The Unconscious Bias workshop is an interactive and stimulating conversation about biases, how to disrupt individual and team biases that impact the workplace and the business results. In this workshop, we unpack 5 of the 180 unconscious biases that are most likely to impact business results and introduce heuristics that historically affect businesses. This workshop is the first step in a journey of disrupting biases, focusing on awareness and understanding of the nature and origin of biases.

 

Unlike many workshops on unconscious bias, we start from the premise that just understanding that you have bias isn’t enough. We know that when we personalize the concept to everyone individually and the company results, the commitment to addressing bias escalates. We take it another step further, we engage the team in actively identifying solutions. This formula is powerful and has a tremendous impact on the individual and company results.

 

One example of a heuristic we explore is the Fundamental Attribution Error, blaming the personal characteristics of others; people tend to (unduly) emphasize the internal characteristics of others (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining others behavior. Another is how we over-index away from threats instead of toward rewards which can have a significant impact on innovation.

 

This workshop is a great team builder. People walk away with a deeper sense of connection to each other, new shared language and strategies they have identified to mitigate biases. We encourage dialogue and honest expressions of the many perspectives, as they help level the playing ground as well as allow the participants to share their experiences as senders, receivers, and observers of biases.

 

The workshop is enriched by examples and stories relevant to the audience, as a path to highlight the business impact of biases in innovation, market coverage, and talent decisions.

 

Once the workshop is completed as a critical first step, we believe that a second key step is to identify system-embedded biases which exist in key business, talent and operational processes, which might be generating inequalities. In doing so, we have found that the impact of bias disruption can be amplified broadly across the enterprise.