 constituency power. With Fellows Joann MacKechn MacKechn and Yvonne Hutchinson. In this fireside chat, Joann will interview Yvonne and guide the discussion which is there to my heart on reimagining workplace learning unpacking workplace learning as a means through which we can also learn to be better, more inclusive at humans. Joann is from Waithaha, Ngaitamaamoea Ngaitahu, descent and has spent over 30 years working as a teacher peninsula superintendent and education leader and countries around the world. She's a celebrated author, speaker, change leader and executive coach. She's also the CEO and founder of the Learner First. Education is learning who you are, how you fit in and how you can contribute to community. Just a little bit about EHF for the first time as to one of our conversations. Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a collective of over 500 entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investor change makers who want to make an impact globally from Aotearoa in New Zealand. These life sessions are informal conversations between the fellows and the New Zealand ecosystem so you can get to know them and what they bring to New Zealand and are often the start of an ongoing conversation through to action. We'll be having about a 30-40 minute discussion depending on how deep it goes and then moving into Q&A and the discussion with you all during this next 60 minutes. Just a little bit of housekeeping. It is recorded and it will be up on the website if you wish to watch the recording afterwards and stay muted or raise your hand if you wish to raise a question but we'll probably leave the questions to narrow the end and if you have to leave that is okay too. Over to you, Joanne. Tena koutou. Shalyn, thank you so much. It's just so lovely to be here today and thank you so much for giving us this honour of being able to have a chat today and welcome. It's a huge welcome to Yvonne today. We are so honoured to have you with us. She's a colleague from EHF in Los Angeles and I'm sitting here this morning in Nautatahi Tiwai Paenamu and it's a brisk autumn day here this morning and no doubt a lovely spring day for you Yvonne over in Los Angeles. So I'd just like to take a moment to introduce this most incredible beautiful person we have with us today. So Yvonne is one of these people that believes in solving big problems and she likes to use toolkits to do so and that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy talking with her. She loves to use interdisciplinary approaches to solve these complex problems because she understands that we're whole people and that we can't do things in silos. She likes to build bridges between different research and practice and knows that that's the way that we work together. Before she started her company really said she worked as an international labour and human rights lawyer for nearly a decade so she's really steeped in how to work with humanity and with people. She's worked with foreign national governments in the US Department of State and with the UN, a group that's working really hard to change our world. She's a member of Harvard's Law Institute for Global Law and Policy Network. She's an expert on labour relations and diversity in the workplace and Yvonne is presented on diversity, inclusion and labour issues at Harvard Law, MIT Sloan and UC Berkeley as well as conferences all over the globe. She holds her doctorate as a JD from the Harvard Law School but her favourite pastimes are baking pie, playing with her puppy and travelling and watching unfortunate action movies. So I'm sure we're going to hear a little bit more about her as we go through. This is a little bit about her company so really set as a consulting and a strategy firm that helps companies build more human and centric and inclusive cultures. I think that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today because that's what it's all about. It's about that human-to-human relationship and how do we change our workplaces to become places where we all want to work and to be together and make a difference for all of the people that we're working with. This isn't about the tech part of it, it's about the human part of it but how do we include the way of working together. But her clients are including people from technology, from entertainment, from non-profits, from social change organisations and each of them are starting at a unique point in their own DEI journey and that's diversity, equity and inclusion just to make sure we're all speaking from the same language. So welcome my friend, it's a real honour to have you here today with us and I'm really excited about this conversation. Waivon and I have had a couple of conversations before we started this journey together and this is a beginning of a lot of conversations with us and I hope that today you are going to really enjoy our conversation as much as I've started to as well. One of the things I loved when I looked on the website was everyone said we put people first and I think that's the most exciting thing. So I'm just going to say tell us a little bit more about you as a person and how did you come up with that, Waivon? Yeah thank you so much for that wonderful introduction first of all and I'm really excited for this dialogue and I'm also super excited to see some familiar faces in the chat so I'm really excited for the discussion portion of this as well. But how did I get into this work? I think for me it's um you know I always say there's like the official story I tell and then the unofficial story so I'm going to do a little bit we're an intimate company I'm going to do a little bit of both today. You know the official story I tell is that I so I spent my my early career as an international human rights lawyer working in conflict zones. My first job was in Afghanistan and I was working with the ministries really just to figure out what their capacities were and to think through questions like aid effectiveness right like how do we make the most of our resources for the people that are on the ground and what are we doing that's really working and what's not. And for a really long time in my career I would say the majority of it as a human rights lawyer I tended to think of violence kind of in those terms as something that was exceptional as something that happened in times of conflict as a space in which an outsider could come in and like spread the gospel of peace and democracy and fix everything and um as my career progressed I slowly left those situations and started working in more protracted human rights emergencies and my last job was in Nicaragua working with sugar cane workers who were dying of occupational disease and what I saw there the scale of the violence was horrific right like I like to say that in the town I was working in you know you couldn't get lunch after one o'clock everything shut down it was really sleepy but they had coffin stores that were open 24 hours a day right and they were