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JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 145. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Hey, John. And I'm here with our guest, Brandy Foster. Brandy is a full-time mom of two rapidly growing humans, Facebook poet, sci-fi junky, an Android app developer and Diversity and Inclusion Coach at Detroit Labs, a technology solutions company in Detroit, Michigan, and TEALS volunteer aka, she is doing the most. She's been in the tech industry for about five years now and truly believes that the world's at a crossroads. We'll either create Skynet or the United Federation of Planets. So Brandy, welcome to the show.

BRANDY: Thank you.

REIN: Brandy, what's your superpower and how did you acquire it?

BRANDY: My favorite superpower, I think, is adaptability. And I acquired it because I was born with a congenital birth defect that resulted in me having to have a limb, my foot amputated. I was about four. And so my whole life, I have been adapting to new situations and circumstances from learning how to walk again, to being in spaces where folks don't look like me or think like me.

JOHN: And so you've been in the tech industry for about five years now, I expect that joining this industry was also an adaptation for you.

BRANDY: Oh, very much so. Home healthcare was like the last industry I worked in and it's very, very regulated. And so to come into the tech industry where not only is there not a lot of regulation, it's still so new that things are being figured out on the fly. So, it was very, very different.

REIN: And actually we're starting to learn from industries like healthcare about how to be safe and how to be resilient. So, that's interesting.

BRANDY: Yeah. I think one of the things that stands out to me right now is ethics in the healthcare industry in order to be a physician or a nurse, like you have a code of ethics and how you're supposed to behave and treat others. And the fact that technology is so incorporated into every aspect of our lives that there is no code of ethics for developers, for software companies that are creating these things. Again, like Skynet or United Federation of Planets. It can go either way at this point.

REIN: Healthcare professionals have a code of ethics because they have the power to affect people's wellbeing, right? Like if you can't hurt people, you don't really need the code of ethics. But the technology industry has that power too. And more and more as we develop self driving cars, as we dominate the media, all these things, we have the power to affect people's wellbeing. And it seems like if we don't have a code of ethics that acknowledges that, if we're not acknowledging the power we have to hurt or help people, then we're not doing it right.

BRANDY: Oh, I completely agree. Thinking about even something really popular right now, facial recognition technology. There is some push to get that in Detroit and for Detroit police departments to utilize that. There's been a lot of pushback that I don't think our council is really hearing right now. I hope we get through to them eventually, but this stuff we know, it's documented that the data that it is using is bias and that putting that kind of technology in the hands of a police department in a majority black city means that you are more likely to give false positives and harm people trying to do your job. You're trying to keep the community safe, but you're more likely to harm people unintentionally using the software. And with no code of ethics, the developers of said software are not held liable or accountable in any way for the things that they've created and are released into our world.

JOHN: Yeah. An engineer builds a bridge and their license is on the line if it collapses, but like we just can write a license for our software that says, "Oh well, we absolve from no liability whatsoever for your use of the blah, blah, blah." And then, boom! There's no accountability.

REIN: So you talked about facial recognition software that embeds biases, racial biases and things like that. There's also software that just seems unethical on its face. Like Amazon is currently developing fear detection software for the government.

JAMEY: What does that mean?

REIN: As a part of their sort of facial recognition system, they're also developing emotion recognition and they just recently announced that they can now detect fear.

JOHN: Yeah. That's not going to go anywhere.

JAMEY: Why? What did they claim that that's for? I feel like I know what it's actually for, but what did they think...

REIN: I don't know. And like the dude that announced this just put this out as like a press release tweet like, "Recognition now supports this awful thing." I was unhappy about that.

BRANDY: Especially as a black woman, again, adapting through the world all the time, constantly being hyper aware of how I speak, how I stand, how I move my body through spaces. The idea that they think they can recognize fear, which I'm reading this fear to movements, which is something that police already feel like they can just stop you because you look suspicious. Like are you saying I look afraid and therefore I must be doing something? But we know, again, data science says that black people's movements, especially in white spaces always come off as suspicious and potentially dangerous. And so again, you're just increasing the likelihood that you are unintentionally going to harm citizens who are just like going about their life. It's scary because I have two small humans, they're both black boys. And so as they grow, as they get taller, my anxiety is like ratcheting up every year.

JOHN: Yeah. I think the chances that they used a dataset that included people from all socioeconomic categories and all different areas of the country and different countries in the world who have different styles of movement and facial expressions that are expressing various things is effectively nil.

JAMEY: I think it's really important what you said too about what causes fear or otherwise, like trepidation and what that could mean if the person using software like this is being thoughtful about that. I'm a trans person and there's a lot of fear in public just in general about how people are going to react. I've experienced it to some extent. I know other people that experience it more intensely than I all the time, and it affects all of your interactions in this way that is probably not being thought about.

BRANDY: Yeah. I'm currently working on building an unconscious bias mitigation training. And in doing so, I've been doing a lot of research on unconscious biases. I found a study that was done in, I believe 1990. The participants think they're just identifying if a face has been shown once or repeated. But at the same time, they're doing an MRI. And what they noticed was that the amygdala lit up when they saw black faces. And they repeated this study trying to like, well maybe it's because it's a new face and they saw similar results. So that means that automatically these white participants saw black faces and felt fear. And so like, "Oh, our software recognizes fear." Who's fear? Who's even your baseline for what is fearful? Again, Skynet, they're in a wrong way.

