All right, as we wait for everyone to enter, I just wanna invite those of you who are here to just take a second and center to start thinking about with me, how when we talk about words like diversity, equity inclusion, what we're trying to cultivate and what that means.And also to start thinking about what are the actions of equity, inclusion, belonging and justice that actually get us to an outcome like diversity and how perhaps we were doing that or not doing that. So just starting to think for yourself from your own perspective, what that means to you. So I wanna start painting a picture that we can, I think understand together over the last several years, we have seen what some would call social justice improvements, voices being raised and changes happening. They have been around inclusion of neurodiversity, talking about the anti blackness and the violence against black bodies that exists around the world. We have focused on how to start thinking about gender from the non binary in the Western societies specifically and also the violence that is often still happening to women and girls throughout the world and how we can start to empower each other and give each other a voice.

All of this is in comforting of de I but what we go to work in every day is not necessarily excited about any of that or even centered on it. So when we think about what work culture is or what it has been, I invite you to start thinking about the industrialized revolution and how much that has added and grown our societies throughout the world. But what we don't often talk about is what the values it is founded on. So when we think about work culture that comes from industrialized work, we are then setting ourselves with the intention of the values that come from how that work was schema. And it has been centered on the ideas of division, exploitation and competition. So I think as we start from that perspective, and then we start to think about how the division of labor a term that only existed when the industrial revolution started. Um how this has created separation within our understanding of how all things work, where resources come from, who it impacts when we take those resources or we go and look for them. And in the middle of all of this is a centering of very specific identities that were welcome within these spaces.

This is also where we started to center the idea of management needing managers who had a larger picture and could direct all the moving parts that were individualized and necessarily didn't need training to have people do them. Additionally, we are talking about cultures that were specifically made to support white men, men who had other people to take care of daily tasks to help them think about questions and define answers. And those broadly come across as slaves, servants, assistants, wives, mothers.

And the list goes on of people who are supporting this management schema within the way that you and I continue to work today. So as we think about this, I want to recognize that what this has given us is a very homogenized idea of what working is. And I think it's frankly, no wonder that the experience most of us have every day when we go to work is traumatizing is harmful, is actually pushing against the identities, the experiences that we bring in into that space as a woman of color, I've experienced that in multiple spaces.

And what I think we have to start naming is that when we think about the acceleration of women of LGBT Q communities and trans communities of embracing neurodiversity and starting to recognize how oppressive we are to blackness within the world, we have to start to think about then what do we want work to actually be?

Because it was founded on a lot of those ideals that we still have to push against every day when we go to work or when we go into specifically homogeneous spaces. And tech is one of the most homogenous spaces within the world at this time when it comes to working. So, thinking about this kind of archaic model of work, I ask you to think a little broader right to step outside of the office and to think about what it is, we're actually wanting to start removing from the way that we work, the way we show up together, the way we make decisions and think about ourselves within the world.

And if you look at the spectrum of domination, what it is basically getting at is that on one side, we have these ideas that are oppressive and build hierarchies, not the hierarchy is wrong, but these hierarchies are not based on skill, best ability or best intentions. These hierarchies are based on violence, harm and creating that homogenous elite that we were talking about that shows up as management within the industrialized revolution. So if you and I want work to be different, we want the decisions made within the tech world to be different.

We want the spaces we're in to feel safe and excited to engage us in our experiences. We have to realize that we need to design something different, stepping into the shoes and the roles of our brothers and our fathers of the mentors that many of us have had in the role models isn't wrong, but it's not going to get us anywhere different. And so what I'm inviting you today to start thinking about is what is the design of partnership, how does that show up in spaces and how does that actually create communal healing when you continue to think from that domination to partnership schema? And then we consider how much money time um you know, processing has gone into larger discussions internationally around issues of oppression and domination. We unfortunately are seeing that a lot of the efforts are falling short, right? The numbers that we are seeing in the tech industries of women, leaders across the world of black women, leading of Latino women, we are not seeing a lot of changes and we are more predominantly saying that a lot of the people we say were there to support or to try to include, we are actually pushing away and having a runaway from our occupations from our spaces.

