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In this episode we talk to Cheryl Gladu, Researcher-in-Residence at Thompson Rivers University, and author of Dessa: Growing a Diverse and Inclusive Artificial Intelligence Company. This case follows Dessa’s founder and chief operating officer, Vince Wong, as he develops hiring practices to create a diverse workforce while fostering a culture supportive of diversity. Cheryl discusses the importance of having uncomfortable conversations in the classroom, co-creating ground rules with students to approach these difficult conversations, the difference between dialogue and debate, defining implicit bias, and the value of workshopping a case before submission.
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Thank you for joining us for decision point from Ivy Publishing at the Ivy Business School. In this episode we talked to Cheryl Glad to, researcher and residence at Thompson Rivers University and author of Tessa, growing a diverse and inclusive artificial intelligence company. This case follows Dessa's founder and chief operating officer, Vince Wong, as he develops hiring practices to create a diverse workforce and fosters a culture supportive of diversity. We spoke with Cheryl about the importance of having uncomfortable conversations in the classroom, co creating ground rules with students to approach these difficult conversation, the difference between dialog in debate, defining implicit bias and the value of workshopping a case before submission. Enjoy. All right. Well, thanks very much for joining us, and maybe we'll start with if you could briefly take us through the dilemma that the protagonist, Vince Wong, is facing in the case. Okay, so Vince Wong is a cofounder of this Ai Company and it's going through serve early stages of growth and he's got to the point where previously he had. He had his hands on all the hires up until that point. So he had been involved in the hiring of basically every one of the firm and it was getting to the point where they are transitioning to where he was hiring people to do the hiring for the company and he was concerned. He was concerned, but a lot of things and related to growth, but this was a one of the topics that we sort of just our conversation, conversation kept, you know, drifting towards, was the notion of hiring people who would ultimately end up being yes men or yes women in the firm and he was really concerned, given the it's a very innovative company, they're trying to do very, very interesting work and some of it could be very disruptive politically, socially, so on and so forth, and so he was concerned that there be people who would sort of just go along with a flow, and so he really wanted to set up a process that would embed his sort of internal monolog like is this person going to challenge us? Is this person going to bring a different set of experience to the firm? So his sort of internal processes, his sort of way of hiring up until that point. How can he embed that into a process when he's no longer involved in managing that process directly? So that was kind of where it came up. He was it was a very proactive approach, which I thought was interesting for a business case, because mostly we're dealing with crises in teaching cases. That was one of the pieces of feedback I got from Ivy. was like, but there, there's not a problem yet, and I'm like, exactly. That's what makes it interesting. He's being proactive and that is I think that was a really interesting conversation to see him struggling with that, and I love that word struggle, because I can only imagine, you know, sitting in that office going okay, we know this is going to be a challenge in this is a tricky conversation to sometimes have. So it's great that it's dealing with something that leaders have to deal with every day. I want to want to follow that through with your thoughts around why you feel it's so important to have these uncomfortable conversations in the classes, particularly right now with with the environment that we're in, because Vince is taking us through this journey. Yeah, I mean and and I think it's important to set ourselves up for success as it relates to these difficult conversations. So I wouldn't, for example, start a class with this case because it is challenging and possibly personally challenging for for the for the individuals in your class. This could be problematic conversation to have. So I but I nonetheless think it's really important to have hard conversations because it builds resilience and it prepares students to have these conversations in their lives with other people in a respectful manner, and I think we need more respectful hard conversations more than ever. We need these conversations to be had. And so in the way that I teach my classes, whether I use cases or not, I tend to in bed a lot of experiential learning, and so in order to for those kinds of experiential learning to be both meaningful but also constructive, I tend to lead the class through dialog exercises, like teaching students what dialog is compared to debate and how dialog can help us create new understandings and how those new understandings can lead to innovation and creative thinking, and what dialog means as it relates to suspending judgment, learning to listen, learning to communicate in a less violent manner, or less combative manner, let's say, and how these kinds of constructive conversations can be uncomfortable at times, but to assume goodwill and then to project goodwill and to bring those to those kinds of conversation class. So we do like I would lead up to this case. I wouldn't start with this case, but I would sort of in bed these processes of, you know, looking in into our own assumptions before jumping to conclusions and and doing that in other cases before coming to a case like this, so you can start challenging your assumptions about, for example, how you know thoughts how business students might think about a problem versus how a science student