JOHN: It sort of reminds me of that thing from, that was probably a decade ago. Where there was a flurry of people that were trained to recognize those micro-expressions at airports to see if people were looking fearful. And the whole program was a bust because whether or not you can do that doesn't mean it's useful at an airport where people can be fearful for thousands of different reasons. And it's not going to tell you whether you should pull them out of a line and do a search. But not to mention the fact that humans are doing this and their biases are going to be plugging into all of that.

BRANDY: Yeah. I get pulled out of a line in airports enough for people to pat my hair. Between my hair and my prosthesis, I'm always pulled to the side. "Please Don't put me to the side because I look nervous because I'm going to miss plane." Not beneficial to our society to do things like that and then offloading it to software that for some reason, I believe is less likely to be biased because it's a technology for getting that. It was built by people and people, we put our biases in our craft. In everything we do, our biases come with us.

JAMEY: The thing that's frustrating to me about this conversation is that I feel like this is such a known thing that happens and has been for such a long time. Because I remember a while ago, reading about still unethical but lower stakes kind of stuff, like automatic hand dryers that don't work right for black skin, which I can see why it would make people feel crappy but isn't the same kind of life ruining thing. But instead of being like, "Oh, we should think about that more, we should fix the hand dryers and we should think about this more next time," apparently, we've just decided as a society to not give a shit about that. So, that's the frustration I'm having while we're talking about this.

BRANDY: I actually just read an article about the watches that can read your pulse and that the technology that's being used in most of these watches uses -- what did they say? Uses red light which doesn't transmit through melanin well. And so it doesn't give accurate reading. They know this and yet continue to use it. And I'm like, so at some point, we were like, "Brown people, sorry, not important that you have your pulse read properly," which sounds low stakes until you find out that actual medical providers are also using the same software and hardware to do their job and remotely track patient's pulse rates. So it goes from low stakes to high stakes very quickly and we're not even trying to put the brakes on things when they're low stake.

JOHN: Yeah, it's the sort of same process where you build your proof of concept app with all the hacks because you need to get it out in a week. And it gets out there and it works well enough that everyone says, "Great, let's ship it."

REIN: I remember when the hand dryer thing happened saying, "Would this have happened if the team had employed a single black person and they had tried to use the thing they were developing?" So, I wonder what the role of diversity and inclusion is in solving these problems.

BRANDY: I think it's huge when it comes to technology and things we're building. The more diverse, the more representative of your customer base your team is, the more likely things are to be caught in real time. I can't disclose it. There's a company that has an application that allows you to see where a car is. Right. That's sounds cool if you're a parent and you want to know where your kids are going or if they leave a certain area. But immediately the women on the team are like, "Wait, this could be used in an abusive relationship. Have you thought about that? How do we protect our users against misuse of our technology? Obviously, that's not what we designed it for, but we need to be aware that's how it can be used." And so, the more representative your team is, the more likely things like that are to come up. And I'm not saying you can even stop it in some instances, but the more protection you can provide to your users from your apps being misused for harmful purposes.

JOHN: But you have to catch that early in the design phase so that you can build in those extra friction points. I remember discussion on an earlier episode of this show where they were talking about trying to mitigate abuse vectors in an application and how they had to model out all the various different types of bad actors and what their goals were so that they could add friction to those specific types of behaviors without impacting the rest of the flow of the application. Because often, just a little bit of friction isn't enough to like, especially with trolling and online abuse, sometimes that's enough to slow it down so that it's not so easy to tag people. But again, you have to build that in. You have to have that part of the design process because if you just say, "Let's open it up. Anyone can see where anyone else is going and all their statuses are public." Just like with Venmo, nobody really knows that all of your transactions are public by default.

JAMEY: Do people not know that because I love reading the random things people write in Venmo.

BRANDY: I did not know that. I also don't use Venmo. I haven't really dug into it, but I didn't know that. And I wonder how many people who actually could use it know that.

JOHN: Someone built a tool maybe a year ago that would extract all the drug deals that were being done on Venmo and just posted a list of all of them because they were like, "For the great weed, here's 50 bucks," or whatever. And then he deleted it because he just wanted to prove a point and not get anyone in trouble. But by default, that's how Venmo was designed to work. But I think that detail gets so lost when people are just like, "I need to send this guy some money," that now you have all these weird unintended things going on.

JAMEY: I also think there's a real difference in what you were getting at between a group of people that is saying, "Oh shoot, we never really thought of that." I mean, you should think of that, but there's still a difference between like, "Oh, we never thought of that, but now that we have, we should do something about it," versus a team that's like, "No, that's fine." And I think you're seeing that a lot on Twitter where people are using the quote retweet function to blah, blah, blah, harass people and I don't think Twitter is going, "Oh, that's an unintended thing about their quote retweet function." I think Twitter is going like, "Good. People are tweeting. We like that. That's where for it."

REIN: There is unintended consequences, which are things like, I think the classic one is AOL's profanity filter prevented people from a town in England called Scunthorpe from talking at all because their town name contains the word cunt. That's an unintended consequences. That's not something you could really predict. But then there's all these things we're talking about. These are things that someone could have figured out. This isn't a technical problem. This is a willpower problem, from my perspective.

