REIN: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 133 of Greater Than Code. I'm here with my friend and co-host, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA: Good morning! And I am here with John Sawers. 

JOHN: And I'm here with our guest, Chante Thurmond. Chante's interests are full-bodied, eclectic and reflective of her entrepreneurial spirit. In 2018, she founded The Darkest Horse, a next-gen consultancy exploring the intersections of radical inclusion, the future of work, emerging technology, health, well-being, and human potential. Chante is also Contributing Writer at Futurithmic, a new digital publication powered by Nokia. Her background is anchored in Organizational Development, Social Innovation, Health & Well-being, and Community Engagement. Welcome to the show, Chante.

CHANTE: Hello and welcome. Great to be here.

JOHN: You probably already know what the first question we're going to ask is. 

CHANTE: [Laughs] I have an idea. 

JOHN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? 

CHANTE: I would say that my superpower is actually being able to spot talent or to be able to spot dark horses. That's how I got into my business. And how I acquired it, I would say was through my own experiences as being one. But also, I played sports. In terms of playing sports, I played basketball. I was a point guard and you kind of have to know what's going on around the court. You have to be able to know who on your team can deliver, who you can pass to, who can get you out of a bind when you're down on the block. So, I think that really helped me.

JESSICA: Can you define dark horse?

CHANTE: Yes. The dark horse is usually the person in the race that has the least chance of winning or the people that you never even expected to be in the race. And the reference is sort of in conjunction with like a thoroughbred for horse races. A thoroughbred is somebody that you know has a pedigree and has a track record of winning, whereas the dark horse would be somebody that doesn't. In modern day, I would say it would be a Barack Obama or even Donald Trump, unfortunately.

JESSICA: Oh, yeah. I guess it goes both ways.

CHANTE: Yup. 

JESSICA: Is that one way you spot dark horses is by having been one? 

CHANTE: Yes. I would say that I'm a dark horse. You know, I grew up, I would say, without a silver spoon in my mouth. In terms of a pedigree, I actually hate that word. But when you look at me versus somebody who maybe went to an Ivy League school or somebody who grew up with two parents in a household and a middle income family, I think that you see me and if I'm in the room with you, you're thinking, "Well, how the hell did you get here?" It's through perseverance and hard work and determination and just never giving up, and daring to race or to even enter in the race that maybe wasn't built for me.

JESSICA: It's a constant choice to be in the race.

CHANTE: I would say so. Although, I would say early on in my life, I was in the race that I didn't know I was running. I grew up in Iowa and I'm very multi-cultural. I come from a mixed background. My parents were in an interracial marriage and relationship. And so, that was chosen without me having a choice. That was the situation I was brought up in. And so, it starts I think from just looking at my own family and my background. And then it kind of followed me through school and as I went to get my first job. Some of the things that I was doing, I was in a race, so I wasn't necessarily interested in riding but I had to show up and I knew that as a person of color and as a person who was oftentimes like a double or triple minority, that I had to deliver because I really had no choice. If I didn't, I'd be kicked out of the group or ousted.

REIN: Being a dark horse has a lot to do with performing above expectations.

CHANTE: For me, it is. And it's also being able to rise to the occasion. I've learned that it's not always about winning or coming in first, it could be that even just being able to run with some of the greats is really helpful. I can remember back when I actually ran track in high school and the women that I ran against were all really great. And so, even though I didn't place Top 3, I still ran with some people who went down in the history of the state, and that made me a better runner.

JESSICA: Yeah, because we learn from the people that we work with and that we interact with it. It's like you don't want to own the most expensive house in the neighborhood because we bring each other up or down.

CHANTE: Right. That's a great way to put it. I would agree.

REIN: If this is about how you perform versus how people expect you to and the perceptions that people have of you, that means it's socially constructed, right? 

CHANTE: Absolutely.

REIN: So, what is it do you think that causes people to not be able to perceive talent or potential?

CHANTE: I would say that many times, it's like our unconscious bias. It's a belief or an attitude that we have that basically impacts the way that we might see a situation or an opportunity. And so, that unconscious bias that we have is usually part of our conditioning socially. And it starts at home, and then it was reinforced at school. And then as you get older, it reinforced in your interaction with the social circles and spheres. If you look at the history of this country, for instance, it's very hard to deny the fact that we had slavery and that there was a social value of people who were white or who were of affluent background. They had skin in the game in terms of trying to construct this belief that people who did not look like them and who actually live below them in terms of hierarchical standard were either better or worse, that they wanted to be on top. And that's how they constructed it to be that way. So anybody who didn't come in looking like them or being as wealthy as them or having a background in terms of education as them, or even religion, early on in this country, that was a big issue. And here we are today. If we fast forward to 2019, you see this intersectionality in terms of our identity and the way that we identify with politics and our religion and our ethnic or cultural identities, our sexuality and gender, all of these things playing to what society is expecting of somebody to show up as in the market or come to work looking like and performing as a top person or below them.

JESSICA: Yeah, because when you expect someone, when you just look at someone and you glance at them and you're like, "Yeah. [Inaudible] went to MIT," whatever, you expect them to be in the race. And if they don't do well, you'll still keep inviting them to the race.

CHANTE: Yeah, absolutely.

JESSICA: Well, they belong there. This is fine. Whereas someone who's a minority that those expectations aren't automatically there, you have to see them [inaudible].

CHANTE: Yeah. "Let me get a look at you. Let me fill you out and see if we can invite you here, to begin with, and if you should earn your spot." Absolutely.

REIN: This has to do with essentialism. If you look at a rich person versus a poor person, you want to say, especially if you're a rich person, "I'm rich because there are qualities inherent in me that make me successful and you're poor because of the opposite."

JESSICA: And this is not their world hypothesis, isn't it? I mean, you don't have to want to be on top.

CHANTE: That's true.

JESSICA: You just have to want the world to be fair to think that minorities don't belong there because minorities aren't there in the correct proportions, in fair proportions. And so, you either have to think the world isn't fair or at some level, they deserve it.

JOHN: Right. And if you accept that the world isn't fair, then maybe the advantages and privileges that you've enjoyed weren't fairly bestowed upon you. And therefore, you're in a precarious situation. So, it's one of those you can't convince someone of something that their salary depends on not believing. And so, you're just going to ignore that fact.

