On Culture Change | Mary-Margaret Zindren, Executive Director, AIA Minnesota

For more than 20 years, Mary Margaret Zindran has worked to further equity, diversity, and inclusion in city government, the law, the profession of architecture, and the built environment. She is a frequent speaker and panelist on organizational leadership, gender equity, and racial justice. Since 2015, Mary Margaret has held the position of EVP/Executive Director of the AIA— I'm sorry, American Institute of Architects Minnesota, AIA Minneapolis, AIA St. Paul, AIA Northern Minnesota, and the Minnesota Architectural Foundation. Um, before joining the AIA, she served as the Executive Director of the Hennepin County Bar Association and Hennepin County Bar Foundation, as Director of Communication and Strategic Initiatives at the League of Minnesota Cities, and as Legislative Counsel at the National League of Cities in Washington, DC. I, um, was just reflecting on this this morning that I was introduced to Mary Margaret by former K Connect keynoter and kind of all-around badass Carol Wedge of Shepley Bullfinch. Carol wrote me to say that I absolutely had to meet Mary Margaret and that our community would really appreciate the work that she and her colleagues are doing. And after spending time with you, Mary Margaret, and your work, I can say that Carol was totally on point, and it is my deep pleasure to welcome you to K Connect. And the stage is now all yours.

Thank you so much, Chris. I so appreciate it.

Um, thanks for having me here, uh, as part of Knowledge Architecture's, uh, great series of education sessions and as part of this great community.

Um, I was really pleased to see some questions sent in in advance of this session, and I just want you to know that those have actually helped shape this presentation. Um, some of the questions that have been posed will be addressed throughout my remarks, and several others we'll, we'll try to get to in the Q&A that follows as well. I am going to share my screen here. Bear with me just a moment.

Okay.

So we're going to start off with an overview of the AI Minnesota Culture Change Initiative, uh, something where we spent 2 years conducting research and analyzing the culture of the profession of architecture in Minnesota. The goals of this culture change initiative were to examine the current culture of the profession of architecture to define the desired culture, what we're aiming for, and to determine what it would take to accelerate progress from the current state to the desired state. This culture change initiative was really prompted by the rise of the #MeToo movement back in spring of 2018. That was when the New York Times investigation brought forward accusations made against Richard Meyer, and when there was wide circulation of a list that brought forward additional accusations against others in the architecture community anonymously. AIA National's response to those events was primarily twofold. They revised the AIA Code of Ethics to include stronger language discouraging harassment, discrimination, and bullying behavior. And they adopted and required AIA components like ours to adopt harassment and discrimination policies. Our staff and our board of directors really felt like our response needed to go further than that. Um, from our observation, many companies and industries have had ethical guidance and policies like these in place for decades, uh, but not to significant effect. Uh, we realized that we needed to go beyond dealing with the symptoms and get to the deeply rooted issues in the culture of architecture. A culture that really allowed that sort of behavior, which were open secrets in the profession, to be tolerated. That perspective of our staff and board were very much informed by the work of AIA San Francisco, their research findings from their Equity by Design initiative, and by AIA Minnesota's own research between 2014 and 2018. For the Culture Change Initiative, we took on both primary and secondary research. Our original primary research involved assembling more than 70 members of our AI Minnesota community as the Culture Change Resource Team. That group met in multi-hour sessions, including deeply, uh, very in-depth small group work 4 times over the course of 2019 and twice to review and refine the outcomes of this work. The group we pulled together was very demographically diverse, uh, with the intent of reflecting the demographics of the population of Minnesota and thereby overrepresenting the number of women and people of color in the profession. It was also diverse in terms of age and positional power. From students and people who are very new to the profession through to individuals who are CEOs of architecture firms and recent retirees. And in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, meetings were held with Black architects and designers of our local community, um, some but not all of whom had also been involved in the Culture Change Resource Team, to gain additional insights. Secondary research sources for our work included the AIA Guides for Equitable Practice, which I hope you all have spent time with. If you have not, I, I strongly encourage you do so. Those guides were the basis for the initial questions that were asked of the Culture Change Resource Team.

We also looked to media interviews and columns that involved people who are underrepresented in architecture. And also, so, so those media interviews and columns also informed this work.

To determine what would best move us from the current state of the culture to the desired state, we turn to systems theory, complexity theory, adaptive leadership theory, and intercultural development theory. The first core finding of our research is that culture change is possible now. Systems theory tells us that destabilization of a system makes it more susceptible and more amenable to change. Over the past few years, there have been four profoundly destabilizing forces building upon each other to make now the right time to lead change in the culture of the architecture profession. The Me Too movement, the nation's latest reckoning with systemic racism, the rise of climate change as a societal and client priority, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The convergence of these major destabilizing forces really has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity for systems change and for culture change. It's important to note, of course, that these destabilizing forces are overlapping and intersectional in nature. And these forces affect both the profession and the built environment. The pandemic has, of course, had deeper impacts on women, who tend to still carry significantly more of the caregiving burden than men. People of color are more susceptible to severe health impacts from the pandemic. Due to health issues that are tied to systemic racism in healthcare and generational poverty. Climate change is a contributor to both the creation and the dispersion of novel coronaviruses like COVID-19 and has disproportionate impacts on people of color, who through discriminatory housing and planning practices are more likely to live in areas with less green space, higher temperatures, and more air pollution. And while this culture change initiative is focused on the profession of architecture, it's clear that these same destabilizing forces are already changing the desires of clients and the design solutions that will best protect the public health, safety, and welfare going forward. With this in mind, the firms that are best positioned for success in the years ahead are firms whose demographics reflect those of the broader population, firms that have strong ongoing partnerships with women-owned and BIPOC-owned firms— BIPOC, of course, standing for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color— and firms where individuals throughout the firm have strong collaboration skills and the ability to both recognize and bridge across to adapt toward difference. What is called intercultural competence. Here we're talking about not just internal demographic differences, but being able to work successfully with industry teams, with clients, and with users who are and will be more demographically diverse than ever. The diversity, inclusion, and intercultural competence of the team will be key to winning work public, nonprofit, and private sector work, and being able to complete that work to the satisfaction of clients and users. Firms positioned for success are also those that have made flexible outcomes-based approaches core to their way of working and have established a solid base of skill and knowledge in developing, implementing, and measuring design solutions that are climate-oriented and equitable. Unfortunately, the number of firms that can say with integrity that they are currently well-positioned in these ways is much fewer than it needs to be for the profession to succeed in the years to come. An attendee of this session who submitted questions in advance asked, how do you determine if culture change is needed in a certain environment? And my response would be that unless you can say with integrity that your firm is well positioned in all of these ways, you need to engage in culture change. Someone else asked, how can you get white staff to see the importance of culture change? This business case is part of the answer. There is a true business imperative for the culture of the profession to change. Culture change is needed to support firms' ability to survive and to thrive.