might think about a problem, and to try to challenge you assumptions for, you know, topics like growth and that sort of thing could be ways of having those initial conversations before it gets at this kind of personal, personally charged topics like bias and sexism and that kind of thing. So you're almost paving the way to leading up to leading up to this case. I like the fact that you're, you know, assuming good will. I've heard others talk about challenging the idea, not the person. Are there any other rule or kind of guidelines that you set the stage with throughout the class or for the listener to go? Okay, I need to implement this or talk to the students about this before diving into these type of topics? Yeah, like I tend to ask students to go create rules around these kinds of discussions. So in the beginning part of the semester I don't impose my rules, but we have a discussion about how do you want to be treated, how do you want to have a conversation like? How do we designate this is a time for open discourse versus debate? So are we making a decision here? Do we need to make a decision here? If we don't need to make a decision, how does a conversation different from when we do need to make a decision? And so asking students to co create rules around shared experiences is helpful because it makes them think about what they find acceptable and what they find challenging and it forces them to in some ways they have they have authorship over those rules. At that point, if I impose them, they might disagree, they might think going to know, every moment is a moment for debate and and and and that's in fact how a lot of them have experienced business school up until this point or up until some points. But you know, a lot of this isn't a debate, it's a conversation and a conversation is run different way than a debate or a dialog is run differently than debate. Yea. So understanding those differences can come through the CO creation of things like rules of governing discussion, that sort of thing, and you have them all. So you talk in the teaching note, which I love that you've included this, is the biased tests that you have you may have students take beforehand as well. Could you talk a little bit about how did you come up across these this website? Why do you think it's great and what is it meant for that discussion and for the student coming into the to the safe space, into the classroom? Yeah, so the implicit biased test is put out by Herbert and I'm not sure where I read about it. At one point in my like self teaching, I encountered it and took the test myself and was interested in how it's presented and and the sort of conclusions that are drawn from it and how it's grown over the years as well. And I had students in a course, but I was teaching at McGill, use it as part of facilitation. So in the course that I taught there, the students actually led half of the learning in the class and so they would they would, with my facilitation, create exercises for learning and one of the groups of students actually ran the implicit biased tests in the classroom and it was through that experience. But I thought maybe this is something people should do at home on their own, because some people it's a bit of a shock and then immediately, if you're doing this in public, if you're kind of surprised by your findings, defensiveness becomes quite common and I think that's a totally normal response for somebody who's just, you know, like a maybe a twenty year old person and covering possible implicit bias in themselves is kind of a moment. You need a moment to think about that. You're not going to just accept that necessarily, especially if you don't see yourself as somebody having bias, and that's to me the you know, the difference between somebody who's overtly say racist and somebody who has bias based on their experience. And so in a moment to think about it and then giving them questions to reflect on start us to build context where everybody's experiencing something and and given time to think about it before they're being put into a classroom where it could get heated. And how do you define implicit biased, because for some this might be the first time that they're hearing that term and kind of going okay, I hear that. Well, how do you define it in the context of the classroom or as a as a fact they member? Yeah, so this is not my area of expertise. I have to stress that I'm more on the dialog side of things. But implsis biased to me is something that it's not. It's not something that's forward in your thinking. It's not like I know this about myself. It's something that is subtle and probably as a consequence of the culture that you grew up and it's not some like thought that you've had. Oh, I feel this way about that group of people. It's more like, possibly, I don't know this group of people. I've only been exposed to them through stories in the media, and so those stories in the media may have shaped some of my instinctual responses to these people. It's not over. So if I were to be asked, how do you feel about, for example, gay people, you know, you might be like, I don't know, gay people are okay, I guess, but then when you when you have to sort of associate good words with gay people, you might be more reluctant to do that than to associate negative words, for example. And so it's not and it is something that I feel the research has shown people can train themselves out of. So, for example, it's been found that medical practitioners tend to prescribe pain medications at lower doses for African American women. There's a sense, for whatever reason, that these women either tolerate pain more or don't need the pain medication that, say, a white woman or a white man needs when they're asking for help. And so some medical practitioners will have a little like reminder when they're writing in their computers about the prescription that they're giving to this person. Hey, reminder, I've noticed your patient is African American woman. There's