JESSICA: Which ironically makes the world unfair. If you think the world is fair, then you're part of the problem.

REIN: It's a perpetual motion machine.

CHANTE: Yes. You all are speaking my language here. Absolutely.

REIN: Your experience, your focus is on diversity and inclusion, and a lot of that has to do with fixing that imbalance, getting more underrepresented people into positions where they can demonstrate their abilities and be successful. How much of that has to do with helping the people making these decisions to confront their own biases?

CHANTE: I think that's where I usually start. I'll give you this very specific example in terms of talent and recruiting. Many times, people are calling me and they'll say, "Hey, we think we have this issue. We don't have enough women and enough people of color in the pipeline." And I usually stop them right there and say, "Let's just do some in-house sort of checking to see where you are and how you're defining diversity, first and foremost." And we often find that people are defining diversity just in terms of gender and just in terms of color or ethnicity. And we also know that that's just bullshit because there's a lot of diversity. And I would tell people this, I grew up in Iowa which I think is why some people might make fun of me for that. But I actually think it's very helpful because it's in the middle of the country, it is very homogenous. And I can look in a room and most the time while I was growing up there, there will be like, let's just say nine out of 10 people who were white. If you ask them what is sort of your diversity score? How do you show up? What's so interesting about you? People we're like, "Oh, I have a mom." And what I learned quickly was that again, that's bullshit. Kids who might all look alike, they might have blond hair, blue eyes, you could learn that people come from German, French, some other other Eastern European background and they can all have different religions and different socioeconomic statuses that make them very, very diverse from one another. And actually that is to their advantage. But if you don't ask, we kind of keep drilling in on the surface, we assume, "Hey, I'm not diverse." And so, this is what's happening because if we are only looking at somebody externally, we put an unconscious bias and an assumption there. We attach it to that belief. And so, you have to break that down first. And once they have that 'aha', it's so much easier to talk about intersectionality and to talk about, "All right, here's how we can diversify even more. Here's how you can get super inclusive. And here's how you bring in some equity and accessibility to the conversation as well."

REIN: Is the idea there to not just see people as part of a group but to see that each person has unique qualities, as a unique human being, even within groups, there are differences?

CHANTE: Absolutely. Yes.

JESSICA: So, you start with dividing?

CHANTE: People are already dividing themselves. I think what we see naturally is people like to give things -- we're in a society or a time in society when people are really comfortable with categorization and putting people into buckets or trying to figure out how they will deal with you. Even on LinkedIn, you come in and you have to determine which industry you're in and what the skill sets are. And if you're good at that, you're adept, you'll do it correctly. But most people were actually doing it incorrectly, which is fine.

JESSICA: On LinkedIn?

CHANTE: I think on LinkedIn, I often laugh because there's not even enough categories. And so, if I don't identify any of those things, there's really no space for me to put other. Otherwise, I think we would see people showing up a little bit differently in terms of [inaudible]. Or even Facebook, for example. We see this happening across multiple platforms and technology right now. And I think it's just because that's how people are naturally coming up with these categories.

JESSICA: Are you saying that LinkedIn is doing it wrong by providing a fixed list of categories?

CHANTE: I think a fixed list is limiting.

JESSICA: OK. I mean, we want to bucket people because there's just so many people.

CHANTE: Yes. Naturally, as humans, we're trying to get a hold up. We're trying to get our arms wrapped around these big concepts. And then once we do that, it's a little bit more comfortable for us and then we can maybe see where we are more alike versus different. But I think this is what's naturally, at least, this is how the industrialized world works where we're really good at categories, like categorizing each other and labeling one another. And oftentimes, we're pretty horrible about doing it for ourselves correctly.

REIN: It's interesting, the whole point of this. The reason that these categories [inaudible] free text entry field is so that we can aggregate.

CHANTE: Exactly.

REIN: So that we can look at things on a statistical level, but that necessarily also homogenizes people.

CHANTE: Exactly. Yes. Great insight.

REIN: I think we just don't have the tools to deal with the actual diversity that exists.

CHANTE: I know. It's something that I actually think will emerge as we get into this next sort of what I call the fourth industrial revolution. I think we'll see new things happening because even if I think about, for instance, a virtual or a digital twin of mine, if there's an avatar online, I don't have to necessarily decide on their ethnicity and their race, and their gender. This thing, this entity could be an extension of me, as Chante, but I might not get bogged down as much with the ethnicity and race, gender, sexuality, age. There's other things that I might use to describe myself to exist online.

JOHN: And they don't have to be fixed either.

CHANTE: Exactly.

JESSICA: You said about categorizing and labeling, we're horrible at doing it for ourselves correctly.

CHANTE: One of the things that I've learned through my own human development and going deeper into who I really am, is that most people aren't sitting and thinking of 'who am I really' without all these labels. We're told lots of things. It starts from the time that we're born. You're labeled a woman or a male, in terms of the gender marker, and that determines so many things for you. So if you come from a family that's really attached to those identities, just those two kind of binary choices, if you come from a traditional family where women do something and men do another. And for instance, if your father is the provider and women are the homemakers, think about how much of a choice that wasn't for that person and how much that basically influences our identity and then it causes a conundrum for many people if you don't fall within that binary. So, this is something that we're seeing happening more and more. And as we see the digital world is helping to kind of even things or make things more universal, people are really at this place of like, "Oh my God, I've been kind of lied to all my life. I've been told that choice is binary on so many levels," whether it's your gender marker, success or not success, going to college or not going to college, religious or non-religious, spiritual or non-spiritual. And these are things that you're just told and you're like, "OK, I had to choose one," versus saying, "What do I really believe? And if I don't believe in those binaries, what are my other options?" Because children just aren't really being taught that at school. They're mostly being taught that they have a couple of choices and they can choose one or the other. Even with lunch.

REIN: So not only do we categorize people but we also impose those categories on people. And they start to think about themselves, that forms part of their identity.

CHANTE: Yes. 

REIN: It limits their choices or their beliefs.

CHANTE: Very much so. I think that that's what's wrong with our modern society in many ways across multiple levels and everything. It's unfortunate that this happens. And I cringe when I see this happening to young people especially with youth because I was often given choices like from my parents. A lot of it had to do with education and success and what I was going to do in the world and who I was going to show up as in the world. But it was usually a choice that they provided to me and I had to select one or the other. And then based on what they provided, I would either feel really good about myself or really terrible about myself.

