A real-world simulation exercise to help uncover unseen bias in the workplace
Overview
Individual and organizational bias manifest themselves in different ways, however if left unchecked, their negative impact on engagement, talent selection, trust, profitability, moral, and inclusion can be devastating.
Deciding Factor, a highly interactive exercise designed by Palagn Enhancement Strategies, simulates how our biases surface and impact critical decision-making processes — for organizations, teams, tasks, and committees. Given realistic scenarios and portfolios of diverse team members and situations, participants are challenged to balance decision-making processes while learning to recognize and navigate their own and others’ unseen biases.
Learning Objectives
Increase self-awareness in decision-making styles, and how one’s style introduces personal bias and blind spots
Appreciate the value of diverse perspectives
Learn to manage and minimize naturally occurring bias to increase diversity and improve organizations
Understand and mitigate structural and organizational bias tendencies and behaviors
Recognize the impact of bias on reaching consensus – such as in an interview process – and learn best practices in account for those biases
Discuss the involvement of micro messaging (micro affirmations, micro aggressions, and micro inequities) in mitigating biases within individual behavior and systemic processes
Proposed Solution
Deciding Factor – Educational Leadership Edition will be specifically tailored to the public school system environment. Deciding Factor has been presented to high acclaim to hundreds of audiences and thousands of participants across various industries:
While participants have expressed the relatability of the content and ability to apply the concepts to their own environment, simulating a public school leadership experience will create an unparalleled opportunity to make the learning accessible and impactful.
The Experience
Deciding Factor simulates real-world situations in which individuals and teams must manage high pressure, unwelcome interruptions, time limitations, excess information, group decision-making, and personal implicit bias tendencies all while making decisions that impact people’s lives and organizational success.
The exercise immediately begins with the participants being transported into the scenario, theoretically leaving their current work environment and taking on a comparable role within a new, but fictitious organization.
The scenario explains that the participants are part of a task force charged with making recommendations to support organization’s expansion into more diverse communities.
Prior to making recommendations, the task force must expand its ranks by adding individuals possessing critical skills to the team.
Participants receive a set of materials, including a packet of character profiles that weave in education, work experience, strengths, opportunities, internal and external diversity dimensions, and more.
A short timeframe is provided for participants to review profiles, make individual decisions, and reach consensus on small group decisions.
Each table shares their group decisions to begin the debriefing of the experience.
Debriefing the Exercise
Mitigating unconscious bias in situations with limited time, overwhelming information, high pressure, uncontrollable environment is near impossible. Our mind unconsciously creates short cuts in these situations to reach our goals, yet these circumstances increase the presence of unconscious bias and behaviors. As a group, additional factors also come into play such as group think, power dynamics, and introversion versus extroversion.
Although the exercise is a rapidly moving experience, the debrief is methodical and designed to consider many different learning angles, considering prompts such as:
How were individual decisions made?
What were the deciding factors that mattered
and what was ignored?Did individual choices survive the group deliberation?
How did the distractions impact your work?
How did participants leverage personal information
such as photographs, sexual orientation, academic pedigree, generation / age, immigration background, and marital or
parental status?
Bias Training
With the experience of the exercise fresh on participants’ minds and intentional work to build trust within the room, the debrief allows an unusual opportunity for honest dialogue and introspective realizations.
The Palagn facilitators use the dialogue from the simulation to provide education on the three different types of bias – rater, structural, and calibration – and best practices for mitigating bias, both on individual and institutional levels. Accessible, practical examples help participants connect the broader concepts of bias to their individual and collective environment(s).
By the time participants leave the Deciding Factor session, they have an improved understanding of bias, as well as a new set of both immediate and long-term tools to address biases individually and in their environment.
Ready to accept the challenge of navigating your personal unseen bias?
Click here for more information.