 I'm a big fan of hip-hop. You will hear me speak with a bit of an American twang. I have never lived in the States. In all my life, I think I've spent maybe a maximum of 10 days there. I've lived in Canada for the last 18 months, but I've been speaking like this since maybe I was 13 or 14 because I used to listen to a hell of a lot of hip-hop. And I wanted to be like the folks who were making it. And so I took on a bit of this. Hip-hop was born in New York, somewhere in the 60s, and was played mostly outside in parks or at underground parties. And at these parties, you would have a master of ceremonies. In fact, you'd have more than one. And these masters of the ceremony would take it in turns to say something over the beat, something that would get the party jumping. And typically it was some sort of a rhyme, some sort of a lyric that would be spoken over the beat. This is what was called rapping. And when each MC rapped, they wanted to be the best and they wanted to make sure that you knew that they were better than the rest. As you can expect, this resulted in a limited number of topics that were being covered in those early rhymes. The topics were as follows. The MC and their name, how good they were at rapping and how much everybody else sucked at rapping. Those were the main things that they spoke about. Even to this day, if you listen to a lot of hip-hop, you will find that there is a lot of speaking about the act of actually making the music. Hip-hop is a self-referential art form. It likes to talk about itself. In this respect, you will not hear many rock songs that are about guitars or shredding. You won't hear jazz songs that are about smooth chord changes and phrasing. Since then, till now, for better or worse, hip-hop remains self-referential. And that's how it was at these parties. MCs expatiated about their exemplary elocution over dope beats, all in the aid of having a good time and getting people out of their seats. But like with all good art, it wasn't long before hip-hop music went mainstream and started taking over the world and as demand increased, artists needed to find new things to talk about. And topics of discussion in rap songs started to diversify a little bit. Rappers started to talk about how awesome they were, or rappers continued to talk about how awesome they were, but they also began to speak more and more about their day-to-day lives, which for most black folks in the 60s and 70s in New York meant poverty. The music and lyrics started to reflect vivid imagery and stories about drugs, poverty, crime, toxic masculinity and violence. Some artists told these stories through their music as a way to educate and warn others about their plight. And this was good. It increased awareness of the social ills and about things like police brutality. But there was an unintended side effect. Some listeners interpreted these descriptions as prescriptions for how they should live their lives. They thought the music was glorifying the crime, the violence and the drugs. By the early 90s, it was no longer clear whether hip-hop music was just documenting social problems that faced black people in America, or whether it was amplifying, and some would even argue causing some of these social problems. Hip-hop came under strong criticism from politicians, from religious leaders and media, questioning whether the music was good for society, whether it needed to be regulated, and maybe even banned. The hip-hop industry had become its own worst enemy. I don't know if you know of any other industries that are becoming their own worst enemies. But not entirely. Some artists made music that reflected a more self-aware side of hip-hop. In 1999, Most Def, pictured here, released an album called Black on Both Sides. This is my favorite hip-hop album of all time. On the opening track called Fear Not of Man, Most Def goes on a bit of a ramble and he's complaining about how he keeps getting asked, what do you think's gonna happen with hip-hop? Where do you think hip-hop is going to go? The media at this time were obviously convinced that hip-hop was going to implode and destroy itself, or maybe they hoped that this was going to be the case. On this track, Most Def gives his answer. And what he says is, you know what's gonna happen with hip-hop? Whatever's happening with us. If we're gonna be smoked out, hip-hop is gonna be smoked out. If we're gonna be doing okay, then hip-hop is going to be doing okay. He says, people talk about hip-hop like it's some giant living in the hillside, coming down to visit the townspeople. And this is the clincher for me. He says, we are hip-hop. Me, you, everybody. We are hip-hop. On an album that became an instant classic, this was a powerful message not just of hope, but a call to reflect and a call to change. It was self-referential music or self-referential hip-hop at its best. Through the music, Most Def was saying that the hip-hop community is made of individuals. Me, you, everybody. And he's asking the community. And he's saying, if we keep talking but don't make any changes, our community will always stay saktastic. But if each of us meet you, everybody, become self-aware, if we realize where we need to improve and take action to grow along those dimensions, then hip-hop is going to be doing okay, because the people will be doing okay. I think we can learn some things here. I'll take a bit of a tangent. His name is Eddie called Rosa Beth Cantor, who is a professor of business at Harvard. Back in the 70s, she worked at a management consultancy that was called in to a big industrial firm that was going through some changes. This big company had about 300 sales consultants spread across the States. They were all men. The company had decided to change and started hiring women in 1972. And over a two-year period, they had managed to get 20 women on the sales team. They'd lost a lot more. A few months in, the women weren't doing too well in terms of performance. And the company was concerned. To their credit, the company seemed committed to making this work. They wanted this to happen. And so they hired a consultant to try and find out what was going on. And this is