JESSICA: Depending on whether you're happy about one of the choices.

CHANTE: Yeah, absolutely.

JESSICA: If there's two choices for lunch and one of them is your favorite, that's fine.

CHANTE: But if they both suck and you're like, "I don't know. I want to be a vegan." And they're like, "Too bad, we don't have vegan food. You know what? This is my house." Which is true. This has happened to so many children. We see less and less of it but it so happens quite a bit. I was at school with my kids a few weeks ago and they had lunch and there was just only a few options. I thought, "Well, shit. If the kids didn't want to eat these things, what would they do?" And I'm guessing that happens rarely because there's usually some options. Some kids who are very, very sensitive and hyper aware of themselves at young ages, they should be able to have a choice.

JESSICA: There's always the 'bring your lunch' option, right?

CHANTE: Well, I would say 'sure' but if you come from a family that maybe doesn't have the option to get lunch to provide you with that, it might not be.

JESSICA: Exactly because that 'anything else' option takes resources and it takes thinking ahead, and it takes effort. And we only have so much of that. Some of us have more resources than others to apply to opting out of those binaries.

CHANTE: That is right. And so, having those options and also having the ability to have some foresight to be able to plan ahead to have lunch is so much of a privilege.

JESSICA: Yeah.

CHANTE: And then that translates and that carries over into the real world with work especially. So much of our lives is consumed with who we are at work in the workplace which is why I'm so obsessed with trying to deconstruct it again and rebuild it or help people see [inaudible] way.

JOHN: It strikes me almost the identity box sort of thing is a feedback loop where if you're placed in the gender box with a gender role box at the start and then you're told enough times that that's who you are, that becomes your identity. And once it becomes your identity, you want to defend it. And it's so hard to snap out of that because it's a personal attack if that box starts getting deconstructed.

REIN: And the way that it's formed is if you're told you're a woman and you do things that don't fit that box that are masculine, you'll received negative feedback and you learn, "Oh, that's not how a woman behaves."

CHANTE: Yes! And before you know it, you're caught up in this sort of cycle and you're like, "Wait a minute." If you're smart enough or you have enough EQ about you as a young person, you might start to sort of challenge the paradigm that's been placed upon you. But I would say just based on my own experiences and then being a coach and working with people, it doesn't happen quickly. You have to sort of have some things that completely obliterate or challenge you to really say, "Wait a minute, pause, time out. I didn't even sign up for this. What the hell is this?" Maybe we all know this one sort of hippie kid who came from this amazing family who didn't raise him in that way. But I think it's rare, very, very rare.

JESSICA: Once you have that moment where you recognize that there's some category that you have been identified with and you reject it, does it make it easier to see and appreciate that in other people?

CHANTE: I would say yes because any form of oppression, once you've had some oppression put onto you and you feel the pain and you really are honest about the pain that you've experienced, I think it's so much easier to have some compassion and identify it with somebody else.

JESSICA: I want to say that everyone is oppressed in some way.

CHANTE: Yes.

JESSICA: Not everyone has recognized it yet.

CHANTE: I agree which is one of the things we talk about too that actually, the darkest horse could be any one of us. And when we help the darkest horse win versus a dark horse, but the darkest horse win, we all win. And in my mind, that planning for and anticipating who their darkest horse might be would basically require you to have universal human-centered design.

REIN: Because it's not just about picking a person saying, "Oh, we need to help you." It's about doing things that benefit lots of people.

CHANTE: Absolutely. It allows everyone to come in with their very intersectional identities and find some part of themselves to be reflected in that bigger circle.

REIN: The flip side of being the one with the least opportunity is if you correct that, they get helped the most.

CHANTE: Precisely. We often say as well that what we perceive as our weakness is usually our greatest advantage. And when we can allow people which comes into this whole thing of self-empowerment or teaching folks to have self agency and kind of falls into that category of human potential, when you allow them to see that they have an advantage now, wow, you shift somebody's perception of the world and how they're going to navigate it. That is so amazing when you see a huge difference in exponential growth happening from individuals who understand it and do something about it.

JESSICA: Do you have an example of that? 

CHANTE: Yes. I would say for me, I've done a lot of mentoring with youth along the way in terms of consecutively mentoring executives in the workplace. And one of the things I noticed about the younger people if I caught them early enough in terms of their identities and how they were actually even describing a problem in their life, then I would give them this assignment of, "I want you to really think about who you are. Take away all the titles and all the things that your parents told you, and all the things your teachers told you or your friends told you that you are, and come back and tell me who you really are and what you're meant to do." They were able to get to that assignment and say, "Oh my God! I was only thinking about these things because my parents told me, or because at my school, these are kind of like the options I had in terms of the degree," and whatnot. And if I would talk to somebody in the workplace who had been, let's just say about 40 years old, they'd been doing this for 20 years, it's really hard to get them to do that because there's so much attached to that identity. And they're like, "Wait a minute. So, you want me to stop in basically being who I am. Give up this identity that could basically impact who my friends are, who my colleagues are, where I live, how I feel about the world."

There's two great examples that are public, and there's two shows about them - Jazz Jennings, who's a young trans girl, and Caitlyn Jenner. Those are two perfect examples. When you see those shows that are running at the same time, basically talking about trans identity and challenging what we perceive to be these binary identities. Jazz had a much easier time accepting and deconstructing and challenging the paradigm, whereas Caitlyn Jenner didn't. And it was really hard because Caitlyn had to -- I love the scenes when Caitlyn went on this tour bus with all these trans women and they were talking about Donald Trump specifically about Republican and conservative views and how that impacts the trans community. And Caitlyn thought that she sort of had the best of both worlds and I think she ended up figuring out that that was not going to be the case because this new person, this new identity that she was going to take on and fully embody meant that there were parts of her past that she had to give up in order to be this woman in the world.

JESSICA: Yeah, that's a big deal. Maybe because when you are that student, you can say this is what my parents and my teachers have pushed on me. But by the time you're 40, it's not your parents or your teachers questioning you anymore. It's you.