expanding the cemeteries and I say that not to be more of it but to kind of give you an idea of the scale of the structural violence that was really impacting this population of people and it really made me think about the power that work has over our lives and the fact that the workplace can be a place of opportunity or it can be a place of really great harm and in that situation these workers were really sacrificing their lives going into the fields dying in their 30s and 40s sending their kids into the fields and their teens who were then dying and leaving behind babies you know it was just generational violence in the name of survival um and so you know it really made me start thinking about the nature of work the the idea of workplace as this place of opportunity and harm and and that sort of is what led to the creation of ready-set and it really just became a parent in that journey that the question the problem particularly back then which is 2015 it wasn't that long ago but it feels like forever ago and you think about it was you know like the the DEI to me was like the question of our future like who gets access to high opportunity employment how people are treated at work the kind of physical psychological impacts it has like it just seems like that was that ripple effect so that's the official story and then i'm going to tell tell the unofficial story incredibly quickly so because i you know we want to times is very important yeah um the unofficial story is just i was in a really toxic work environment myself so i'm like going in and be like i'm going to help all these workers and meanwhile i'm an environment that's sexist that's racist that's abusive i'm covering up for a leader that is acting egregiously and you know having my own traumas related to that and having these these crisis with my feelings of self-worth then it was trickling down to my relationships and i finally just had this moment where i was like i'm going to take my power back like i'm never going to let someone do this to me or be in a position of power over me like this again and like i'm mindful that in this group right now it's just so great it i don't want to presume anyone's gender but it looks like we're all women here and you know i just i'm sure that so many of us have been in that position in the workplace where we've really had to be at the whims of somebody who was sexist and toxic and and and didn't really know what to do about it except to leave yeah and i mean i think you know i can i can speak for myself who i've certainly been in situations where i've been in that that position and i think you know you've talked about two really two really severe extreme cases one where it's affecting you know a whole race of people and another one where it's affecting you personally and i think if we look at both of those areas it's it's it's it's systemic it's across it's across the whole board it's across your country my country it's across another country where you've worked in i've worked in multiple countries and it's across all of their two so the question that i'm kind of having on it's really sits it's deeply within me is how do we get people to understand about inequity when they haven't had an experience like this or they haven't heard that story they haven't had they haven't understood that narrative and this is a thing that we're sort of kind of grapple with i think at the moment here in Aotearoa and in your country in the usa how do we how do we get people to hear that story when they don't want to listen or they haven't had that experience because we all understand that or people have experienced and have that understanding you and i are both working really hard in this space how do you how do you you know we've both got ways of doing what's your way of doing that why why what's your sort of methodology or practice i don't know if i've figured it out yet i think i i i i try though to lead with empathy because i think to your point and what i've what i've experienced quite often is that everybody's experience or almost everybody has experienced a feeling of inequality or lack of access because of their identity or factors that are out of their control it's not that that that the majority we live in unequal world right it's not like the majority of the world hasn't had that experience whether it's on the base of class nationality gender disability aid there's just so many markers of identity that are part that are put into a hierarchy i think that what happens so often in my work is that people hear dei and they just the blinds go up the silo happens like that's them that's not me or that's this little piece of a thing and it's not the whole question of inequality i remember listening to this podcast and i will take my data anecdotes suggestions anywhere where i can get them and on this day i took it from npr but i was listening to this podcast where they were talking about building empathy across israeli and palisraeli and lines and they were saying that when they told the story i'm trying to figure out how to how to how to put this right when they told the story of another group's oppression it was harder for people to kind of identify with that group but when they tied it to personal oppression all of a sudden it became easier and so in my work yeah i really try to get people to first take down whatever those barriers are when they hear dei you know that's like just so much baggage i'm just like okay like i will say it for like what are your fears about this conversation what do you think this conversation is about what do you want to get out of this conversation like how do we remove some of that defensiveness that this is not about me to get you into a place to understand it is about you right and then how and then for me it's like how do we open up and tell a story that feels personal and universal and then how do we take the idea of shame and penalty at it because that's where the defensiveness comes from right is this idea like okay people are going to say because i have white privilege that it's my fault and then i'm going to have to be defensive because i'm going to defend my whiteness or i'm going to defend my maleness or i'm going to defend my able bodiedness because i feel like that part of my identity is under attack so for me it's like a combination of those things it's like building that empathy it's about coming from a place of shared experience and not shame it's about really figuring out how to get the person to tie the experience of somebody who they assume as an other to their own experience and it's a work in progress and i think something that's really important to note about this and i want to hear how you do it too because let me tell you i've got my notes right here but i think what's what's really difficult about this is that there's a fluidity there i found in the work so you can get a person to identify in a room in the US in 2020 we got a whole group of people and i think you could write