Building Equitable, Diverse & Inclusive Organizations | Renée Cheng, Dean, University of Washington

Okay, hey everyone. As you all start coming in, I'm going to throw a chat question in. And so our chat question while we wait for folks is, what are you reading? Yeah, thank you, Greg.

Yeah.

I've seen Cass several times come up. If you're just joining, we're throwing what we're currently reading in the chat. Feel free to jump in and we'll get started in just a minute. Shannon Kaplan's reading emails. Great. We'll be capturing this, saving the chat down and saving this and sending it out in the notes that we send out. On Monday. So yeah, keep them coming. This is some great, great stuff to read here. All right. So, um, welcome. Um, this is our deep dive on building diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations featuring Renee Chang, who's the Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. If you don't know me, I'm Christopher Parsons. I'm the founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture. And today we've got 90 minutes together, and we're going to spend the first 50 or 55 doing a discussion with Renée, and then we're going to open it up for Q&A at the end. I'll likely take some questions along the way, and if you want to get questions towards Renée via me, you would use the Q&A panel, and it's down at the bottom of your Zoom screen if you haven't used it before. So feel free to add in questions at any time throughout our 90 minutes together. We'll take most of them at the end, and if you've got a question, it's good to get it written out so you don't forget it later when you're trying to remember it. You also have the ability in Zoom webinars to like other people's questions, and so the way that we do it at the end is we go from the most liked questions and we just work our way down and get through as many as we can. So go ahead, even if you don't have a question, it's good to review the questions and then vote for the ones that you would most like to see CS address. So today's program is being recorded and will be available on our website shortly. I'll also send out a recording on Monday just directly to people who registered and are attending today. Susan Strom, our Director of Client Success, who many of you on this call know, will be taking notes during our session in a Google Doc. So it's open for everyone attending this session to jump in, take notes alongside Susan and the rest of the community, If you find quotes or links or resources, books, etc., that you think would be useful, feel free to just go ahead and add them in. We'll polish up the final document and send it along on Monday along with the talk. So I'm going to go ahead and post that link into the chat now. And you should have it. Okay, so that's logistics. Um, let me introduce you to Renee and then bring her on. So Renee Cheng is a nationally renowned professor in the Department of Architecture and Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Renee was educated at Harvard College and Harvard Graduate School of Design. And she has been recognized for educational excellence with numerous awards from the AIA and others. Renee has pioneered research surrounding the intersection of design and emerging technologies, including work on industry adoption of integrated project delivery, Information Delivery, IPD, Building Information Modeling, and Lean. In addition, Renee led the research team responsible for developing the AIA's Guides for Equitable Practice. And this is something that we're going to dive into detail later. I have personally just had the pleasure of knowing Renee for multiple years. We've had Renee come and speak to different groups over the time, but haven't been able to get her to CA Connect until this year, where she was supposed to be a keynote speaker in April. But, um, as we know, 2020 had different plans for us. And since that time though, her knowledge and experience and her research into equity, diversity, and inclusion and best practices in our industry has just only become more relevant for the moment that we find ourselves in. And so Renee and I plan to cover quite a bit of ground in these 90 minutes. We'll begin with an overview of key EDI concepts and challenges, and then move into proven strategies and approaches for making AEC firms more equitable. So I'm very happy to welcome Renee Cheng to K Connect. Renee, you can turn off your camera and unmute yourself.

Great.

Hi.

Hi.

Thanks for doing this.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm looking forward to it. So I did a brief introduction, but I'm wondering if you could start by sharing a bit more about your background, your areas of research, and kind of your role at the University of Washington.

Okay, yeah, so I actually just started here as the Dean of the College of Built Environments in January 2019, so about a year and a half. And the college is one that really attracted me because of the work I had been doing at the University of Minnesota was very broadly across the whole AEC industry. But I was doing it from a college of design, which was also broad, but it had in it other disciplines besides the ones that you would associate and didn't have real estate and construction management. In particular. And so those two disciplines, plus the ones that you might ordinarily think of as our design disciplines of urban design, landscape design, and architecture, really creates a college that I was eager to see how we could make those connections with the industry leaders that are here, and then also obviously regionally, nationally, and internationally. Um, so there were some programs that you and I have talked about before, about Applied Research Consortium, that I can talk a little bit more about, that also really tries to change the type of leader and the type of agency that students have. And so coming here allowed me to do that from an interdisciplinary perspective that was super focused on the AEC industry. So that's kind of where I, you know, why I ended up moving here. My background was really all from architecture and worked in a number of design firms and then had my own firm and then started realizing that really teaching was what I wanted to do more than practice. So I tried to balance teaching and practice for a long time, but it was hard. And just became more and more into full-time teaching and started actually teaching drawing. And from there, got into just visual communication right around the time BIM was starting to emerge more in practice than in academia. So I was one of the first academics to look at BIM and its potential as a database parametric way of visualizing, and then started realizing that there was a lot of different collaborations that happened around BIM as a database and started from there getting into integrated project delivery and then into Lean. And from there, the equity piece was sort of parallel, but I am actually seeing tons of connections in terms of team effectiveness and ways that teams talk across difference. And whether that difference is disciplinary or racial or gender, there are certain skills that I think are really key to high-performing teams that and the role of culture in our industry is one that I think we don't talk about enough. And so for me, they all started connecting in ways that I didn't expect, I think, when I first started looking into some of these things for— maybe my curiosity was leading me in ways that has really converged. And so that's been great for me, at least. I don't know if it makes sense to other people, but it makes sense to me.

It does.

And what—

how do you— you kind of told us how you got into the IPD work, but what drew you into the equity work? What first grabbed your attention and wanted you to start investing resources and time into it?

Yeah, so, you know, when I was a student, there was only one woman faculty member, and she left to go to another school. And the women students— and we were about maybe 50% of our class was women, maybe a little bit fewer— and our faculty was 100% men and no people of color. And so we went to our dean and we said, this is not acceptable, we don't feel welcome, it doesn't feel right, that you surely can find more women qualified to teach. And his response was, um, we actually can't find qualified women to teach. And I came away from that meeting thinking, that's pretty lousy that there's no role models here, and really angry that there hadn't been just more effort because I knew there were qualified women. And it just might have been harder to find them. And so I think that's when I first started saying, okay, there's something going on here where people are believing that this is just the way it is because the demographics in our industry, in our fields, which I just didn't believe had to be the way that it was, that it was kind of like the natural way that things were shaking out. And now, you know, I can recognize it much more as kind of of structural, all kinds of structural things that were built in that give certain people more visibility. And so that started really early, an interest in it, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with it until much later. And, you know, my colleagues often joked that, wow, it's strange, all of Renée's mentees are women. And they aren't all, but they are definitely skewed towards that, and many women of color. And so hearing more from them, you know, what they're experiencing, and certainly as an Asian woman, women, it's very different than my mentees that are Black or Indigenous and the types of things that they face. It really made me realize that there's— so I started kind of more one-on-one trying to help. And then when the— and so I'd written a couple of articles, and so when I was— when AIA reached out to do the big call for the AIA Guides for Equitable Practice, and we were the team that was awarded it, that's when I really started doing the deep dive with a lot more rigorous research. And it was great. I had a research team and we were, you know, trying to do the guides as accessible as possible, but as rigorous as possible. So you were really looking for what research there was and realized how little research there was for architecture. And maybe there were some things in engineering, then maybe there were some things from the corporate world that could be useful. And so really seeing that translating need for bridging between AAC practices and demographics and the nature of the projects we do and the open-ended kind of design work that we do and the kind of evolving project teams we do. And that's where it really started merging for me with the IPD work and the team effectiveness work of kind of having some real aha moments around the ways that the teams that I was observing that were really high-performing, that were using lean and integrated practices, were actually doing a lot of the equitable best practices without calling it that.

