On this episode of The Main Scoop, Greg Lotko and Daniel Newman sit down with Dr. Gloria Chance, founder and CEO of The Mousai Group, to discuss the current posturing of DEI initiatives across the technology industry, why diverse perspectives are key for creating non-biased AI models, and the importance of belonging and inclusivity.
It was a great conversation and one you don’t want to miss. Like what you’ve heard? Check out all our past episodes here, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode of The Main Scoop™ series.
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Transcript:
Greg Lotko: Hey folks, welcome to the next episode of The Main Scoop. I’m Greg Lotko, and I’ve got Dan Newman here, my co-host on The Main Scoop. Good to see you again.
Daniel Newman: It is good to be here, Greg. It’s always good to be with you.
Greg Lotko: I like being in person. A lot better than kind of going across the web there.
Daniel Newman: You mean after three or four years of not being out there and being on a lot of Zoom meetings we are all clamoring?
Greg Lotko: Yeah. I’m not talking about pandemic. I’m just thinking about our busy schedules and traveling. We don’t always get to do this in person.
Daniel Newman: It is good to see you.
Greg Lotko: So it’s very important for people to connect. My humble opinion, I think you develop a much greater rapport, you develop much more understanding of each other. This is kind of a different topic for us but I think it kind of builds on that. It’s all about people, it’s all about our differences, our similarities. We’re going to be talking today about diversity, equity, and inclusion, so when you think DEI, what comes to mind?
Daniel Newman: The thought process here is really about building and bringing together the most capable teams. It was about how you think about an organization, think about the best talent, opening doors to new potential, and how do you grow an organization? We have a guest today that’s going to probably provide a whole lot more construct to it, but over the last few years it’s been front and center. The attention that it’s given to the world and to industries is opening up the aperture of how you think about growing your company, thinking about the kinds of talent, the kinds of people, the kinds of communities, organizations, and of course, what is going to enable you to grow by not necessarily using the same thinking that you’ve used historically.
Greg Lotko: I definitely would agree with you there. I think our differences are what make us not only unique as individuals but it’s what makes teams more powerful when you’re open to the idea of including everybody, hearing what they think. It doesn’t mean that you go with one constituency or another or one voice, but often when we have the opportunity to hear from different perspectives we come to a better decision, which is more whole, more comprehensive, more inclusive, and I know it drives better business value. But we do have an expert with us here so let me welcome to The Main Scoop the founder and CEO of the Mousai Group, Dr. Gloria Chance. You’ve heard us two guys here talking diversity. I imagine you’re kind of averse. Can you tell us a bit about the Mousai group and then tie into what is it you guys are talking about and what’s your experience?
Dr. Gloria Chance: Sure. Thank you so much. Thank you all for having me today. I have to say that I’m really proud to be talking to two white guys about this topic, seriously, and it brings me pleasure because it’s so important to have all people in this game. The Mousai Group is about being human. I was a CIO for all of my career, primarily in banking and healthcare, and I’ve worked across other industries as a consultant, like utilities, gas, a whole bunch of other ones. What I found in my work and why I created the Mousai Group is that I was always very creative and I could come up with just solutions and things that were industry, serious industry disruptions.
I wanted to understand, when I retired early from banking at 46, I was like, well, how does that work? Ironically, the way creativity works, so you guys were talking about thinking, is it works in the right side of the brain. That’s the part of the brain that we use the least because it’s where all of our creativity, our joy, our emotional intelligence, and actually how we look at diversity is processed on that side of the brain. My work in the Mousai Group is about the power of the imagination to transform how we think and how we see things. We combine art, science, tech, and psychology at an intersection of, what is it like to be human with the social issues that we’re going through today? We’re not a diversity firm. We’re actually a creative thinking firm, but I believe that diversity in my research is about change management and how do we change the way that we think.
Greg Lotko: I think it’s interesting that a couple of words you used there. You were talking about transformation and I know we’ve had this buzzword for years that organizations need to transform, whether it be their business offerings, their way of thinking, but often you’ll find in companies or organizations that people will tend to look for confirmation or affirmation. They tend to try to fit in and they can lose part of that identity. But the real transformative stuff doesn’t just come from saying I want to be transformative or I want to be different, it’s from opening up, creating an environment where people can participate, they feel comfortable talking about things differently or having different observations, and that is the part that opens up the creativity. I think the left side is when you’re thinking, “Oh, this is what it means for me to be in this company or in this organization.”
Dr. Gloria Chance: It’s logic. It’s logical, right? It’s like, how do I do data? How do I do processes? At work that’s really what we think we’re here to do, is just to do step one, two, three, and that’s what the left side of the brain does.