a dissertation on the intersection of COVID and Black Lives Matter and 2020 and why people were so moved when they were but i think it's some of the same factors at play right you know but that that that doesn't last right and so it's i think the question is also how do you continue to get somebody to continue to identify to always kind of want to break down those barriers that they've been indoctrinated that exist right instinct is always to kind of confront the discomfort and i feel like that's where the real challenge lies but i am interested to hear from you how you approach it in your work yeah well in my work i think why i've on it's about going right back to the sort of four key elements of education for me because in my world i spend a lot of time in education and through all of all of my learnings i think what boils down to a sort of four key outcomes about how we think about ourselves and how we learn and the first one is around self understanding knowing who we are how we fit into the world and then how we take action and how we can contribute that back to humanity planet and prosperity and i think that starts and stems from do we have a good understanding about self and when we know who we are then we can actually take action from the base of who we are and i think a lot of the time our education systems don't don't spend time on focusing on that what they do is they spend time on the acquisition of knowledge and that knowledge is often static and that knowledge that is static doesn't do us justice anymore because we now know knowledge is available anywhere so from my perspective it's let's spend that time with our children and our young people and everybody now because we've let a whole generation go by where we've talked about standardized knowledge as being the key to being successful to really go back and remember who are we who are we as a human being and how do we fit into our world around us and then how do then we take that knowledge and take that knowledge of ourselves and then figure out how can we can then contribute back to humanity so that's the first sort of area that we focus on knowledge about yourself your family your whānau your where you come from and where you go seek a one is around connection how do we connect to our our self our purpose for being alive our reason for being here um how do we connect to our land our our fenua our our community our our sort of slowly moving further out into the world and then what we're going to do with our connections so if we don't know how to connect to each other then we're really challenged and I take that from the example you know as a Harvard graduate you'll know you've got connections everywhere as somebody from a small community your best way of surviving is through connection then the next piece around that is around knowledge what knowledge do you need as an individual to be successful in this world and so and I talk about that when I'm working with school systems that's the curriculum that we're talking about there and for many countries that's been standardized now I challenge people who who have twins in their family or siblings how dare they treat anyone the same they would never dare do it but yet we go to schools and we say this is the knowledge every single person needs to learn and I just say well that's not true because I don't know any people who want to learn the same exact same stuff and for too long we have overprivileged certain sorts of knowledge and certain professions now that's gone we learned through COVID that there were certain profession certain jobs and roles that we needed more than the profession professions so what we've finally understood is that humans are more important and then now we've got the addition of AI we're starting to see that the white collar jobs are going so that's something that we're really starting to understand now that what knowledge is needed for each individual person and then the final outcome I sort of work with is around our competencies can we be a critical thinker do we know what's true or not have we got the right understandings about what is true what's not can we collaborate are we taught teaching kids how to collaborate with this new knowledge of self understanding connection can we communicate can we collaborate can we critically think can we be creative and innovative with our ways of working and so I put all of those sort of four outcomes together and then at the moment I'm working globally with some other sort of education thought letters on and thinking about a global curriculum and sort of looking at Gutierrez's four outcomes from the UN which he presented last year in 2022 in September and he talked about learning to be learning to do learning to live with each other those kinds of outcomes for education which are the most important now so we're moving away from that content based knowledge base only to a much broader set of outcomes that enable children to know who they are so they can actually fit into the world together and I think in education from that k12 area or in New Zealand we call it the schooling sector we have a huge responsibility to shift away from the the token content areas and just saying that that's life is silo because it's not and I think so I'm really excited about the push to move into this this whole child and I'm not saying whole child is fluffy puffy woo woo I'm saying this is a deliberate move to say academics plus well-being really matters otherwise we're not going to survive and I said it's too late to turn back we have to keep going and really push into that whole space of using and I talk about it it's using indigenous wisdom as well it's really taking that knowledge of who are we and moving that forward into the world so I'm very passionate about that and I talk about it as contributive learning and saying we need to contribute with each other and finding out who we are and using our own skills and being so celebratory about each one of us because when we celebrate what we can give then we are successful because you're different from me I'm different from you you're giving what you can I give what I can and together we create the whole you know that's amazing and I want to like pause I want to like sit in this for a second and I know you're you're doing the interviewing Jojo but there's something that you just said that um that brought up something for me because the those kind of four categories you lay out talking about identity talking about connection and thinking about that as sort of the foundation of the methodology for learning you know it aligns a lot with sort of how we think about precursors to structural change and and and so in my book I talk a lot about what is the process um my book is called how to how to talk to your boss about race and essentially it's premised on the idea of how do you get yourself ready to have a conversation about race in the workplace but what it is also is kind of a trojan horse for social change