So there are several things that have not been addressed. Um I think that we have created a lot of employee resource groups and support. We have created a lot of dynamic discourse to really think about history and roles. Um some of the systems of power that are around us, but what we aren't doing is then addressing how that power and position is showing up within our actual industry or the space that we work in, how that equals out in pay and accountability within those spaces and how to start building more accountability in a social schema.

We also are not then committing very specifically to understanding and removing the barriers of the people closest to us and around us, right? Um So, we might recognize that we need to center diversity, but we are not recognizing that we are then going to have to change the way we are structured and start to support those who have not been supported before. Additionally, we are not then working with employees and working with communities. The huge push that we see around the world um happening very strongly and predominantly in America. Specifically, we see this push to go back to working in offices. And while this isn't wrong or bad, it is not lining up with the needs of people today there, the new normal is not exactly what it was before in many instances. And so we see then that all of these pressures are pushing people away because the culture is still toxic and unwelcoming and is not reflective of who they are and also not reflective of necessarily what they need want or feeling passionate about in the world anymore. So what we would like to talk about and kind of engage in the space around is how do you actually redesign what is happening around you?

What is the process of rethinking moving into action understanding in a different way, taking in qualitative narrative is important as quantitative and moving through a process. So what I'm going to share with you today are a few important aspects of that kind of change that we look for.

One is starting with proactive process and inclusive culture. So, understanding how to be restorative and trauma informed and how we are building culture, which invites all aspects of people and recognizes their behavior as communication. We learn to talk about how do we, what are we designing for? Right.

What is all the burnout? What is all the uh hostility and violence? What is the economic pressure causing it's causing this regulation? So how when we are designing, are we designing past inclusion to get towards resiliency and to actually support ourselves and others in a way that makes them feel that they belong, that makes them want to be a part of that work culture that gives them the space to be creative.

And then we're gonna talk about how actually implementing design thinking and using an actual process of design thinking is allyship. That is a way that we can take our position, our power, our experience, our um witnessing of what's happening and put it into action with others to make changes that actually support all of us. When we consider what this means. I want to then tell you a little bit more about who I am. So uh I come to this work with a multicultural, multi racial background growing up in the Southwest of America and my entire life, I wanted to celebrate as well as bring together the differences and bridge the needs of people and to look at what communal healing really means when we think about the diversity of the people within our spaces now as the world becomes closer and more integrated.

I think that this really centers on us working together to heal and community, to do different, to design the world that actually reflects all of us and includes all of us. And so through my company, Intersectional Innovations, we do just that we work on helping people to start rethinking to look at discovery processes that are qualitative and quantitative and that are then really centered on healing emotional issues. Um understanding why they're there and actually starting to integrate the needs, wants desires, outcomes of the entire company and all the people in it to start shaping how you move forward together. I'm really happy to be here with you today and I hope that as we walk through this discussion, you walk away with an understanding and even just some contemplation for yourself around. What is the design of AD E I culture? How again are we enacting the action steps of equity, belonging, inclusion and justice to get to diversity and start to rethinking what we're doing within these spaces and how we're addressing this? What is so different if you were to compare industrialized work culture to de I design culture is that the values number one start in a completely different space.

We are also then looking at how to incorporate honor and integrate the experience that are diverse and innovative around us instead of putting people back in boxes and telling them to do a specific line of work, which again, I think is how uh many of us work today, right? We have a lot of intelligence, we have a lot of tools, we have a lot of experience. And so we want to put those together collaboratively to be innovative rather than siloing how we work. And then ultimately, what we're trying to do is create spaces that actually engage everyone if they're actually psychologically emotionally safe and physically safe for everyone that honor and celebrate the differences that come into the space of innovation and that propel things forward faster and also uh propel them in a way that is moving with everyone.