Right.

So that's where I really started getting the connections.

Yeah, that's interesting. And I, and I wanted to kind of come back to that a little bit later and, and some of what those practices are, but to start people maybe on a more level playing field here, um, And maybe it's an obvious question for many people on this call, but how, um, what is the difference between equity, diversity, and inclusion? Like, how would you explain that to somebody coming to this work for the first time?

Yeah, and that's actually super important to get these definitions, even for the purposes of this call, right? So just say for this session, this is the definition that we'd like to use, because it's a euphemism for so many different people that you when you say the word diversity, it means different things to different people. So if the audience is willing, it seems like they're very active in chat, so I think this will probably work well. Um, if I can just do a little exercise with us that will hopefully make it clear to you how I'd like you to think about equity, diversity, inclusion, and actually justice as well for the course of this conversation. So let's imagine that we've got this 230-some amazing people, and we're all part of the same company. So we're, you know, we're part of this company, and let's also imagine that wonderful day when we all can be back in person because there's a vaccine or we've managed to deal with the virus. So this is our first day back in— we're, you know, tomorrow will be our first day in the office that we're going to come back. So try to imagine, what are you going to wear? Okay, so put in the chat what you're going to wear, and particularly tell me So look down in your mind's eye. What shoes are you going to wear? And put that in the chat, please.

I'm going to play along.

Okay, so clearly lots of diversity here. Okay, so everyone's going from like super casual to dress shoes to all kinds of things, right? Like, and like some, some, hopefully some wacky things because we'll all be so excited to be back in like an office setting. So that's diversity, right? So we've got diversity, lots of choices of shoes. All right, so now we're all in this beautiful office space together and we sit down in a gigantic circle. And now you take off your shoes and you pass your shoes to the person to the right of you. And you receive shoes from the person to the left of you.

All right.

So these are your shoes for the day. So for— so now everyone has shoes. They're not the shoes you came in with, but everyone has shoes. So we are inclusive. Everyone has shoes. But we are not equitable because for a few, very lucky few, privileged few, you will have shoes that fit. That fit your feet. So everyone else has shoes, but they don't fit their feet. And for some of you who came in with sneakers and end up with heels, it's going to be really different than what you expected your day to be like, walking around in those shoes that you received that might be way too small or way too big. So that's— we've got diversity of shoes, we've got inclusion because everyone has shoes, but we don't have equity. And now let's say one of the first things we do as a group is we're going on a picnic and a short brisk walk during which we will do some exercises that will establish the future year and the priorities that we're going to be establishing as a group. So this is a really important walk. So we're going on this walk, and for those privileged few, you're going to be able to concentrate on the topic that we're talking about. The rest of you, you're going to be tired, awkward, you're going to get blisters, and you are not going to be focused on the conversation that we've got because you are you've got some disadvantages. And there are people that don't have those disadvantages. Okay, so now at the end of the day, we say, okay, that was great. We got all our business done. Now we're going to just hang out and do a fun run together, a 5K fun run. And there's only going to be a couple of people that are going to be willing to do that. And maybe we say, okay, we're going to try to get to Justice Now. So now everyone gets running shoes that fit. And that's equity, that you've got what you need for the task at hand. But justice means I'm going to give you Band-Aids if you have blisters because you were disadvantaged before, and because of that disadvantage, you are hurt and you need help, extra help, more than running shoes. You need a foot massage and some bandages. And so that's where we get to justice for our 5K friendly run that wraps up our first day at work. Hmm.

And how— so this is a great metaphor to set us up. How does an AE firm know whether it's equitable, whether it's being diverse, how are they being inclusive? Like, how do they even start to know where are we on this? On this journey.

Yeah, and that's a question that I think a lot of firms are asking that didn't believe that that was a core issue. I think for a lot of firms, EDI work, or equity, diversity, inclusion work, was a nice to have but not a needed to have, and was something that they felt that they could afford because the, you know, times were good and that this was something that might be effective and a lot of grassroots desire for it. And so the conversation was a little different before the recent social justice movement that I think just increased everyone's awareness on the role that all of us play in our daily lives as well as in our practices in the unjust systems and institutions that are part of the world that we live in, especially in the, in the US, which has a very dominant white culture, and in the AAC industry, which also has a dominant white male culture. So how does a firm know Well, it's— there are markers of success where you could say a firm that has achieved good levels of equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice is one where you tend to see very high, not just employee satisfaction, but in employee engagement. Employees would recommend their firm to others. They are very loyal. They are deeply engaged and bring their best work and bring their most creative selves to the, to their daily work, that the firm is able to meet some challenges, both opportunities and challenges, in ways that are really resilient, nimble. So those are generally signs. You can be successful without having met equity, diversity, inclusion goals. You can be successful in a lot of ways that don't have anything to do with those goals. And many firms have been successful for many, many years without even talking about these things. I would argue, though, that even before the social justice movement has made it a little bit more urgent for everybody to know where they stand, that there's also some other things. And we can talk more about the business case, the ethical case, the professional case. But you get more innovation when you have diversity where people feel comfortable speaking up. And that can go for racial diversity as well as— You look at a project team that typically will have a wide range of skills on that project team and expertise areas. And if you have a project team that's high functioning, people are able to say that dumb idea. And it's what's sometimes called psychological safety, where you can say something that is a dumb question, that you don't assume that everyone is thinking the same as you. And that dumb question will often create a really important discussion to bring up things that everyone had been assuming or no one was thinking about in an unconventional way. And so I actually think a lot of creativity and innovation comes from diversity if it is accompanied by the inclusion and equity part and increasingly justice. So, you know, there are multiple reasons why you would have those goals, but the ways that you would know that you've met them are some of those general markers, but then being clear about why are you doing it is a whole nother area that I think we'll need to get into more as the discussion goes on.

So Renee, if I can kind of summarize something I think I heard there is, you know, you said you can be successful without doing this work. And so part of what I'm— I think I'm hearing is you can be a non-diverse firm and be successful to a point, right? And we can kind of get into areas where that might become a challenge in the future.

Right, where it begins to limit you. Yeah, where it begins to limit you if you're not diverse. Well, it also It depends on your measures of success, right?

Sure.

So if your measures of success is profitability, right, you can be profitable without being diverse or having even diversity goals, right?

Right.

If you start to say, oh, well, there's these minority and women-owned business requirements for the project that I'm on, or there's a certain public project that we want to go for that we can't unless we have a certain team, right? Composition, then that starts to say, okay, that we—

we're—

it's starting to hurt us now financially. And so, or we have a client that is saying, what are your diversity numbers? And we're getting eliminated at the early stages, so that's starting to hurt our profitability, right? So there are times where business will intersect with equity, but if you are in a certain sector, there are definitely firms that have been very successful without dealing with the equity issue, depending on what their measures of success are.

Yeah, got it. Yeah, that's— so that's kind of a case. And then another case would be, um, I'll try to use the simplest language, like either you've decided to go in, uh, become a more diverse firm, or you feel like you have to in order to meet your business goals. What I think I heard there is diversity is just the first part, like in your shoe analogy, right? It means that we have you know, a range of different kinds of people from different backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientation, whatever it might be. But unless you commit to doing more work, right, around inclusion and equity and into justice, that's where— we were talking about the psychological, psychological safety of teams and people feeling like they can say things in certain meetings and getting to that innovation you talked about.