where Rosa Beth Cantor comes into the picture. She interviewed all the women and some of their colleagues as well, their customers. She gathered data and she analyzed it. And the answer she gave to the company was, the problem is not that the women aren't up to scratch. The problem is, they just aren't enough of them in your business. This was strange. It turns out that the team of 300 was spread out across the country. And each office had about 10 to 12 people in it. And the women were distributed in such a way that there was usually only one of them, maybe two on those teams. It turns out that these women were tokens. They were the one of a kind on the team. And it's really difficult if you're the only woman working in a group of 10 other men. Why? Because if the group is not inclusive, this is what Rosa Beth Cantor found. The women spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to fit in. And this ultimately conflicts with the amount of focus that they can actually put on their jobs. And so their performance suffers. And as their performance suffers, they either quit or they get fired and it becomes this terrible self-fulfilling prophecy of the fact that women can't get the job done. This is what Rosa Beth Cantor found. And this is what she meant when she said, there are not enough of them in your company. It seemed almost dangerous to have just one. You needed to have more and more. But you've got to start somewhere. It's this conundrum that we're faced with, right? And in our industry, we have the same challenge. We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion. We have problems to solve. To be clear, if you are hearing me today and you don't believe that meaningful inclusion and participation of diverse groups in the design community is critical so that we can design a better world worth living for everyone, then you are not paying attention to what the world needs from our industry from this design community. And in my mind, you have two choices. You can go and educate yourself so that you can catch up to the conversation that we're having today. Or you can get out of the way so that the rest of us can get on with making better teams, better companies, better products, and building a better world. The earth is round. We must vaccinate our children. We have a global warming crisis. Game of Thrones is finished. And our teams need to become way more diverse. These issues are not up for debate. You may have heard this phrase. Diversity means being invited to the party. Inclusion means being asked to dance. The intention may be right, but I think that this is broken. Instead of being asked to dance, I'd prefer to help plan the party. I wanna help pick the music. And maybe we can teach each other some new dance moves. I believe that inclusion means that you can be yourself and you can be valued for that in your environment. Why does this matter? It matters because women are 45% more likely to quit tech jobs than men. Why? Because they don't feel included. Rosabeth Cantor found this in her findings back in the 60s. She said that the findings from her study don't just apply to women, but they can be extended to all token groups, the one of a kinds that are working in groups where they don't fit in, where they don't feel included. And if they don't feel included, if they aren't able to perform to their best, they'll either quit or they get fired. And so this presents a challenge because as we try to increase diversity, we are hiring more and more people. To put it crudely, we're trying to widen the funnel. But it turns out that we've also got a leaky bucket. So as we try to get more people in, we don't include them and they end up leaving. And so we end up doing this work that doesn't actually change any of the things that we're interested in making better. Now where you work, there may be a diversity and inclusion team. And we believe, and we may believe that because we've got this kind of team, that their work is gonna make things better. But Aubrey Blanche from Atlassian holds a different view. She says, every job is a diversity and inclusion job. Every job. To build an equitable inclusive company, every single person needs to do their part. If you stay exactly where you are and turn your job into a diversity and inclusion job, you can create even more organizational change. To me, what this sounds like, it sounds like she's saying the same thing that most of us are saying about hip hop. We are diversity and inclusion, me, you, everybody. We have a role to play in this. So let's talk a bit more about why. Because when we don't include other people, as Rosa Beth found, they literally struggle to do their jobs properly. And this can be at a personal cost to themselves, but also to the opportunities that we are looking to capitalize on. What does it mean to be the only one of your kind? I'm the only black person, maybe. This is something that I've experienced throughout my school. I was very fortunate. My dad worked for an American insurance company. I lived in Zimbabwe, that's where I grew up. He worked for an American insurance company that paid for school fees. And he was like, I'm gonna go for the very best school. The very best school turned out to be one that had very few black people in it. In the first two weeks of school, my dad got a call from the school and they said, listen, your kid can't speak English. You're wasting your money. You need to take him out of here. But my dad persisted and he was like, no, we'll figure it out. We did extra work at home and eventually I managed to get through. I went to high school, similar situation. We were looking for the best and that's what the best that my father could afford. When I left there, I went to the UK. I wanted to study medicine. Didn't get the grades. So I ended up being a designer. Not to say that designers failed medical people. I'm just saying, this is how it turned out. But nevertheless, I was in Plymouth, a town in the South of the UK and lo and behold, the student halls that I lived in, the course that I took, all of those things, I was always this person who's one of a kind. But one of a kind isn't just about