I want to come at this from another angle as well.

A 2019 Harvard Business Review article pointed to research showing the business benefits of creating a culture of belonging. High belonging was linked to a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days. Employees with a higher workplace belonging also showed a 167% increase in their willingness to recommend their company to others They also received double the raises and 18 times more promotions. The article— the authors of that article also conducted a study focused on whether there is also a cost to exclusion. They found that feeling excluded actually causes employees to give less effort to the work of the team that is excluding them. In determining the culture we need to create, we recognize these business imperatives. We also went through all of the notes from those multiple multi-hour conversations with that 70+ member culture change resource team. We went through the additional interviews and media articles and columns, and we mapped all of this against the AIA Guides for Equitable Practice. We grouped and narrowed and landed upon these three core elements of the desired culture: AEC—authentic, equitable, and collaborative. When we're talking about an authentic culture, it's one where a person can be open in sharing their thoughts and perspectives, where the lives people live, the many aspects of who they are, can be openly communicated and are valued. Authentic culture is one based on trust, trust that is from the beginning of the relationship rather than required to be proven and earned over time. An authentic culture is one of candor, candor based on trust and mutual respect, where various and opposing views can be expressed and heard, and where they have the potential to actually shape the outcome. An authentic culture is one where you can be yourself, where your gender, your sexual orientation, your race, your ethnicity, and other important aspects of who you are don't have to be concealed in order for you to be seen as a valuable member of the team. In Minnesota, working to create an authentic culture within the profession of architecture is particularly challenging because Minnesota culture tends to avoid conflict and openly disagreeing is considered by many to be rude. To make headway in creating a culture of authenticity in the face of headwinds from Minnesota culture more broadly requires us to focus first on trust and respect. When we talk about an equitable culture, it's one where we move beyond focusing on what we all have in common our shared humanity, our shared desire to create great, great outcomes in the built environment, and recognize where there are differences among us. Focusing on equal distribution of resources and treating everyone the same regardless of their gender, ability or disability, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity often ignores important differences in how the broader world and the profession have historically treated people who have been underrepresented within or marginalized by the architecture profession. Equitable cultures focus on fair outcomes. They recognize where the system of architecture provides inherent advantages to some individuals more than others and offers ways to bridge those gaps. Equitable cultures recognize where there are aspects of the culture that accelerate the career growth of some individuals and hinder the career growth of others. Golf as a networking and mentoring activity is one example. It's a sport that takes a lot of time and money to get good at, and one where women and people of color were long excluded. The amount of time it takes to practice and to play makes it less conducive for people who are caregivers to participate in. Equitable cultures adopt beliefs and frame challenges in a way that recognizes disparities as more systemic in nature than about the individual. And leaders within equitable cultures are those who are able to adapt toward the differences of others, as opposed to assuming or insisting that others adapt toward your own traditions or ways that are comfortable for you. We are also aiming for a collaborative culture. One of the most interesting findings from our research was that many people take pride in the collaborative nature of architecture, that this is seen as a characteristic of the current culture of the profession. Yet at the same time, many others in the profession did not see the culture as collaborative and pointed to the many ways it is individualistic in nature. The difference here was particularly pronounced among women and people of color. While the stated intentions, the assumptions, are that the work of architecture is collaborative, the actual experience of women and people of color was that the work did not feel collaborative. When we looked back to strategic planning research that we conducted in 2016, we saw the same issues related to the broader AEC industry. Architects viewed themselves as collaborative and want to be seen as collaborators, but people in the trades, engineering, and construction did not see architects as collaborative and wished for a more collaborative spirit industry-wide. We're talking here about how there is currently a difference between intent and impact related to collaboration. In the desired culture, the intentions of collaboration are matched by how collaborative the process actually feels skills for all involved. In a collaborative culture, teamwork is prioritized over individual achievement. This is reflected in things like criteria for performance evaluations and in how project outcomes are assessed. Collaborative cultures foster mutual respect and involve listening to understand and responding based on what is learned. Listening to understand is about being authentically present and requires a comfort with not knowing, an assumption that it— you as the listener have much to learn from others, as opposed to holding tightly to the idea of architect as expert. And finally, collaborative cultures recognize there is no one right way, that there are almost always multiple ways of interpreting information executing a process, and getting to a desired outcome. For those who may feel that it's daunting to try to create a culture of architecture that is authentic, equitable, and collaborative in all of these ways, it's critical to realize that culture is built every day by every one of us through the actions we take, the conversations we have, the questions we ask, and the choices we make. This recognition led us to look more specifically at the system of the profession and those everyday actions and decisions. We recognize that the profession of architecture is a dynamic, adaptive human system to which systems theory and systems thinking could be applied in determining how it currently operates and how we can best and most quickly move from the current state of the culture to the desired state. To ensure shared meaning, systems thinking is about viewing the elements of a system in a holistic, expansive way, focused on the interconnectedness and relationships among elements of the system rather than on the individual parts, recognizing that dynamic adaptive systems don't operate in a linear fashion or in silos. Each element influences the other in ways that are ever emergent. What's courageous about systems thinking is that it leads you to ask questions that are impolitic, that can feel uncomfortable. It leads you to solutions that may be counterintuitive and challenge foundational assumptions and beliefs. So I— in identifying ways to intervene in the system, we turn to leverage points analysis, the approach developed by Donella Meadows decades ago that remains core to systems theory. Meadows identified 12 leverage points, 12 places to intervene in a system, each with varying levels of ability to move the system. The 12th and least impactful is the leverage point of constants, parameters, and numbers, the stocks flowing into a system. In the case of the profession of architecture, this would be the numbers of individuals of various demographics entering the profession. The 11th is buffers and stabilizers, elements of the system that counter and diffuse the impact of efforts focused on the flow of stocks into the system. Tenth, how the system is structured. Ninth, delays between when an action is taken in the system and the impact of that action. Eighth, balancing feedback loops, those that work to keep the system at its existing equilibrium. Seventh, reinforcing feedback loops, those that encourage actions to build upon each other to create a particular outcome. Sixth, the flow of information. Who has access to what information at what times in what sequence? Fifth, rules. What is rewarded and what is discouraged? Both the rules that are stated and those that go unsaid and are inherently understood by those who are successful or dominant in the culture. Fourth, who has the power to change what elements of the system? The power to experiment, to self-organize, to make determinations in the moment. Third, the