Don’t do unconscious bias training. It causes harm.
Like many organizations, you’re probably talking about anti-racism right now. Inclusion. Diversity. Belonging.
And, like many organizations, you may be thinking about unconscious bias, anti-bias, anti-racism, or cultural sensitivity training for your team.
Don’t do it.
Here’s why.
Unconscious bias training can make stereotypes feel more significant because most biases are conscious – not unconscious. People with long-held biases are highly likely to have their views reinforced by a training that talks about them as commonly-held.
It can establish a culture of moral licensing, where folks feel that, because they’ve received training, their actions are inherently moral.
It can even lead to a reduction in upward mobility for marginalized groups.
Importantly, this kind of training also frequently means that people of colour, women, LGBTQ2I+, and other equity-seeking folks are forced to sit in a room and listen to all of the ways their coworkers discriminate against them.
Unconscious bias training is not only doing your organization, your team, and your stakeholders a disservice: it is actually causing harm.
If you’re thinking about this kind of training for your team, it’s probably because you want to do better. You see a challenge in your organization, or you want to be proactive in your approach to building a welcoming, progressive workplace culture.
That’s a noble goal. An important one.
But if you’re starting this journey by focusing on individual behaviour change rather than organizational or institutional systems and structures, you’re not going to get there.
Here are some questions to ask yourself and your team to help you understand why you’re really thinking about unconscious bias training, and how you might approach this in a less harmful way:
What are you responding to? What challenge exists in your organization, community, or wider society that you are trying to solve?
Is this a systemic challenge, an organizational challenge, or an individual challenge?
Are you responding to an incident where an individual caused or is causing harm, and if so, is the challenge you’re dealing with serious enough to warrant accountability rather than training?
Who is this training for? Will they be helped or harmed by participating?
Who has asked for this training? Was the request from people who aren’t caused harm by unconscious bias? Or was it requested by marginalised team members?
These questions should help to clarify what your team is trying to accomplish. Once you clearly understand that, you can start to think about strategies that are actually effective.
I get it. For the last ten years, a multi-million dollar industry has been built around diversity and inclusion training. This is the only language we have for the very real challenges we face.
Here’s what you SHOULD be doing: develop a measurable strategy for diversity, belonging, and inclusion that is built into your processes, culture, and systems for real, measurable change.
And if developing a strategy sounds overwhelming, consider QuakeLab’s DIY Inclusion Strategy: an online self-guided course that will support you to go all the way from audit to evaluation as you develop your own inclusion strategy based on design thinking and results-based management.