CHANTE: Yeah. And that's hard to basically own. I think about it, there's parts of myself -- damn! I don't really want to have to own that. But if I'm going to be a better person, I have to. And it sucks. It would basically require you to admit that you're wrong and to say, "This is what I'm going to do about it," which most people don't want to do.

JOHN: I know you talk about health and wellness as part of the sort of package that you're addressing with the dark horse. So, tell me about how that intersects with all this other things that we're diving into.

CHANTE: I have a nursing background. And one of the earlier thoughts I have when I was in school was, "Oh my God! I love public health, community health, global health." I was really interested in this sort of model and framework which is how I sort of see the world now. And one of the things we talk about in public health, for instance, is that health is usually on this axis of either you're healthy or you're not healthy, either you have an acute or chronic condition or you don't, you're with disease or you're without disease. Many times when we're talking about health, [inaudible] whereas well-being will be a choice because that will maybe be the choice of having a healthy lifestyle and eating healthy food and even these different activities like for instance, meditation and yoga. Things that we can do to increase or to enhance our mental and spiritual well-being, in addition to our physical well-being. And so, it's a choice. And I would say then taking a step further, human potential is just that we all have human potential. And based on where you grew up and who you're hanging around and the things you choose to do, in terms of even health and wellness, could impact your human potential. And some of us, frankly, have more potential than others based on our circumstances and the factors that I mentioned before.

JESSICA: Because some of us grew up with the ability to bring our lunch to school if we darn well please.

CHANTE: Exactly.

JOHN: Or in buildings that didn't have lead.

CHANTE: Or asbestos, right? Exactly.

JESSICA: Sometimes, we talk about privilege and people will get their hackles up. But maybe the word potential is better.

CHANTE: I think it could certainly be one of the options. There is such a thing as privilege whether we want to acknowledge it or not, and also potential. And they could be somewhat different or we could use the words or exchange one word for the other in certain circumstances.

REIN: Privilege is also very abstract and maybe the sort of concrete ways that it shows up are access to opportunities, access to resources, things like that.

JESSICA: Oh, yeah. Because you don't want to say, "Oh, I have higher potential than [Chante laughs]." But you could say that in my situation, this same person has higher potential than the same person in a situation of discrimination.

CHANTE: Yeah.

JESSICA: It's about the context. And it's not about your parents having money makes you a higher potential person; it is that you sit in a situation of higher potential. [Crosstalk] more potential energy, well done, go faster.

CHANTE: Right. And with the higher potential, then the greater opportunities that are put in front of you. So I would say that yeah, you're on to something there.

JESSICA: So, maybe privilege corresponds to situational potential.

CHANTE: I certainly would be open to that. But I know of some folks or friends of mine who are in this space might say, "That's not right." But again, I'm a person who likes to deconstruct and challenge the binary and the paradigm even if that has to do with diversity and inclusion.

JESSICA: And I'm not proposing that we change the vocabulary. However, there are certain people when I talk to them, I use the word 'privilege'.

CHANTE: Yes.

JESSICA: Because they're just going to get their hackles up.

CHANTE: Yeah. It's a trigger word. And again, it challenges who they believe that they are showing up as in the world. So once we get past that, it's much easier if people are much more malleable, but we have to get past that first.

JESSICA: On some people, I don't say 'bias'. I will say mental shortcut.

CHANTE: There you go. [Laughs] Whatever it takes to get through that conversation, I'm a fan of. Because I think people have to, again, words - that's another social construction. The meaning of a word, we have to agree on as a society. And 100 years, 200 years ago, it may have meant something else. Even 20 years ago, Google wasn't in the dictionary. Now, it is. And we socially accepted it, constructed that, put it in there. And so, in 20 years, 100 years, somebody else might say that's a crappy word, get it the hell out. [Laughs] We're not having that in the lexicon anymore. Get it out of here.

REIN: There is a model that I really like in other situations for understanding performance or potential or possibility. It came from Stafford Beer. And I'm not going to go into that because I could spend 15 minutes going into that, as you all know. But it is Actuality, Capability, and Potentiality.  Actuality is what we can do right now with the resources we have. What we're actually doing right now. Capability is what we could be doing if we really maximized our use of these resources and constraints. And then potential is what we ought to do by removing those constraints, giving people the resources they need.

CHANTE: Right.

REIN: So, capability, there is an upper bound on how much you can do given the resources and opportunities you have. And then, actuality is how close you are to it. Then, increasing potential is about moving that upper bound up.

CHANTE: I like that definition. I would agree with that. And again, I think that there will be people who might say, "Well, there's alternate ways to define that." But I think it gets to most of what we're talking about here.

JESSICA: Oh, oh. I'm going to say the philosopher, [Karl Popper] says that arguing over the meaning of words is pointless because words have meaning in context. However, agreeing upon the meaning of the words, even if its scoped to a particular conversation, [inaudible] that's useful.

CHANTE: I agree with that. I practice detachment as part of my meditative practice, and I detach from, sometimes, the outcome and the meaning of things. We're having a skin in the game because it doesn't help me get any further in what I'm trying to do. You know what I mean? It doesn't really help me. It actually hinders me if I have too much attachment to something like an outcome or, like I said, a meaning. If I can open myself up a little bit more, I unlock the potential.

JESSICA: Is that like choosing not to run a particular race?

CHANTE: Or it could be that I'm going to run the race but I don't care about winning. It's just that I'm running the race for the experience right now.

JESSICA: Oh, that's beautiful [inaudible]. Because then it's not about the outcome of the race, it's about the other outcome of all of our actions which is the next version of us.

CHANTE: Yes. It's like the collective experience and the collective outcome. Yes.

REIN: So, Stafford Beer, in the preface to his book, the Brain of the Firm which is where this model comes from says, "In communication, everything depends on what you end up with, not on what was actually said or written down." We get to choose the words and the important thing, like Jess said, is that we share some understanding by using them to communicate.

CHANTE: Yeah, there would have to be some shared understanding, some shared understanding to have a shared experience, I think.

REIN: You point out that people like to argue about the names we use and forget about the ideas they represent.

CHANTE: Precisely. I think that was sort of the point I was making about like for instance, LinkedIn, all these categories. We argue about names and the lexicon of our shared language at work or in professions and in industry. But sometimes, letting that go is so much more impactful because you may have a new emergence of something else that you never would have known before.