stated and unstated goals of the system. Sometimes the goal of reaching a particular level of profit, for example, is not stated or shared broadly enough to be a common goal, but is kept close within a small group of executives. Second, mindsets and paradigms. The beliefs, biases, and assumptions from which the other aspects of the system flow. Mindsets are the basis for everything from structure to information flows to rules and goals. And first, the ability to transcend paradigms, to look entirely beyond the existing system and its mindsets to new ways of thinking and being. The interventions that focus on the leverage points closest to the fulcrum in this graphic are those with the least ability to impact systems change, while those farthest away, most distanced from the fulcrum, are where small changes can have significant impact on the system. As part of our Culture Change Initiative research, we conducted a leverage points analysis of the system of the profession through Through the lens of culture change. Well, it was not an exhaustive analysis. It has begun to illuminate the many ways our various structures, processes, rules, goals, and mindsets are self-reinforcing and where our efforts are counterbalancing. We're often getting in our own way. Overall, when it comes to most efforts to change a system, people and organizations focus their attention on the first leverage point: constants, parameters, and numbers. It is the leverage point that is most obvious and logical to people. However, it takes extraordinary effort, extraordinary resources for interventions focused on numbers to have an impact in moving the system. We've actually seen this play out in architecture for years. Related to pipeline efforts. There's no question that pipeline efforts are crucial. To create a profession that reflects the demographics of the public the architecture community serves, we need to inspire and encourage young people to pursue a career in architecture. But pipeline efforts are not enough. The current members of the profession need to change themselves and the organizations they've built and that they sustain. We've already seen how true this is in the context of women in architecture. For years, the number of women graduating from schools of architecture has been about 50%, which essentially mirrors the broader population. Yet career progress among women often stalls out, what has been referred to as the missing 32%. There are other forces within the system that are counterbalancing. The fact that there are still very few women who hold the top positions in architecture firms, especially in lead design roles, speaks to aspects of the system that go beyond the pipeline of new entrants. Having very few women or people of color in top positions within architecture flows back and influences the, the numbers flowing into the system, dissuading demographically underrepresented young people from pursuing an architecture career. Many individuals and firms have put a great deal of time and money into youth engagement. More recently, firms are developing relationships with historically Black colleges and universities, wanting to strengthen recruitment efforts. But without also examining and changing the rest of the system, the situation individuals are being recruited into, these recruitment efforts will ultimately be unsuccessful. It's really a matter of integrity. If we are serious about recruiting people of all genders, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA people, people of all races and ethnicities to the profession of architecture, we need to be equally serious about ensuring that firms are set up to ensure these young people have a strong chance to thrive within the culture of the profession. To create a profession that reflects and can best serve the public, we need strong pipeline efforts focused on the numbers flowing into the system. To create a culture where all can thrive, we need to focus on interventions on the far side of the continuum. Things like who has access to what information, the actions and approaches that are encouraged and discouraged, who holds power in what situations, the goals of the system, and the mindsets that are foundational to the system. Mindsets are where we believe the work of culture change in the profession needs to focus in tandem with and complementary to pipeline efforts. As those of you who have spent time focused on intercultural development or adaptive leadership know, Self-awareness is core to growth and change. Self-awareness at both the individual level and the organizational level. This is about being honest with ourselves about the mindsets we hold, being curious about where those mindsets came from, how they were instilled, and how tightly or loosely we currently hold on to these mindsets. Our research sought to understand the mindsets currently held within the profession. Both those that are dominant and those that are emergent. We've developed a long list of these mindsets drawn from this research. These are mindsets profession-wide. Identifying and examining the mindsets you hold personally or that exist within your firm is the self-awareness work that is yet to be done. We took this work a step further and identified desired mindsets within the profession. Those that on balance would be more likely to accelerate than to hinder creation of the desired culture that is authentic, equitable, and collaborative. In most cases, the mindsets needed to accelerate change already exist within the profession, but they are emergent, not dominant. To determine what mindsets already exist within a culture and to determine where culture change is happening, We need to be actively looking for patterns of behavior that demonstrate, that are the manifestations of the mindsets we want to move away from and the mindsets we want to reinforce. This is pattern spotting. It can reveal where our self-awareness individually and organizationally is flawed or uninformed, or where our intent is not matching our impact. The mindsets document we developed brings forward the hindering and accelerating mindsets we identified in our research. Two examples of existing mindsets are shown on the left of this slide. One is a very prevalent mindset that long hours show dedication and are a badge of honor. We found this to be a mindset that on balance hinders an authentic, equitable, and collaborative culture, and that a parallel mindset that is emergent will be more likely to accelerate change toward the culture we seek: the mindset that long hours are unhealthy and don't lead to quality work. Another very prevalent mindset is that architects can design a better world. We found this to be a mindset that on balance does not hinder the culture we seek. That it is a mindset that should be reinforced and further leveraged in the context of culture change toward a mindset that the architecture community can design a better profession. In a few minutes, we'll come back to talking more about mindsets. A complementary theory we dug into is complexity theory, which is about how we best implement interventions informed by our analysis of leverage points in the system. What leaders often want to do is simply direct that change happen, that new rules and policies be established, and that people be told to abandon past mindsets and adopt new ones. It's not quite as simple as that. The work of culture change is cultivation. It's about creating the conditions for change to take root and grow. While the desired change does need to be defined, getting there is an adaptive and iterative process where listening, observing, and responding are key. The cultivation work of culture change is a lot like being a gardener. It involves seeding, nurturing, weeding, and harvesting. Seeding is about both people and ideas. It's about inspiring people to pursue architecture as a career and bringing new people and partners into your firm. It's also about seeding new thinking, new experiments. Nurturing takes a lot of different forms. Like soil, it's important to make sure the environment where seeds are planted is rich with nutrients, that it has been prepared with the supports and resources that people of various backgrounds and identities may need to thrive. Like rain or watering, culture change benefits from regular pauses, from regularly questioning assumptions and ways of doing things. Like sun, culture change can grow more rapidly when light is shown on those efforts that are having the desired impact. Culture change also benefits from efforts to create space where initiatives and individuals with potential to exemplify the desired culture have more room to grow, and where individuals and efforts that are crowding out, out authenticity, equity, and collaboration are challenged and sometimes even removed, where individuals are held accountable for their impact on the culture. When we see efforts bear fruit, We have the opportunity to assess our outcomes, to compare our intentions to our impact. We can re-examine and