race. It can be different, right? You could be the only single parent or the only parent on your team who has to deal with childcare. You could be the only one over the age of 60 or the only one under the age of 20. You could be the only cancer survivor or the only one who's breastfeeding. You could be the only one who needs to pray five times a day. You could be the only one who needs to use a screen reader to get the work done or the only one who needs wheelchair access. You could be the only one who's on the autism spectrum. You could be the only one who speaks to the Portuguese accent or you could be the only one who doesn't know how to speak Portuguese. There are many, many ways that you could be the only one of your kind and worst still, you could be one of a kind in many of those groups. This is what they mean by intersectionality when you are the only one in many ways on the team or on the group that you're in. And when you stand out in a group, when you're the only one of your kind, you might experience things like this. I stand out more because I'm the only one of my kind. The women in Rosbeth Cantor study found that anything they did seemed to attract more notice from their colleagues than if the men did it. In a group of 10 other men, a single woman would be instantly recognized. This meant that they couldn't blend into the crowd. When you're the only one of your kind in the room, you can experience the feeling of over-observation that puts you under pressure to perform. When you walk into a meeting and you're the only one, you stand out. When you speak with a strong accent on a conference call, you stand out. When you don't speak the local language very well, you stand out. If you need to take time off for religious purposes or for medical reasons, you stand out. If you need to go find a room to pray during the day, you're gonna stand out. And what does this mean? It means that everything that I do feels like it gets scrutinized a bit more. Sometimes it's basic things, but sometimes it's my work. And so I feel like I need to do better than everybody else because I feel like I'm being watched. If I make a mistake, my mistake feels bigger than everybody else's because I'm the only one of my kind in the room. This results in the one of a kind being less likely to take risks. And we need to take risks in the work that we do, right? And failure should be positive so that we can learn. But what Roosevelt found is that sometimes one of a kind is less likely to take risks because they feel over scrutinized. In cancer study, when things didn't go well for the women, even if it was for reasons unrelated to their competence, there was a tendency to associate the failure with the identity. They failed because they were of that kind. This belief was found both in the majority groups and sadly among the one of the kinds they as well. Some of the women began to believe that they couldn't do certain things because of who they were. Of course, this pressure had a negative impact on their performance and so they didn't do well. Some of them quit and got fired, which in a way ended up proving the point unfortunately. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I studied at a posh school in Zimbabwe as I mentioned before and I didn't know it at the time but the schools that I went to, they taught what some of you might know as BBC English. You're taught to speak English so well that you could present on the BBC in the UK. I didn't know this at the time but this is what I was learning. So when I left Zimbabwe when I was 18 and I went to the UK, my first job I worked in a pub and this pub was frequented by English contractors, construction workers. And they used to say to me, or say to each other shall I say, he speaks really well for someone from Africa. I used to hear the same thing when I was in South Africa. This is a strange thing that can happen when you're the only one of your kind. A basic thing like how you speak English becomes the topic of conversation. Just because you're the only one of your kind, this is what the kind of scrutiny means. They focus on your characteristics and less on the people you are. And this can get even more complicated because in Kantor's study what they found was that the women in the group, their female characteristics were noticed more than their actual achievements. Their colleagues would be more likely to comment on how well they dressed than the fact that they kicked ass on that report that they just produced. And what happens when your achievements don't get noticed? You don't get promoted. You don't get a pay rise, right? In my conversations with people from minority groups in our industry, many folks believe that they have to work twice as hard, twice as hard as everybody else just so that their work can get noticed over their characteristics. They'll come in earlier, they will leave later than everyone else just so that they feel they can meet some sort of standard sometimes that they're sitting in their own minds. But these are the pressures that folks might be exposed to when they're the one of a kind in the group. To avoid being overly visible and to avoid the scrutiny, what you might find is that the one of a kind can begin to limit their exposure. They might dress differently, tone it down. They might start avoiding public events, working from home a little bit more or keeping silent in meetings. In Canter's study, she found that some people didn't want their achievements to be known for fear that this might increase unwanted attention for the majority group that they didn't even feel like they belonged in the first place. And yes, this limited their career success. Further in the study, what Canter found was that when the women had to travel to visit clients, they would go with their male counterparts. Sometimes there would just be two of them, two or three of them. And when they arrived at their clients, most of whom were men as well, their clients would assume that the woman was in a secretarial role. Or maybe she was a wife. Worse still, she was a mistress who was a company, the salesperson, the salesman. Each time this happened, the women would