JOHN: If Twitter had had one URM on the team talking about the design of the quote tweet who had experienced some harassment, they could have said, "Whoa, this is going to go somewhere not good." But I feel like until someone is around who has had that experience of how online harassment works and how bad these things can go, like from the happy path, it's hard for a team of people like me, privileged white guys, to think through all those things because they've never happened to us. And so again, back to the point about diversity and inclusion, like that's the solution.

JAMEY: The person like that on that team also has to be respected by the team.

JOHN: The inclusion part for sure.

REIN: From my perspective as a systems thinker, I think of this as a failure of requisite variety. So there's a lot of variety in the world. And if we're building tools that need to be able to deal with all of that variety, we have to have enough variety to be able to subsume the variety in the world we're trying to control. So if I have a team full of white dudes from San Francisco and I'm building tools that are detecting faces -- there are all sorts of places those tools can be used that these people will have no experience with and they don't have the variety to deal with the variety in the world they're trying to deal with.

BRANDY: Yeah, I completely agree. I think where some companies might get stuck is maybe the lack or what they feel is the lack of available team members to fill these roles. But I push back on that personally because you could do AB testing and your design phase with intentionality. You could say, "We don't have black women on our team. So when we're doing our AB testing, before we are building anything, we're going to seek out this group that we don't have represented to see how they use the app and what they think about the app." And getting feedback from those people who aren't there. So I think it's a cop out for teams to be like, "Oh, we didn't have anybody on the team that fit that demographic so we forgot about them." It's like, "No, you recognize what your customer base is, what those demographics are, and you seek out that input before you build the thing and really sit into the world."

REIN: That requires a level of awareness that if they had that awareness, maybe wouldn't be in the situation in the first place because how do you get someone to understand a problem when the problem is that they don't understand the problem?

BRANDY: In my experience, what my experience has brought me to believe is that there's way more understanding than we like to think. We want to give people the benefit of the doubt or we want to assume that their behavior is related to a lack of information. But I think in like 2019, there are very few people who could literally say that there is a lack of information. And especially in these rows, lack of access to information? If you see another company go through something, you would think that all other companies will look at that, "Hand dryers not working for Brown skin people. We're building something that looks at skin or that is reading emotions that is doing this thing. We're building something similar. Let's learn from their mistakes." But they don't. They choose not to. I think at the end of the day, we've gotten to the point where there is some economic calculations that go on that says this subset of population not being served is not valuable enough. They're not worth enough for us to delay our project or for us to put extra money in building a product that serves them. I feel like there has to be some calculation that goes on, and folks just lose out.

JAMEY: I totally agree with that.

BRANDY: Just to briefly jump back to what Jamey said and John, you said about inclusion. In my many years of just an industry altogether, I realized that when D&I became a popular thing, I think a lot of people got stuck on the diversity. They got stuck on the first word and they've spent a lot of time, energy, money, resources in trying to achieve that first word, whatever their goals are as far as diversity goes. And so a lot of times I like to say inclusion begets diversity. Inclusion has to actually come first. That's the first word. If you build a healthy, inclusive team it is very easy then to add people with vastly different experiences and backgrounds on to that team. Studies have shown that even really diverse looking teams that don't have strong inclusiveness do not get the same results as diverse teams with inclusiveness. And so you lose out on what you can gain if you don't first focus on what is this ground we're planting these people in? Is it healthy? Is it safe?

REIN: The way I've put this in the past is if your pipeline leads into the sewer, you don't have a pipeline problem, you have a sewer problem and that's the thing you should fix. If your culture is toxic, if you're not providing the support people need to be healthy and successful, then why would they want to join you and how are they going to stay there even if you do fix the pipeline?

JAMEY: It seems wild to me to spend so much energy on this "diversity" and then not actually gain the benefit of being a diverse team.

JOHN: I feel like that comes down too because you can shove diversity into the HR department and just say we need a bigger pipeline of more diversity. You just bring us more candidates from different backgrounds and that's the route and we'll just happen to hire them. And then that doesn't require people to examine their privilege. It doesn't require behavior change and people to really examine how their teams are operating.

REIN: Yeah. If it's a pipeline problem then to some extent it's an external problem. We need to go out and do other things out there to fix the problem. But if it's an inclusion problem, then the problem is right here at home.

BRANDY: The 2017 Tech Leavers Study found that one in four people of color reported being stereotyped, and 35% of those who experienced stereotyping reported it contributed to be legal. And so even if you do all the hard work to build your diversity and get folks who are different than your homogenous team into the process, then you don't treat them well and they leave. And so you keep like the same number. If you look at Google and I think Facebook over time, they had about the same number of black employees, the same percentage because they had really high turnover. And Google finally had to just admit like, "Yeah, it's hard to keep black people here." And I'm like, "That's great. What are you going to do about it? Now you know, what changes are you making?" Still waiting to hear back.

REIN: If we assume that the people that are sponsoring and building these D&I programs were competent people, what if the outcome that we think is wrong is actually just a result of them having different goals? What if we're wrong about what their goals are?

BRANDY: I think that's highly possible. I also think that especially in large organizations or even in large organizations, I was very surprised to find out how many diversity and inclusion executives don't actually have executive power. And so it is very hard for even the most well-intentioned, well-reasoned, well-educated people to make systemic changes in organizations that do not give them the power to make those changes.

REIN: Yeah. And if they're not getting power, it's because the people who aren't giving them power don't want them to be effective. So what I'm wondering is, is the goal there to actually build an inclusive and diverse workforce or is it to appear to be doing things that solve the problem so that you can build social capital?