this bias that tends to have and in the consequence of being reminded. So he's like, you know what, I'm going to take that note of that, and this is the standard dosage. And it's not like a it's just like a flag, like just remind yourself. Hey, there's being mindful, being mindful of that people of this tendency. It's not like you are a bad person, therefore, you know, it's more just like, Hey, heads up, there's this thing that exists by us. We all have it one way or another, and we tend to be blind to it. It's a blind spot in our thinking. So just be mindful, like you said, be mindful of this difference that tends to happen in terms of prescription. So heads up. Now do you recommend faculty members take this, this particular test as well? Because we've talked a little bit about the students and preparing them. What thoughts do you have on preparing of a faculty member, a class leader, to have these conversations and to be able to, you know, to absorb there's lots of pressure, there's different types of I loog. How do you suggest that the faculty prepared to have these conversations? Yeah, well, I definitely think the teachers, the people who are going to be teaching this particular case, should take the test if they're asking their students to do it. I think in the same way that you would ask the faculty to read the case. Yeah, and prepare for the case in the same way that this or in a different way, but, you know, so that they're prepared to teach the class. I think it'd be helpful for them to know what it is they're asking their students to do. And it also just you know, and that's the thing I like about the tests, is that it kind of makes it personal, makes it about you. It's not about Vincent Wong in in that moment, you know, it's about your experience and and thinking about we know where this might have come from, if you do have a bias, and whether it's, you know, something you might want to challenge in your day to life, like how are you going to now go to your class? Is it going to be different or you're going to think about it differently? And I think also just those a way of trying to relate a little bit more to what Vince is talking about. In the case that, you know there's these we just know that they need all these tendencies. So how do we design a process that acknowledges this tendency, doesn't judge it negatively or reprimand somebody, but to say, okay, given these tendencies, how do we design our systems better, which, you know, he's working to feel the computation and design, you know, and why not in bed those kinds of thoughtful algorithms into their organizational processes? Yeah, make it part of that system. HMM. Actually, now I want to because a lot of our listeners are going to be authors thinking about getting started writing a case. How did the case evolve and how did the company hit Your Raider? How did it come to your attention? Okay, so I've known Vince personally for a number of years and I watched him as he was going through the process of starting this company and actually before that I watched him juggle, or not juggle, but like think about becoming an entrepreneur. So I teach entrepreneurship. That's why I write, like I've written two cases now through Ivy, and I'm always looking for truly entrepreneurial cases, like the sort of early stages and the struggles that people have in creating a company and I watched Vince actually go through the maschinations of what kind of company I wanted to start. Like he, he was not happiness job anymore. He's pretty to prototypical. He's in his s and he has a lot of experience, but he's kind of feels like he's hit a limit to his interest there. He had moved up as far as he could, as far as in his in his mind at that point, and he was looking at different fields. He was looking at fields where that were more aligned with his personal interests and he was working a lot like he was working with a dog doing research, you know, he's working at restaurants and night to see is that the line of work, and I could just see him sort of tossing these, you know, different ideas around in terms of his future. And then this opportunity just landed on his desk and it wasn't, you know, a pub or a restaurant, it was artificial intelligence. Right. Just happen to have a friend from his left personal life that was an expert in this and you know, Vince himself has an experience in it, but not in this area, and so he had this opportunities or land on his desk at his current job and he had in his network somebody who could help him build this into something special, and so he he just jumped at the opportunity hit the ground running because they were very successful at what they were trying to do. Oh, that's great and I think that's sometimes we, you know, look into the news or look at research to find an idea for the case. But the fact that you knew Vince before was great, whether challenges that came in the writing of the case and that whole process, because you knew him personally. How do you are there any pieces of advice you could give to an author that's managing that relationship where you where you know the person, but then you're also trying to dive into what can be like uncomfortable conversations? You know, I don't I don't know. Like I don't think that that was an issue. Like he became harder to get a hold of, like even as a friend, became so busy like that. Like when I first talked to him, it was about a different topic and we are just talking and it was in that conversation that this became clearly a question that he had. It wasn't the question that I came with. Like they had gone through several sort of phases of growth that were interesting to me, and then he just kept coming back, circling back to this kind of topic, and so I ended up actually changed my case. It was more like a rebranding case at one point when I wrote it is a short case, and then it shifted over to this question. I don't know, like I think is a writer, you just you follow what's you know, in some way, in the way that