So, divert— focusing on diversity alone actually has a lot of potential dangers. There's, first of all, backlash, that if people feel like you're just focusing on the numbers, then you're recruiting people only for that reason. That's one danger. The other danger is that you bring people in that are from different backgrounds or genders or races, but then you haven't done the work to figure out what are you going to do differently with these different people. And so you're basically saying, okay, well, you know, recruit for diversity but onboard for sameness. Don't be so different. Like, okay, so you're different, now come in and now be like us. And here's the rules of engagement and here's the way we think and we want you to fit. And so if you're talking about— and there's been a lot of recent popular press stuff around cultural fit as a filter that is often full of bias, like overtly full of bias. Of we want you to fit into our culture. But then it's like, well, why did you recruit for diversity? And then it becomes like, okay, well, we did it because we needed to meet some of these requirements from our clients. And that's not a great reason, and you're actually going to get people saying that's really superficial. And then the people that have been recruited in for diversity and being told now to assimilate are going to, first of all, not bring their best work. Second of all, they're going to get really tired and they're going to leave and they're going to potentially say bad things about your firm and their experience in your firm. So it's, you know, if you don't, um, there's actually a way to flip this and say, okay, instead of let's go for diversity as the first step in our goal, um, let's go for equity. And that's why I usually shorten the acronym to EDI instead of DEI. Because the— there's definitely some people that believe that the equity piece actually draws the diversity, right? So if you are a firm known for seeking other voices and letting them be heard in ways that will influence and let these things that might challenge your norms and expectations in order to reach whatever goals, again, innovation or other things, if you become known for that you will draw people that want that. And so diversity comes as an outcome, not as a driver. And that, I think, is a really important flip for people to make, because you can work on that right away. You don't have to do the recruiting and the, you know, get these new people and onboard them and figure it out. Figure out your onboarding now. Like, is your onboarding making people assimilate? How do you get to that culture that you value so much? With aspects of that culture that might be stifling other points of view. And do that work now. Because if you imagine if somehow magically 10% of your company is now Black or BIPOC, right, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, right? So all of a sudden that's happened. What do your meetings look and feel like? Is it going to be great? Everyone's super excited? Maybe at the beginning, but then over time, who's frustrated? Who's not heard? What unconscious or conscious things are happening? Do your conference rooms all have the names of white men and there's no role models or room for people that aren't that model?

Yeah, you're kind of, um, kind of getting muscles that people can build. And would you even go so far to say this is like a recommendation to start making those those kind of cultural changes and those building those habits before pursuing, um, more diversity?

The first recommendation is clarify your goals.

Clarify your goals.

So, right, and if the goals are, um, we want to be diverse, that's not— then I would definitely say dig deeper. Because why do you want to be diverse? And then what will you do when you are diverse to support that diversity and to support those people? Especially if you don't get 10% of your firm coming from the BIPOC community right away, you get 1. What is that one person going to feel like in your firm? And how can you say to them, please join us, we, um, and you're not going to be a token, you're not going to be the only one doing this work, you're not going to be, um, the lonely voice, and you're not going to be put on every single committee, uh, you know, how do you, what are you going to do? So I think that the setting your goals includes asking deeper questions on what have we been doing unconsciously, for the most part, to exclude— if we haven't, if we don't have the diversity that we want, what, what have we been doing that has been making that the way, this outcome, right? We have this outcome, we are where we are, why are we here? And so those kinds of questions come from and lead to defining goals.

And I think I'm hearing that this lack of clear goals is one of the big obstacles that firms need to overcome, uh, when they're trying to become, you know, more equitable, diverse, inclusive.

What—

is that true? And then what are some of the other ones? What are the, the, the kind of barriers in the way that make it hard for AE firms to, to make progress here?

There's so many ways to think about the barriers, right? I hear from a lot of people that the demographics in our industry is the main barrier. I actually don't believe that that's the main barrier. I think that that's a barrier, but the— I think that there's a number of things. One thing I often hear from or sense when I talk to firms is there's a real fear of making a mistake. Especially in the recently, right, since the George Floyd death and the Black Lives Matter movement growing there, and the criticism that's come from, and you know, some of the, it's come down on some of the firms as well. You know, there's firms that I know that have made incredibly well-intentioned statements that have been criticized for being too vague or not aligned with things that are actually happening. And the backlash can be really hurtful and hard to deal with. And so there's a sense that we have to get this right. And then when you do EDI work, you really need to take the point of view like, I am going to make mistakes. Like, in this talk, I might be saying something that's going to offend somebody. And it doesn't work for me to just say, no offense, or to have like a blanket disclaimer around all this to say nothing I'm doing is intended to offend you. Well, one assumes that I'm not coming on this program to offend anybody, so my intentions are not the issue. The impact, I don't know these group, I mean this weird format, I can't even see them, right? So there definitely could be somebody who I'm either leaving out, or I say something in a way that is one of their pet peeves, or you know, I use an analogy that's, you know, there's a lot of figures of speech that come from really racist, discriminatory backgrounds that we don't even think about. And, but, you know, for some people they don't think about it and it's no big deal and it's just a figure of speech, but for other people it's deeply offensive and makes them feel unwelcome, makes them want to just like turn off the camera and go away, right? So the willingness to make mistakes and know how to recover from them. It's probably the biggest barrier that people don't realize is happening, that they feel like they have to get it all prepared and all right, and we have to have the diverse group before we can even start this work. And that they— so the, the one of the biggest barriers is that people don't feel like they can start, right, because they haven't been doing it more, or they've been working on it and they're not getting anywhere. And so there's a lack of momentum and a discouragement, right? So depending on where the firm is in their awareness of this as a goal and how deeply those goals have been examined and updated in the wake of all the things that have been happening lately. I mean, the challenges facing firms now are just incredible, right? The colliding crises, and you in California are getting forest fires now on top of all the, you know, the pandemic and the economic crash and the social justice movement, and so it's no surprise people are hesitant and don't want to waste time, or don't want to waste resources, or don't want to make a mistake. But with this kind of work, you have to just be willing to make really big mistakes and really hurt people that you don't intend to, right? And it's one of the worst things, like, I don't intend to do anything bad, but I'm pretty sure because this talk is going to be touching on some pretty raw issues for people. Someone's not going to feel great about what I say or what I do. And so, you know, you kind of like feel like, well, maybe I shouldn't do this talk. It's like, no, this is actually— tell us where we went wrong for you, where the impact didn't land for you, and put it in the chat or put it in the Q&A. And we learn from it. We not only learn like how to adjust our behavior, you and me. We also learned something about them that we didn't know, because if we had known it before, we wouldn't have said the thing or done the thing.

Yeah, and I think what you're getting close to touching and not quite saying is, and then not being defensive and worrying about protecting yourself so much.

Yeah.

Worrying about the intention, right?

Right, and the— this is, you know, there's coaching that you can get around making mistakes like this, but you know, the defensiveness often comes from, but my intention was good, Right. And intention is worth really nothing. You know, impact is in this type of work, right? So helping explain your intention is helpful when things are calm and rational and we're sitting and we're, you know, kind of in a situation where we're both very trusting and comfortable. If you're negatively impacted by something, you are not going to be speaking from that calm, rational part of your brain, and I'm going to be receiving you from also not my calm, rational brain. It's going to be my lizard brain, and it's going to be fight or flight, you know. So either I'm like pushing back, or I'm like, "Okay, okay, I didn't— I'm sorry." I need a little time to figure this out, right? So it's the defensiveness is part of the— it's part of retreating back to rationalizing the intent. And almost always the problem is not with the intent.

Right.

And understanding the intent doesn't help.

Yeah.

And what I think I'm seeing here is like, you know, because we're asking the question, what do firms do? But there's a lot of personal work that leaders and folks involved in this need to do as well, right?

There's a lot of personal work, and there's things firms do collectively. And so, you know, I do think it's at all the levels of a firm. So the firm leadership, the emerging practitioners in a firm, the middle group that might be in more management roles. There's work to be done at the individual and group level throughout the firm. In order to try to again clarify the goals.

Yeah.

And figure out what is likely to potentially land badly for some people, and then figure out what you will do and not be paralyzed by saying, okay, well, since anything we do is going to come out badly for somebody, maybe we shouldn't do anything.