BRANDY: You just made me sad. No. [Laughs] I agree. You have to wonder. I think appearance is a lot. I also think, again, those economic calculations that come into place and the fact that it's really hard for diversity and inclusion specialists or team members to show the same gains as if you're releasing a product and you can see how many people have downloaded the app and how many people are using it, and you can prove how valuable your work is. In this space, It's like, "Okay, in five years if you let me do this thing today and give me all this money and resources, in five years, you'll see these gains," or the gains are that people are happier and more content and enjoying their work, which are important. I think very important, but like softer, harder to measure, harder to show growth.

REIN: Allso more important for the workers maybe than for the executives.

BRANDY: That too, definitely.

JOHN: One of the topics you mentioned wanting to talk about today was about whether hierarchies and equity can coexist in a team. And especially I would imagine how that's impacted by minority status and race and things like that. So tell us what you think.

BRANDY: Yeah. This is something I've been ruminating on for a while because the way power dynamics work if you're looking macro, your social power dynamics, you have race, you have gender, you have class, you have all these sub-categories that determine in any given situation or interaction or environment whom has more social power. When you look on micro scales, when you're looking at an organization, can you have real equity? Can you ensure that the people who have the most need are getting served the things that they need? And a hierarchy, which means you have another level of power dynamic, another scale. So how do you balance both of these scales at once? It's literally a thought. I don't know if they can coexist, but I don't know how you scale a company without some kind of hierarchy either. But if you have a black woman, let's say who's rising in the ranks and she achieves like say the status of managers, so you have the hierarchy, she still needs some form of equity and that she is socially in the macro on the lower side of most power dynamics. How do you ensure she is getting served additional resources that she needs to go from manager to executive manager and continuing up, still making sure she has the power in that micro space to manage well and that the people she is managing respects her. If they know she's getting these, what some may call benefits, which again it's balancing the scales. They're not benefits, they're necessities, to sure that her growth and development. But if the team knows that that is happening, does that negativity impact her power and her ability to actually serve as a manager? And that's like the thought I have. I don't have a solution or a definite like, I think these things can work. I think it's a problem we need to go ahead and talk about and try to figure out and tackle. Especially again, if we're going to increase diversity, increase inclusion, we cannot wait until we're like, "Oh yeah, black women who make manager never really have power in their organizations because they're black women managers," who are getting additional resources from upper level managers to keep them rising and people resent that. Before we get there, we should talk about it.

REIN: This, I think, has to do with the idea of this shadow hierarchy where two people who nominally have the same rank may have very different real power or authority within the organization.

BRANDY: I agree. And when you don't have a truly inclusive organization, if it is window dressing and it's not really meaningful, you often have two realities. You have a duality, you have the spoken value system, and then you have the lived value system. And those contradictions, studies have shown that employees will follow the lived reality. So not what you say, but what leadership is doing. And if what leadership is doing in some ways is disrespecting URGs even as they rise in the hierarchy than lower level employees or employees who are coming in or their peers will follow that same pattern and behavior.

REIN: I think you already gave a really good example of this, which is the director of diversity and inclusion who doesn't have check signing authority, who can't actually make decisions about where to spend money and things like that. But you need to be able to make to do that job.

JAMEY: What a frustrating position to be in too, because if you are the person that wants to take on that kind of responsibility in an organization, that's a lot to take on your shoulders, like a noble thing. But then to be like, "Oh, well you have to do this, but we're not going to give you the resource to succeed," then it's like that person's in a position where it's like, "I want to make a change, but I've been set up to fail."

REIN: It's like the inverse Spiderman rule, with great power comes great responsibility. If you have great responsibility, you need to be able to make changes. You need some power to be able to actually be effective in discharging that responsibility.

JAMEY: I used to see myself in that position where it's like, "We told Jamey that they could fix it, but then they didn't fix it." And then it's on me for it being broken, even though I was trying to do something. I used myself as an example, but...

JOHN: Yeah, it reminds me actually, I read a summary of some science that had been done recently about looking at social context, determining reality where they had a group of people would look at a line and then another line and decide whether they were the same length. And the way it was set up is that everyone in the audience but the one person being studied was in on it. And so, they would agree the first few times and then they would start intentionally deciding that the longer line was the same length as the shorter line. And most of the time, the people being studied would go along with it. They would just say, "Yeah, it looks the same. We're all good. We all agree." And they did this actually while looking at fMRI data and they showed that there was all this extra detail, extra activity in the brain showing that basically the social harmony parts of the brain were overriding their optical inputs and basically saying, "Yes, you are seeing a line that is the same length as the other line." So like their reality was effectively being short circuited by this group think. And I can imagine that the same things are happening, like you were saying, the implicit lived values of an organization are what get played out no matter what. And every new person that joins gets socialized into those values. And all of a sudden, everyone just "agrees" that this manager who happens to be a black woman isn't as good as the other managers or is, for whatever it is, they're going to all agree that that's the reality. And then of course, she's going to leave.