Vince saw this opportunity, was like, Oh, this opportunity is in my left I'm going to take this off writers. You know, as case writers, you should be networking in a way that creates those opportunities and it just, you know, like all the cases that I've written have been people who are in my personal network, not necessarily close friends, but people that I knew and that I liked and I was impressed by their work and wanted to get to know more about it and that's how I made those initial contacts. I don't think I've ever Cole called anyone for case. I'm sure that will come at one point because I've moved into a new city and so I'm a bit of a bit of a fish out of water here, but I find that by being involved in in be by being involved in your community, you encounter these people. I love the idea that you listened to the dialog and almost listened for the case to tell you which way to take it and not fighting it. I think that's really cool and a great piece of advice for for authors. was there a challenging part of writing the case? You know, what hiccups did you face? You know, to challenging to get in touch with Vince's at some point. Anything else come up in the in the process that you found to be difficult or challenging? Well, I would not advise writing a case like this when you're in the throes of your PhD disscution. Yeah, I think that's the main thing is that I was doing this off the side of my desk and I was doing a lot of things off the side of my desk, and publication is iterative, and so I workshop this, I brought it into my class in various ways and then I brought it to at least one conference. But we had at Concordia we had a really nice program to help workshop cases so that was really helpful for me. That's the the program that Ring Packe, my co author, is running. It's super helpful. But, you know, doing all this while I'm, you know, working and and and trying to finish my dissertation was, you know, maybe not the smartest way to go about it, but I felt that the timeliness of this particular case was important and I know also, just as I said previously, I really admire Vince's proactive approach to this issue. He didn't let it become a problem and then, oh well, this is the way we work in management. We deal with problems after they're a problem. You know, like I see a he's establishing a norm of like this is likely going to be an issue, let's address it, let's not just let it fester and become a problem. Let's just work on it now, and I think that's a norm that would be helpful to teach in class. Yeah, so, so much self awareness. I really like that. And I want to go back to something that you said about workshopping the case. This is something that we are repeating over and over as we talked to new authors. are going, you know, don't worry about hitting the submit button. Yet take the time to test it out, get the feedback, run it by some colleagues, take it to do conferences and see, because that type of feedback is so important and it could cause you to rewrite big sections or take the case in another direction, but in the end the result is going to be so much better. So I love the fact that you did that. How has it been received by students? How's the how's the case gone over? Well, it's only just recently been published, so I've never used it in this published format in my class. I've used it like I used to. Vince used to visit the class like virtually he'd show up and we talked about these things and and that's where we you know, I prep them for the conversations and and then I tend to test the nugget of a case as an illustration of a concept. So when we talk about early stages of growth, I'll bring in the case of Vince Wang to talk about how he proactively in and how that's a thing you can do. You can proactively address these known issues that come as a company grows and as an entrepreneur you can embark on addressing them through design. And then I you know, I brought another case in of a friend who has a company to demonstrate effectuation, because he could see how he went through this iterative process of designing a solution that he didn't know he was going to solve from the beginning. He thought he was solving another problem, but as he learned, and so I start by workshopping, just by using it as an example, and then getting the students to reflect on that example and then from those reflections I start to build ideas. And you know, this is the second case. I write it and now I'm starting to understand the process might be might it might be better structured that with sort of like I just did it intuitively, and now to start with a teaching note and those reflection questions and then build the case from there and then go back and forth between them. That way might be more productive. But I don't think I'm the best. Another one who should give you the best of us. No, I like bringing Vince into the classroom so great like I've had the opportunity to sit in some case classes where, yeah, the CEOS coming in, the protagonist of that case is coming in. How has that gone over? What role has vince been there? To answer questions as as he helped teach, like as there been a CO teaching type of scenario. That's happened. How is that work? What roles he played? Visiting mostly Vince and the other guests of my class. It's pretty open forum, like it's really just to expose students who are in an entrepreneurship class to entrepreneurs. So I had a background in, you know, I started a company myself when I was in my s and so I have one perspective, but I'm trying to bring in different perspectives and different industries and have people talk about an experience and and I don't force them to talk about the topic of that week and I don't force students to, but they tend to sort of there's a structure to the course and then the students tend ask questions that are more or less aligned with the module that we're covering. But it allows students to get exposed to people who are doing neat things and sometimes that like I had one