Yeah.

You know, that's the paralysis that can happen. Well, so it is individual for sure, but the collective is very powerful and trying to understand where your stated values and your stated goals might then be applied to policies you're making around leave or around recruiting or onboarding. So they have very practical applications that aren't an individual. Like an individual manager doesn't decide to do a totally different onboarding than the rest of the firm does. They hopefully are feeding their best practices or the reasons why they're doing it, and then maybe there's some alteration that's saying, okay, well, the architects have a different onboarding than the engineers in our firm, or whatever other things are happening. But you don't do that on your own, or you get pretty chaotic pretty quickly, and then you have more confusion and more chance for things to not be aligned.

That's powerful, Renee. Um, that kind of fear of getting started, you did mention the demographics piece, and we got some write-in questions around the lines of, you know, how can we create an equitable, diverse, and inclusive firm if our leadership, if our staff, if our city or region or industry isn't diverse? And how do you, how do you think about that question?

So it's definitely true that the industry is not as diverse as the population, for sure. But if you just look in architecture schools, which is the demographics that I know best, we've been at 50% women for a really long time, and we're, I think, at about 4% of, um, of Black and Indigenous. The Indigenous is really tiny. Um, but in practice, if you look at who gets licensed among the architects, it's not at those percentages. So we're losing particularly women and people of color. So you start to say, okay, well, there's— it's not— whatever we're doing to get those people in education, we're not retaining them. So for sure, we need to build the pipeline to education to make more visibility among communities that don't have a lot of role models and aren't thinking of architecture as a potential field for them. And so there are ways that we can build that pipeline through K-12 outreach, and there's a lot a lot of really great work that's doing that. And then over time, you hope that we get to a tipping point where we have enough critical mass of BIPOC folks that are in leadership positions that can candidly say to the younger folks in the K-12, this is a great job, this is a great field, this is a wonderful way to build your career as a person of color. And so, you know, that's kind of what we hope will happen in the future. But meanwhile, we have to say, okay, we've got this leaky pipeline, Right. And it's not just attrition because otherwise the proportions would stay the same.

And the leaky pipeline, Renee, being the from graduation through leadership, how are people not—

Right. So if you look for architecture again, right, so if you— every milestone that you begin to check that we have data on, um, so women who enter school, graduate with a professional degree, who get licensed, who make partner, who win the fellowship, who have an AIA gold medal, you know, it's fewer and fewer and fewer, right? And then if you try— so that's— we have better data on women than we do on race. But the, you know, so in— for women, we tend to say it's the missing 32% or the leaky pipeline. For BIPOC folks, I'm not even sure there's a pipeline that we can say, right? So because the numbers are so tiny, and so trying to, you know, I was talking to a Black woman landscape architect and she was saying she thinks she knows all of the licensed landscape architect women who are Black. She knows them all. So you look at the American Indian architects and engineers, their membership fits on one page of a website. Yeah, you know, and there probably are others that aren't part of that group, but not that many, right? And so yeah, we've got a demographic issue, and it has to do with the visibility and the attractiveness, which involves lots of other things, right? So it includes the value proposition of our industries and the ability to make a difference in communities of color. So if some— if a person of color is going into a field in order to benefit people that look like them or communities they came from, or, or for whatever reason they want to go into a field. Right now our field has been part of things that have really disadvantaged those communities and people that look like them, and so we have extra work to do to attract that demographic of person and to acknowledge that it has the reasons that they haven't been showing up. Are not because of them. It's because of us and because of the way things have been set up and what we celebrate and what we, all those messages that we send of this is what an architect looks like. Bill Baines has a, or Bill, sorry, the one who just stepped down as AIA president has a great story that he tells of his son, fourth grader, went to a, he posted a thing for them to come to one of his building sites and he overheard one of the classmates say to his son, "Your dad can't be an architect. That's not what architects look like." You know, and the fourth grader had an idea of what an architect looked like, you know, probably with a cape and maybe a cane, you know. Yeah. And it didn't look like this guy because he was Black.

Yeah, there's a lot to overcome there.—

it can be done, but we're not starting from a blank slate.

What are firms doing in this area? Like, so I think you kind of divided it in, uh, in, in a simple way, right, for our conversation, into a leaky pipeline versus to some degree not having a pipeline at all. I'm curious on the— your thoughts about— we will start with the, the building a pipeline at all. Like, what are you seeing firms do? In this area? Because I go back to your original statement about fear, and it seems like we don't want to make a mistake, but it's also that there's too many things. Like, this is too big a problem for my small firm or my medium-sized firm to tackle. Right.

So ACE is a really great program that I think doesn't often have enough participation depending on the area that you're in. So it's Architecture, Construction, Engineering, very much focused on outreach to high school students. Particularly those from lower-income neighborhoods that wouldn't ordinarily have the opportunity to intersect with someone from the AC industry. So that is kind of a mentoring program, and firms can participate at any size. There's often student groups once they're already in school, right, that are, you know, we often have firms that might support, say, the AIAS group that might be having whatever, a portfolio day or something like that. There's also NOMA groups that are often separate. Sometimes they're together, sometimes they're separate. And sometimes firms don't realize that they're putting all their resources and offering firm tours and help to the AIES group and not to the other group, just like because they didn't even know that other group is there and they might be smaller, right?

NOMA being the—

Little work. National Organization of Minority Architects. They have a NOMA student group. So NOMA class. Not every school has that. But if you, you know, if you're connected with a school, and most of you are in some proximity to a school, or nowadays remotely, there's all kinds of things you can do, and then your alma maters. And so, you know, some of it is just taking an inventory of what are the opportunities that are already there that maybe we haven't been participating in or not realizing, or steering our resources towards a group that doesn't really have the— is maybe already pretty well resourced, and there might be another group that's very similar but isn't as visible or as resource. So there's, there's some concrete things that can happen that way. I do think that the recruiting process, which I know there were a lot of questions around, yeah, you know, you have to be prepared to answer the questions. And so if you're recruiting a, you know, we had a story in one of the guides where a Black man who was a senior designer in one firm was being recruited at another firm, and so he looked to the website and He saw their current— the firm that was recruiting him was all white men, and he went to the interview and, you know, they said, "We really want you to come. We think you could really be a leader." They didn't even really mention that much about his race. They just said, you know, "We really think you're talented. We want you to join." And then he followed up with some questions about, "What are your goals around equity, diversity, inclusion?" And he got silence for 2 weeks. And then they came up with an answer which he said was a kind of poor answer that looked really undercooked and kind of cut and pasted and superficial. And he was like, you know, sorry, there's, you know, it's like, could you, were you not expecting this question when you recruited me? Because you were, you know, he got the feeling they were recruiting him for his race but they didn't say it. And then they weren't prepared to answer that question. So, you know, there's definitely practices that you can look to in your own firms to make sure you're prepared and to think about what it means if your firm then will have one BIPOC employee. And then what if they have— what if you have 10? What if you have 100? Or whether it's 50% or 10% or 2% or 1% or half a percent, you know, like play through what that looks like and why you want it. And what are you going to do to make it successful for everyone, including the white people in your firm?

Right, right.

Definitely including the white people who are very much likely to be the majority.

Mm-hmm.

One of the things that we heard a lot in the questions, you know, and it was kind of about engaging leadership in EDI work. And, you know, some examples of some questions, right? How can someone show firm leadership that EDI is crucial when they don't understand its importance? How do you motivate the people who don't seem personally invested in seeing this change? And how can I get my fellow leaders to understand the value of a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace?