for structural change how do you as one person think about changing a culture changing an environment and the framework that I lay out in the book is like first you have to understand yourself so that's that aligns with the identity piece that you're talking about right right right and then second you have to understand like where you are in the structure the social structure of your workplace and also who your friends are within the workplace who your allies are who your accomplices are who you can strategically engage in and then also who you want to target in this work but then finally it's like also you have to understand what you're actually what you're talking about right you have to understand the experience of others whether it's as an ally or whether it's a marginalized person yourself you have to understand whatever things that you may be missing because you're of your privileges and your experience and only then can you approach a conversation and only then can you think about setting the stage for structural change and so I think that's really interesting because it also brings up a question for me is like learning to what right when we're talking about these this this approach and marrying the knowledge the self knowledge and the well-being and what we want to position learners to do after you just said that I was like you know that actually that is aligned because we want people who are learning to make a positive impact on humanity who are learning to change the world and I think that's one of the reasons why those methodologies align because that's the knowledge you need to do those kinds of things and I sort of talk a little bit about it we've on about how you know before we sort of there was a static pathway and you'd go and you'd learn this knowledge and you'd go off and do do what you were you know you would follow a recipe whereas now there is no recipe there is no recipe for the future of this world that we live in we have to be innovative and creative to create new solutions every day of our life and so what we have to help help our people to do is to use that knowledge to create the new and I talk about when people say or contribution well how do kids know what to do or how do adults know what to do it's like they have to they have we have to help them learn the processes of figuring that out and I talk about contribution is just being able to even smile at somebody might be enough or save the oceans but everybody can because we're sitting on a 35 trillion dollar mental health bill by 2030 if we don't change our behaviors and we are in serious trouble around this and workplace is huge because that is as you said right at the very beginning that makes or breaks so many of us and the repercussions flow back into our family and whānau life into society into the sense of feeling inadequate and not worthy all of those things start to come from that whereas if we have a strong sense of identity and that can be helped through our work through what we can contribute through our being then we have a much much stronger society that enables everybody to feel like they have some value and they can offer something to to our world and I think that you know whether you know we talk about structural racism we talk about structural who holds the power and that that can that can be that can be spread out if people all have an understanding of what they are contributing and they feel good about what they're doing they don't get pushed over you know you can't be pushed over when you know who you are and you know what you're contributing so is there sort of some sort of you know worth the data that you've been collecting through your work do you see any shifts happening through your work have you been able to see some sort of successful examples if there been some some exciting patterns changing for you or some things that have been moving yeah I think in the US yes and no right in the US it's tricky because in the one sense there have been some exciting things but we're also in the middle of a backlash right so when I started ready set you know I started and people were afraid to say the word race like just that word not racism not like they would be like we want to talk about they would call me out because all of our business in man they would call me up wipe on and I would be like yes because I would I answered the phone back then because it was just me and they would be like you know we are so excited like we cannot wait to have you we want to just really dig in we want to talk about unconscious bias we want to talk about gender we want to talk about class we want to talk about age and then and then they would be like and you know race and they would like kind of like scape past it and I was just like I was like wow like you can't even say the word and like in the US especially like it's a foundational organizational or you know like principle of our society is from where you are able to buy a home to like whether you're able to open a bank account to where you went to school to like all like for very long time determined by what race you are you know and and I think today that's really changed right you know there has been a little bit of a rollback since 2020 in terms of like people's appetite to talk about structural racism whatever but that's the the genie is not back in the bottle on that one right like people people now know they can't unknow yeah for example structural racism exists they can't unknow how toxic some of these workplaces are they can't know me too you know it just in the the way the same way they can't unknow like the impact of being able to work remotely for some of them right and and and what and the inequities that just are involved with walking into the office you know so I think in that in that way the conversations move forward a lot really interesting but in the same way you know all of these things that we're talking about are like precursors for curious global citizens who are prepared to make a change are some of the very things that we're seeing political rollbacks on like the idea that you would not be able to talk about your identity in the classroom learn history related to that right the idea that identity is itself political as opposed to something that is personal and so therefore must be in order to depoliticize we must do the very thing that Jojo you were saying like we can't do which is like everybody gets the same baseline sterile kind of learning thing that is going to be inoffensive to which is just not the way learning works learning is provocative learning pushes you so if it's good you know so yeah I see that because we see it's I think we're very much at an inflection point and those people who don't want things to change are really pushing back against that kind of education we're talking about both in schools and in the workplace yeah and and we see we see you know I do a lot of work obviously with schools in the US as well as here in Aotearoa New Zealand