BRANDY: Yeah. I've been privileged enough to listen to some diversity and inclusion executives speak about their personal experiences and again, what amazed me is that they didn't have a lot of power, but also that they knew that culture and value starts at the top and it trickles down. And so, I imagine the struggle of kind of living in the middle, trying to convince your bosses that what you're doing is important and that the changes you're asking them to make are valuable because you know they trickle down. So even if you push things out as a D&I, it is being nullified if your management, your bosses aren't in agreement. And I go back to the fact that I feel like these are kind of known now. They're studied. They were researched. We can point to many things that the fact that changes haven't actually been made are either economic because it costs a lot to do, it's extra resources. Or apathy: I'm not being personally affected. You're asking me to make a change that puts me outside of my comfort. And because I have this personal feeling, no amount of research data or information [inaudible] can actually be heard or understood. It's all just denied.

JOHN: Yeah, that's I think something we've talked about on the show and in other discussions a number of times is like if someone doesn't care about other people and what their experience is, it's very hard to make them.

BRANDY: Yeah. In D&I, you're less relying on business cases and hoping that you can increase attention to your calls or your desire changes with business cases and then that's back to economics, which may or may not win. But even if you get the business case, then you're fighting with this timeline of trying to show financial gains by a certain date. And then people being people, it's very often that you may not hit it and then they take back the resources that they gave you before they've been invested long enough for you to see real change.

JOHN: Yeah, I mean I think corporations tend to have such very, very short term thinking that, like you were saying, the five year timeline on returning on a culture change is very hard for a lot of people to conceive of, that being what's required or how would you even calculate their ROI on that? Because so many things have changed in five years that you'd never be able to isolate it. You just have to sort of trust that the research is correct, which I certainly do. And that it's a good thing regardless of whether the numbers go up. [Chuckles]

BRANDY: Yeah, I think in this way, I count myself lucky. Detroit Labs, where I work, we are still relatively small organization. And so the work I do as the D&I coach, first, it's super supported by the founders, but also because of the small size, I'm able to make more changes. I'm able to see faster returns on investment because I'm talking to a hundred people versus thousands of people. And then the more people you're speaking to, the more likely it is your message is not being transmitted and received the way you intend. So I consider myself lucky to be doing the work I'm at where I'm at because it feels good, but I also get to see change grow at a faster pace.

JAMEY:	So we talked a little bit about when people in that kind of D&I role aren't given the resources or are being treated poorly or ignored or whatever. What are some specific examples of things that you've experienced? I'm glad to hear your story that's not like that. But I wonder if you could point to some things, like someone said this and it made me feel like I was being valued and I wasn't one of those people in that first group.

BRANDY: Okay. So caveat is I have a hard time accepting positive feedback. I don't know why. I most usually struggle with it. But I have gotten direct feedback. So people coming to me after I lead a session, I'll pick a different topic and do a short learning session on it. We recently did asexuality and afterwards having people come personally and say, "That was really meaningful. I learned a lot. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for the resources." And then in other instances, we do quarterly engagement surveys. One of the questions on it is about D&I. And so having people specifically say like, "Oh, the work Brandy is doing, I really appreciate it. I really appreciate her effort." That is meaningful. And also as time goes on, having the founders and the leadership team remember that I'm here and say like, "We're doing this thing or we have this thought. What do you think about it?" "We're trying to do a marketing plan. Can you look it over? What are the possible implications?" "Could you read this message?" All of that makes me feel like the work I'm doing is seen and valued and appreciated.

JAMEY:	I'm glad for that answer because like what you said about people thanking you for a session and saying they got something out of it, that's something that people can do. You can see a session and really appreciate it and not say anything about it or you can say something about it.

BRANDY: Yeah. I'm going to pretend to take a little credit for my work in creating an inclusive culture where we do a lot of feedback. And we have short feedback cycles and more in the moment feedback. But it's also that I work with a great group of people. They are fantastic individuals.

JOHN: I liked what you said there about your interactions with the founders and the sort of executives about how they're including your opinion in their decision making. Because my follow on was going to be like if you are a founder, if you are someone with the power and you want to start having a D&I person working in your company, what does it look like to support that person beyond just 'here's all the money that you could ever want'. I think the examples you gave are good ones. Do you have any others?

BRANDY: Yes. Diversity and inclusion should not be an afterthought if you can ever help it. The sooner founders incorporate diversity and inclusion as a real value, as a lived value inside their organization, the better off they will be in the long run. But utilizing that person when you are speaking to the public, it's like before you start new messages, new campaigns, just double checking to make sure there's nothing obviously harmful in your messages or discriminatory or exclusive, inviting them to be part of just your regular business meetings. So a lot of times those are closed door - leadership, they close the door, they're talking about how are we making money? What are we doing next? Inviting your diversity and inclusion into that room to participate in those conversations could head off a lot of things. So if you're like, "We're going to build this app with this new feature," or, "We're going to pursue this new line of business," that person being in the room before you even start could be like, "Whoa, I did some research on that company recently and we might not want to partner with them because of X, Y, Z." And so you don't even have to waste your time chasing down business that in the end you decided you don't want.

Again, making sure that they have resources, not leaving it up just to the D&I person to think about resource needs but making sure you're checking and making sure they're just part of your budget overall. And that you're seeking out like, "What do you need this quarter? What does that budget going to be used for?" Participating. I think that's like the number one thing. If you are a founder, you have D&I, your D&I is doing things. Show up, show up for the sessions, show up for the trainings and don't just be present. Participate actively. Show your employees that it is a live value for you. Correct your own speech. If you make a mistake, live that, "Oh, I made a mistake. I said something exclusionary. Let me correct my senses." That probably matters more than anything else I've said. Because no matter what leadership does, no matter how much they pay, no matter how many meetings D&I is in, if the rest of the organization doesn't see leadership living the values also, nothing else will matter. Your organizational will become the toxic soup you're trying to escape.