rework our seeding, nurturing, and weeding approaches. It's important to recognize that this work is not linear in nature. Cultivation requires constant and simultaneous attention to seeding, nurturing, weeding, and harvesting. As was said early on in this presentation, culture is built every day by every one of us, and this is true for culture change too. Culture change is everyone's work. No matter what position a person holds, how new or seasoned we are in the profession, the type of work we do, we have the opportunity to lead culture change. This cannot simply be the work of those in positions of leadership. Or it will not take hold. We each can and must find our place in this work. Communities of practice are a recommended way of supporting work like this, where people across an organization, across a profession or an industry, work together to reinforce each other's learning and experimentation. AIIM has created a community of practice for culture change and all within the architecture community who are committed to creating an authentic, equitable, collaborative culture are invited to join in. The community of practice has begun its work with a focus on mindsets, pattern spotting to see where the mindsets show up in everyday experiences in the profession. We identified 3 pairs of mindsets for participants to choose from for their pattern spotting. This way we'll be able to group people together to build off of each other's work. To give you a better idea of the mindsets participants are currently pattern spotting around, here are the pairs they could choose from. For the first pair, the hindering mindset is that individual achievement is primary. Pursuit of legacy is noble and individualistic in nature. The paired Accelerating Mindset is that collaboration is primary. Credit and legacy are team-based, and that team includes those involved in all aspects of the project. For the second pair, the Hindering Mindset is that people need to be both artistic and technically proficient to be a quote-unquote "real architect." and to be successful in the profession. The accelerating mindset is that architects and designers have strengths in various areas. We don't need to all be great at all aspects of the work of architecture to be successful. And the third pair, the hindering mindset, is one where people need to tamp down or hide the expression of their gender culture, or sexual orientation in order to be successful. And the accelerating mindset is that the work of architecture is best accomplished when we can bring our whole selves to our work. So we've asked members of the Community of Practice to document their observations around one of these pairs of mindsets. We're also asking them to map their observations to particular leverage points, which will in turn inform experiments with interventions in the system. Within the community of practice, we will share our learnings. We will keep constant attention on this work, and we will practice what we preach. We will work to operate with integrity in a manner that is authentic, equitable, and collaborative. This community of practice launched in late January. And will be primarily virtual in nature. There is an active group of nearly 100 people from across the nation who are participating. Eventually, this work may include an in-person component as well. A few attendees of this session asked in advance that we provide concrete examples of culture change within organizations and the factors that made this work successful. While we are still very much on a journey of culture change, I do think that AI Minnesota as an organization is a good case study to look at. Answering this question allowed me to look back at our work over the last 6 years as an organization through the lens of what we've learned from our culture change initiative research, and I do think that there are some helpful takeaways. The fact is, the question we've gotten most often in presenting this research is, doesn't culture change take decades, take generations? From our experience, it can actually happen quite quickly. We've seen significant change over the past 6 years. It might be easy to dismiss us as a small organization, but the culture change we've seen is within our staff team of 9 and our boards of directors, which total more than 60 members. And the leadership of our committees, which is another 50 or so people, as well as the broader deeply engaged membership, which I would put at, at around 200 additional people. The investment we've made in this work, I would estimate being at around $80,000, which came from our reserves over several years. For context, we have a $2 million annual budget. Before, before I joined AIA Minnesota, momentum had already started to grow around making diversity and equity priorities for the organization. I pursued the position of EVP and Executive Director in large part because this priority was clearly stated in the job description, and it came through in the interview process too. My first month on the job, The Diversity Task Force, which had been created a year earlier, recommended a diversity policy that was unanimously adopted by the Board of Directors. Within it, the organization set a goal of having the profession reflect the demographics of our state in terms of representation of gender and race by the year 2035. 6 months later, I worked with the same task force to produce a report that documented the demographics of the AIA membership and local schools of architecture and compared those to census data. It also included a set of recommendations for change within AIA Minnesota as an organization. These goals and recommendations became foundational to our work. We went through a strategic planning process, the first in a decade, in a manner that engaged the membership in conversation about what they wanted from the organization and the issues that needed to be addressed. We purposefully overrepresented women, people of color, and young people in our research with the outcomes of the Diversity Task Force in mind. We set new goals and values for the organization but paused before developing a work plan. Using the matrix map analysis approach, we took several months to evaluate every program, service, and committee against those new goals and values, working to identify where our values were already showing up in our work and where there were gaps, essentially pattern spotting. These findings then drove the work plan we developed to guide our efforts for the next several years. And we reviewed and revised our employee handbook to shift policies to be more equitable for caregivers of all genders and various definitions of family. We specifically retained an approach of separate vacation and sick time and later created an emergency pooled sick time bank, recognizing the disproportionate impact on, on sick time that women often experience due to more often carrying the burden of caregiving. We hired a woman who was 7 months pregnant and needed to go on bed rest a month early. We provided 3 months of fully paid maternity leave and simply asked that she sign something stating her intention to stay with us for a year following her return to work. She's now been with us for more than 3 years and is a deeply valued member of our team. We also hired a consultant, Team Dynamics, out of Minneapolis-St. Paul. We laid out a multi-phase, multi-year approach for organization change. Starting with intensive training for the whole of our staff team. That training involved 7 multi-hour sessions over the course of a year, each person taking the Intercultural Development Inventory, a diagnostic tool that measures one's ability to recognize and bridge across difference. Team Dynamics provided both individual and group-based applied learning and coaching, with additional opportunities offered for people of color in the context of a white dominant staff team and culture. And after the core training was completed, we paid for additional follow-up sessions for staff team members to connect with our coaches as we continue to apply learnings to new situations. With the learnings and growth from that experience, we turned to developing training for our membership with a focus on the leadership of AI Minnesota and our local schools of architecture. We invested in one of our staff members to be trained to administer the Intercultural Development Inventory diagnostic tool, and our staff team worked with Team Dynamics to develop a version of the training we had gone through to be one that is tailored to architects and architectural designers. After several iterations, we launched the National Intercultural Leadership Program in 2020. The staff member who became a qualified administrator of the IDI supports the NILP and conducts a program called Foundations of Intercultural Development. Where the NILP is meant to be a deep dive in developing skills to recognize and bridge across difference, the Foundations program is meant to introduce as many members and volunteer leaders to the intercultural development