Yeah, these are questions I hear pretty often, and sometimes they come from peer leaders, and sometimes they come from emerging practitioners. Underlying that question is a question of power. And when you think about the type of work you need to do in equity, diversity, and inclusion, you have to acknowledge the role of power, and you have to know where it sits. And especially if you want to shift it, and you may not need to shift it, but if you're trying to shift it, that needs to be really clear. And so So if the role of power is that the decision maker is not seeing the importance and is not giving me the resources to go do what I want to do, or if the question is the decision maker is doing it for the wrong reasons, and that has a lot of judgment in it, which is often not very useful in EDI work. Because, you know, there are times where if, and I talked before about the various reasons why you would pursue EDI, and that comes from clarifying your goals, right? So there's, you know, roughly speaking, and what we use in the guides is there's a moral case. This is philosophically the right thing to do. There's the ethical case that, you know, this is the values that we hold plays out in this way. There's the business case of my clients are asking for this, or I can compete in a better way, potentially even around that innovation and creativity that we're not tapping. Or missing. There's the professional case that as a profession we all need to be part of this bigger effort because it is a big effort for AUC to become more diverse. And so there's, you know, and then there's the societal case of, you know, there's institutional practices that we have been perpetuating, we're part of perpetuating, that need to be challenged, right? So there's all those different levels and for sure you can be wanting to pursue this for all of those reasons, or only some of them. And so I do hear sometimes for people that are approaching it from the societal point of view, maybe, right, or the professional point of view, and they're frustrated by those that are approaching it from the business point of view, right? And they're saying, you're not getting it, and you aren't in this for the right reasons, and I can tell because all these things the way you say it, and your actions. And my point of view is that it's really important to know why someone is entering into this, or why they should or would, what value they expect to gain as an individual, or as a firm leader, or on behalf of their firm, and not to judge it. Because it is totally fine with me to have a leader come to me and say, we're doing this because of the business case, I would be like, fantastic, here are the business reasons that I see. What are you seeing? Now, what are you not getting for this? Now, you do realize this includes some other things that you need to do besides just like, you know, getting to this goal. You need to do some things around that. And but you're doing these things because you're— because we've got this goal in mind and we're not forgetting that goal.

Right.

And it's not judging you like you're a bad person because you don't see see it the same way that I do. It doesn't matter why people are coming into this work. It's hard enough work. To then add judgment on top of it mostly makes us feel better and not necessarily helps anybody else. And so it's not worthwhile spending time judging others. It is worthwhile understanding what is the value proposition that makes sense from their point of view, from the firm or from their individual point of view, or things that will resonate with them and not say this is something you should, you must, you have to see it this way. And it's okay if people see it in different ways, but you have to work out those goals. You can't just say, well, okay, if you've got two people on the leadership team that want to do, pursue this for really different reasons, you're going to find misalignments in where they're going to want to put their resources, what they want to do first, what metrics they want to measure. Right, so you can't just sort of wave your hands and say, okay, great, we're aligned, we've all, you know, signed on, we've like pledged or whatever we've done. Now we're charging a team and they're just going to carry on. And then where after that team presents back, one leader is going to be like, this is fantastic, I think this is— we're already making progress. The other one's going to be like, what is this? This is not what we talked about. Yeah, so, you know, that's why the definitions of diversity, equity, inclusion You know, is diversity a euphemism for race diversity? Or is it a euphemism for gender diversity? Or is it any diversity? Is it diversity of thought? Which for some people is a real cop-out. Like, what is it? Diversity of training? Is it that we're getting some people that didn't come from an Ivy League school? Like, what is diversity to you? So that we know what we're aiming at.

So clarity around goals and then clarity about what we mean by the words we're using.

So clarity around why you're doing it, why your motivation, your motivation intent. Yeah, so that when your goals are, you know, because you can have your own personal goals, but as soon as you're starting to work within a group, those goals are going to be seen differently. And so don't just use, don't settle on words like, right now at our college we had some pretty interesting discussions on our strategic plan around the word profit. And we have construction management, real estate, architecture, landscape, and urban. And so there were some people, and I'm oversimplifying, who said, "If the word profit is in the mission statement of the college, it's not my college." And we had some people that said, "If the word profit is not in the mission statement, it's not my college." Right? And then people immediately started saying, okay, you know, because we all get along actually really well. And so it's like, well, what about we call it economic value? Right? And so, and then it was like, well, what about just monetary value? What about just value? Right? So there started to be like all this kind of immediately like, let's find something that is acceptable to everybody. And I said, wait, stop. We actually found a really important conflict point. We need time to tease this out because this is actually a fundamental difference in the business plans, in the way you're prioritizing things. The flow of money is part of all kinds of aspects that we either make invisible or we make visible. Let's set aside a time for the places that we disagree. Because if I had just said, okay, fine, we've come to some, you know, we've got a lot of people that are really good at facilitating and moderating, right? So it was like, right, okay, we can come to a word that we all agree on so that we can move on, right? So we can move on, right? But that's not like, it was like, no, stop, stop, don't move on.

Yeah, yeah, don't move on.

Because if we had then every time someone mentions the word economic value in the mission statement, some people are thinking this means money, some people are thinking this means time, some people are thinking this means community impact, and they're all happy because they're like, oh, this is what it means, and that makes me really happy and part of this college. But then when it comes down to like, okay, where are we putting our resources, the person's gonna be like, well, obviously we're putting in the community impact part. And that, or, and, or like, what are, what are we going to measure? It's like, well, obviously we're going to do that. And the other one's like, "No, we're gonna do—" Yeah. And so then you're gonna get conflict without having figured out the source.

Yeah, and you won't know, you can't trace it back to that. Yeah. Folks, we're gonna start taking questions. I'm gonna ask Renee one more. So if you haven't put a question in the Q&A panel or you want to go in and vote for some, now is a good time. So one last one I want to ask you, Renee, is we got a lot of writing questions that I kind of summarize as navigating the political and/or difficult questions and situations that arise when you make this kind of change. So some examples were, "Do you have ideas for keeping these conversations from becoming overly political in our current climate?" Or conversely, "How do you move people around the barrier of keeping politics out of business?" "How do we tackle EDI internally in a thoughtful way without overcompensating in a non-thoughtful way?" and how do you avoid a negative backlash? So this can't be new for you. So how do you think about these challenges and how you've seen organizations navigate them?

So these are super tough questions, and the answer is definitely going to be dependent on the specifics of the group at any point in time. And I would say that what I've seen over the past even 2 months, or if you include longer, there's a lot of shifts, right? Like, definitely the remote setting exacerbates some things, makes other things easier. The impact that has been so differential on people in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement, for some people it's kind of been this enormous awakening, for others it's been super emotional and really tough to just even function. You know, so the the people are in, and then the election coming up is definitely raising some things. So that I think that the emotions are closer to the surface and the stakes seem higher. And so still some of the things that worked in the past will work again here. And so when you think about, you know, for some people, the Climate change was political and the decision to go for whether to sign on to Architecture 2030 or how you work sustainability in was controversial. It didn't have as deep of the emotion, didn't have the structural institutional racism piece, which obviously adds just a huge extra layer of challenge. But you look to some of the things that you did in the past to get agreement around something that not everybody was aware of or thinking was important. And so, you know, when in the early days of the adoption around the, um, of goals around sustainable design or even resilience, um, there, there were some firms that were like, well, this is not us. This is nice. I'm glad people are doing it, but this is not us. You know, we do whatever, whatever project type that didn't really have that much to do with sustainability overtly. And some of the early examples were definitely from clients like the Bullitt Center, who, you know, really that was part of their mission. Rocky Mountain Institute, you know. And so, in some ways, kind of made it seem like it was for some people and some project types and some client types. And it was actually when you started seeing CodeTap 10 get— include projects that were, you know, community type things or commercial things or corporate things, program types, that I think it became more clear that you could achieve this and it was actually a really good thing to do for all kinds of reasons. Again, it's those cases, you know, business case, moral case, ethical case, professional case, societal case. So there are— we have done this. You know, if you look at how differently sustainable design is compared to what it was when LEED was new, and, you know, the— just some firms were just saying, this is not something I'm opting into. We may be at a moment where equity and social justice is something that you don't opt into or out of. You are in it, and you have to do something. We may be at that moment. I think some firms feel that way. So unlike the sustainable design, but now sustainable designs like that, you can't not do that. Like, people expect architects to have an awareness of at least the building performance, if not the supply stream and the carbon footprint and the disassembly strategies, right? There's an expectation that that's part of our expertise. And so, you know, if that's coming around social justice, there's gonna need to be a different level of expertise and a different level of awareness for all firms. So I don't know if that answered your question because it's a really hard question.