REIN: I think this highlights a very fundamental problem with hierarchical organizations, which is in a hierarchical organization, basically every corporation, if the organization is ethical, it's because the leadership is ethical. These systems also promote unethical people into leadership positions. And so I think one of the fundamental questions for us is if we want hierarchical systems, how do we build them such that by design, they promote ethical people into leadership positions.

BRANDY: I'm a firm believer in you have to be long to fire folks. We see signs that someone is not growing in our culture, first and foremost, that they themselves are not growing, which I mean we should want the best for people. And if someone's not growing, it's cool to help them exit and find a position that's better for them. But also someone who's bringing things to our culture that anti our values. And I think that shows up way sooner than we act on it. Like it'll be one instance and then 10 instances and then 20 instances. But then after you make excuses so many times to yourself for that person, eventually you even stop paying attention to those behaviors. That just becomes how Brandy is. And because Brandy's good at other things, we're going to excuse this behavior and that gives me access to climb up the rank because I wasn't removed from the organization at a time where it would be easier or I had less responsibility where putting someone else in my place again would be an easier transition for the organization. And the higher someone gets, the harder those calculations become. So I think we have to just be okay and say, "Hey, this isn't working out why you are a level one developer." Or, "Why you are a level one designer." And, "Let's find either a different place for you here," or sometimes a whole new organization.

REIN: I think that's really important. I wonder how that addresses the problem when people who have power over you or the people who need to change because you can't fire those people.

BRANDY: That's when you need ethical HR. If a company's starting this in year 10, the idea that they want ethics, that they want ethical managers, that they want to be ethical organizations, your 10 is going to be really hard. You have a lot of systems in place. You have a lot of people in place. You're talking about revamping and overhauling. And again, that's when you need your human resource department, your diversity and inclusion. They need power. They need systemic power. They need to be able to say, "I've gotten complaints about this manager from team members. That is enough." Either like, "Let's sit down and come up with a plan of how you change with this new culture. You grow with our culture or you exit." But if they don't have that power, they can't do it. And if you don't have ethical HR, which is another thing, HR usually protects the organization and not the team members. So it literally has to be like leadership, the actual CEO, saying, "We want to do things different." Who do we get in place in these positions of power that are decision makers that are equal enough to us where they can fight and push back with us, that can trickle down those changes?

REIN: I think if we want people in leadership to be ethical, there's only ultimately one way to do that and it is that they have to be accountable to the people that they have power over.

BRANDY: Completely agree.

REIN: Which I think means building. If we want hierarchy, I think it means building new ways of structuring these relationships. I can give you an example. Russell Ackoff was a management consultant, professor type person. He has this idea he calls management boards. And a management board is where a manager has a board that they're responsible to. The board includes both the person the manager reports to and also everyone that reports to the manager. And everyone that reports to the manager has firing privileges over that manager. Each manager meets with their board to learn whether they're doing a good enough job to keep their job.

BRANDY: I think that's a great example of rethinking the system and I think that could work. I guess immediately when I heard that I was like, "Oh, but what if I'm the only black woman manager and all my team members are white men who resent me having this role in the first place?"

REIN: Yeah, it's interesting. It fixes a problem maybe, but also introduces other problems.

JAMEY:	I have a question that's kind of related. I was thinking about this with something Brandy said earlier of like there's also the idea of once we realized that we've made some sort of mistake, how do we admit that? I think it can be really hard for people to be like, "Oh, I did the wrong thing. I said the wrong thing. Actually my first idea was bad. Let's take it back and try again." I think that can be really hard for people when people get really defensive. And if everyone was better at kind of admitting when they were wrong, I think this whole process would be easier. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.

BRANDY: Yeah, I agree. That's a form of vulnerability to admit a mistake, to make amends. It's really hard. And then when you have socialization, when we are socialized to be rugged individualists saying that I did the wrong thing or I made a mistake, you can be socialized in thinking that it makes you weak. So, I personally like it. The world changes. I want to see, I recognize. Like you have to start with babies and get our education system and how we socialize and like we just need to hit reboot. But for things like organizations that are already rolling and growing, leadership has to be decisive and they just have to commit. And they have to be the first one and exemplify the culture they want to see. So they have to be willing to say, "I, founder, made a mistake in front of everyone," and say, "This is my plan forward. These are the amends I am making." And by setting that example and then holding other people to account and being asked to hold account, you start to see a change in the culture. But it has to kind of come from uphill. And again with that, how do you keep leadership accountable if they're not accountable?

REIN: I think when you said starting with babies, that's interesting. It reminds me of when Thomas Kuhn said, and I'll paraphrase, that a scientific progress happens when the people who are preventing it die of old age.

JOHN: Yeah, I've always thought that that was an important factually factor in scientific progress. Einstein was very much against a lot of quantum theory.

REIN: Sort of. So if we start with a new generation and we teach them how to be ethical and then we wait for the people who aren't to retire, then things get better.

