 My name is Mark Coleman. I am the president and founder of the tactile group. We are a digital agency, like she said, located about three blocks from here. We concentrate on civic work whose goal at the end of the day is to improve the lives of all people. So we like to say we're designed to give a damn. So I'd like to get a sense of who's in the room just by show of hands. Who here works at an independent agency or firm? Okay, good. How many of you work on in-house sections of large organizations? Okay, good to know. How many of you are freelancers or solopreneurs? I think it's equal balance of all of you. Here's a really interesting question. How many of you are responsible for hiring decisions at your organization? Okay, all you freelancers, you're welcome. Those are the people you need to talk to after this presentation. So let's get started. Now that I know a little bit more about you, I wanted to let you know a little bit more about me and my background through the telling of a little story. So earlier in my life, I did a four-year bid over in New Jersey at a little institution called Princeton University. And when we were in my sophomore year, I received in my campus mailbox, yes, pre-email, an invitation to attend a reception at the president's house for... They were just welcoming incoming students or sophomore students. I was like, gosh, Mac, it's like, great, I get to meet the president and it was only going to be about a dozen of us. So I walk into the room at this reception at the Palmer House, and like I expected, there were a dozen or so colleagues of mine or classmates of mine in the room. And at Princeton at that time, it was about as diverse as it was. So that meant I was the only African-American male in the room. But other than that, the room itself was diverse in that I was there. There were people of different genders. There were people from different parts of the country. Some of us sombered in the Hamptons. Some of us were scrubbing dishes to get through school. So there was a diversity of different aspects of people in that room. At the proper time in the afternoon or in the evening, we were kind of put into a line, a receiving line to greet the guest of honor who was the mayor of Princeton Township, which surrounds the... is where the university is actually located. This is a well-heeled woman of a certain age with a perfect manicure and a matching Chanel suit. She also had a jaunty eye patch over one eye, which I thought was kind of pirate-y cool. So she goes down the line and kind of greets everyone with little inane questions about where you're from, how much do you love Princeton, it's a wonderful place, thank you, goodbye. When she gets to me, the only African-American male in the room, she asks the same inane questions, but she leaves with a parting shot, which is kind of stuck to me to this day. She said, I'm so glad that you're here today because you get to see how the other half lives. So, you know, I'm in the room, but I'm not included. You know, I'm in this diverse space, quote, as much as the person could be at the time, but I'm still on the outside. So I decided that and a couple of other experiences that are too monolithic to go into that I didn't want to ever feel like that again. I made a space for myself in which I would always feel included, always feel valued, mostly by being a solo entrepreneur. I spent a long time as a DJ. I ran a bed of breakfast if you can believe it for a while. If anybody ever tells you you want to go to bed of breakfast business, go screaming in the other direction. It's not a good idea. It's not fun. So, in trying to create a safe space for myself and fast forward to 2004 when I started the tactile group, and as we've grown to be 16 to 25 people, I wanted to make sure that the space we were creating in tactile was safe and inclusive for all people. So that kind of dovetails into our talk today. I would like to talk to you today about diversity and specific, specifically the value of diversity on design teams, how to build a diverse team, and what a diverse team needs to thrive. Let's start with the definition. It's most basic. It's pretty straightforward concept, right? Diversity can be defined as a condition of having or being composed of different elements. So, if we look at the population of the world, we as a population are diverse. We in this room even come from different backgrounds and different ethnicities. We represent different gender, gender identities, gender expressions, different ages, different immigrant statuses, different religious beliefs. And as designers, developers, and creative teams, if we think of them as a subset of the general population, these type of teams should be no different. But what often happens is many design teams are really homogenous. So, why is that? Well, my concept is really that the familiar is easy. Our peer groups are often influenced by socioeconomic factors drawn along lines of class, race, gender, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual expression. It's easier to work with and to hire people who are like us. Intuitively, this makes sense, right? So, a homogenous team, on homogenous team, people are more likely to understand each other really quickly, and collaboration seems to flow smoother, and it gives a sense of quick progress. Dealing with outsiders or people with different opinions or different backgrounds may seem to cause friction. And what I'm about to show, it's that diversity of perspectives that's baked into a team that's diverse that makes that team so valuable. So, in trying to assess the value of a diverse team, let's just go right to a few interesting scientific studies that have come up recently. Diverse teams tend to focus more on facts. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, scientists assigned 200 people to six-person mock jury panels whose members were either all white or included four white and two black participants. The people were shown a video of a trial of a black defendant and white victims. Then they had to decide whether the defendant was guilty. It turned out that the diverse panels raised more facts related to the case than homogenous panels, and they made fewer factual errors while discussing available evidence. If errors did occur, they were more likely to be corrected during deliberation. One possible reason for this difference was that the white jurors on diverse panels recalled evidence more accurately. Diverse teams are more likely to constantly examine the facts and remain objective. They may also encourage greater scrutiny from other members' actions, keeping their joint cognitive resources sharp and vigilant. Diverse teams also tend to be more innovative. In a study published in the Economic Geography, the authors concluded that the increased cultural diversity is a boon to innovativeness. They pulled data of 7,615 firms that participated in the London Annual Business Survey, a question conducted with the UK capitals executives that asked a number of questions about their company's performance. The results revealed that businesses run by culturally diverse leadership teams were more likely to develop new products than those with homogenous leadership. So, though you feel like more at ease working with people who you share background, don't be fooled by your comfort. Working with individuals who do not look, talk, or think like you can allow you to dodge the costly pitfalls of conformity, which discourages innovative thinking. So pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone will make you better at whatever you do. Another thing to consider is diverse teams have built in focus groups. I'm sure many of you in the room have gone through their process of building user scenarios and user personas. We found in our team, since we have such a diverse team, it's much easier to build those cases when someone on the team has personal experience in the type of user case you're trying to build. You're more likely to get what a user group needs if someone on your team has shared direct personal experience. And this is becoming much more important as technology is pushing us toward a global economy when our design teams can understand a larger swath of the world and the end user. You're going to have a speedier development process. But finally, diverse teams yield better results. I want to point to a study by Richard Freeman. He's an economist at Harvard University. He recently did a study on how diversity impacts diversity on a research team's improved quality of science. He used the citation method to look at 1.5 million papers delivered between 1985 and 2008. Basically, the citation method states that the more times an article or political paper or scientific paper is cited by another journal, the more important it is, the more valuable it is. When he compared the number of citations the papers received when they were written by diverse teams compared to when the authors came from a similar background, they found that when you write a paper largely with people of your own group, it's likely that the paper gets less citations than if you write for a broader group of people. So in dealing with more than a million papers, the link seems pretty clear. If you have a more diverse, you get a better research paper. What's interesting is that this seemed to affect all groups. So papers written exclusively by Anglo authors don't do as well as papers that have Anglo authors and, let's say, Chinese authors. But that's not because the Chinese authors are always make the papers better. If you look at the papers that were written exclusively by Chinese authors, those papers tended also not to be as good as papers that were written by diverse teams. Ethnic diversity is an indicator of idea diversity. People who are more alike or more inclined to think alike, and one of the things that gives science a kick is when you get people coming at a problem from somewhat different views. So that's the value of a diverse team. But in order to create an environment in which a diverse team can actually thrive, you have to have a couple of things in place. And we've learned this over the 16 years, 12 years that the tactile has been around the hard way. We have just really kind of gotten it all together. This is the team that includes the diversity that is built. It's taken years to get here. After a few missteps and course corrections, our culture, our process, and our work has gelled in a magnificently symbiotic way. We have just found our voices a company. So this is what we kind of learned in building this diverse team. So at the base, we have to have had a culture of inclusion. A diverse team can only be successful in an organization that has a culture of inclusion, that has to be baked into the organization, it has to come from the executive level, it has to come through policy, and it has to be enforced. And I want to make a very important distinction here. Diversity is not inclusion. Remember the story I told you at the beginning of this about my time at this reception at Princeton? That room was diverse, but I was not included. I was in the room but not at the table. So it's just because you're in the room doesn't mean you're at the table. And according to a recent Deloitte study, millennials think of diversity inclusion as valuing open participation by employees with different perspectives and personalities. Diversity without inclusion is just a bunch of differently huge people sitting in a room. You have the possibility of friction without the promise of progress. In order for these diverse people to actually work collaboratively