Greg Lotko: Or model a behavior, or how we’re successful.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly. Like in leadership, back when we all grew up in leadership, I’m not trying to say how old you are, but seriously, it was a lot about how do you mirror the white man who was the leader because back then that was pretty much, at least for me, the model.
Daniel Newman: As a left-handed person, they tend to say I’m very right-brained. So I think it’s always been more about creativity and then the data logic stuff actually is the stuff I have to work a little bit harder at.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Oh, interesting.
Daniel Newman: Obviously, I don’t know, sometimes those kinds of things, how true, is it an old wives tale or is it a real thing like a left and a right brain and righties and left brains. But you heard us kind of in the preamble. We’re trying to sort of depict and explain. As you said, you’re not a DEI firm, but you’re focused as part of the strategy and creative. The environment’s changing, it’s evolving. I’m seeing headlines coming out right now with companies shifting programs moving away from programs. Although during the last several years, I think companies also opened up, as I said, the aperture to how being more diverse can help. How are you seeing the whole landscape evolve right now because it is changing, the rhetoric’s changing, the conversation’s changing. I mean, where are we at?
Dr. Gloria Chance: Yeah, so let me go back to something Greg was going towards around transformation. The first thing in this work you have to do as a human being is be self-aware. Anyone who knows me knows I always talk about that as a psychologist. Ironically, during the pandemic, what I found in working with companies, I would do town halls with CEOs, with their executives about their fears and what, so for the first time during the pandemic it kind of opened up the ability of us to talk about fears and emotions and struggles in a real big way in corporations that we had never done before. In doing that, what I found is that most people, I don’t know if you can guess the number one reason that they were struggling during the pandemic.
Greg Lotko: Connecting with people, I would think.
Dr. Gloria Chance: No, it was their kids.
Greg Lotko: Oh, I was thinking on a corporate level connecting with other people.
Dr. Gloria Chance: You’re with your kids 24/7, where if you work a full-time job, you’re away, you travel, you probably kind of see your kids like a way, way smaller amount.
Greg Lotko: You can get that interruption because they’re knocking on the door.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly, and so that was the biggest struggle, and then seeing their kids mirror the behaviors that they were taught, right, by their parents actually was a mirror to say, “Maybe I’m not that great at this.” That was fascinating. Self-awareness is really important when you talk about transformation and when you talk about diversity. When I look, I work with a lot of companies around leadership development and diversity comes into play because it really is a leadership tool. I think when you’re seeing now people reacting to, now it’s a bad word, DEI is a bad word. Whenever there is a social event in the world, we will see a big shift in human behavior, and the pandemic was our social event.
If you look at back in the dark ages, what came after the dark ages was the Renaissance. Because whenever there’s a major virus or war or whatever, we always, as human beings, we have to adapt, and that’s what we’ve done during the pandemic. The DEI, kind of initially everybody wanting to give all of this money and then pulling back, literally in the literature, almost no one has met their goals because what corporations do is they come out and say, “We’re going to do this by 2025,” but what we kind of know as humans, if I tell you I’m going to lose 20 pounds in 30 days, are you going to come back and check to see if I lost?
Greg Lotko: I’m not going to check with you.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Well, totally. Right? You’re not going to. It’s the same thing with DEI. That’s one of those measurements that no one goes back and checks. It’s kind of almost okay in a weird kind of way to say, “Oh, well, we’re just going to get rid of the program.” Ironically enough, while in the US, black people, they tend to be the race. And by the way, every country has their sort of wound, their people wound. Like in Canada it’s the indigenous, and in the US it’s black people. Ironically in diversity programs, although they’ve laid off a huge amount of people, black people are less than 4% of the executives who run DEI programs. So the laying off, it gives from a numbers perspective, doesn’t necessarily impact the marginalized people as much as it impacts the industry and the big blinking word that people are scared and they’re running away.
Greg Lotko: You talked about a major event happening and we adapt. I actually want a question on that. I don’t know that I believe it’s an adaptation as much as a reevaluation of what are my priorities going to be? Because I don’t feel like the change you see is always an adaptation to the event. It’s more of a reevaluation of, “Hey, what’s important to me? What are my priorities going to be and where do I focus? Would you agree with that?
Dr. Gloria Chance: Well, yeah. What I would say, Greg, is that is an example what you just said of projection. That is what you would do. You would think through it and reassess. But what happens is if you look at the literature and what’s happening now, mental illness is becoming the number one issue in corporate America right now across all generations. And by the way, generations are introducing a whole other level of diversity because we used to think about it. We would live and we had our parents and maybe our grandparents, and they would die by the time you were out of college, right, because now the life expectancy is longer. We have five generations working and seven living. With that, just that alone is impacting the way that people have to adapt.