So ultimately, what we're trying to get to and what we do within intersection innovations is center on social efficiency. So social efficiency is multi layered and as you can see, it starts with restorative process, it then centers creating a trauma informed workplace, we then are going to center relationship, which is really going to build trust and allow us to have safety and empowerment with each other.

Um and empowerment individually as a person as well as being able to empower each other. Ultimately, when you build a space like this where people want to engage, they feel safe to ask questions, to try and to fail, we actually start to build equity, belonging and inclusion, we build that healthy culture that engages and embraces and utilizes all aspects of who is there.

So this is what I want you to walk away with today is some of these ideas of how to think about social efficiency across your company or organization. So we're gonna start with proactive process and talk about how this starts to build an inclusive culture specifically when we think about being proactive. Um This word is also coinciding with the word restorative. We are thinking about how to address things before they happen, right?

Instead of being reactive, putting out fires uh and maybe trying to nullify the harm that's happened. We're thinking ahead by engaging people to avoid the harm in the first place and we're engaging the measures, policies, protocols, relationship space that keep us away from that problem in which we see could happen down the line. So this is where we start, if we want to actually start to redesign work culture and we want to think about work and engaging people differently. But to do that is to take into the reality of how we're all feeling what we're dealing with. Um I have said this a few times in the last few years, I believe that we are living through abnormal adult behavior in the last few years. As far as seeing people break down not heavy emotional stamina to deal with things they could deal with before being triggered by things they hadn't been triggered by in the years, all of this uh myself included has come up for us, right? As we've had continual change and unknowns. So I wanna share with you this diagram very quickly that comes to excuse me, comes to us from the neuros network.

And this is an old idea that explains how stress affects us and why it affects us differently, depending on what kind of stress it is. So to recognize what we continue to deal with as change continues to happen and pressure continues to build is we have this regular cycle of unpredictable stress that's been created for us over the last 3 to 4 years. So as we think about this dress, I'm sure you can think about some conversations or situations for yourself or just in witnessing other people that maybe it just didn't go the way you expected them to or became much more volatile than you expected. This is explained through this system, right? Predictable, moderated controllable stress. These are the things that we get used to, right? Um Getting up at a certain time and making sure you get in your car and drive to work. So you're not late paying your bills. Uh recognizing you have to have health care or going and doing uh the good work of feeding yourself well and getting exercise, right? These can, can still be stressful, but they can be tolerated and build resilience when they are predictable, we can schedule them, we can plan them, we can interact with them when we become sensitized and vulnerable is when we are living through regular unpredicted stress, right?

This is why the stress of poverty is one of the most intense stresses that can be experienced because the unknown is constant. Uh the lack of safety and thriving is constant. So this is what creates vulnerability in all of us. And it's something that as a culture, as work teams, as communities, we are all experiencing together in different ways. So how do we move forward? There's multiple facets to this and ways to think about it. There's obviously so many systemic issues involved in this kind of discussion.

But when we think about again, the spaces that we are in and the people that we work with, we want to start from this proactive restorative continuum perspective, centering trust within relationships so that people actually can speak up and engage, they can say what they need or ask questions without being ridiculed or without fear of losing their job or losing an opportunity.

And again, meaning sharing themselves. Um We then want to figure out how to maintain that community and build on that, right? Like how are we systemically building in relationship and trust development within our culture? How are we centering that relationship in those conversations to understand more needs and then where there is harm, we have to repair it and address it when we have had um unwitting or unknowing events happen between people that have caused harm. We need to still come to some resolution and move forward. Sometimes the harm is organization to person and that has to be addressed differently, but still needs to be addressed because otherwise people walk around with that harm and it continues to be resistance and to impede this change that we all desire within the spaces that we are sharing and working in.

