Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep5: Conversation with Ron Carucci (EP.57)
Updated
March 22, 2022
In episode five of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Ron Carucci, an author and Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Navalent, a firm that works with CEOs and executives who are pursuing transformational change for their organizations and industries.
This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”
Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:
Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG
Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods
David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia
Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab
Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21
Kit Hughes, Co-Founder & CEO, Look Listen
Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools
John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach
David Reuter, Partner, LLR
Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University
Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films. Read “Reflections From a Token Black Friend,” mentioned in this episode.
Host: Tim Cynova
Guest
RON CARUCCI is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He has a thirty-year track record helping executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership. From start-ups to Fortune 10’s, non-profits to heads-of-state, turn-arounds to new markets and strategies, overhauling leadership and culture to re-designing for growth. He has helped organizations articulate strategies that lead to accelerated growth, and design organizations that can execute those strategies. He has worked in more than 25 countries on 4 continents. He is the author of 9 books, including the Amazon #1 Rising to Power and the recently released To Be Honest, Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice & Purpose. He is a popular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, where Navalent’s work on leadership was named one of 2016’s management ideas that mattered most. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes, and a two-time TEDx speaker. His work’s been featured in Fortune, CEO Magazine, Inc., BusinessInsider, MSNBC, Business Week, Inc., Fast Company, Smart Business, and thought leaders.
The Whole Me
He lives in the New York City area with his wife. On weekends, you’ll find him on his bike, on the tennis court, on his skis, at the movies, or cheering for the Seattle Seahawks. His greatest joy is seeing leader’s thrive by having the impact on the lives of those they lead. Helping leaders find their voice, and use it to serve their organization’s greater good is what gets him up every morning. In his office, Ron has a collection of antique door knobs, door knockers and skeleton keys. Every day, they remind him that life is about finding and pursuing the open doors in front of you, and making sure those doors open for others. In the morning, one of his favorite routines is picking the coffee mug in the conference room from among his collection. Each mug hails from a difference experience and person in his life, and helps him begin his day remembering to be grateful for all those in his life who’ve been part of his story.
Host
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press.
Transcript
Ron Carucci:
In the '50s when racial segregation was normal, when mistreating people of color and treating them as less than was normal, it was painful, but it's all we knew. Today, when you have so much more evidence of equity, so much more evidence of people making equity an issue, of organizations committed to it, and you seeing tangible evidence of representation in leadership and representation in high personal ranks, it actually makes the gap more painful. Because when our psyches have to live in the cognitive dissidents of two different worlds of it's much more fair and it's still unfair, it's more painful. And so we actually feel the gap more intensely, even though technically the gap is smaller than it was 40 years ago, it feels actually bigger. Because the way our brains process that is that, well, if we made this progress, why didn't we make this progress?
Ron Carucci:
If we ended this, why is this still a problem? Those are great questions, and sometimes they don't make sense. And so the unfortunate conclusion many white people draw is, well, this is as good as it can get, and can't they just be thankful for how far we come. Rather than saying, no, it just means this last part of the gap that isn't closed yet is much harder to close because they're rooted in such systemic entrenched systems that keep those parts of the gap in place. And it wasn't that the rest of it was low hanging fruit, it came at a huge cost, but the cost to close the gap we've closed so far came on the backs of people. The rest of it has to come on the backs of white people.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck, a podcast about, well that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10 part mini series called White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism. While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out episode 54 of our podcast, where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduced the series and frame these conversations. All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic not by white guys can be found on workshouldntsuck.co. In this series we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked, they each define the work in slightly different ways.
Tim Cynova:
Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti-oppression work, others say they approach it more through a justice lens, others inclusion and belonging, still others equity and impact. Through these conversations we'll explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations that this was work for white guys to be doing. We'll discuss, what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging. And since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with. On today's conversation I'm joined by Ron Carucci, co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, a firm that works with CEOs and executives who are pursuing transformational change for their organizations and industries. You could read more about Ron and his bio that's included in the episode description. So in the interest of time, let's get going. Ron, welcome to the podcast.