and in other countries around the world Australia and we're noticing that there are there are people are voting with their feet people are leaving the education system in droves because they're not satisfied with what they're getting and especially at the high school age because they can see they've got access to other ways of learning other ways of being and that's going to really shift what happens in the workforce too so I think you know one of the things I'm interested is what did you notice when you came to Aotearoa New Zealand did you see any similarities any differences with the cultural identity here because we pride ourselves in Aotearoa on being you know working hard towards moving to much more of equitable outcomes for our people did you what did you notice yeah I mean it's I always hesitate to try to sum up a you know a culture or country if I've just been there for a little while so ask me this question again in December I think my answer may change but you know I I did feel like there there was an intentionality there and a knowledge about history particularly I think you know the dynamics are different just because the historic contexts are different but when I think about sort of the relationship to the Maori and then the the question of Indigenous rights and access I mean like it's just a different world than it is in the U.S. I think you know in the U.S. many of our Indigenous peoples were eradicated and you know there's even though we do land acknowledgements I think there's very little consciousness around what was really lost and around sort of privileging those and lifting up those of that background I think our traditional notions of civil rights activism come from the descendants of the of people who were enslaved you know yeah and and so that means that it takes a very well not a very different flavor but it takes a different flavor what I will will say about this is I think that there's still some similar challenges that being said you know there's still challenges of economic access and opportunity and participation there's still challenges around shared power there's still challenges around integration versus segregation versus assimilation and what that all looks like and I and um yeah I think as we get into a sort of era where we have the realities of living with COVID where we have the realities of living with climate change where we have resource constraints you know the questions that pluralistic societies are dealing with I think are going to continue to be or actually get increased in severity and I think you can kind of see those trends in New Zealand as well as in the US too so those would be the overlaps that I have noticed and the final thing I say and then I want to hear because you actively work in both countries I would love to hear your perspective but I think in terms of the workplaces which which I which I know best I definitely like you know I always say in the workplace the histories may be different but the outcomes are still the same right you still like you know the boards look a certain way right the people who make the most money look a certain way the places where the their economic centers are concentrated look a certain way right like you know you you see differences in pay you see pay disparities you see differences in equitable treatment you see differences in access to power like all of those things we share so I'll end by by saying that I'm curious to hear your perspective out yeah I think I would probably agree with just about everything you've said I think there's nothing I would I would disagree with I think we just have a smaller scale here and I think because we do have the te tiriti Waitangi we have that we have a treaty here that actually enables us to have a better arrangement between ourselves as Māori and and Pākehā that makes it that we have we have there has to be some honouring of that and then I think what what I do notice here is that we've got a chance to we've had reparations we've had sort of things like that that has not occurred in the US yet as a yet with with every hope in the world yet but I think what what I do think is that we we still have we still have less outcomes for Māori we still have as you say the same sort of same sort of challenges is getting the people into the spaces the same sort of business issues etc but I think there's a real attempt at making change and we've got we've got processes and people in place to really trying to make a really big difference and I see a huge attempt at that you know one example I can give is that you know I work heavily in the education system and and I noticed that that you know when when we've got a when I look at the kura results which are the schools that are led by Māori designed by Māori for Māori our leaving data and our our student achievement data shows that in those results they are outperforming our regular school system so the last 10 years of data shows that that that they are doing better than any other you know the average of any other student in the school so we're seeing huge results so we we know what to do we know how to make better outcomes so it's there's there's there's results that are really exciting and and fantastic to see but then there are still the challenges of our students who are in the in the regular school regular school system that are still struggling so there's the disparity is still there but I think that there is opportunity to show that that actually when we do do things differently it does make that different so it's a matter of how do we get that to every child and then the other thing I think is that we we can play a little bit of lip service to using some of the amazing amazing knowledge of Indigenous and we put that into some of our policies but we don't know how to enact it and we don't know how to use that rich knowledge yet and that's one of the things I'm doing a lot of work and at the moment just can't forget how do we how do we use that knowledge in the best way possible so there's lots of lots of ways that I think you know I'm really proud of our tearoah because of what they're doing in the space and what we're doing to create change but there's still a long way to go for all of us across the whole world and living together learning to live together to utilise all sets of knowledge that we have so that we can have that connection and I think the way that I see us getting there so we each know ourselves well enough to be able to connect better so that we can get the outcomes that we want but there's still a lot of pain there from from for people all over the world to be able to get to that point and there's still got to be a lot of giving up of power and that's one of the hardest things I think of all is are we prepared to give up some of our power in different places around the world and that's the toughest question of all and and that's going to be the question can can people do that and that's you know that's the that's the