JOHN: This thread of the conversation is reminding me of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which I think, Rein, you had said isn't necessarily [crosstalk].

JESSICA: Yey! [Inaudible] 

[Laughter]

JOHN: The hypothesis that like the language that you used to think about something limits what you can think about it because if you don't have a word for a certain thing, it's just not going to come into you. And I think that's what you're talking about with LinkedIn and with these other things where if these are the 10 industries that you could be in and you're not in there, then you try and sort of force yourself into it or you don't exist in the system. And so, you're just not counted as part of whatever it is. The same thing goes with the gender field that has male and female in it. All the other options are just eliminated from reality.

CHANTE: Yes, absolutely. For me, I've realized over time that I'm really an innovative thinker. And when people put limiting notions into my mind, like when we're having an ideation session, for instance, and folks sort of give me [inaudible] and bounds. I feel like, "Oh, damn!" But if you don't talk about boundaries, for me, I can come up with a whole bunch of 'never thought about, never have spoken about' concepts and ideas and words and things like that. So, I think the minute you put this something in the air, the energy can actually shift for people. I really wholeheartedly believe that. 

JESSICA: Something like what?

CHANTE: I'm very much into somatic healing and energy healing, for instance. So, if somebody walks into the room with this notion of there's a limit, that life does not or this world does not exist in abundance, you can feel that shift. You can feel that in their energy. At least for me, I can definitely feel it. When I bump into people who are not open, they're very closed in terms of their energy at field, it feels bad to me and makes me feel a certain way. And I just wonder how much that plays into who we show up as in our families, in the community, at work, and the world.

JESSICA: It's interesting and that goes back to accepting the boxes that you've been labeled with. If you accept those boundaries and take them as given, then you close in and you close yourself off, which is so much better to just let all the ideas in and then filter them.

CHANTE: Or to not label them. I'm not sure if anybody here practices meditation or not but there's several different types of meditation in everything. There's this concept of having a thought, acknowledging that you have a thought but not labeling it good or bad when you're meditating and you're trying to get into this meditative practice. And I'll take it another step further. One of the philosophies, an ancient philosophy, attached to yoga is the concept of Advaita Vedanta which is about oneness and it's about non-binary things. There's no yin and yang. There's no good and bad. There's no right or wrong. It's just we are. We're here and we are, and people in the moment tend to actually realize that's actually how we experience the world. If you are living in the future or in the past too much, you start to label things because yet it's a step away from the moment and make a judgment or [inaudible]. 

JESSICA: Judgment is expensive.

CHANTE: Yeah, it is. What's the cost of it? That's what I'd like to figure out. What's the cost of judgment?

REIN: Heavy.

JOHN: My friend, Matt Ringel, has a conference talk where he talks about whiteboarding where he'll take a simple exercise. He says, "All right. Let's get some ideas up on here and I'll draw four squares and we'll put the ideas in these four squares and they represent these axes." He's like, "I've just told you seven truths about the universe that are going to bound these ideas." That there are four categories that they can go into, that this category is different from that category and a whole rundown. And it's this sort of idea that you've just put a whole structure around what the ideas are going to be. And nobody even realized you were doing it.

CHANTE: Yes. Right. We set these little rules. That is precisely what I think. I believe that.

REIN: Framing is incredibly powerful and also controlling the frame is an expression of power.

CHANTE: Yep, agree. And this is something that I've also been very interested in exploring right now as I even think around this idea of creating a podcast. I thought, "Wow! Framing." It's very similar to the curation and those who curate and who show up and lead the conversation, the facilitators, have so much power. So, who are the facilitators? Who are the curators in your life? Who do you allow to basically influence the story that you're being told and that you're going to repeat? And this shows up online all day long, Twitter. Who do you follow? Who do they follow? Where do they get the information?

JESSICA: What comments [inaudible] and hits the 'like' button. 

CHANTE: Yes. Is Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn the places you really should be? Because that provides a framework as well, just the way these platforms are.

JESSICA: It's not like we can choose not to frame. That's not [inaudible]. But we're always looking at things within some frame and we have to categorize at some point. But the trick is just look at it with more than one frame. Just know this is not the only one that makes such a difference.

CHANTE: Yeah, read about lots of frames, figure out that you can sort of cut and paste and adapt things that resonate best with you and it could be a conglomerate of all those things. But I think recognizing that there are frames you might be called to one more than the other is essential to doing things right in the world.

JESSICA: If you've ever switched religions or [inaudible], then if you can think about something in terms of your past frame, that's progress.

CHANTE: Oh, yeah. Which I had done. Yeah, totally. I grew up a Catholic and there was a point in time I was like, "No more Catholicism. I'm completely done with all of you." I wouldn't say I'm atheist but I would probably identify as agnostic. And then, it took me some time to sort of be comfortable there and to be arguing with the world from that point of view. And once I got comfortable and everything, I said, "OK, I can now go out and re-educate myself because my brain's [inaudible]." So, it's like a white space right now. But I had to get over all these assumptions and these feelings I had about Catholicism and Christianity first. It really required me to do that.

REIN: So there's a concept from psychology called Functional Fixedness which is when you are unable to perceive an object as having a use that's different from the one that you already know it has. And so, the experiment that they did to demonstrate this is you were given a box that had a candle and some thumbtacks in it and you were told, "Make this candle stick to the wall without falling down." And what everyone tried to do was figure out some mechanism of thumbtacks that they could put the candle on and then the obvious solution that escaped them was thumbtack the box to the wall and then put the candle on it because the box was a thing that held the parts to use and not a thing you could use to solve the problem. So, I wonder how much of this sort of categorization and limitation is, maybe not caused, but impacted by some sort of fixedness where we see ourselves as being in a category then we just don't see that there are other options for us.

CHANTE: I think that's a large part of it.

JESSICA: And if you can see, there's other options, that's where you can see why your greatest weakness is also a strength in different use.

CHANTE: Yes. I love this conversation.

REIN: How much of what you do as a coach is about -- I'm kind of guessing that this is the thing you do. How much of it is about looking at what a person is doing and how they are framing their lives and their responsibilities and saying, "Hey, have you thought about maybe you could do this?"

