj Sisodia, of Conscious Capitalism fame, this book is proof that business can create workplaces that heal, uplift, and even transform workers’ lives in ways that grow healthier communities, reinvigorate sectors like manufacturing, and make a ton of money as the by-product.

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This introductory excerpt does a beautiful job of explaining the basic concept of Truly Human Leadership, the clearest example of “conscious organizational evolution” that I know of. Consider an old line manufacturing company in an industry where the jobs are disappearing overseas, the capital plant is deteriorating, the employees are miserably disillusioned. Then examine what happens when those same employees are given the opportunity to rewrite the story, redesign the processes, regain their self-respect and their optimism for the future. Transformation because the way the new company owner views success is through the way they touch the lives of people. People are not hot-swappable production units, they are the reason for having the company in the first place.

It’s real, it’s practical, and it’s wonderfully profitable. Consciously choosing to grow a company culture of appreciation, caring, and deep respect can turn around “lost cause” companies and re-energize communities. The Barry-Wehmiller Company is the proof of concept so many of us have been looking for. This book, from CEO Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia will give you hope for the future of work. Period. I’m here to testify, along with thousands of B-W employees around the world, that you can do what B-W has done, and it can be the most fulfilling leadership role of your life.

For a taste of what is possible, see this excerpt: Everybody Matters

Observers believe that those who don’t act to stop bullying and discrimination support that behavior. From the point of view of the victim, particularly, inaction is interpreted as agreement. Otherwise, any decent person would intervene, they say.

Do bullies also  believe that passivity on the part of observers denotes acceptance or approval of their behavior?  That is exactly what we’ve found over and over in industries (e.g., oil, chemicals, manufacturing, +) where women were entering “non-traditional” jobs and received intense bullying, hazing and disrespect from a few men. The other, observing but not interceding, men were often horrified to learn that they were tarred with the same brush– that the women believed that they were fully in support of the ugly behavior. Once that conversation was opened up, the rules of engagement rapidly changed. The observers now stood to be personally blamed for what they allowed to go down.

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I’ve always been driven by a sense of the waiting potential of the human race, our systems, communities, organizations, teams and individual members.  I’ve provided lots of service in pursuit of that picture in my mind, mostly without an articulated overarching model.  I’ve been deeply involved in helping men and women, people of different races/cultures/nationalities/mindsets/organizations learn to see deeply into each other and find new partnership.  I’ve led large-scale organizational culture revitalization and small team self-reinvention, and lots of training, facilitating and coaching in between.  And I’ve been deeply involved with the work of the Pachamama Alliance in recent years, volunteering in many capacities toward their vision of helping “bring forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on the planet”.  I’m taken by their proposition that we cannot successfully achieve any one of those three goals without concomitantly working on the other two– that they are inextricably interwoven in how human consciousness and human systems operate.

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