tough one yeah I mean I think that that and that question is so cutting I I frankly think it that questions about equity can we give up our power so that we can have more shared power but I think it's also a question about just thinking about the way the world is currently structured and how it's so fundamentally extractive and if we look at you know again at climate because I know like so many of us here are passionate about you know fighting climate change and that is fundamentally a question of shared power and resources and what you know and I think if we're if we want to create a better future understand how do we redistribute that power is such a fundamental question yeah and I don't believe that it's a it's a it's a zero sum game I think that the thing that I sort of think about is that there's enough for everybody in the world and it's a matter of how do we how do we do and I'm not trying to be a polyannu yet I'm actually thinking there is actually enough if there is and I've seen that through the work I've done through education that when actually we are equitable on our outcomes we can in our ways of delivering we can get better outcomes for everybody and you know the ways that we've worked with different different systems we've seen everybody lift not just you know we have you know and I think that's the piece that I really would love to be able to get others to sort of dig into and figure that out with us because I think that's the thing that and you will have seen that too when you've done your work and and you know when everybody starts to dig into this and actually figure it out they can actually see that it's a win-win for everyone everyone everyone gets a better life out of this so I think that's the thing that I find really fascinating you know I think one of the things that we kind of touched on when we talked before this the session my one was around having difficult conversations you know and and that's that's one of the things that I think you and I have no problem probably doing because we've we've been used to it and our lives have probably been full of it that's probably why we are where we are today but it's sort of like how do we how how do you what's some some ways that you've been able to help people to do that I know one of the ways I have is to be able to actually describe what success looks like in a different way and that's part of my sort of helping people understand that evidence doesn't look the same for everybody and my example for that is like when I'm teaching or about you know science or something like that will give you a quick example is that you know people if I'm if I'm in my sort of wahine toa form I'll go down to the river and I'll listen to what birds there are or whether there are eels in the river and I'll and I'll say I know what's wrong with the water because there are certain birds aren't there or the eels aren't there if I was had my pākehā hat on I'd go down to the river and I'd take a test tube of water and I'd take it back to this the you know lab and I'd check it and I'd find out what was wrong with the water and I'd know something was wrong with the water then so both of those are evidence of what's and then one of you know what we've been doing for a long time is we've been overprivileging the test tube way but actually my Māori way is just as is just as right right and so what what I've been trying to help people understand that there are multiple ways of knowing things there are multiple ways of evidence there are multiple sources of knowledge but what we've been doing is overprivileging for too long certain ways of knowing and that's been as far as I talk about assessment that's stopped a lot of our kids knowing a lot of our kids who have other ways of knowing things being able to be successful do you have any sort of examples like that of sort of how we're trying to teach people in different ways to accept others knowledge is valid yeah I think it's I think that's a really interesting example and it for me it kind of reminds me of this question the idea of a goal and like who's goal and who do we centre right and and and underneath and underneath what you're saying I hear you saying you know centering certain types of knowledge certain types for me it's centering certain types of experiences like I also don't necessarily know when it comes to experience and humanity if there is one universal truth what we tend to do is default to a dominant narrative around what's healthy what is positive what is impactful in a way that reinforces inequality and unequal paradigms right so you know to what you're saying my question is always well how do we centre the marginalised how do we enter marginalised knowledge around the health of something that's external like the river that you're talking about but also like the health of something like an organisation or the experience of their fellow workers you know in my experience you can talk to two different people in an office you know you can talk to and I'm not going to stick with guys not all white guys hashtag not all white guys but you can talk to like a white guy in office and his experience is going to be very different right somebody who looks like me you know and you can talk to somebody who's straight is very different from a queer person someone who says experience is going to be very different from a trans person so like to what you're saying I think when we go into organisations we're trying to figure out what's going on and where the challenges within that organisation line that organisations impact on society at large may be and I think to get to that truth we often have to unpack a multiplicity of truths and make sure that we're not just centering what historically has been the default truth right and we're making sure that we bring in the perspectives of the marginalised I think that's one layer to it another layer and I don't I can get like I don't get super philosophical because I can get in the weeds all day and then you're going to have to like pull me back but I think there's a very real question around in my work the role that companies and organisations should play you know I think that the idea of having a society where being a billionaire is like a thing that exists is fundamentally opposed to being a society that is sustainable where resources are fairly distributed and we're not extracting and you know in a toxic way from our climate and our people you know and I think that there's a real question also when you talk to different people from different cultures and different experiences in the workplace like what is it is it grow or die is it extract extract extract at all costs is it you know flood a market so that you you know you destroy all the competition and then you're the winner and you get to save the day is it you know how is it you know is it the sort of let's all be unicorns kind of ideology or should we in our corporate lives in our corporate spaces be going towards something