theory of change as we can to grow individual self-awareness and to provide recommendations for self-directed applied learning. Over the same period of time, we also worked to grow our collaborative efforts with special attention to Black and POC-led organizations. We worked with Local Architects of Color to support their efforts to start a Twin Cities chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects. We brought the exhibit "Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture" to St. Paul, even though we didn't have an exhibit space or any experience. It was a very successful collaboration with the curator, with Formula, a Black-owned firm featured in the exhibit, and with several Black-led youth organizations. We developed relationships with Bryan Lee and his colleagues at Colloq8 out of New Orleans, Juxtaposition Arts, and the Center for Transformative Urban Design, all Black-led organizations, to help us define equity in the built environment and translate this work to be accessible to the general public through collaboration with youth of color. And we developed several additional partnerships in ways that sought to integrate attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our ways of operating and collaborating. Along the way, we periodically measured our progress in a variety of ways. In terms of progress in developing our skill in bridging and adapting toward difference, our staff team took the IDI at the beginning of our engagement with TeamDynamics and again about a year and a half later. The first time we took it, our group profile was primarily in minimization, a developmental mindset that minimizes and misses difference and emphasizes commonality, a mindset that nearly 70% of the population is usually in. The second time we took the IDI, after about 18 months of training and applied experience, our group profile moved along the continuum to acceptance, with at least 2 of our staff members moving into adaptation. This was so gratifying to see, mainly because we really felt that we had changed as a staff team, and we were starting to see broader changes in our organization and our membership too. Within the team, we recognized greater self-awareness as individuals and about our organization. We were better able to recognize differences that make a difference, differences that shape disparate outcomes within the team. Among our engaged members and within the profession of architecture. We noted that we were experimenting more and collaborating more deeply as a team. And when conflicts arose, we engaged with greater humility, understanding that there is no one right way to do things. We used our new pattern spotting and analysis skills to describe what was happening from material relational, and symbolic standpoints, and to employ various interpretations of meaning in determining how to respond and to resolve conflict. We also implemented and documented changes to our conference and continuing education, not just adding content and shifting curriculum of leadership development programs to focus on EDI topics, but also setting goals to have speakers represent the demographics of the public of Minnesota to reflect the profession we are striving for. Those goals have been exceeded for the past 4 years. The leadership of the organization has also changed dramatically— committee leadership, board service, and board leadership. We have experienced multiple firsts in leadership over the past few years. The first Black man to serve as AIA Minnesota president, the youngest woman to serve as AIA Minnesota president, and now is the first time that the positions of past president, president, and president-elect are all filled by women of color. Next year, we will have the first Black woman to serve as AIA Minnesota president. The composition of the AIA Minnesota board overall has changed dramatically. Compared to 2015, there are twice as many women serving on the board and 7 times the number of people of color. 34% of the board members are people of color. This compares to 21% of the Minnesota population and just 4% of the AIA Minnesota membership. These shifts in volunteer leadership have had the desired ripple effects of making it easier to recruit and retain women and people of color in various leadership roles in the seating of more diverse juries, and in people of color being chosen for the organization's top honors, including the AIA Minnesota Gold Medal, which this year for the first time went to a collaboration of two Black members. The matrix map analysis and pattern spotting also played a role here. Barriers to leadership were identified in our leadership selection and awards processes. Both processes were made more transparent and eligibility was open to be more accessible to more people of more varied experiences. Pulling up a few thousand feet, we recognize that the most significant culture change has come from the deepening of relationships with people who had long felt marginalized by the profession of architecture and by our organization. We know there has been change in these staff members' and AIA members' experiences because they've gone out of their way to tell us. We also know because they tell us when we as a profession or as an organization are veering off course or not picking up on differences that matter. They tell us because they now have confidence that they will be heard and action will be taken. We also see how the work of EDI has started to become ingrained in all aspects of our programs and operations. We know by the questions asked and comments made in everyday communications, staff meetings, committee meetings, and board meetings, we are increasingly bringing an EDI lens to all that we do. We also have an ongoing opportunity to bring attention to issues of equity in the built environment through our new digital weekly newsletter called Enter that goes to the whole of our membership and to clients and key influencers of policy and public opinion in Minnesota. Equity, climate action, innovation, economy, and experience are the content pillars that we address in every issue every week. When we look back at all that has changed over the past 6 years, we can do so through the leverage points analysis I shared with you earlier. I think that we have moved so far so fast because of key mindsets that were embraced by the organization's volunteer leadership and staff team. Shifts in mindset have happened related to how we view tradition versus future focus and in how risk is perceived. We've moved away from a mindset that one needs to, quote unquote, pay their dues for years in working one's way up before being ready for leadership positions. It has come in the form of a focus on individual members more than firms. The mindset that our primary obligation is to help each individual member achieve their definition of career success by working to remove the systemic barriers that get in their way. We think of the people we serve as the architecture community, recognizing the term architects is not inclusive of the whole of our membership. Our mindsets are also continually being refined. We've had recent discussions about terms like empowerment and inclusion as often not conveying our intentions. These terms infer that there is a dominant group that needs to choose to confer power or to include, when what we are working toward is a feeling of power and belonging that is not oriented toward the actions of a dominant group. We also instigated and experienced many changes across additional leverage points that are on the more impactful side of the continuum. We instituted new goals and values, including to represent the public we serve. Our core value of integrity has been a game changer. If we say we care about EDI and we know what that means in practice, we have to have integrity around following through, even and especially when the circumstances are challenging. Who has power, autonomy, and agency is evolving and expanding. Aligning performance evaluations around our core values and goals has leveraged rules and rewards to encourage culture change. And who has access to what information has also changed. We are pursuing a just label, which is the next step in this effort. Currently, there is much greater transparency in our processes, criteria for decision-making. We're clear about what we know and what we don't, and most of all, we're clear about our values and commitments. So that's an overview of the AI in Minnesota Culture Change Initiative and how it relates to our own culture change within our organization. If you'd like to sign up to participate in the community of practice for culture change, I encourage you to contact my colleague, Paweal French, Her email is on the slide. And if you're interested in learning more about the National Intercultural Leadership Program, please email me directly. I can also put our emails in the chat as well. Thanks so much for your time and your attention, and I would love to answer any questions you may have. I'm going to stop sharing.