So really what we're focused on here is starting from curiosity wanting to understand what's happening and why engaging in relationship and then being willing to repair harm, working to avoid future harm as it might show up for us. This is how we prevent issues. This is how we prevent conflict. I talked a little bit with you or I mentioned, I should say about having a trauma informed space and so trauma informed space has these six guiding principles present happening all the time. So, you know, when we say that we want to have psychological safety, but we don't work on building peer support, relationships and collaboration, we usually don't get very far in our trust and safety because we don't know each other. We don't know the strengths and weaknesses of each other. We don't know um follow through and ability. And so it changes the way we react and work with each each other. As we build safety and psychological safety, we build trust and transparency. Then we can again continue to create peer support and collaboration. Centering that continual relationship develop through the products, the projects that you do together as well as intentionally creating accountability or relationship. In other ways, we are centering the empowerment of voice and choice for every individual.

So this is where often we say we want diversity. But then when we have different needs, different opinions and different experiences in the room, we shut them down, we go back to how things were. So if we actually want diversity equity inclusion, we have to actually empower all of the voices, start to include these differences and realize that there's going to be a momentum of shifting as we have more of that within our space. If we are doing all this, we will start to engage with understand bridge culture, we will start to understand context and connection to history and think about that in our future decisions and we will address the power dynamics that are specifically hinged on gender, which we find in all spaces and shows up in many ways, whether it is around homophobia and transphobia or whether it is specifically oppressing the female roles or the females within spaces again, uh the points of this.

So the takeaways are to really be centered on that understanding behavior and moving forward together so that we can start to think about designing for resilience. So we talked a little bit before about um what has happened, right? The turmoil is created vulnerability. So what I want us to kind of swing the pendulum towards is what offsets vulnerability and what shifts VUN vulnerability, which creates anxiety. It creates burnout, it creates disengagement and distrust is resiliency and resiliency always starts with the individual. But it is also something that we can build within our spaces collaboratively with each other. So that is where I would like to kind of jump us to thinking about one for ourselves but two in community, what is it? We're trying to actually create when we talk about de I and we talk about justice and social shifts within the way that we work. So resilience, when we look at it from this um pillar set, we are looking at it from an individual perspective, what has to be present for an individual to become resilient. So each of these five pillars has to be present for someone to become resilient. And what I think is most important about this is that hopefully you can see that where we have to start within these discussions of changing is to think about self. How are you doing in resilience? How are those around you showing up within these perspectives?

Starting with self judgment and po positive view of self, right. Self talk. How are you doing with that? Um how you speak internally, those patterns of discussion that you have those turn into your feelings and thoughts about others as well, right? So it's very hard to even bridge sometimes with others when we aren't feeling well about ourselves. And so this is where we have to start having goals, which again can be great when done in community or on projects within your teams and organizations. This is also moves us towards resiliency, realizing there's something that we can accomplish. We decided we're going to and we're going to work towards making connections is not just about relationship. It's actually also about like the connections of idea and context universality between people.

It's about building context of things within yourself to have greater understanding. And then I think, you know, it's, it goes without saying when we think about the vulnerability made by constant change, that part of it, we become resilient is accepting that change will happen, it does happen and will continue to happen. But that we will be OK, we have the ability to make new goals and then eventually to take decisive action towards those goals and towards the things that are most important to us in life. So this is thinking about resiliency on an interpersonal individual way. I want to take you back to this idea of social efficiency because social efficiency gives us these pillars in a organizational way to think about what is resiliency in an organization. We are in a group, we are working together, our goals and outcomes are tied to each other.

How do we become resilient? And so again, starting from what we just talked about we are looking at these proactive processes that have the pillars of trauma and form practice throughout them that allow everyone to engage everyone to ask for what they need and also to step up and to loudly proclaim what they have to offer and how to engage within the work from there.

We are centering again that trust and safety, psychological safety, that empowers individuals to actually not just know that they're allowed to be there, but to actually believe they are welcome and invited and will continue to be respected and engaged no matter what they say or what they share.