that's more sustainable because we can you know and I talked about this at you know the welcome weekend we can be interpersonal around our activism and our contributions all day but at a corporate level if we're if we don't think about the impact that business has on society then we're never going to solve these problems that we have whether it's economic inequality or policing or access to education or the climate a lot of those are also complicated by corporate interests right and I think there's there are different ways of imagining corporate citizenship the relationship of the company to the society what the workplace actually is it actually does that also align to cultural experience and I think equal to and more almost more importantly the experience of being the group that is extracted from the experience of being group that is going to be exploited the experience of being you know that that's part of capitalism right the group that's on the bottom right I think and I think that that has something to tell us as well that's what I found in my work yeah no that's that's such a valid point and I think that that's worth I think that's why this team around with the EHF team has got a lot to a lot to contribute and um I think that that's that's a really a good place for us to just take a little bit of a pause and see if that any of this wonderful team around us have any questions before we continue on is anyone who would like to ask a question of why one of the particular weren't you Joe Joe go Rosalie sorry because this is this has been um this is a wonderful conversation um thank you look I wanted to go back um one of the points that both of you have made is the beginning point being about knowing ourselves and I just wonder I'd love to get your thoughts about the journey given that often our perception of ourselves has been shaped by a school system a parental system a workplace system that is actually saying you should be this these are your weaknesses and you should be better at you should be more than that often creates this real sense of imposter syndrome and people that are are going through their life and this is just from a female perspective let alone a a disability or a race or you know any any other perspective but there's always sense of perhaps not being misfit and I just wonder that process of how do we help people to find and know the Turanga Waiwai where they stand where they are strong where that they are beautiful and whole and who they are outside of this very mechanistic performance mindset that's been inculcated in our systems I can take the first stab at this I write about this Rosalie a little bit in my book right I talk about my journey to my identity and um how particularly as it relates to my racial identity you know I I write in the book I don't know what being black means right I know what people tell me I'm supposed to be like I know how it's sort of shaped my experience in the outside world but what it really means for me from an innate perspective it's almost impossible to say right because it is so dependent on those perceptions and I think that gets to a broader point which is that a lot of these identities that we have are socially constructed female versus male black versus white you know indigenous versus foreign like there are these sort of categories social categories that we put people in to determine in group versus out group right and I think from my experience it's important to understand these categories which of the categories like we belong to and what they may have meant for our upbringing and the messages that we received and what the kinds of experience that we may miss from other people but in terms of your own internal self-worth in terms of your own sort of guiding principles you know I think that um that is in in some ways while it may be shaped by your identity and your culture it does sit apart from it a little bit right and it's like I you know all I say in my book I don't know how to tell you to know yourself but like you know it's helpful to go to therapy it's helpful to have a support system it's helpful to like in you know have those people that will engage you on the individual level but I think when we are learning to change I talk about the role of identity in that being able to identify those messages that the ones that you've just laid out being able to understand the biases that are inherent in those being able to understand what we may be replicating what we may be missing etc and that can tell that can also tell us a little bit about who we who we are but that's sort of how I think about positioning those questions because and I'll stop here I think you could almost go insane a little bit and I don't want to use ablest language here but you could really kind of just spin yourself up in a circle saying who am I who am I not is this the is this the black me is this the indigenous me is this a female me is this the upper class me the lower class me the middle class like who you know at some point who knows you you know you're going to be you and I think just identifying those influences you know can be can be helpful to focus on but Jojo I'm curious to hear from you yeah thanks and that's that's a really good question and a good answer I want to because it's a mean for me it was understanding who I am as a first of all a female as an educator and then and later understanding who I am as a Māori woman too because that was taken away as most of you know that was taken away from me as a youngster and I wasn't allowed to learn about my Māoriness even though I was a Māori it just wasn't labeled as a Māori because my mother was so Māori and her way of being and so but what I've done is a lot of work in the space and tried to figure out how to help kids remember who they are and also adults as teachers so I've done most of my work has been in education and so I think how do we help teachers remember who they are because I talk about the dissonance that's sitting inside them about being doing things that they know are not right but they're doing things because they have to because they have to pay a mortgage and that's about a workplace stuff so I've written a tool that helps people to do that and it sort of focuses on like understanding how I fit in the world who I am as a person what are my goals my aspirations and my potential for success and I'm happy to share this with everyone because it's public one and it talks about sort of what I mentioned across in a progression of understanding the first one is about where am I from what's my place you know what's my time period what's my whānau who and where do I stand on my whenua and the best that you know if you could poke across a progression of time the outcome for that is being able to stand tall and say I know my story story of my whenua my whānau and how my experiences have made me who I am I know why I matter and why I matter when my other people matter to me and I'm proud of our history who we