student get a job from one of entrepreneurs who came to one of the classes. Poked about. This was a design like a fashion type design company and it was a small, you know, Edgy Base Company and the woman was looking for help and the the young woman in the class was super stoked about the company and just kept asking your questions after class she got a job with her. So those kinds of things where we're students just get exposure. It's like you're trying to build networks for the students as well and it opens up a door to create a network for that student to a real entrepreneur, because a lot of business schools, for better or for worse, are training students to be members of larger organizations, not necessarily the small upstart organizations, like a lot of folks who who are at incubators. Are Not always the case, but they're often engineering students or students and other discipline. So this opens the door to networking with these kinds of people. That's it's such a great experience. So you know, highly recommend when when you can and you're writing a case, you know talk to that protagonist or person the context that you may have at a at a company, to come in and chat. Another thing that authors have done, which is which is awesome, is if there's a discussion happening in the classroom, see if you can record that and bring it into the teaching note so that other people that are going to be using the case have an opportunity to see the style and what kind of questions come up. It's always a great thing to add to the teaching note. Now, before we leave, I wanted to you. I always like to ask this, where can people learn more about you and your work? And I want to hear a little bit more about the podcasts that that you create and the things that you're creating so that people can learn more about you. Okay, well, I have a website. See, glad Youcom and I'm not currently working on a on a podcast. I did work on a podcast called the world's we want a couple of years ago with some students at Concordia University and we've all gone in different directions at this point, though, we do you know if you have us keep in touch, and that was a podcast related to innovations around climate change and people doing interesting things and not like just necessarily tech innovations, a lot of social innovations around climate change adaptation and mitigation and a lot of interesting cultural practices, mostly in Canada, but we had some international guests and now I'm working on a course. I'm developing the open learning course for course called Creativity and innovation at Thompson Rivers University and I'm using podcasts there and and a bit of video, but as a way of telling stories about the different topics related to creativity and innovation. And I'm about to start a new position called a researcher and residence at the university and the city here. So I'm going to be sitting halftime with the city and halftime with the university, doing community engaged research as part of a pilot project on, you know, building bridges between municipalities and universities. That's amazing and will be sure to include the links in the in the podcast the show notes and there's a great website, cool design. I love that and I really like that you're talking about bringing podcast into the learning experience, because it doesn't have to just be cases. I think the mix of things is so important that they can all lean on each other to create a really rich learning environment and experience for learners. So so I love that you're doing that. Before we wrap on the PODCAST, is there any last words that you liked of encouragement or tips that you'd like to leave for for somebody that is just thinking about writing their first case. Well, I think the best way to figure out if this is something you want to do is to do it and to give yourself room for failing the first couple times. Like, like I said, I went in with one expectation to write one kind of case, in another case came out, and just allowing for that to happen is helpful, I think, for your own ego to be just like well, I'm not sure what I'm doing, I'm going to just try this out. And you know, most academics were writers anyway, so this is a fun way. Like, this is not my area. This case is, you know, dealing more directly with human resources than I normally you know, research. So it allowed for me to explore another area that's important to me, but it's not my main area, and to involve other people and writing with them or learning from them to write a better case. And and I think, especially if you're looking to do these kinds of entrepreneur cases, you have to be involved with your community, like get out there and, you know, engage your or your scholarship with folks doing cool things. It's easier to find a cases that way. Like. I think the the disconnect between some academics and the institute and and they and the community around them can make it difficult, and so it's easier to do qualitative research, is easier to do this kind of case based research if you're actually active in your community and looking for ways to be active in community. I think is super important in this day and age in you know, the questions around the relevance of academia. Part of it is this disconnect from our wider communities and I think casewriting is one way to connect and I think it would be great if folks who want to look for a way to connect use business tom you know, teaching cases is a way to do that. No, that's great. So, Cheryl, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us again. I encourage the listener to go to your website see the work that you're doing follow along as you're diving into the into your new role and the new things that you're working on. Thanks again for joining us so much. Mad If you enjoyed today's episode, subscribe to Decision Point on spotify or wherever you listen. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to cases, resources and more. HAVE ANY FEEDBACK? Send US an email at cases at IV DOTCA.