But then next, we have to do something actionable to think about how to make change together, right? Um If we're going to move beyond the model of one manager, knowing how everything works and getting people to work together, the next step is to think about how does everyone work together. And we need a mode, we need a system to do that so that we all understand how to do it together. But when we use that mode and we have a system which we'll talk about shortly, we even actually start to create real equity, belonging and inclusion because we are going to address the different issues in the pockets of oppression, the pockets of silencing the pockets of otherness that have shown up in the way we've been working for generation upon generation.

And often a lot of that is microaggressions. It's uh silencing through policy, it is just removing people really quietly and we don't like what they had to say. So let's think about the actions, right? How do we create change together in community? I want you to think about it even further to think of to consider, excuse me, what is allyship? How do you actively engage in allyship, to empower someone else to remove barriers? Um and also to recognize and take care of yourself within situations. And so what I propose is that ally in action means that you are actually taking a process that you can use with others in a trauma informed and proactive way that gets you to a new conclusion that everyone has engaged in, right? That it's not just the few, it's the many can process and do together. So this is where design thinking comes in for us. So again, starting from that idea of allyship, what I would just ask you to do in this moment and to consider as you move out of this space is how this starts with you, right? How do you start to assess where you are disempowered and maybe need an ally yourself? But also where you have position and power.

And uh just to clarify when we talk about position and power, we're talking about the power, we have that shifts from space to space, from situation to situation. So, you know, in one space like today, I might be seen as someone worth listening to at a webinar and yet I can leave the space and go to a grocery store and get followed around by an older white person that's worried I'm stealing. So in each space, my power and position changes, how I'm treated what I have access to changes. And so how we start as allies is first assessing that what is our power and position, what do we have in relation to supporting others to so that they can then empower and support themselves. So if we start from there and we're leading towards uh designing together, another thought, we just have to always keep in our back pocket is that when we think about empowering others, it's not about doing for them. This is not a savior complex. It's about recognizing they need someone to move barriers out of the way and create space for them to do for themselves. So if we think from that perspective, designing with our colleagues, designing with the people around us makes a lot of sense, right?

Because empowerment is actually them creating for themselves and asking for what they need and having that become reality. So um some of you may be familiar with the Human Centered design model. I really like this visual. So I want to share it with you because I think it explains it in a simplistic way when we think about design, what we're actually really thinking about is what is the po process of creation. What is the actual process of collaboration? And how do you do that from a best practice perspective, which is to understand the actual needs of the constituent, the consumer, the client and then create from that need, right? Design, whatever it is a chair, a process, a speech from the need of that actual person, it makes a lot of sense. It's how we become equitable, how we become universal in what we design in the world. So what this process shows us is that to do this, we start from empathy. We start from that curiosity of what did the person need? What do they want? Um And how can I understand that best? How can I ask them and get that information once you have that you can start to define and make sense of what the problem actually is. What all of the possibilities are for fixing that problem and how to start honing in on solution from there.

You start to idea what are all the solutions? How do these function? What is best about them? What is weakest about them? And what should we focus on that again? Is centering the human need, the ask from the person in what we're creating. Once we decided that we're gonna prototype it, we're gonna test it. And I think what's powerful about prototyping is that it gives us a space to not think about every decision is final. Every product is final. It creates this option and reality that we live in, which is that the context around us continually changes, right? So the needs um what it offers us will change. This is why engineers make well, they also do it for money. But this is why we have so many versions of every cell phone that exists in every laptop. They're iterating that prototype, testing it and then making it better. So the last part of testing includes that iteration process, right? Where we are thinking about how did the solution work?

What was great about it? What do we need to continue to define and make better? What I would um like to say is I think the next leveling up is human centered design is this concept of laboratory design. And laboratory design starts with identifying as a group what your equity commitment is. So instead of just looking at a problem and going through this process, which is very similar of designing a solution, we start from recognizing what do we actually want to achieve when we talk about equity, what are we working towards? What is that outcome? What do we see happening around us? And then from there, how do we start to see and understand problems and barriers and work them through this process of solution? So here we are doing the same steps, empathizing and defining asking questions to understand more. Then from that we start to imagine in prototype and ID eight. And once we have done that. We're able to see if it works right to come back to iterate and to try again, recognizing though the human experience of oppression, the human experience of being disempowered and how with our equity commitments we're working towards shifting that and changing that overall.