are and where we're going and that's that first sort of section the second one's around my identity my language is my cultural interest in my feelings and that sort of comes up to the outcome of that is you know and there's a progression of things across there and that's where we're sort of that's kind of where I talked about that sort of knowing what evidence means to different people but the outcome of that is you know when I'm asked I can describe in detail what makes me me so I know and work with this across their whole schooling period and with the adults too but it's sort of like I know how to nurture my own identity and others identity so I'm not frightened to be me and I'm not frightened about other people's identities and I know what matters to me and my whānau and then the next one's around sort of my purpose I know what my pursuit I know what my pursuits are I know what my goals my aspirations and how I can contribute and that sort of outcome for that is like I know the unique ways I can contribute I'm confident about how to live my life every day my actions make the world a better place for myself my whānau friends and community and whenua and the last one's around capacity potential intuition and bravery and belief so like I can use my I've got courage to take action and make decisions to improve my life and others lives and I believe that my hopes and dreams will come true and that I know I have what it takes to succeed in the ways I want to and that's you know it starts off it starts off with first of all that sort of concept around myself first and when I move into how do I fit in the world around me and then I'm going to the space of how do I go out and take action into the world and it's kind of it's kind of a you know and I use this as an adult like when I'm struggling with learning something new how do I fit my identity into this new stuff or you know and you know nearly 60 now so it's sort of like I go backwards and forwards as an adult going back to this tool to help me remember that you know when I'm faced with something challenging there's a new piece of my identity that might be challenged with this so how do I figure that out and then I might use this and say to somebody well how do you see me in this space and get some evidence and some you know feedback or feed forward around that so it's like you know I'm really I'm really conscious that if we don't have something to hold us and help us to move forward it's really we do float we do flop around we do go all over the place and turn into jelly it's kind of hard it's really challenging so that's why I've spent so long figuring out what is a simple way of describing what it might look like but for me it's very different than it would look like for Waivon because your life experience is a different but neither one of us will right or wrong we just have ourselves I think there's something else so first of all like JoJo like that I would love to see that tool because I think that's a beautiful just a process that you've just laid out and I'm so happy that you like you shared that with us but I I also think hearing what you said and Rosalie thinking about what was underneath your question too is like how do I know who I am versus others perceptions of me and I do wonder if maybe there's some middle ground where you know yes perception of other people is informed by bias and therefore we must engage that from a critical way but it can also tell us something you know like depending on who's doing the perceiving and just thinking about how we how that is affected the way we navigate the world in general I think something that that I talk about in my book also is the idea of social location and so not just our identity but then to kind of to what you're saying JoJo is our relationship of our identity to a position in a given place and time and then how that affects the way we interact with others and the power we may have in that moment and the power that we may not have and what we may see versus what we may not see you know I think that there is something that can be helpful in thinking about external perceptions as well I just sort of feel I guess you know it's taken me I don't know 50 years to get to a point of of that shift and I don't think our generation have time so absolutely love what you spoke to JoJo and how do we inculcate this from such an early stage it's really both of you it's very very beautiful reflection yeah I agree Rosalie I took me to limas in my 50s too so I don't want to I don't want to help I don't want other people to have to go to that so yeah thank you so it's a great question any other questions I know we've got probably three minutes left so we probably don't have time for anymore um but if anyone does have one I'm burning one we could probably take one last one mine was a very practical one JoJo which is you just said that that tool that you described so beautifully just now is a public tool I'd love to know and I imagine other people watching this later would love to know where they could find that so if that I think it's on my website and if it's not I'll make sure it is I'll get it there by the end of the day I think it is because we do send it out to anybody who wants to have a look at it that's our sort of our freebie for the world so yeah I'll make sure it's there it's just on the chat actually Ting yeah okay good thank you thank you Michelle um I think one of the things that um is really important is just to say that Maivon had said that she's willing to come to Aotearoa and do some work with people in in our lovely little country so if there's any interest from anybody out there that would like to do that with Waivon I would certainly be very interested in that myself so for my own team um so if there's any if there's a way that we can get in touch with you Waivon what's the best way to do that um you can find um our website which Michelle has put up as well so thank you so much Michelle for sharing these resources and you can email me at waivon at thereadyset.co so I'll just drop that email um in the chat right now and that's the best way to reach me yeah we'll think it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on this session with us today Waivon we absolutely have had so much fun with you and I'm looking forward to spending some time with you over in the US and we will welcome you with open arms to Aotearoa anytime you want to come and I would love to see you over here and I'm sure all of the team would too and any of the companies in New Zealand that do decide to have you come and spend some time with them and help them work with you to understand a little bit more about DEI I'm sure they will learn so much by doing that with you so thank you so much it's been an absolute honour and a privilege and a pleasure so thank you very much for joining us today and thank you to our team and our audience it's been an absolute honour to have you with us as well thank you and enjoy the rest of your day