It's a hard question to answer. I think you— I think the area you got into about judgment is probably helpful here too, because when emotions— in my experience, when emotions are high, judgment can be high too.

And well, bias also goes way up. There's actually some really interesting studies about how if you take a bias this assessment when you're calm, you're going to have one score, and then if there's any kind of stress on you, your scores just really, really change. And so, you know, stress of any kind, it can even be physical stress, but definitely stress can change and make you retreat back to things that are more comfortable or that you just, you know, you're not as open. You actually have to be in a really different space to be open enough, to be vulnerable enough, to be willing to make those mistakes. And that is something that we haven't really necessarily talked about overtly. But, you know, when someone's talking about setting the stage for it, you know, if people know in the end the end result of the conversation is going to be layoffs, right, they're going to come into the conversation really differently than if you say, we just want to have this conversation because we want to try to establish some goals, or we're just, you know, so be clear about So, you know, we talked about being clear about the goals at a big scale. Be clear about the goals at the scale of that meeting and be clear about the definitions during that meeting as well. Like, here's how we're defining diversity. We're talking about demographic racial diversity for BIPOC employees, you know, or we're defining diversity in terms of just creativity and being able to get different points of view, right? And that's much broader for the purposes of this discussion in the I'm out of time. So framing and saying, you know, and finding ways to create that safe space that you do in lots of other situations when you're anticipating conflict, right? Like, I definitely have seen high-performing teams, that psychological safety that Amy Edmondson talks about. She has a lot of TED Talks and things like that.

Now that you've covered these things, but I would recommend to people on the call, if they don't know Amy Edmondson's work, it's just amazing.

Yeah, and, and it really I think it's so much about culture, and EDI is culture, right? But some firms are better at talking about culture than others. And so, you know, and some teams are better at talking about culture than others. And some talk about culture, but they never really implement it, and they actually can come into more criticism than those that don't even talk about it, right? So there's a bunch of things around onboarding, around calling out problems, and dealing with conflict. That are really common, and they actually just become more important. So if you're not doing those well now, you might need extra help, like outside people. If you are doing them well, then just say, okay, this is how we model our issues around conflict. Like, we've got a huge budget cut coming, or we've got something that, you know, the program just changed, so here's how we manage conflict around that. And then say, okay, we know how to do this, so here's the rules around this this discussion around conflict that we're expecting. And if you're not getting to conflict, you probably aren't making progress, because if you're not getting to conflict, right, you're probably just saying a lot of vague general things that leave everybody with a different idea of what happened, and that's wasting time and making people frustrated.

It's powerful, Renee. I think that connects me all the way back to where we started. Where you talked about, you know, the things that you can do to prepare yourself to be, you know, for diversity in some ways, right? To like, and navigating conflict was one of those things. So like, these are muscles the organization needs to build in order for the EDI work, but it's also useful for all the other difficult things.

That's where I started seeing, so there's actually an assessment, that's your IBD, right? Yeah, yeah, so it's the conflict Conflict Styles Inventory, CSI, and it's offered through the Intercultural Developmental Inventory, is also offered, it's idi.org, I think. So maybe someone can find that, but the Conflict Styles Inventory kind of tells you where you sit in your normal business practices, your style of communication, and how you deal with conflicts. And it's that got some cultural aspects to it too. And there's actually a lot of really interesting work from business in the '70s and '80s when there was a lot more— I don't know if you remember that there were seminars for businessmen going to Japan to make sure that they didn't offend people because there's so many rules that are kind of unspoken around taking off your shoes or leaving your chopsticks in your bowl, handshaking, bowing, all these kinds of things. And so there were all these business schools that were offering curriculum on international business where they were saying, okay, in Africa this, and then Middle East this, and in Europe this, and sort of coaching people on these different forms and different— and a lot of that was around conflict styles. And conflict is not necessarily like, I disagree with you. It means that we have something we care about like if, you know, if you pick the, you know, if it's like I'm cheering for the Seahawks and you're cheering for, you know, the 49ers, like that's not really conflict, right? Because in the end, I don't actually— nothing's dependent on that for me. Right. And so, but for other people, that actually might be conflict, right? So it has to be something that you care about and that we have to work together on. Like, I can't just say, okay, well, whatever, you know, I'm gonna do my thing, right? So conflict is a couple of different situations have to be met. And so, and so it's, it's not a negative thing. It's a positive thing to find the areas where we disagree on something that we need to work together on, and that we have differences of opinion. The way it ties with equity, I mean, one, one quick illustration is there's this thing called planning poker. That's part of Agile. I don't know if any of your group has heard of this. Agile is more for software, and a lot of the effort around Agile is trying to figure out how much time it's going to take to solve a bug or something. And so you do planning poker where you have these cards, 1 through 10. So I have a set of cards, you have a set of cards, like, okay, here's the problem. So I choose a card, like, how much time do you think it's going to— how many person-hours do you think it's going to take to solve this? So I choose a card, you choose a card, we lay them on the table. And so there's a group of maybe 5 of us. So the non-equitable way that disguises the differences is just like, okay, well, the average is 5. There's an outlier here of someone saying 10, and there's an outlier of someone saying 1, but most people think 5, so we're just going to go with 5. That misses the person who said 1. Are they just like crazy optimistic, or do they know something of like, oh, well, all you have to do is change the setting. You know, and the person who said 10, are they just really pessimistic about the amount of time, or they maybe just don't know the problem, or do they know something? We had this problem before, we tried to solve it, it didn't work, so this is the result, you know. So I know some history that you guys didn't know. But do you spend time talking about the outliers instead of about the middle? And so that is a way to bring in the diverse opinions there in a way that's totally safe, because I've picked my card before, I know, because there's all these biases right? There's confirmation bias, there's anchoring bias, there's, you know, there's a lot of groupthink, right? And so if I had— if you were the most powerful person in the room and you said 5, I might just like slip my 10.

And if I went first, right?

And if you went 5, right, I might like put my 10 back in my deck and like pull out my 5 and be like, okay, makes sense to me too. I can see how he would say that.

That's powerful. I'm going to unmute people so they can ask questions directly, Renee. So Drew from Milwaukee, I've seen you in. Drew, are you with us?