So I invite you to think from that perspective um to engage and start for yourself. I would, I would recommend printing out this diagram. You can visit uh the National Equity Project or the Stanford D School to learn more about the laboratory design model. And I encourage you to, there's also classes you can take. Um but what I will point out is that this only works when we are centering on using the process with others. So actually printing out this diagram, putting it on your clipboard, bringing it to your meeting and then mapping out these steps right for you and your teams or you and your colleagues is exactly how the change comes about. Because within these conversations and these thinking and understanding steps, you start to gain not only understanding of a problem but of each other, you start to understand the greater context of what is happening around you, the feelings that are showing up as well as the needs.

And from there, you start to make decisions, which I think is 100% contradictory to what most of us have experienced, whether it's been in our families, in work in our churches in our community spaces, we often have someone making decisions for everyone else, hopefully out of wisdom and compassion, but if not everyone deals with the outfall, right?

And so this is how we start to shift that we make it a collaborative process, we sit down and walk through the steps together, whether that takes us a couple meetings, a couple days or a couple of weeks to get our answers and to start thinking about our solutions. And then we recognize that our solutions will change, right? As your work team changes, as the employees themselves change as the outcomes change and the goals, the funding, we will change the solutions, right? We will actually also have more needs that start to show up or just new and different needs. So to have space for that and interact with that, we need to engage this idea of prototyping and idea what I would lastly say about this is that one of the outcomes that can happen when you start to use this process, whether it again is for a product or for a team dynamic that you're trying to solve a team problem.

Um One thing that comes from this when it's done genuinely and through these steps is that we start to see people having a greater understanding of the actual needs and outcomes of others and starting to be able to connect themselves to others needs and outcomes. This is really important, right? When we are wanting to create diversity of people and to have a lot of people within a room that come from different languages, walks of life, cultural and climate experiences. When we have people in a room who are used to speaking very loudly and being listened to all the time or used to being silenced to having their ideas spoken over or taken from them. We show up with a lot of different needs that are hard to be verbalized in just an hour meeting conference where we are talking about the week's agenda. So we will create space that is separate from that and we will walk through each of these steps, giving a commitment even to the process of starting from compassion and empathy, starting from our group and individual equity commitments, we start to see huge shifts in our interpersonal relationships within space because now we have started to build a total different understanding of who we are.

We are starting from a very different place than uh trying to just meet deadlines or to make ourselves seem actionable. We're starting from a space of actually wanting to learn to work with people to actually enact the ideas of collaboration, which can be very difficult if we have never experienced before. Um I think often we think of collaboration as a couple people having ideas and hopefully smashing them together and then making it happen. Uh And if not, oh, well, so I think that this gives us an opportunity to really step beyond a lot of our own experiences of collaboration and to dive deeper into what are the experiences of collaboration when we are creating. And if work, the space, the way we're asked to show up the way we're told to behave, the way we're spoken to doesn't feel good, it's toxic and harmful. There are processes we can take to change this if people are willing to. And I think one of the most powerful is this idea, design, thinking and implementing that from a restorative process and trauma and farm practice idea.

So as we sit with these ideas, I'm interested to hear if anyone has any questions or thoughts, I do see one note in the chat. So I will go look. Um But yeah, this is our opportunity just to answer any questions or to talk about what you've seen today. I hope that what you will consider as you walk away is what can you do to start to create and design inclusivity around you? What are those action steps? What can you do to engage a design process that would allow you to be able to work with people in a new way and to create something very different? I thank you all for being here. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your conference. I know that I will. Thank you.