CHANTE: Yeah. It's very much, I would say, a big part of what I am doing. And it shows up so much so differently for each client. For instance, I'll give you one I'm working on right now, there's an organization I'm working with. My partner Rada and I, we want to figure out, for instance, how they engage their female staff but they already made it this: they showed up making an assumption that that was what was wrong with the organization today. It may have been an obvious one but I challenged the way in which they're setting limits for themselves. And we talked about engagement versus happiness. And somebody said, "Aren't they the same?" Well, no, Actually, they're not. So how we identify it and how we define it would limit us and maybe those are the only two things, the factors that play into this organization's "issue". I'm putting issue in their in quotes because again, it's how they're defining it and it sets tone. And that's in an organization. But if it's an individual that I'm coaching, to say it's the CEO in an organization. The language that they use tells me so much about them. How they approach a perceived problem tells me even more. 

JESSICA: Yeah, like the word female.

CHANTE: Yeah. And so then, I'll coach them and basically meet them where they are. And a lot of it for me is about the language and the actions I see. I listen first to the language and then I watch for the actions that they're taking and most of it's right there. They're easy. And then I coach to where they are developmentally. Some folks can hear you, and some folks have to see it and actually experience it to change. It's about behavioral change, too. We'll just use a whole bunch of things to sort of help people take on.

So, it's an interesting job. And when people come in saying, "Well, I thought a recruiter was this," or, "I thought that diversity and inclusion consultant is that." There you go again, putting limits on me. I'm really good with people and I'm really good with starting there and I feel comfortable because I feel like the people are the ones who run the organization. So, I'm good with people and figuring out how to, first of all, help them with their intersectionality, how they want to contain it and show up, help them reframe sometimes and make pivots to get to a better outcome.

JOHN: It sounds like you're approaching organizational change through the people rather than trying to address the organization as a whole.

CHANTE: Yeah. I think many times you have to. But of course, sometimes, you have these clients who want to do it very much like, "Nope, it's only just the organization. None of us here has an issue." It's like, "OK." 

REIN: This organization is somehow not made of people.

CHANTE: Right, yeah. "Don't call us out please. OK. It gets really uncomfortable." I'm like, "OK, guess I'll meet them where they are." I've learned. I mean, I think early on I'd be like challenging it but now I've learned. The path of least resistance sometimes when you're trying to help people with behavioral changes like, "I'm going to meet you where you are." I learned this in terms of nursing and trying to change somebody. They were diabetic and they loved Snicker bars. I'm not going to tell them not to eat Snicker bars. We're going to talk about something else. I'll leave that last. It's very touchy. It's a trigger for them.

REIN: I think that this is actually another binary to be deconstructed. There is on the one hand, the idea that a society is a function of the actions of individuals. And then on the other hand, there is the idea that an individual is a function of social pressures. And I think that the answer is somewhere in between.

JESSICA: And there's this assumption that the actions of individuals are formed by individuals, but it has a lot to do with the people around them who hit 'like'.

CHANTE: Right. People who hit 'like', people who pay their bills, people who validate them outside themselves. There's so many things that make us who we are and then how we go back and show up with that.

JESSICA: If you want more vegans in Iowa, offer a vegan lunch option. 

CHANTE: Right.

JESSICA: So much is about what we make easy. And then so much of inclusivity and accessibility is about making more things easy.

CHANTE: And which things we're choosing to make easy. How do we define easy?

REIN: I think of it as sort of people flow downhill. They'll do the thing that has, from their point of view, the least cost or the most benefit. They have some function they're optimizing. 

JESSICA: Usually, their attention.

REIN: And so, each person has different factors to weigh in on it. You can't just say, "This is easy." You can say, "This is easy for you."

CHANTE: Right.

JESSICA: Right. There's that whole thing. You can't change a situation to put things right in front of people. You can give them a button instead of requiring them to open a program type of command.

REIN: So from that perspective, it's a design problem, right?

CHANTE: I think so. I think, yes, the Masters of the Universe or the ones chosen who are protecting it. Have you watched, what is it, The Lego Movie, the Master Builder?

JESSICA: Yeah, the original Lego Movie?

CHANTE: Yeah.

JESSICA: It was so good.

CHANTE: And they figure out that the guy who had nothing in his mind was the master builder, which made me laugh so hard. It was such a bad example and lesson. I think it was Emmet? Am I wrong with that?

JESSICA: Yeah, Emmet. That's the hero.

CHANTE: Yeah. Remember? That was hilarious to me.

JESSICA: It was all situational, though. He was in the right place at the right time.

CHANTE: It was. I often start using that movie in the referencing of that more often, show it with my Lego, Emmet.

JESSICA: And your glued cap stuck to your back.

CHANTE: Right.

JESSICA: Because the hard part is removing something from the universe, like the Krazy Glue. Taking a word away is really hard.

CHANTE: It is. And usually, because of the pattern recognition, if you take something away, they want something to replace it. [Noise] not comfortable with that, like white space or like there's a gap here. So now what? They want sort of, you to tell them how to get to the next place.

JOHN: That actually ties in really well with Ariel Caplan did a keynote at RailsConf called The Stories We Tell Our Children. It's a great talk. But there was a particularly interesting point that's relevant here was he talked about forget who posited the original sort of law of bullshit which is that it takes 10x the amount of effort to refute bullshit as it does to create it. But in the talk, he poses Caplan's Corollary which is that rather than refuting bullshit, if you provide an alternate path, an alternate narrative that works around the bullshit, you can give something for people to follow rather than directly just telling them, "Take this away, take this out of your mind, don't think about it this way." But if you give them an alternate narrative that says, "No, this is how we can explain this thing," or, "This is how this thing works," people can follow that as a positive step towards a thing rather than trying to do a negative step away from a thing. And I really like that way of rather than just always pushing up against stupid ideas, if you just provide better ideas and explain them well, the people can be attracted to those and follow that path.

CHANTE: Yes, I agree with that notion. I would call that a tactic that you can use and that might be very helpful. And in some ways, it's helpful with folks especially with the concepts that we, as a society of this what we call infrastructural beliefs and changes we need to make, that require us to have a paradigm shift that's appropriate. But then somebody might say going back to the framing, the way that we show up and provide some suggestions individually could be an issue if you're trying to help somebody get some identity, for instance. But I do think that there's some truth to that because if I'm just thinking of my own identity, for instance, if I'm really lost in who I am or those variable sort of foundational things that we see in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, if I'm very much in a bad place, I need a way out. I need to see a glimmer of hope. Many times I need to see a rope come down the hole to give me a slight notion that there's a way out.