and collectively together, there has to be a kind of underlying sense of empathy. This is respect 101. It's not that everybody in the organization is going to be BFS forever, but there has to be a basic level of respect. To quote a colleague, Talia Emerson from RevZilla, nobody wants to work with a brilliant jerk. So when you're working with people who don't look like you or have the same background or weren't born in the same decade or come from the same part of the world, someone in your group will have been made to feel other at some time in their life. Someone in that group will have experienced some sort of institutionalized oppression, whether it be racism, sexism, homophobia, Asianism, whatever. So myself as a cisgendered gay black man in a generational relationship, I see all these things on a daily basis in various forms and in different ways. So it's important to have an understanding of the next concept, even though it's really kind of too broad for this talk. And that's the concept of intersectionality. Basically it states that all these kind of systems are interconnected and they're based in the same, all the ins and phobias that separate us are born out of the same system of oppression of one group's belief that they are inherently superior to another. So intersectionality kind of challenges us in what my take on it for the purposes of this talk. What it challenges us to do to look at the challenges all of us personally face in our own lives and see how they overlap with those of their peers, they won't be the same, but there's a commonality in all these systems of oppression. For a really kind of deeper dive into this, I suggest reading Audre Lorde. She did a really short point essay on called, There Is No Hierarchy of Repressions, and I have links to that at the end of these slides. So intersectionality is like the graduate level. Understanding intersectionality is the kind of graduate level, but every company has to have empathy in order for a diverse team to work. So that's the environment that a diverse team needs to have, but how do you actually build a diverse team? I would challenge everyone, especially the people who raised their hands last, who are involved in the hiring process to make building diverse teams a priority. By breaking up workplace homogeneity, you can allow your team members to become more aware of their own potential biases and trench waves of thinking that can otherwise blind them to key information and even lead them to make errors in decision-making process. So in order to actually build a diverse team, you have to value diversity in the hiring process. What works for us is that we actually are lucky enough to get a lot of applicants every time we have an opening at the company. So everyone we consider has the skills for the job. There is no dumbing down or lowering the bar here. Everyone has to have the skills at base. Everyone we consider has to show signs of being able to work on our team that respects one another. They have to show empathy. They have to have it be a good cultural fit. But when it gets down to the final decision and after all other evaluation criteria have been considered, we make the offer to the candidate that brings a different set of experience than we currently have, someone that will help us think of things and approach problems in a different way. And for us, we're having a very diverse team already, sometimes I ask the cisgender straight white man, which is rare in this industry. The second thing that you really have to do when you build a diverse team is not to tolerate intolerance. A culture of inclusion requires constant care and feeding. Bias training and sexual harassment training, these should all be kind of baked in and when these kind of conflicts invariably happen, you have to address them openly, transparently and immediately. Everyone has to know that their skills are based, that they're valued and included and lack of empathy has to be addressed or else a diverse team will fly apart. And lastly, once you have put the effort in to build a diverse team or you really want to build a diverse team, you really need to promote the hell out of it, whether it's up the chain to management to help them understand what's necessary of an inclusive culture or whether it's letting the people, candidates known in the world know that your company values diversity and inclusion. And I'm not just talking about having Taco Tuesday. I mean, in a real substantive way, there has to be a way that you promote the fact that your company is values the inclusion of all people's opinions. So in conclusion, I'll leave you with this. The friction of diverse perspectives can spark magic. It's scientifically proven that diverse teams produce better results. They're more innovative and ultimately more profitable. Diverse teams are also not easy to build, but they're definitely worth the investment. So that's my talk. Thanks. Any questions? Well, record time. Hi. As an immigrant, I'm also part of a diverse team, even though I think I'm probably the only person who is not an American in the company. My question is, though, it's not related to this. But as I understand, you work a lot with companies that, like you said, would give them or give them about something. So I guess they are nonprofits, correct? Sure. Not all. Not all. But when you're working with nonprofits, like what is your experience usually with them? Because when we work with nonprofits, they usually work harder to work with because they may not have a budget that they, you know, other companies might have to work for the organizations. And sometimes we just disconnect a lot with those companies because there's something we're not used to. So I just want to hear what is your experience working with them? Well, there are challenges in working with nonprofits, and usually they don't have a large budget. That's what you're getting at. We kind of balance that by doing civic and government work and some commercial work as well. We don't exclusively work with nonprofits. But every project we take on is culturally or mission-along with our business. There are certain projects we won't do in the federal government. There are some companies we won't work with. But the larger, more established organizations allows us to take the kind of more kind of heartfelt nonprofit things which are generally not as profitable. So we balance the money issue by taking larger and more diverse kind of clients. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Hi. Hey there. What are some examples of some more ways that companies can incorporate the inclusion part on their teams? Well, it depends on the size of the organization. I mean, it's kind of difficult to... In a really large organization, everything moves slowly, right? So I think you have to really push the economic value of a diverse team in order to make it a valuable shift in priorities for large organizations. For a small organization, especially ones that are kind of personality-driven, it has to come from the executive. You have to convince the person at the top that it's good for their business. And then help them understand what some of these tips... Please share these tips on how to make an environment that's conducive and safe for a diverse team. Hi. Could you share some examples of times when having a really diverse team has maybe saved you or made something really better that you weren't expecting? Okay. So we were doing an initial kind of internal review for some project that we were working on. And one of our... It was kind of really, really tight and had these really kind of gorgeous font treatments. And before we even took it out to user testing, our project managers who's 62 years old, she's like, I can't read that. I was like, oh, okay. So we need to really rethink this for people with different site abilities. And that was early in our process. So we adjusted our entire process to really look at that earlier. I thank you very much for the talk. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for things that companies can do to broaden their pool of applicants and to make themselves be a more comfortable and feel like a more safe place to apply for candidates that might not necessarily identify with the people that are there already. Sure. It's one of those chicken and egg things, right? I mean, we're in this situation where diverse candidates find us because they know that we have that kind of space and that they will be valued there. For a company that's looking to transition to that, that messaging is really difficult. And I'm struggling with really good ways for companies to shift towards that. So I would suggest just really talking to management, helping them understand the value of it, have internal discussions about it. And it's difficult. I think you really have to promote the fact that your place is inclusive. It has to actually be inclusive for people to gravitate towards you. I mean, diverse candidates are not as popular. We know that it's a smaller pool. But if you kind of really promote the fact that you're actively seeking diversity in your solutions and on your team, people tend to find you. But you really have to be active about it. Thank you. Hi, thanks for speaking today. So I have a question a little bit more about retention than hiring. I mean, one thing I've noticed, especially as being a developer of color, is that places will seek you out in order to make their workplaces more diverse. And so in addition to hiring a diverse group of candidates, how do you think the best way is to retain some of those people? And what do you think the challenges are in maintaining, not just getting someone at the table or at the desk, but keeping them there for enough time? Yeah, I think it goes back to my point about the culture of inclusion. The organization just wants to get you in the door, but there's not a kind of base level empathy throughout the organization. And there's not a celebration of diversity that you bring to the table. And it takes constant care and feeding. You can't just bring somebody in the door and hope they'll be fine. You have to address the issues that they're having and understand that there are specific issues that diverse candidates are going to have that non-diverse candidates won't. But find commonality in that. And I really think that has to come from the top. There has to be a culture that really makes people want to work together and solve problems together actively and not just one where people just come to work every day. Again, not everybody's going to be best friends, but you have to really understand each other's perspective and value it. I think that's the key, the value of other people's perspectives and not just the fact that they're sitting next to you. Hi. I was wondering if you have a good example of an interview question, whether that's online or in person, that can get someone to feel comfortable to open up about their background without violating any laws asking about something. That is extremely tricky. So there are very specific things that you cannot ask in an interview. I steer away from that entirely. That's why we do all of our interviews in person. I try to get a sense of the people we're interviewing and without asking them any specific questions that are specifically around their race, their gender, their ethnicity or their identity. That's really tricky to do. I look for their background and when they talk about their history, I can glean certain things about them through how they solve the problem, where any sort of challenges they have. Those type of issues around