BRANDY: Well, I don't know. Many kids nowadays are becoming CEOs in their own right. So you've got a whole gamer organizations for me now. I mean, in reality, that's not enough. It has to go both ways. So it's fallacy for us to think like racism will die out. As I was growing up, I used to hear that. When the old white people who hate black people die, the racism will end. And then you see now 19 year olds committing racial terror. So it's not that simple. It is (a) fixing our system. So going down, reaching our youth. And then also as best we can, getting to the top, like going up, having a strong middle. I don't know. It's more of a double prong than a single prong thing. If you don't reach our youth, then they will just continue to be socialized in this continued mess that we have. If you don't somehow reach as many elders as you can, then it will take 60 years before you have a CEO who is ethical.

REIN: I'm sure you're very sensitive to this, but there are also structural problems. There are systems in which these people grow up and learn values and learn how to relate to each other that create the society and the culture that we have and enforce it and perpetuate it.

BRANDY: Oh, definitely. In Detroit, I feel safe saying all, but I mean anyone listening, please correct me if I'm off on that. All Detroit public schools have metal detectors and resource officers, which are pretty much just school police on site. And in my mind, the first thing from kindergarten on that you are socializing children to believe is that they are potential criminals and that they are one incident away from needing to be arrested, and that everyone's just waiting for it to happen. And then when things do happen and children see the outcome of that, which is you are quickly removed from the school sometimes in handcuffs, you are taught that your behaviors, and again, studies have shown that the behaviors we see in black children as being threatening, as being harmful, as being not learning well, like all of those are racially biased, the same behaviors in white kids are evaluated completely differently. And so you're socializing the children this way because of the system. The system says, "In 1980, there were a couple of school shootings in Detroit. And so we need metal detectors everywhere. And there was some fights, so you need resource officers on site and be careful because kids can quickly get violent. So you got to be tough with them." And they start to believe it to be true. You have a whole generation of children who are being educated inside of prisons. What else do you call a place where you have security going in that you are locked in, there's only one exit? You need permission to leave, your every move is dictated by others. What do you call that other than a prison?

JOHN: On top that, there's no facility for treating the trauma, not only of the system but that could have happened outside of the system earlier in life, later in life, like people are ending up in terrible situations but their access to mental health treatment is so hard to come by even if you have insurance. And then obviously if you don't have insurance, it's non-existent. And I feel like that's one of the issues that also is affecting it because you take that trauma with you for the rest of your life. You pass that onto your kids, you use it to reinforce the systems that you live in and it just perpetuates.

BRANDY: Oh, definitely. Tear down all the systems. I can't, I'm sure there's one. I did that but I can't think of it at this moment. That is really beneficial for humanity. Most of the systems that come to mind are built to support a supremacy. And if it's white supremacy or male supremacy or class supremacy, it is built to support a system of supremacy. And therefore where there is someone supreme, there is someone who is discriminated against. And so you have to have the will of the people to actually break the system and start over. Again, that's one of those things where I'm like, "Oh man, but you have to resocialize people to realize that they're even in the system that is discriminated against them to get them to have the will to fight against the system, while you're fighting against the system.

REIN: I think about -- there's a law of cybernetics. The purpose of a system is what it does. And in terms of racism, it seems like the system we've built is a factory that takes naive white children and turns them into racist white adults. And if we're talking about how can we improve the working conditions in this factory, I feel like we're not even having the right conversation to begin with.

BRANDY: I just got the book today How to be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and I'm super duper excited. He wrote from the beginning a history of racist ideas in America, which was fantastic. His thing is that it is not enough to just not be racist because not being racist is not even a thing. That's a defense mechanism. That's something we say in defense of being called racist a lot of times. But we have to learn to be anti-racist, which is actually like to go against the system that currently exists, where there is any idea of racial hierarchy or supremacy. I haven't dug into it yet, but it literally just came today. I'm super duper excited. But that would be the change that we need to see in order for (a) our children to stop being socialized this way and (b) for us not to have to wait again 50 years before we have ethical non-racist managers.

JAMEY:	There's so much stuff to unlearn and it's not even just like unlearning about other community. I don't want to speak for other people's experiences, but I feel like I do so much unlearning of awful gender stuff in the trans community that I don't want other people to treat me in these ways. But also I too was socialized in these ways and I have to be careful about how I'm treating or at least thinking about other people. Other trans people that have different experiences from me and how I integrate that with my kind of whole -- it's really kind of sad but also really interesting and rewarding to do. I think that you see people will be like, "Oh, I'm not racist. I have a black friend or I'm not transphobic. I have a trans friend." And I'm like, "I am trans," and I have to deal with this stuff. So, I'm pretty sure that we all have to work on unlearning stuff, stuff that we don't want in our brains, but that we have to work if we want it out. And that's why it's so stupid to say things, like you said, like a defensive, "Oh, I'm not racist." This is such a useless thing to say. If you don't want to be racist, then you don't want this stuff that is in your mind, so you need to do the work to get it out. I don't know. That's just how I feel about it.

BRANDY: Yeah. When it comes to race, I heard a really great analogy. The system is the walking escalator at the airport, and you can stand on it. And you're still moving though. You're moving with the racist system. You could walk on it, move faster with the racist system. That may be like your overt racist. But unless you turn around and run in the opposite direction faster than that escalator is moving, you are still moving in that racist direction. And I think people confuse passiveness or what they consider lack of action, "I'm not doing anything," as like, "Then I am not racist." I did not call you a slur, so then I am not racist. And it's like, "No, you didn't call me a slur but you said I was aggressive." That's not a slur. But that is a racial stereotype about black women who are in positions of power. So you are still engaging in the racist system by perpetuating that.