REIN: We're getting close to reflections. I just wanted to ask a quick question, actually not very quick and we could probably spend a whole episode talking about it. We wanted to ask you, and it has to do with how you work with organizations to improve diversity and inclusion, and specifically when organizations are metric-focused or data-driven and they tell you, "OK, what's the metric we're going to use to track diversity that we're going to use to make decisions about diversity?" What do you do?

CHANTE: I would first want to know and this is a thing that happens quite a bit. I want to know how they define it, because how they define diversity will impact the way in which they're measuring it or what data points they're correcting and putting emphasis on. If they define diversity as gender specific and cultural and racial, then that's what they're probably going to track. In that instance, I would probably, and I do often challenge and say, "Is it self-identified, self-selected or are you making an assumption by looking at somebody and having a conversation with them?" Either way, it's probably wrong because again, it could be that if you are offering a survey and you're in this data point you're collecting, with just five answers only. But my answer doesn't fit within those five options. Well, you miss my data point. And then the analysis that you're making as a conclusion to basically guide you as an organization to move forward could be skewed. So, I'd like to start with this universal place of the definition, the context that we're in, maybe choose a few different competitors and non-competitors to help you gauge within the context in which you're working as an organization and then start again. And most times, people were actually doing it incorrectly. They have a strong assumption and they don't want you to challenge it. They really want an easy answer. And there's so many ways to get there. So, I tell them there's more than one way to skin a cat. You really do need a strong diversity and inclusion road map that often usually starts with deconstructing your beliefs.

REIN: Here's the thing that makes me super anxious about social and cultural change and metrics. There's a law called Campbell's Law. Donald Campbell was a psychologist and a social scientist. His law is that when you use a quantitative social indicator, when you use a metric to make decisions about social and cultural change, that the metric itself will become corrupted and that the use of the metric will corrupt the social structure that you're trying to change. It will corrupt that social process that you're trying to change. And so, my concern is when a company says, "Hey, we want a metric for diversity," and then you give them one. No matter how good it is now, that it will become bad, it will become corrupted over time. And not only will it become a bad metric, but it will cause the people who are optimizing for it to corrupt the social processes that they're trying to change. Their metrics can be [inaudible].

CHANTE: Oh yeah, I think that's what we're seeing actually. We see this happening quite a bit right now in terms of these bigger Fortune 500 companies, unfortunately. And you see that these metrics they've selected have created this situation in the marketplace where candidates now respond to those metrics and anybody who comes into the job thereafter, even if you're a startup, you mimic those metrics. So, my belief is that things are always changing and you shouldn't -- again, don't get too attached to these things. Practice detachment because a definition of diversity is extremely fluid as are the identities, the identity of who we are is usually very fluid. If you're being honest with yourself, it can be. And if you don't think it is, then I will say that's problem.

JESSICA: A fluid identity [inaudible].

CHANTE: Oh, yeah. And as we get into this whole emerging technology, we'll challenge who we are and how we identify and what we believe, hopefully forever. Again, as I was going back to the Avatar example, I think about it. It's like there's no option to select a gender and that's really interesting. And if you start with an app like a digital twin that has no gender, goodness, you can take away all the things you thought would be limiting to you such as selecting one or the other. It's an opportunity, like exponential opportunity.

JESSICA: Because selecting the other just means you have to take on a different role.

CHANTE: Yeah. But what if you were all of it?

JESSICA: Then you have to choose so many things. It can be a lot of work. Just like bringing your own lunch. You have to figure out what to bring every morning. That's why I never bring it.

CHANTE: Right. But going back to this whole thing. Like if you're all of it, like you're a reflection of it all, like the Advaita Vedanta, that I am a reflection of the entire universe, a collective conscious. That means I'm everyone. I'm all [inaudible] and all that I can't even see. So, I don't need to choose or decide what's good and bad. I'm simply here and I can know that there's a lot of power in the collective consciousness, in the collective identity of who we are as humanity, for instance. Then we could be a lot of avatars.

JESSICA: I mean, at some point, you have to make a choice. You have to take one action and not the other. Does it mean you have to do the same thing [inaudible]? 

CHANTE: Yeah. Living out alternate realities and universes with the power of mixed reality, virtual reality [inaudible] reality.

JESSICA: Amazing.

CHANTE: It is. I'm super excited about it.

JESSICA: Someone said to me the other day, "Wouldn't it be cool to be a bird and live in three dimensions?" And I was like, "You kind of do have extra dimensions on the internet."

CHANTE: Yeah. I think that we are getting closer to seeing that and to having it be like an everyday reality versus only folks who have that technology. I think eventually, it will be [inaudible] worlds and realize, "Oh my God! I've been an avatar the whole time. Oh, shit! What does this mean?" Then we have lots of exponential crises happening all around the world.

JESSICA: Is the world in my head? Doesn't matter!

CHANTE: Does it exist? Maybe it doesn't. OK. 

JOHN: So, I think it's about time to get into the section of the show we call reflections to talk about things that really stood out for us in this conversation and things we'll take away to think about later. I think for me, there's lots of things that I'm going to be thinking about later but I think one that's popping up particularly for me is a theme that's popped up on quite a few other shows in the past year which is, like you were saying, Chante, when you pay attention to the margins, to the marginalized, to the things that are the farthest from the center and the main parts of things and optimize for those getting better, you also, at the same time, optimize for the happiness of the rest of the people inside those margins. The people that aren't as marginalized because by making it a better environment for them, you make a better environment for everyone. I think the conversation also came up in the context of accessibility where if you build your website using accessible coding standards, you improve it for the people that need them but you also end up building a better design for everyone.

CHANTE: Yes.

JOHN: So, that's a theme that's definitely highlighting for me here.

CHANTE: I like that. Thank you for sharing that one.