their background tend to come up in an interview when you ask soft questions. But anything direct about their ethnicity, their background or their history, their religion, I steer away from it. I had a question. Coming from a large corporation with 80,000 people, we have a big diversity program within our business as far as the employees go. I went to some diversity events where I was being a six foot five white male married. I was the bad guy in the room. But I was brought up the question there being involved with the internet project and said, okay, how are we taking this diversity and converting it for our diverse customers that we serve? And the answers were just kind of, well, we're not really doing that yet. So how would you recommend, I guess, using the diverse teams that we're trying to build to make a diverse experience for our internet users? Well, there are two ways. Do you guys have an employee resources group? Yes, you do. And the other way is what are your kind of vendor outreach programs like? We are very, very aggressive with vendor outreach too. I mean, we're very diverse with our vendor outreach. But again, our internet experience does not reflect that. What are your challenges specifically around? So we're a large retailer. But I think specifically our retail experience is just very one directional. I mean, even going as far as talking about ADA compliance and stuff like that, there's a lot of things that we're not reaching. 20% of our customers are bilingual, but we don't have a bilingual, or 20% of ours don't have English as a first language, but we don't have even an option for a second language on the internet. So I think trying to incorporate some of that would make a big impact for our customer users in the end. So if you say you have a diverse employee group, and it sounds like you're saying that they're diverse people on those teams that are creating these products. You should be encouraging those folks to really have their opinions valued. If you're trying to be... This is how I put this. If your employee group is diverse and you're not getting to the diversity issues, then those people who are on your diverse teams are not really as valued. The voices are not being heard or they're not encouraged to share that experience, that possible impact on the people which they identify or which they're part of a group of. Now we go as far as to say those voices are being heard, but it seems like too big of it to have like, oh, that work is too hard for us to implement. It's got to be incremental. If you want it to happen, you can't just say it's too hard to do. You got to start to make incremental steps, so for this interracial, we're going to try this feature set that's going to specifically target or help reach this segment of the market. And you do it internally in small steps. If it's a big problem, just chuck it down into pieces. Hello. I don't have a question. I just wanted to recommend a resource that I came across related to the concept of idea diversity that you brought up. Harvard Business Review in October released a series called The Big Idea and their first focus was on rebel talent. And so it's talking about the power of constructive nonconformity. So there's a series of articles and videos and other resources which I thought was pretty interesting considering I used to work at Princeton University and I had a huge issue with nonconformity there, which has led me to become a solopreneur. Yeah, cheers. So I only lasted six months, but I just wanted to recommend that to people as a great resource to think about the value of idea diversity and that concept of friction, it's uncomfortable, right, but it can yield good results. Exactly. Thank you. Yeah, I have a question. What can someone who's interviewing with an organization, is there something they can ask, and I would think this would be after you have an offer and you're considering whether to take it, probably not before that, but how can you ask to find out if that organization really is committed to all these things you're talking about or is this some of them? Because they're all going to say they are. They all have a written policy. You look at their record, you look at what they've done, you look at their commitment to versing the products that they produce. Are they actively reaching into communities that are underserved? Does their employee group look diverse? Are their large organizations, do they have employee resource groups? Are they walking the walk as opposed to just saying, you know, talk in the talk? So you have multiple, or at least if not with just one diverse team, do you have an issue picking clients that either agree with your policies or your inclusion or not? And if you don't, or let's say you do pick a client that does not agree with your policies, you say you do a lot of government work. So there are obviously like state governments that do not agree with your policies of inclusion. Now in that scenario, does your team have a feedback of whether they want to participate in that project or not? I don't take those projects. I mean, there's some states that, let's break that down a little bit. The state of Pennsylvania, I can still be fired for being gang anywhere. There's no equal protection of the law for that here. But there are also, there are some diversity incentives within government and federal contracting. But if there's something, if there's an agency or an organization that is actively discriminatory, we don't take those projects. So if you don't take those projects, how are you actively trying to gain clients that do agree with your policies? The overwhelming majority of commercial entities that we found and most of the government agencies that we found consider our diversity an asset. Okay, any other questions? Thank you very much.