JAMEY:	That's an amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing. This has been a really, really good conversation, but we're about at the part of the show where we all do our reflections and think back on something that we talked about that really stuck with us or something that we learned or want to learn more about or a call to action. And I think what I'm thinking about at the end of this conversation was related to something that we talked about near the beginning of the show about diversity and inclusion. Like having people on teams, kind of beginning with what Rein said about having one black person on the team with the hand dryers and then leading into what Brandy said about testing and getting in. If you know that there's spots on your team that you're missing demographics, like going out and seeking out those people. And I guess that it occurred to me that that was kind of the tech version of having sensitivity readers and publishing, which I think is an interesting analogy because in 2019, having sensitivity readers in publishing is just an expected thing that pretty much everyone does. And if you don't have a sensitivity reader, you take shit for that which I think is a good thing in the publishing industry. But I guess it makes me wonder why is this such a weird suggestion to do the same thing in tech? If it's standard in other industries, why isn't it standard in tech, let alone being rare the way that it seems to be. And so I guess my reflection is I want to continue thinking about how -- I use the example of publishing because I also do work in publishing, but there are many other industries other than the two that I have personal experience with. And so, I guess my action item is thinking and looking into more other industries other than these two and how do they deal or not deal with these kind of issues and how can we bring some of that into tech. Because actually publishing is also an industry that has a lot of these problems. So it's interesting to me that at least on this one access, it seems more proactive than the tech industry is. And I wonder why that is and what can be done to change it.

JOHN: I think one idea that's sticking with me which is something that I already knew, but I appreciated how much Brandy emphasized it in a lot of the things she was saying, which is that the culture of a company comes from the top, and all of that rolls downhill. And so when you're trying to make any sort of cultural change, it has to be embodied at the top in order for it to pervade the rest of the organization. I can imagine maybe there's a rare experience where one team can start with a new culture and sort of spread that sideways through the culture, but that seems like it would be pretty rare. And that really the importance of getting that going at the top is so important.

REIN: There's a thing that I really struggle with that has, I think, been a big part of this conversation, which is how do I find a balance between working within these existing systems to improve things for people and doing what I think is ultimately the work that needs to be done, which is dismantling these systems. For example, a lot of my day to day work as a consultant is around helping teams work better together, helping them become more empathic towards each other, helping them show more solidarity towards each other and these things help them do their jobs better. It also, I think, improves the quality of their lives. And I think that's a good work. I think it's good that I'm doing that. Helping people is one of my core values. But at the same time, by making these teams more viable, I'm also making the organizations that they're in more viable and I'm perpetuating the systems that I think are violent, materially violent systems that hurt people. So I don't know how to solve this problem for myself. And this is something I'm going to have to keep thinking about.

BRANDY: This was such a great conversation. I think what stands out to me at the moment though is what Rein said about manager boards, and really thinking about how that could be improved upon to reduce possible harmful, like this upward discrimination from teams that are being led.

REIN: Yeah. If you figure that out, please let me know.

BRANDY: I sure will. I definitely want to noodle on that because that does seem to move us a little closer to ensuring that there is accountability as we move people up in organizations that are hierarchical. And also maybe touches a little bit on the, how do you have equity when you have a hierarchy? Is equity the value of the organization, just like diversity and inclusion is the value of the organization, then that should or would be part of the calculation that that board is using to evaluate them. And then, could we even push it up further where it's not even like your direct manager? Can we make our CEOs, like can there be boards that include actual employees [inaudible] that is then given to the board of the company and the determinations. And so again, having diversity and inclusion, having ethics, having that a part of these evaluations and then a step further, can we hold organizations to a code of ethics? Can we evaluate them on being ethical on diversity and inclusion? And how do you build that to scale? I'm excited by just the thought. I have no idea where I'm going to start with this research, but I'm definitely excited to put my mind to it because I feel like that is a thing that can move us closer to the United Federation of Planets and further away from Skynet.

JOHN: I have this sort of secondary reflection based on what Rein was saying, which is, I read an article recently that absolutely blew my mind. Talking about how mindfulness and meditation is a huge trend in the American culture right now, especially in work culture and especially in Silicon Valley. It's got a lot of currency. A lot of people talk about it. It's something I do and it's something that I'm very interested in. But the thrust of the article was saying that without doing the requisite self-examination, simply meditating and practicing mindfulness is just making it possible for you to function better in a crushing capitalistic system or in a terrible company. And is that really something that is useful at all? Or should it be focused more on realizing how to take yourself out of that situation or how to change systems in such a way that you don't have to bear them as much? You don't have to do as much work to tolerate being inside them.

BRANDY: This isn't a reflection, but that touches on something I read about meditation and mindfulness and how it can mitigate unconscious biases. And while there are studies that show that if you practice mindfulness about a group that you feel biases against and you think about the positive attributes of that groups very intentionally, it can begin to mitigate your bias. But there's like a thin line because it can become very easy to tokenize, but also then you are kind of encoding another set of stereotypes in your mind. And when you meet people of that group who fall out of that, then you start to penalize them for not now living up to your new definition of what it means. And so I thought that was a very interesting thing. Like how do you even teach someone to walk that line? And in their case, maybe it's not such a great mitigation technique because it has to be dealt with so much care.

JOHN: Yeah, positive stereotypes aren't as damaging, but they are problematic, just the same. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Brandy, for being on the show.

JAMEY:	Yeah, it was great. Thank you.

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