The mental illness is now happening across mostly Gen Z because of everything that they’ve been through with the pandemic, et cetera. Then we have all the other generations, particularly Gen Xers, who are our leaders.
Daniel Newman: It’s very interesting you point that out though. I think part of the mental illness, and you’ve done the research, this is like an assessment of a father of three children. One that’s actually 22 that grew up, didn’t have a phone until she was maybe eighth or ninth grade. Second one got a phone in fifth grade, third one’s been glued to the iPad since-
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly. One or two.
Daniel Newman: What I’m saying though is one or two, but everyone at this table grew up and basically went to school and we only interfaced with the people we were at school with.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly.
Daniel Newman: I wasn’t in college until Facebook came out and some of us never went to school in any period. My point is how much does that sort of, you’re talking five generations, some that literally had 20 years of career before phones and BlackBerrys were a thing.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly, so therein lies the problem, right? How do you even communicate with each other with that big disparity? But what you just brought up is really key to diversity. It’s about the way we see the world is based on how we grew up and when we grew up.
Greg Lotko: And the way we acted.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly, and how your ancestors, so what mental model did your parents give you? Well, they gave you the model that their parents gave them. The further we go back, the less education you have, the less, like you said, mingling with other people, so you tend to be in homogenous areas. Like you grew up in New York, Greg. I grew up in New York, but we grew up in different parts of New York. He’s in Long Island. I was Brooklyn, so a totally different, same state, but a totally different world because my parents were, they actually worked on farms. They weren’t slaves, but their parents were. When you look at that, and we moved to New York, or they moved to New York for a better, most people did then, to get a better job. But that is really key, and that’s the essence of the work that we do at the Mousai Group is to talk about the mental models that you grew up with. Because until you address those, you can’t change the way that you lead around diversity.
By the way, diversity should be integrated. It shouldn’t be a separate topic. Agree. When we go into organizations, we go into their policies and procedures and we help them change wording, imagery, all of those things, so then it’s a lived experience versus, oh, we got to talk about diversity today.
Greg Lotko: That’s a couple of things I wanted to bring together. Whether it’s an adaptation or a reaction, and I get that I may be projecting it is the way I think about it. I get the idea of companies have set goals and they may or may not have had intent behind hitting those goals. What I struggle with, what I worry about is I feel there’s certain companies or organizations more often than I’d like to see that focus on the goal more than the intent. I always get concerned when I’m talking to people about this topic, and right away they start with spouting stats. We’ve done this many sessions. We have this many people here there, and it’s like, well, that’s not what it’s about. You have to create the environment and it has to be pervasive.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Right.
Greg Lotko: It is about us talking about hard truths. It is about us learning about ourselves and those around us, and you inadvertently touched on something that you said, you were talking about mental diversity, challenges, illnesses. My daughter actually just won Miss Colorado three weeks ago. I had no idea I was going to talk about that during this.
Dr. Gloria Chance: How cool.
Greg Lotko: But her platform, her community service initiative is “It’s okay to be not okay.”
Dr. Gloria Chance: Right.
Greg Lotko: So her whole point is to talk about it’s okay to feel bad, but if you talk about it, if you focus on it, if you get help, if you’re vulnerable and you learn, that’s what helps you not only get through it, but it’s important for others to be aware that there are others like us. I actually think, one of the other things that it’s kind of an interesting topic and a double-edged sword, diversity is about realizing everybody has something that’s unique or different.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Oh absolutely.
Greg Lotko: Right?
Dr. Gloria Chance: Yeah. I mean, I remember the slide that I do, which shows you have a regular face, and we had a masking, we talked about unmasking, but all of us walk around with our faces. We see each other.
Greg Lotko: Our public persona.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly. But underneath there could be a gazillion things going on. And just learning that skill set to recognize that the person standing in front of you is a human being and is important and maybe hurting, and maybe you are that person that day that can help them realize something, overcome something or just, it’s so important to have that human-
Greg Lotko: By recognizing them, by seeing them, by hearing and listening.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Seeing them is the main thing. One of the first things, so last night, Greg, we did a mentoring thing, and one of the things in Making a Strong Community Stronger where we’re wanting to move, or at least I’m wanting to move, is to put things in action, to really give people tools as a toolkit because how diversity should look an organization is, how do we have governance over this? How do we implement the things into our policies and how do we know when they show up? For example, I have a client, and I can say their name, The Giving Institute. They’re a member organization, so there’s about somewhere between 100, 200 companies, and all the CEOs get together to forward the philanthropy industry. What we’ve done over the past three, four years is we’ve integrated diversity into their policies and their practices so they meet quarterly and they’re usually two to three day conferences. We’ve embedded into their programming, into everything, the foundation of how do we make people feel included. Most organizations don’t start there.