I am here. Hey. Hi. Hi, Renee. Hey. My first question, I guess the one at the top is, Should an AEC firm work out loud regarding their journey towards EDI, to clarify, like work publicly about their journey, or is it better to do this work behind closed doors with only internal staff? Hmm, that is such a great question. I've never been asked that before. That's a really, really good question. So as most things in when you're dealing with software squishy stuff is it depends. So I can imagine that if transparency is settled on as a method to reach your goal, right? So again, if a goal is that you want to be showing— so, so the goal is in your firm that you want to have EDI be introduced as a core mission, but right now it's not really well known among or shared among your— in your firm, let's just say. Then you might say, well, the way to get there, one of the tools that we have to get there is transparency and showing the vulnerability. Like, and one of the obstacles we imagine is that people don't want to make a mistake, right? So let's be extra transparent and actually make mistakes in front of everybody, and let's rehearse what that looks like, and let's make sure that we've got robust enough communication that we can handle that, we can tell when something landed differently for one person than we expected, and we have a way to deal with that, right? If you do this scenario and you say, you know what, we already have problems with communication, we already have all these misunderstandings that happen whenever we release any information out about like pretty hard and pretty easy to understand things around vacation protocols or something like that. That's probably not a good idea then to just like go transparent. Let's all make all our mistakes in front of everybody. Because you know you don't have good robust communication in things that are part of your normal practices now. And so you might want to make sure that you're super clear and rehearsed, even to what people are going to say. And have ideas where you put stuff up and take them down and no one ever knows that you talked about it. Right, and that lack of transparency is not going to be a problem because you— or the lack of transparency. So then you go through the risks of being opaque about it. And so what are the risks of that? And you say, well, we come from a culture where most everything is transparent, and so there isn't a distrust of our leadership. So what we do is we say, you know what, we're not going to be fully transparent on all our whole processes because it's messy. We don't want to create confusion. We don't have the good communication plan worked out yet. We will give you updates on these milestones that we anticipate. Those might change, but we're gonna do some work closed door. If you say that this, this firm has had so much stuff happen that has been behind closed doors, and that the criticism chronically has been, this came out of nowhere, I didn't have any input, then the risk of going opaque is big, and you might want to say we have to be as transparent as we can do, but we need to build up our communication system or get an outside consultant who's going to be the one that does that communication piece for us. And so, you know, some of it is looking at your risks, your current culture, what you're— because I would predict for most firms tackling EDI issues will bring up chronic problems that your firm has had around conflict, and the conflict might not have been around EDI issues. It might have just been around how you determine vacation time, you know, who gets to have a say on hiring, or whatever it's going to be. It's going to— those are— you have to do that self-analysis, you know, where do we chronically have problems? Where is there a pattern of excluding people? Are there decisions made that women constantly feel like they don't have input? And build that into your EDI work because you can be pretty sure that those problems will come up and potentially even more sharply defined. And so, you know, it's a, it's a really great question for firms to, to deal with early on is because there's reasons to do either. And, you know, being being transparent about being opaque is actually a strategy, right? You can say, we need to do this amount for 2 weeks, this is who's going to be there, this is what we're doing, we're not going to let you know until we have a better result for you. At the end of 2 weeks, it's like checking in, let you know it didn't go as we planned, we actually found some really great stuff, we need to do a little bit more work, we'll get back to you in 2 more weeks, right? So that's transparent. But you're saying we needed some some space here, or it would have just created confusion and we would have spent so much time explaining to you what we were doing. We didn't think that it was fruitful. And if you have time to get input, like, does that work for you? Would you rather have more check-ins? Is there, you know, then we might need more resources to do that, you know. So it's, it's a process.

Several of the people that wrote in, Renee, you're getting close to something. It's like, how, how, um, How do you balance moving quickly and showing progress with doing things right and making it— setting up for sustainable success? And I'm curious your take on that kind of paradox.

Yeah, and some of that comes again from change process that's been part of my work before EDI as a main focus of, you know, the whole idea of quick wins and the idea of kind of getting the buy-in. Those, those things, you know, and I use sometimes John Kotter's work on Accelerate, where he's got the two operating systems, where one operating system is continuing to do the work that needs to be done, and there's a secondary operating system that's allowed to be quicker, test things out, have things fail, and that as, as things succeed, you start to move them over and have them incorporated into the primary operating system. So as a change process model, whatever model has been something that you have found helpful. McKinsey also has the 7 S's that I also find helpful, you know. So it's, it's not unlike other change processes, and so I think it's helpful to see what kinds of, what kinds of places that you've been able to have success in the past, and then finding quick wins. For some firms, just talking about it is a win. For other firms, say they, let's say a hypothetical firm that that went out with one of the statements that went out that was criticized as being too vague and not aligned with their other values that are evident in their actions. So that firm could, for example, find a response that is more specific, more tied to some of the folks that were most critical. Find ways for anonymous input if that's what it might take, and identify a couple of things that they could do. The, the Google had one of the best responses that I've seen in their blog where they, to the, the George Floyd death, and they talked about the actions that he had taken with meeting with— they already had an affinity group of Black at Google and the types of things they were already doing. And, you know, obviously they had a lot of resources, they had been working on this for a while. And Google's also not been like a great success story in a lot of other ways. They've had a lot of backlash and issues around, you know, reverse discrimination. And so, you know, it's not like they're a model in all ways. But this communication, I thought, was really good. And, you know, so if a firm that had that reaction, again, not because of any ill intent, or that, you know, they might have put a ton of time into crafting that first message, has a response that's different, that says, you know what, we learned a lot about that reaction. Thank you for calling us to task, and this is what we've done. This is how we know, you know, besides your responses, this is how we know that we missed the mark, and this is what we're gonna do now. You know, that's progress. And you might be laying out things that are, again, you know, like, we think there's these long-term things, we can't outline them for you now, but we've had these existing efforts that we didn't realize were really— should be part of this, that we're now gonna start to to, you know, make sure that there's the EDI piece is more clear, you know. So, you know, whatever it might be, even if it's, you know, not to be self-promotional, but I know a lot of firms have actually said we're gonna commit to reading the guides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the leadership group reads the guides and they report to each other, like one does, you know, chapters 1 through 3 and the other does, you know, 4 through 6, and they, you know, report back out to each other, and then you just at least tell others that we did this and you don't have to say this is what we got out of it yet or anything, but you should probably say we did this because we were hoping to get this goal, or this was towards some other goal.

Yeah, it's a good reminder. I'm gonna put the guides in the chat. Um, Todd Henderson— about the shoe metaphor.

Okay, okay, I'm glad I got some feedback. This is the first time I've used that one. I think of something that would work for you. Specific examples of things in the professional practice. So there you go. So yeah, if you want to clarify, Todd, you know, I guess for this—

no, that's, that's the problem. I, you know, I, I, I, I've experienced being excluded in my life, so I get—

well, sure, that I have a point.

Oh, just as a— just, I mean, anyone who's gone through high school has had a shitty—

you know, that's all I mean. So more social, more social and professional.

At least I have a place to hang thoughts about about that kind of thing.

So, okay. And I struggle.

I see all these wonderful metaphors about explaining what equity and justice mean. Yeah. And I can't ever plug them into a really, at an architecture firm, what might we do?

So maybe I can draw an example from the IPD world. So if you've done an integrated project delivery contract before, you know there's a fair amount of time in developing the contract and there's some controversy around, you know, is— can you just use a master agreement, or is that long and painful process of kind of going line by line through that, through the integrated form of agreement, important? I'm actually of the mind that the development of that contract is the very first thing that you do as a team, where you bring forward the conflict. And so, the conflict that I see and the exclusion that I see, the inequities that I sometimes see in that early work, is that a trade partner and an architect think of overtime in a really different way. And so, if the project were to define overtime in only one way, it would work well for the salaried architect and be terrible for the, for the trade partner. Or the trade partner would have to completely redo their systems in order to make it work for the architect. Or conversely, the architect would have to completely redo like their payroll systems, their accounting systems, their the way they track their billable hours would have to completely change. So there would be potentially a huge amount of work for one of those firms to make the changes needed to really be able to track the metrics that the team has decided are important and the pay— the pay scale that they've decided is fair, right? So that's a really common example is in the IPD world when you're talking about the risk-reward pool and the audits of the costs so that your direct costs and your overhead costs are clear to others. Is because there's fundamentally a different billing system for, for compensating the people that work for you in the contractor world versus the designer world and the consultant world. And so that is one where somewhere along the line, if you just breeze through that and you just say, well, we'll just find a way to track money and we'll just make it clear, you're going to end up for sure with a problem. If let's say the trade partner in this scenario really, really wants this job and they, they are willing to lose money because they really want this job, they see this as an important business case for them in the future that they're willing to lose money on this project. And so they see this as an opportunity to completely revamp their billing and the way that they track their hours. And so they're going to put in thousands of hours to change their payroll system. Time and their tracking to do this in order to be part of this project and make it work for the rest. Let's say they don't tell anybody. Right? So they've done all this work, but they're just going to swallow it because they're committed to it and they're going to do it, but they're not going to tell anyone because they don't want people to feel sorry for them or whatever, or a point of pride or whatever. They're not going to say anything. So they put this huge amount of effort in that no one knows about. In order to make it easier for the architect. Maybe that's fine. Maybe the next time they come up with a problem, the trade partner is going to feel like, I just put in $200,000 that you don't even credit me for that. And I'm coming to this table now as being asked to give up even more. I'm not willing to budge. You gotta have to come to me. But no one knows that they did all these things to help accommodate. So they were accommodating. They were walking in shoes that didn't fit. I don't know if that helps.