have to explain their status and their qualifications so that they could be seen as equals to their peers. When you are one of a kind, particularly from underrepresented communities, there can be pre-existing assumptions about your capabilities and your qualifications. You might even be seen as the diversity hire brought in for optics, make things look better. Your skills, your expertise and qualifications may always be questioned while those of the majority are assumed as a given. If people have not worked with people of a certain kind before, it can be easier for them to try and fit that token into a pre-existing notion of what they think that person can do. And this means that the token has to continually work to break out of that box so that they can be seen for who they are and what they can achieve on a day-to-day basis on top of doing their day jobs. Therein there is the topic of changing who you are. I don't know if any of you all have seen this. Pearl, a film made by the folks at Disney. Early on in the film we see Pearl trying to, well she joins this company which you can see is called BRO Capital. Make that, make of that what you will. So she's a ball of yarn and she joins this company of these folks who clearly don't look like her but they're all of the same group. And early on in the film we see Pearl trying to hang out with the folks at the water cooler and she rocks up to them and they're telling dirty jokes about things that they did on the weekend. She rocks up and she tells a joke of something that seems funny to her. Joke force flat. They all walk away thinking that she's a bit corny and she feels like she doesn't belong in the group. She walks away thinking the first conversations she's tried to have has resulted in her being a failure. A few scenes later we see Pearl and the dudes back at the water cooler. She's knitted herself a suit to look like one of the dudes to fit in. Not only that, but in this scene she's telling some terrible joke about a date that she had on the weekend. The bros break out laughing. Pearl has made it. She feels no longer like a token. She's now part of the majority group. In Rosabeth Cantor's study she found that this happened with some of the real women who worked in that sales team. The desire to fit in is not just about keeping a job. Homo sapiens is a social species. When we lived outside fitting in it was a matter of life or death. Being by yourself meant starvation or being eaten by predators. This evolutionary trait, this desire to be part of the group has stayed with us. So when the group does not make the token feel included the token may feel that they need to take matters into their own hands. And in some cases they will change something about themselves to try and fit in. And remember all this is happening while they're trying to live their lives and perform well at their jobs. Some of those changes will be subtle. Some of them will be much more significant. But they all come at an expense. And largely as you see here it's at pills expense. And if all those strategies don't work again the next step may be I gotta bounce. This doesn't work for me. I don't know if you're all familiar with the concept of sponsorship. The idea of sponsorship is that unlike mentorship where you are trying to help somebody to move on with their career sponsorship is about specifically putting someone's name forward for something that you think that they could do. And then making sure that they do that and you support them through that process. I might nominate you to speak at an event on behalf of the company. That is me sponsoring a person so that they can move forward. A group of scientists from the University of Colorado did a study about this to try and understand when someone is in a position of power and in a position to sponsor somebody how does the organization respond to this behavior? What they found was that it's actually risky for underrepresented minorities to help others that are like them. In 2014 some smart folks at the University of Colorado did a study of a group of diverse executives. And in the study they found that women and minorities were advocated for people who would like themselves were seen as selfish. And this resulted in lower performance reviews. Whereas the white folks who advocated for diversity seemed to get better performance reviews for supporting the same minority groups. Yo, does all this sound hard? It sounds difficult. I'll tell you from this perspective it's difficult to speak about. I've written it down so I can get through it. But there are things that we can do to make things better. This is the good thing, this is the thing I'm excited about. The first thing we can do, strangely enough, is that we can be less confident. Say what? So yesterday I was seeing a bit of the town and I took an Uber to a building that I wanted to see. And so we went through a whole bunch of traffic. Then we got pretty close to where we needed to be but I think it was on the other side of the road. And so the Uber driver, because of the traffic, didn't want to kind of go around the roundabout and come all the way back. So they were just like, listen, is it cool if I park here? Well, that's what I understood. I mean, he was speaking Portuguese, I didn't understand, but he pointed, he said I should get out and all those things. So I was like, cool. Anyway, so you're saying you need to go across the road and you need to go over there but I'm gonna drop you off here, right? So that you can go where you need to go. And I was like, cool, that sounds good, we can do this. So I jumped out the right and I'm like, this is dope. And I walked down the street that he had pointed at. But after a few steps, I realized I couldn't see anything familiar. So I slowed down and I looked around for landmarks and signposts and I couldn't see anything. So I stopped and I took out my phone and I checked on Google Maps and due to some bug, I don't know, on Google Maps they have this compass and due to some bug, the compass wasn't actually moving. So I was doing this in the middle of the road, trying to make this thing work so it could actually kind of direct me to