Thank you so much, Mary Margaret. I think, yeah, that's rookie mistake. No worries. Thank you so much. That was really powerful, and I appreciate both the case study and then also the broader framework for us to dig into. My first question is also the same question that Angie Shaw has, so I'm going to go ahead, Angie, and unmute you so you can ask Mary Margaret your question. And if other folks have questions you'd like to ask, please feel free to put them in the Q&A panel and we'll, we'll take them there.

Thanks, Christopher. I was just wondering if you have suggestions for how to create a collaborative culture in a distributed work environment.

Distributed in geography, I assume?

Yes, right now everybody's working remotely and I think as we're looking at bringing people to the office, there's the push and pull of we need to be together to collaborate, but do we really?

Yeah, thank you for asking that. Yeah, you know, we launched this community practice for culture change in the pandemic, so we've been grappling with this, you know, over the past year, certainly in establishing that new group to do this work. And that absolutely has its, its challenges, but there's, there's also great opportunity to do some of the most important work of culture change in a virtual environment.

You know, as I mentioned, this work of self-awareness, both individually and about the organization, is work that can absolutely be done while we are still in this state and as we move to a hybrid future.

You know, it is hard to build trust and build a culture of candor when you're only getting to know people in this virtual format. That said, you know, I'm also thinking about some of our experiences following the unrest, and there have been new collaborative organizations created during this time of the pandemic where I have never met some of these folks in person, and yet over the course of, you know, months of meetings and engaging with trying to be true to this spirit of authenticity, equity, and collaboration, we've been able to build trust quite quickly and are now in a, in a place where we're creating a strong culture.

So I do think that at least based on those experiences, it is possible to build the trust necessary for culture change to happen.

And the work of analyzing your culture absolutely can be done within this, this hybrid future.

Thank you. Sure.

Um, Michael, uh, you have a question you'd like to ask.

Certainly. So recognizing that culture is not a static thing and it's a dynamic and it's almost a living, breathing element, how do you monitor or measure the status of the culture easier maybe when you're together in an office, but when you're distributed in a work-from-home environment, how do you measure, monitor that in some way?

Yeah, I really appreciate that question. It's something that we are grappling with right now as an organization because it's been a few years since we did our strategic planning. This is the time when you usually would do big surveys and check-ins. A couple of things to keep in mind. One is that if we look at the, the nature of this work, it is relational, material, and symbolic. Those aspects are all really important. So measuring relationships is really challenging to do in the ways that we think about measurement, right?

So in my relationship with my partner, with my spouse, if I were to give him a survey that said, how are we doing on a scale of 1 to 10? You know, how do you feel our communication is? Do you, you know, are you feeling heard?

I mean, those kinds of things, it might actually damage our relationship for me to employ that kind of measurement approach. So when you're talking about true collaboration, like partnerships that your firm might have with another firm.

There are other indicators of how your relationship is going that you can be attuned to and take seriously. It doesn't all need to be quantitative in nature.

I think qualitative measures are really important in that realm of relational measurement.

That said, there are some approaches, and I sent along a document from Work Design.

I think it's a journal or magazine, and they do suggest some questions that I think are really well crafted and could be used in a setting where, you know, perhaps have a focus group that's representative of a wide array of perspectives. I'm going to read just a few of the questions that they have in there.

The first is, what does your direct manager say or do that makes you feel valued and respected? In what ways does their behavior make you feel the opposite? Another is, tell me about a time when being different from others at work affected your willingness to share an opinion or idea.

So those kinds of questions You know, there's a lot of thought that's been put into exactly how they're crafted, and, and I think leaning on some of these examples is another good way to start in measuring where you're at.

It does, you know, also measuring things like headcount, you know, seeing what are the demographics of folks in leadership of the overall group. That tells you about diversity.

It doesn't tell you about that feeling of belonging. Equity also can be measured through hard numbers, but measuring culture change is more actually in that realm of inclusion or belonging. It is the harder realm to measure, and you'll see in that Work Design article, you know, there, there's still a lot of emerging research here.

So it's one where experimentation is going to be necessary as, as this realm of sort of academic understanding is built over time.

Thank you, Mary Margaret.

I'm curious, Mary Margaret, um, what was the— when you did the work to identify the mindsets, the pairs that we saw before, which pair that kind of emerged from that work that surprised you the most?

You know, you know, it's surprising is a hard one.

The most surprises were actually more on the leverage points analysis side. You know, the fact that we intuitively think that the way that we change a culture is to change the people who are coming into that culture.

If we just had more representation of X, you know, group of people that are, that are underrepresented, this culture would inherently change. It would naturally change. And that systems analysis was a huge aha moment for us to realize that, uh, yes, that's important, but the change of the system has to happen through all these other approaches. Um, that was a huge aha moment. Um, in terms of the mindsets, It was, it was more a feeling of disappointment and frustration. What we, you know, we had picked up on these various mindsets existing in the profession, but the depth of feeling, the depth of impact and hurt that people expressed related to these mindsets, the prevalence of these mindsets, was something that was unexpected in its, uh, in, in, in how they have impacted the people of this profession. Um, and, and that, um, we, the mindsets document that we put together is so long and not collapsed into broad categories because we really wanted to honor the, the depth of, um, of impact that folks have had around those specific mindsets.

Yeah, I can. I've read that document, but I had the experience of reading the AIA Guide Equitable Practice that you mentioned before. And I put the link in the chat. And probably the most memorable thing to me from that document was reading through the quotes of folks that have been in the profession for a while. And my background was working in two different architecture firms. We talked about these issues in the mid-2000s, like early 2000s, mid-2000s, when I was in those firms. And to still see in this guide for equitable practice kind of where things were, you know, because I've been out of the firm for a little bit. We work with clients, but still it's not the same thing as being inside. It's— I wonder, I guess I'm working my way around to a question, but well, I guess it's a recommendation that folks read these because it will impact you. And I wonder how much the kind of one of the keys to getting mindsets to change is for folks to read these. First, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I think I would read it all in parallel. Like, so again, we, well, we were actually part of developing those Guides to Equitable Practice. We brought a lot of those stories forward. You know, the media interviews with people of color people with disabilities in architecture, right?