Good talk. Thank you. Yes. I love that. We've got James Farakhor. James, I'm going to allow you to ask your question. There you go. Hi. Yeah, so my question is really about engaging people who, I guess, feel marginalized, but their goal really isn't to be an activist. They just simply want to stop being marginalized. And sometimes it's hard to get them engaged because they feel that that puts the work and pressure on them on top of not being one, being in the spotlight. So I was wondering if you had any advice on what a better way for engaging those people might be without making them feel like they're suddenly in the spotlight.

That's a really great question and actually one that I hear pretty often and actually wished I was asked it more often because it's a, it's a big thing. And this is the role of allyship and I think that the— and self-education. So some of it is for Absolutely, the friends that I know and the colleagues that I know that were the most negatively affected after the George Floyd and the reaction in the AAC world were the people that were already marginalized. And they were already exhausted. It was super emotional for them to think about their brothers, their sons, their dads, in George Floyd's shoes, and, or themselves, right? And so then they felt like this was the moment to speak up and get stuff done, and people were asking that hadn't asked before. So there was this pressure to like, people are listening, I need to say something, but I'm so tired and I'm so devastated, and this is bringing up stuff that's been decades and decades for me. And so, and even recognizing how hard it is for some people at this time. And some people that I talked to that were in this position, there was a genuineness and again good intent on the part of, say, a firm leader to say, you know, I never really asked you what it's like to be Black in our firm, to be the only Black person in our firm. I'm sorry I never asked that before, but I'm asking now. And so the person, it's like, plus there's like a power thing, right? And so then it's like you can't say no, but you kind of sometimes maybe have to say no. Maybe that firm leader should have reached out to another firm leader first and said, "Do you know? Have you talked to your only Black employee? I know you also have only one person." Or maybe they should have read more about what that's like. There's been a number of really good articles that came out right after that in Harvard Business Review, as well as things that were in the blog blogs around architecture. Craig Wilkins had a nice one recently. So how much did you read before you asked that question? If you're that well-intentioned firm leader and you genuinely wanted to know and you urgently wanted to know, right? But recognizing that this is super hard for your employee right now. So framing that question by, I really truly want you to be able to say I don't have time right now, I don't have the bandwidth with right now, and that this is not something that I'm expecting you to do, and we can do this at any time works for you. So the awareness that there's a power thing happening here, and awareness that they're going through something that you don't understand, not even as an employee in your firm, but just as a person in this world. And so, you know, framing that and educating yourself, and then what are you asking them? Are you asking them to like bear it all to you? Or are you asking them, can you give me a book to read or an article that resonated for you? Or is there something you want our group to talk about in our leadership group? Would you like to come to our leadership group? Is that too weird for you? Would you like to submit something? You know, and kind of get a sense and protect them, right? So an ally is really someone that, you know, or is there someone that you would like to to speak for you. You know, so these are all things that are really helpful to know when we're in this moment. But you know, there's a fair amount that you can do on your own. I mean, obviously, if this person was in a perfectly calm, centered, and psychologically safe moment, they would be the best person to answer your questions. But they, you know, and so for the people that are marginalized, I think What I've been advising people is to say no, to say, "I'm sorry, I will later," or, "I'll think about what works for me, but I just can't right now." And for the firm leaders or whoever else is asking to know and to be able to say, "Do you want to talk about this? Do you not want to talk about this? What would help you the most? What would help you the most?" Do you want me to just like, you know, leave it? Do you want us to, you know, it feels strange to me to not say something, you know, just want to check in with you, but it's for you, it's not for me.

Bernie, I think I have time for one more question. We'll try and take Julia Herod's question. Drew, we already got one from you, so I hope that's okay. Julie, if you're still here, you should be unmuted Yes, I'm here.

Can you hear me? Yeah. Awesome. So I was wondering, we really value culture at our firm, and I picked up on during your talk, you know, hiring people and then sort of indoctrinating them. Like, we'll hire someone different and then make them like us. And that kind of hit a nerve for me, like, oh, I don't, I don't want us to be doing that inadvertently. Is there a But I also feel like our culture is important, and the way we define culture is more around our values. So for instance, one of our biggest ones is helping each other do our best work. And I think that's something that, you know, a diverse population can latch on to, but not everybody in our industry does, for instance, just as an example. Is there maybe a term or a way to approach, quote, culture fit that makes more sense when we're talking about EDI? Right.

So, that's a great question. And we spent some time on it in the guides. And actually, the second edition that's not out quite yet, but will be in about a month maybe, has more on this. And there's some resources that I can look up and send to Christopher afterwards too. But so, it's just the word fit, I think, is— so sometimes we talk about it as culture add or value to the culture. It's the fit part that is often the one that has all these inherent biases to it, because it's like we have an idea, we've got like a missing piece of our puzzle, and it looks exactly like this, and we need you to shave off all those edges that don't fit into that little piece, right? So that's the fit, right? But the culture part is fantastic, right? So having a healthy, robust culture is what is going to have that equity, have that psychological safety, have the— all those markers of a good culture, which is that people are deeply engaged. They're not just satisfied, they're actually engaged, right? So finding what it will take to engage everybody, and it's going to be different for everybody, and then make sure that that works with the needs of the project. And that carries all the way through to the way you write your job description, to how you onboard someone, to how you do your annual reviews. To how the team runs their meetings and their decisions. And I actually find the Society of Human Resource Managers, or SHRM, to be an excellent resource for— and they keep it very current with new articles. So things have— they've got some good resources that have been— are more timeless, and then others that are much more, um, kind of related to contemporary issues. So, and it's not an expensive membership, so that's one. And then the WLE, or the Women's Leadership Edge, If you're an AIA member, you have automatic access to all of their webinars, and they have one of bias interrupters, which has all kinds of tools and role plays to kind of get a sense of what's happening. But culture, I have no problem with. I think it's what you're adding to culture, not having a preconceived idea of what exactly is, and that there's only one way to add to culture.

Love that, Renee. Thank you. Culture ad. I saw that some people in the chat were liking that as well. Renee, I always enjoy spending time with you. This session flew by, as I thought it would. I know we can keep going. I have more questions than the audience does, but thank you. Whether we're talking about IPD or R&D or EDI, I always learn a ton and so— and walk away inspired.

The one we didn't talk about, my research practice program, so I'm going to put a link link in with you, and I hope that you guys can look it up later because it hits on a lot of these things and what I actually think is the kind of way to really remake the profession. So with that tantalizing— yeah, that's a good lead-in for— it's really, really great and includes a lot of the principles that we were talking about in a really visionary way. So that's perfect for you to look up afterwards, and we can do—

and that will come out in the email on Monday for everybody. You'll get that, and as well as the writes the transcript. So thank you again for sharing your time and energy and work with us. Thanks for everyone for your great questions and your attention, and we'll see you next month.

All right. Thank you, everybody.