Unbias

Diversity Drives Performance. Implicit bias, whether racial, gender, or cultural, hurts sales, causes misses in marketing, and undermines the hiring and retention of the best people. Companies in the bottom quartile on diversity also are at the bottom of financial performance.  

Organizations have been trying for years to advance and promote diversity through awareness, training and mentorship, with moderate success. What is limiting progress?  Recent findings show that much, if not most, of bias in organizations isn’t intentional. Most bias is pre-cognitive, implicit and unconscious: opinions and reactions are formed before we even become aware of them.  No amount of awareness and diversity training overcomes this underlying constraint.  Even organizations with the best intentions to be fair remain steeped in unconscious bias. 

• What can be done?  
• How do we counter unconscious bias at work?  
• How do we recruit and retain the absolute best talent, and in the process advance a more equitable workplace?  
• Can new discoveries in science and technology offer a solution? 

Working with scientists and technologists from around the world, in university labs and commercial entities, the UnBias project is assembling the most promising approaches to countering racial and gender bias in the workplace, and
identifying where they can be applied in organizations.

UnBias is a 6 month project investigating this question:

What emerging tools, technologies, scientific discoveries and practical approaches might be applied to the persistent problem of unconscious bias in hiring, development, promotion and pay?

Areas of investigation will include:

• Recognizing and countering cognitive bias and autonomic preference
• Neuroscience and perception
• Visual and social signal processing
• Bid data analysis for identifying top socializers
• Behavior modification tools
• Self awareness tools and measurement devices, including Quantified Self
• Low resolution techniques and experiments

Sponsoring UnBias

If you are a forward-looking organization as interested in these questions as we are, as committed to investigating unconscious bias, and developing a new knowledge base that can be leveraged in practical, operational situations, we invite you to participate by being a project sponsor.   

Sponsors are invited to take part in shaping the project’s specific points of inquiry, participate in ongoing project direction, and access to early results.  Sponsors  are also able to direct and prioritize solution directions. Sponsors will be recognized in all digital, print and media materials, and will receive an UnBias badge to include in their own communications. 

• Basic sponsorship: All of the above, with digital participation in project direction.
• Vision sponsorship: All of the above with advisory board designation, live participation in project direction, and participation in end of project retreat.
• Spectrum sponsorship: All of the above, plus Spectrum-level sponsors will also receive tailored material for their own unique internal Human Resource and cultural development concerns, including pre-project interviews and assessments, and end of project custom materials.