There's so much out there to under—

you know, to try to grow one's empathy or understanding of others' experience, but it's also not enough.

We can't be admiring the problem by simply taking in stories.

You know, someone in the midst of this past summer and forgive the starkness of this statement, but basically said, every time an unarmed Black man gets killed by police, you know, white people start a book club. There's so much truth in that statement. And it's so hard to own the fact that that is true, that we kind of go inside our heads and we go into a learning, learning, learning mode, but we have to move beyond the taking in to actually working to change the culture, the systems that perpetuate pain, right? I want to come back actually to your earlier question because there, you know, when I talk about the pain of the impact of some of these mindsets, for example, there's a prevalent mindset that we found related to larger firms in working with small BIPOC-owned firms, that they're—

the larger firm is being benevolent, is being charitable in reaching out to help the small firms, right?

Or that it's coming from a client, you know, directive that this happened. That mindset is well known by those leaders of those small firms. They feel it. In that interaction, that that's what it's based on, as opposed to a mindset that these small firms are innovative, they are creative, they have to be in order to do all that they do.

And there's lived experience that they bring that is of tremendous value.

So that flip is one that just through shifting the mindset, people who are in relationship with each other understand that it comes through. Just as, you know, when people were just defining culture, it's that, it's that smell, it's the air you breathe, it's just, you know, the stuff that's unsaid that makes a place feel the way it does.

Mindsets come through in so many ways that it's hard to pinpoint, but people know when you shifted your mindset truly in the way that they, you know, experience relationship with you.

Hmm. Actually, people are very interested in this idea. I've noticed both in the chat and the Q&A, question came if it's possible for us to share the mindset document with— Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I can reach out, Mary Margaret, to you and get it. And then when we send out the notes and the presentation, I'll make sure to include it, include it there, folks. I'm curious. To know, I mean, I guess I like the systems theory piece of it, and I'm maybe staying with the topic of mindsets, and it may sound like an obvious question, but why are these mindsets so important? Like, what does it open up? And maybe you can speak to your direct experience both with, in AIA Minnesota, but then also through this community practice.

You know, honestly, before digging into these different Theories of Change, I hadn't thought of them as being mindsets, right? I thought of them as being values, but it's really in some ways the manifest—

mindsets to me are the manifestation of values and fears. One of the things that you'll see at the bottom of the last page of that mindsets document are the fears that we identified as underlying the mindsets, particularly the mindsets that are hindering, right?

So, so we, we didn't go into our work 6 years ago with idea that we're going to change mindsets. We just simply adopted— I had certain mindsets coming into the position. Those aligned with members of our board and their particular mindsets that were you know, just starting to emerge within our organization. And alignment of values and goals really took the form of a variety of mindsets that we realized in looking back we had held true to over the course of this time.

So I'm curious, could you, off the top of your head, do you, can you remember any of those fears that kind of underlie the mindsets and like how that— Yeah, um, I'd—

so, um, one that comes to mind, um, is a fear of, um, embarrassment, right? Uh, that, that so much of the way that architects and architectural designers see themselves, but particularly licensed architects, is that their identity is deeply, deeply tied into this profession. People say, you know, I am an architect.

That is who I am.

That is core to my being, right? And so, you know, challenges to, or shifts to, shifts, they're manifestations of that mindset that belie a fear of that aspect of identity being challenged, needing to change.

Like the thing around long hours, for example, that badge of honor, that's because that person went through a really hard experience to get to this point. And while in, you know, in one breath they may say, "I don't want this for other people," they will then tell the war stories of, oh, you know, 3 days with no sleep.

And the fear is that if other people don't go through that same experience, it won't be as valued, it won't be that it diminishes somehow their hard-won accolade, their hard-won esteem. So this realm of dilution that you sometimes hear, this fear of dilution of the profession, is actually something that's a little bit closer to home.

It's fear related to self and how one is perceived.

Yeah, that's one that, that pops to mind anyway.

And how did you get to that list of fears?

Where did that come from? Who did— did you interview people? Did they just kind of open up and share it with you? Did they write? Where did this come from?

So again, I mean, we took, you know, dozens of hours of interviews with people, and very much people telling their stories. And and mapped those and, and sort of grouped them together to come up with the authentic, equitable, collaborative culture. But we did the same in determining the mindsets. So the nature of those conversations, some of it is captured by the mindset, but some of it is the, the nature of the conversation. What came through? What was the music beneath the words when someone was talking about, you know, why they hold this particular worldview, this particular mindset. So our core team did that analysis work. We then ran it by the group of 70, that Culture Change Resource Team, for them to sort of say, you know, Does this ring true? Is it, you know, when you think about the mindsets, do you hold, do you actually, do these fears resonate with some, with you as something that you might not have ever expressed, but, but you can, you can literally sort of feel it resonating as something that is deeply true. And so that was our check on our analysis was using that, that broad group.

How does somebody, given some of the resources you've shared today, how does, how does someone enter into this work in your opinion?

So I really do think there's sort of 4 key steps to begin this work. The first really is on that growing self-awareness. There's something that you can seek out on the internet.

It's pretty easy to find. It's called an identity wheel.

The Identity Wheel, and it shows concentric circles of aspects of one's identity. And, you know, just simply going through the process of filling in the little sections of that based on yourself, your gender, your race and ethnicity, your sexual orientation, the nature of your job, where you grew up, You know, these are all aspects of yourself that have shaped how you see the world and how the world sees you. And some of them are more front of mind, top of mind for us than for others, for various reasons.

But even just that step of individual awareness of I am a deeply multifaceted person and my lived experience has been shaped by all of these things, to then recognize that that is true for every other human being. And, and so, you know, sort of prime yourself to see others as multidimensional in ways that you may not actually be attuned to.

You may not have been welcomed in to understand the whole of who someone is.

That and that organizational pattern spotting are things that people can do right away. They can pick one of those mindsets and just say, where do I see this showing up?