Greg Lotko: There’s only one word I don’t like in that, and I hear people say that all the time, and I know you don’t mean it that way. You said, how do we make people feel included? I don’t want people to feel included. I want people to be included.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Yeah, but you have to start with the feeling. If you really talk to a lot of marginalized people, the first, when they walk into an environment, the first thing-
Greg Lotko: They don’t feel like they can-
Dr. Gloria Chance: The first thing they say, they’ll say, “I don’t feel welcome,” like if people don’t come up, and so we actually put guidelines together to say, “This is how we receive people. This is how we welcome people. These are the things we’re going to do.” One of our measurements is, this might sound really corny, but it’s how many new people said they felt welcomed without prompting. That small metric is huge, and it’s turned around the way that people are seeing the organization and how the people inside of the organization feel about their work.
Daniel Newman: Well, one of the things that we studied, and in several of the books I wrote, we focused on culture being a bigger driver of change than the products and technologies themselves. The company’s culture.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Exactly.
Daniel Newman: What you’re sort of alluding to is that when you have the diversity and the culture isn’t created where everyone feels, then the ship doesn’t move as quickly.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Well, it doesn’t and people get left behind. What I’m loving about Making a Strong Community Stronger is that we are not stopping, and The Giving Institute isn’t stopping, and other people we’re working with are not stopping because this is important work.
Daniel Newman: We have a couple of minutes left, Dr. Chance, and I appreciate you sitting down with us here. It’s very different than us diving into the tech. We love to get into the weeds, but you have a background as an executive in tech.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Yes.
Daniel Newman: I would love to get your thoughts for our audience and our community about where these things intersect. We started talking about the industry really went all in on kind of a really defined DEI movement. Now you’re hearing some, like you said, change or some pullback, but you’re also pointing out that it wasn’t necessarily as impactful statistically to what you were saying about quotas as it was about sort of posturing.
Dr. Gloria Chance: Right.
Daniel Newman: As you sort of see these things all converge, what does the tech industry do? You’ve got seven generations, five in the work. You’ve got the diversity of thought, you’ve got language barriers, you’ve got geographic, you’ve got the world working together. You’re seeing in the markets now, but you’re seeing in the markets now, there is no US and everything is global. How do you advise companies to think about all this, move it forward, and maybe take some of the definition away and build some of the culture so that it’s inherent in these companies?
Dr. Gloria Chance: Yeah, I really think that the DEI industry needs to move away from calling itself DEI, only because the word’s been bastardized. Whenever you have blinking words, what happens with the brain is when certain people hear it, then we have situations and we have drama. I think that the DEI industry needs to transform, that it does need to shift in how we talk about it and how we see it. I do believe it’s a psychological and a human issue, particularly now as we have so many different people living. Particularly in the tech space, I believe with AI, so I work in the, there’s actually something called the Imagination Age that I’m working in, but most people don’t know about it because it’s a blip on the radar. It’s the time between the information age to AI.
The information age is about content and how we look at shifting, how we get information, how we consume it, how we develop it. Information being tech as well, right, because it’s the processes. When we look at AI, the biggest challenge that the tech industry has is if you’re not diverse enough, your product’s probably going to cause more harm than good. Working in banking we dealt with this all the time, because of the laws and discriminatory practices in banking and housing, et cetera, we know that people who are marginalized, they don’t get the same treatment, et cetera. If we take those models and we just transport them over to AI, then we’re taking the same problems into AI. But what’s really going to be happening in the real world is we’re going to have all these generations living and the tech’s going to be a mismatch because we haven’t included how we need to deal with all the different generations and how they think and what they need.
Greg Lotko: All right, let me wrap this one up. Okay?
Daniel Newman: You on it?
Greg Lotko: Yeah, so I started this by talking about that it was a little bit of a departure from what we had talked about relative to tech, but the reality is the most important component in technology is people. It’s people that develop this tech. It’s people that use it every day and it’s high time we had a conversation about this, and I think we can all agree that inclusivity, people both feeling that they can participate, contribute, are welcome there, and then actually being afforded the opportunity helps us accomplish more things for business and the world. Thrilled with having you here. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Gloria Chance: My pleasure.
Greg Lotko: Again, I think that was a great Main Scoop. Make sure you tune in and see us next time on The Main Scoop.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