where I needed to go. I must have looked like a bit of an idiot. Then I started walking in one direction to see if the map would follow me so that I didn't know which way I'm going and then I turned and then I went a little bit and it didn't look like it was moving. So then I went in the other direction and then I went back to the intersection where I've been dropped off, just to try and figure out where I was. Eventually I switched off the app a couple of times, I switched it back on and then eventually kind of I saw the blue dot, it was where I was, the compass told me where I needed to go and eventually I arrived at where I needed to be. When we have low confidence and we feel doubt like I did in that situation, this is a signal that something we are doing may not be right. It makes us stop and look around. It makes us question decisions we've made and information we've received. We get curious and we ask questions. We try some things to see if they work. If not, we change what we are doing until we see positive results. This is what it means to be less confident. I guess what I'm saying is, let's have low confidence in the leadership practices and strategies that have led us to build the exclusive homogenous industries and teams that we have. Let's have low confidence in the belief that we can't change anything because of our pay grade, because there's already a department for this, there's somebody else's job that's gonna handle this. Instead, let's get curious about the people and the cultures of people who are not like us about the struggles they face. Let's ask questions about how we can do better and let's try some things carefully until we see some new, better results that are taking us in the direction that we wanna go in. So we can have less confidence. We can also help to create a new normal. When I first started seeing people writing this, I didn't understand, I didn't get it. A lot of people have this on their Twitter profile and I was like, what's going on? This is weird. But then I spoke to somebody and they explained to me. They said that until everyone is doing this, the only people who are doing it are the ones of a kind. When everybody writes this on their Twitter profiles and they write it wherever they feel they need to be represented on their profile, it means that folks from the LGBTQI communities don't stand out anymore. This is what it means to help to create a new normal. It becomes normal to say this, to say your pronouns. And so we can help by starting with things like this. We can continue. If someone in your team needs to leave early or if you need to leave early to attend a kid's event or maybe because you don't have any childcare, don't just say you have to leave early. Explain that you have to leave early because you need to look after your child. Because when you do that, people start to understand that, oh damn, this is the thing that we can do in this business. If someone in your team puts that up on Slack, give them a high five and say, go on your way. Do this thing. You're normalizing, you're making that normal. And the more that people from the top, everyone in the business can do this, you're creating a new normal. If your office has a prayer room or if you have a breastfeeding room, label it clearly and make sure that everyone knows where it is. Not just the people who you think you need. Everybody needs to know where it is, right? So that it's not a secret, just for people who need it. And when you do things like this, you start making the things that one of a kind, that make one of a kind stand out more like the normal thing. You can afford to sponsor the one of a kind. My friend Kat Small has drawn this great cartoon trying to show the difference between sponsorship and mentorship. I recommend you for this speaking gig, can you do it, right? Why is this important? Laura Hogan says, because marginalized people are over-mentored but under-sponsored, right? And the sponsorship is the thing that we need to be looking for. What can you do? Laura says, you can give their manager feedback about their work. You can give public shout outs to the work that they've done internally and externally. Recommend them for highly visible projects and recommend them for blog posts and talks. With a sponsor, women are 70% more likely to have their ideas endorsed and shipped. When their ideas don't get shipped, it's one of the reasons they don't feel valued and they want to bounce. You can be curious. Learn and read more about the topic. Learn and read more about the issues. One of my favorite sources is the Atlassian blog. Atlassian makes Jira. Whether you love or hate Jira, visit their blog about diversity and inclusion. I think it's for slash belonging. They do great work to talk about and write about the challenges that they're facing. They put their numbers up. You can see exactly what they're doing. They talk openly about what they're doing well and what they're not doing. This can help us to learn more and become more eloquent about the challenges and become more eloquent about the solutions and the problems that we're trying to solve. Most importantly, be kind. This stuff is hard and we have a lot of work to do. So let's be kind to ourselves as we do this and let's be kind to one another because we've got a long way to go. Most stuff was right. Hip-hop had to do a lot of cleaning up. And it has happened. A lot of these artists have grown up. Jay-Z's got kids now. He married Beyonce. Things are looking up, right? It's all changing. But this happened because a lot of these artists have grown from their drug dating lives to being grown men and women who are facing real world challenges, right? And I think it's true to what most stuff was saying which is that we are hip-hop. Me, you, everybody, we are hip-hop. And when we change, the thing changes. And I guess my argument is, as I said before, that we are diversity and inclusion. Me, you, everybody, we can do this. We are the tech industry. It is not somebody else, it's us. And we are the ones who individually when we make a change, then we can make something that changes everything else. Thanks very much, folks. Peace.