Um, where do I see a focus more on individuality versus collaboration showing up in the everyday of my firm or the way that it's structured or what is rewarded and who is rewarded, right? Um, you can also do things to practice mindset shifts. I wrote a column a couple years ago. It's a good number of years ago now when I was with the Hennepin Bar. We have skyways here in Minnesota, and I worked downtown and was always walking the skyway system. And there was a day when I was passing one of my members.

I did not recognize her because she was dressed like she was going to go hiking.

And most of my members, lawyers and judges, were consistently dressed in suits. So my lens was not attuned to see her, even though she's walking right by me, because she didn't have these markers of what my members look like. So after realizing what had happened, I did a thought experiment where I walked through the skyways and said, what if I saw every person in front of me as either a current member, so a current lawyer or judge, an aspiring lawyer or judge, or a retired lawyer judge. Like, the whole world opens up to that possibility, but you realize how much your mind is trained to put people in categories, right? So you can do a certain thing like that where you, you consciously work to shift your lens and see how you experience the world differently. I also think, you know, architects have these great design thinking skills. Recognize this as a skill that you can bring to this work.

Even though design thinking involves experimentation and taking risks and failing and then doing it again, When it comes to work like this, you know, around culture change, around EDI, there's so much fear that we've seen in people even talking about issues related to gender and race, for example, much less experimenting and failing and then having the resilience to come back and do it again. You've done this in other—

you, you do it regularly in other aspects of your work.

Apply that skill base to this work, make that commitment.

And then finally, talk about what you're doing. Don't, don't keep your work, you know, in a, in a siloed within yourself as a person.

If you're doing that individual work, don't keep it just within your team. If your team is working working on it, share the fact that you're working on this, that you're practicing this, that you're learning new things, because that actually, just in the sharing of it, just in having conversation about it, starts to change the culture.

You know, culture is what we talk about. It's what we think about. It's what our peers and our colleagues and our, you know, and, and if you want to influence someone who is higher in positional leadership than you are.

This is how you grow a groundswell, is that, boy, everyone in this firm is talking about this. I'm supposed to be leading this organization.

I'm not in those conversations.

So there's a momentum that can come from simply making this a personal priority and talking about the fact that it is one.

You said something that, yeah, yeah, the culture, and I'm thinking about how much of culture is told through stories. And I want to go back to your comment about the long hours. And yes, out of one side of my mouth, I might say I don't wish that on anybody here, but then I also celebrate the glory days, kind of like it was painful, but I was amazing, you know, that kind of tone. And I remember reading a few years ago a book that talked about, I think it was Ritz Carlton, if I remember right, I think I'm saying it right, but it doesn't really matter— saying that they deliberately chose the stories that they wanted repeated about the organization because those were ways of symboling what matters and what's valued. And this is what the good times look like, right? And I wonder where in the leverage points stories fit in your mind.

Yeah, I actually think they fit within the complexity theory. Theory realm. And that idea of nurturing by shining a light on those stories, those, those, those bright spots, right? Shine light on bright spots. There's this sort of mixed, mixed management metaphor there. Terrible. But shining a light on work that is aligned with where you want to go and saying, ah, this is, this is what we want. It's also important to share the stories of where you failed, you know, you know, and, and that's one thing I felt a little self-conscious about in trying to condense our story into, you know, 15 minutes of presentation.

You know, there are absolutely failures along the way, and we talk about those failures as a staff team. Those are very front of mind for us, and we have to honor where we've where we've misstepped in order to truly repair damage done and do better in the future. We can't let those stories dissipate, and they need to be part of that compendium, right?

I— yes. I'm trying to think, we only have a few minutes left and I wanted to decide whether to follow up on that or not. There's a lot to say there. I guess it would be— yeah, actually I saw that Kayla put a question in the chat about your educational background and we didn't do that. And so I'm curious curious, just like the short version of how you got to be the person you are and how you got to be doing this work.

Yeah. I'm not an architect. There's a new program that's going to launch here where you can get an online degree at night over the course of 3 years. And I actually have thought about that, which is bonkers, understanding how much I work right now, to add like pursuit of an architecture degree. But I have a degree in public administration and a master's in public and nonprofit leadership. So leadership theory and organizational change is fascinating to me. I love this stuff. Clearly. I also, yeah, I do. I also have done a lot with various organizations related to racial justice over the years. And really worked to bridge difference between a white congregation and a small Black-led congregation. And an experience of going to Selma for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday was a very transformative experience for me. Many days spent with people with very different life experiences than me. So that, that was a big life-changing, career-altering experience. And yeah, I have the privilege of being able to help lead our Leadership Forum program.

So I have an outlet for some of this leadership theory, but I've also served on the Equity and Future of Architecture Committee committee at AIA National and worked with a tremendous group of leaders there, including Kimberly Dowdell from NOMA.

So I just find this work serving the architecture community just such a privilege.

And kind of maybe the short version, where do you go from here? Where do you— what do you hope you're looking back on 3 or 4 years from now? Now and saying that's what we moved the needle on?

Well, you know, I think when you feel culture change happening, you just want to keep that energy strong and keep that momentum going. Again, to have the board that we have right now is a tremendous achievement in and of itself, but it doesn't mean anything if we can't actually sustain this level of diversity and inclusion and get to those equity goals, get to those actual changes in outcomes, right?

You know, this is all good, but it's not what we're aiming for. We actually have to change the career trajectories and outcomes for our members.

And the built environment also needs to change to be viewed by the public as theirs. As, as, um, you know, we've experienced this, this last year here in Minneapolis, um, there's so much to be done related to, uh, growing equity in the built environment. I am a big fan of the Framework for Design Excellence. I think the equity portion of that can be even further strengthened. We're doing a lot in that space. So 3 to 4 years from now, my great hope is that the built environment of Minneapolis-St. Paul in the areas affected in the unrest is built back in a way that is truly community-owned, community vision, community owning the process, community owning the economic benefit of what is created.

Powerful. Mary Margaret, thank you so much for your generosity and kindness and insight and being willing to share with us. I always enjoy talking about all things community of practice, organizational design, geeking out on this stuff too, systems theory. So, and, and, and also the more deep insights in your work. So thank you so much for being part of this.

Such a pleasure. Thanks. Thanks all.

Everyone else, thank you for coming. We'll send along the recording, the slides, the chat log, a link to the collaborative notes in the next few days. Be well and see you next month. All right, take care.