JESSICA: My favorite quote of the show was letting go of your goal allows emergence of the outcomes you didn't expect. If we're in the race to be in it, then we have our eyes open to everything that comes out of the experience besides the trophy. I've been thinking lately about how whenever we reach a milestone, we stick our heads up and look around. The first thing to look at is not did we make our numbers; it's what effects on the system have we had that we didn't expect.

CHANTE: That's a question people should be asking themselves whoever they work with more often. 

JOHN: Yeah. I think that's a problem with goals in general, which is that often you focus on them for so long, then the moment you achieve them, you're just like, "Well, now what?"

CHANTE: Yeah. "Now, what am I supposed to do?" 

JESSICA: I think this is one reason we have like test driven developments and iterative developments and at an extreme, [TCR and testament report] because the smaller we make our goals, the more frequent we will stick our heads up to look around.

CHANTE: Yeah, that's a great point. That's one thing I really appreciate about the way I see the agile framework, for instance. The quick cycle of sprints. I wish more people would adopt that in other realms of work. In fact, this is a conversation I'm having with some folks from my nursing school. I don't think that they understand what the agile framework is and maybe how it's shown in terms of technology but there are certainly lots of things they could learn from using a framework like that to get to iteration and better design.

REIN: One of the other things about that I think is that we're always operating with incomplete information. And so, we will never be able to take the most optimal path towards our goal. We might even have the wrong goal. And the more frequently that you can, just like you said, stop, look around, and adjust based on feedback, the shorter the path will ultimately take us, and the more likely we are to actually achieve the goal.

JESSICA: Or more likely, something that emerges that is better than your original goal. 

CHANTE: Right. And goals, right? Then you have chances to do more things. It's like if you just commit to one. This is what we see happening in lots of work places. One goal a year or three goals a year. And then it's like, "Shit! You did that all year and you don't stop and pause and ask? You wasted a whole year of nothing."

JESSICA: And it's like, "Oh, yeah. Because nine months ago, I knew exactly what the most useful thing for me to be doing now." No. 

CHANTE: This is the one thing I just love, like I said, about technology and folks in technology is I learn so much just from that simple framework and approach to problem, for opportunity. I agree. 

REIN: One of the things that I'm starting to believe more and more is that this model we have for achieving change where we fixate on a goal and we try to find steps to get to the goal isn't actually useful because it presumes too much about our ability to know what our goal ends up being when we get there. And I think what's more useful is to have values that we can use to determine whether we're moving in a direction we want to move in and to just continue to move in a direction that is towards our values.

CHANTE: I love that. I would say that's something that most people can do. It's nice that you brought this here because sort of what I was saying at the beginning is if you've never been allowed to think about who you are and what you [inaudible] to these values, because usually that's sort of how we describe ourselves, "I have integrity," and that's a value. And so, thinking about the way in which you show up and the values that you have, is far easier and more accessible, more universal, I think, for people. It doesn't require you to have as much judgment. It's more fluid and flexible. It's something that's very inclusive, as well. I love that.

REIN: Let's say, for example, that your goal is to become a Principal Software Engineer. And you think that that's your end value. That's your goal. I always challenge that that's actually the means. That's the means to achieve what you value. And what you value might actually be impact on the organization in terms of making technical decisions, impact in terms of being able to put things into production that are helpful to people.

JESSICA: Or maybe it's [inaudible] salary [crosstalk]. 

REIN: But if you take what you think is your end value, becoming a Principal Software Engineer, and then you analyze that and figure out what it is that you value that caused you to have that goal, I think you can be more successful in achieving those values.

CHANTE: Yeah. 

JESSICA: Yeah, because [inaudible] you're going to get that promotion, you're going to be a Principal Software Engineer and then you're going to have a mid-life crisis because you're like, "No! I'm supposed to be happy!" Achieving goals doesn't make us happy.

REIN: Because it turns out that [crosstalk]. Even if you achieve the goal, the things you value are still there and there's still a way for you to go, moves in the direction of your values even once you achieve your "end goal".

CHANTE: Right. And if the software engineer is the goal and you realize, according to Forbes or whoever, indeed whoever [inaudible] that, "Yeah, that job really isn't that great anymore," then you feel a little shitty about yourself. So, if you make it about the value versus the goal, it's about the experience, the journey along the way and the things that make a good so and so. It could be applied to more than one job.

REIN: Last thing I'll say about this is I think it's also much easier to realize that your values can change over time than to get to the point where you have to reconcile all of your current values with your current goal and realize that they're no longer aligned.

JESSICA: Yeah.

CHANTE: Such a small subtle thing that I think people can accept, makes it more palatable for people to accept.

REIN: Last, last thing I'll say about this is that the goal is a binary. You either achieve it or you don't. Whereas when values be consistently moving toward something that is more fulfilling for you, whether or not you ever achieve a goal.

CHANTE: This is awesome.

JOHN: Yeah.

CHANTE: I love this. This is good. These whole kind of ahas and these takeaways are actually what I like about this conversation the most is that it's really interesting how we can start with these sort of domains or ideas and then we arrive at these sort of different takeaways and different levels of appreciation and that none of it's right or wrong. It's all really good. Having this conversation even amongst the four of us feels really good for me and I feel like I'm making progress in terms of diversity equity inclusion [inaudible]. To me, I feel like I showed up and had a really good day.

JESSICA: Yey! All of our listeners have a better day, too. And if this conversation made your day better, you might want to join our Slack or just contribute to our Patreon. And if you give at least a dollar to our Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, then you'll get an invitation to our Slack channel which is low volume and very friendly. You don't have to join the Slack and you don't have to contribute to our Patreon. But we'd love it if you did.

CHANTE: I will be, for the record.

JESSICA: Oh, Chante, do you have any reflections?

CHANTE: Yeah, that was it. But I was going to say that like I said, that this whole conversation, the way that we started and where we are now feels really good. And that, for me, it's just a reminder not to have as many expectations and adhere to these goals but to be thinking about how I can show up, be better, be effective even with pods of four people versus a room of 40 or 400. So, it's not about quantity, it's about quality conversation which I think we just had. We didn't start the conversation saying where we all landed in terms of these notions and thoughts. But I do feel that we're very much on the same page and on the same vibe, if that makes sense.

JESSICA: We are all better for having run in this conversation race together.

CHANTE: Yes.

JOHN: Yes.

CHANTE: So, thank you very much for having me.

JESSICA: Thank you.