Ron Carucci:
Hey Tim, how are you. So great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Tim Cynova:
Thanks for being here. This is awesome. Before we really get into things, how do you typically introduce yourself in the work that you do?
Ron Carucci:
I typically tell people that my firm and I get the privilege of accompanying senior leaders of organizations on the messy journey of transformation. That as they're about to embark on expeditions to bring their organizations to a different place or out of a bad place, that our job is to be the shepherd. Our job is to sort of architect the journey and architect the path that gets them where they want to go and doesn't get them stuck somewhere, or gets them there in a way that doesn't have regression a year later because it actually sticks.
Tim Cynova:
So the past two years have thrown a lot of curve balls and we're living with a lot of uncertainty. So what does that look like with the work that you're doing?
Ron Carucci:
We've been very fortunate, Tim, that so much of what, and I would've never guessed this, so much of how we do our work translated to virtual world. I would've never imagined some of the really intense organization design work that we do, being able to be done virtually, but we've done just fine. I think leaders have asked for more help. I think some of the uncertainties they're facing, some of their own limitations, which I don't think COVID caused, I think COVID just revealed those limitations and how they engage people in all kinds of complex messes that they never had to, at least never believe they had to worry about before. And suddenly they're in their people's living rooms and bedrooms, and suddenly their personal life is very relevant. And there's all kinds of mushier and blur your boundaries now, and leaders don't always know how to navigate those well. So they may ask them for a lot more help.
Tim Cynova:
Well, and with the topic we're talking about today, I think this is one of the really exciting things about this uncertainty in which we're living. Because it causes people not to go on cruise control role, but you have to really be intentional about how are you building these policies, how are you building the practices while centering anti-racism or racism, oppression, justice, equity. As you think about your own personal journey and professional work, what are the lenses you use? Because to describe the work anti-racism, anti oppression, justice, how do you typically frame it for yourself?
Ron Carucci:
Well, I think a fairness is typically a word that gets overused a lot, but in my new book I talk a lot about justice. And organizational injustice isn't new, they're everywhere, hiding in plain sight. And certainly injustice is aimed at people of certain identities, the people of color or gender, but there are level playing fields everywhere. And the reality is, if you're willing to allow unlevel playing fields to exist, it means it exists for everybody. So you either have to decide you want a fair and just and purposeful organization, or you don't. You can't have it fair for some people or fair for when it's convenient for you to make it fair, and then leave it to be unfair out of your sight.
Ron Carucci:
Whenever I have to introduce the concept, for example, a privilege, rather than go down the identity privilege issues that people get all kinds of weird about, I'll simply say, if you're in a tech company, if I talk to your engineers, are they going to say they're privileged, if I talk to everybody else, are they going to say, the engineers are privileged. If I'm in a high growth company, what are people going to say about your sales people? If I'm in a brand company, what are people going to say about your marketers? You have privileged roles. It's perfectly fine to acknowledge that not all work is created equal and not all work is to the same value, but all humans are. And when the value of your work suddenly becomes equated to the value of you as a human, you've unleveled the playing field. And what we now know is that when you remove dignity and justice from how people contribute, you set the stage for really bad behavior. So it's not a far cry then to say, well, if you have roles that are privileged, I bet there are certain people that are privileged.
Ron Carucci:
What do I make of the fact that your entire executive team is mostly white men with one token woman in, leading HR? What do I make of representations? And you can count all your diversity inclusion stats you want, about all your, what goals are and what you're trying to accomplish and tell me how difficult to find the candidates are, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if it were that important to you, you'd figure out a way. Last year when you struggled to get that product launched and all of a sudden you were four weeks from a deadline that you weren't going to make, suddenly mysteriously the entire organization came out in full force and was able to solve the problem. What if you treated your representation issue the same way, because you believed it was just as urgent that you'd figure it out.
Tim Cynova:
How are those statements typically met by, what I imagine are a lot of white leaders?
Ron Carucci:
No, but I don't get a lot of pushback. Sometimes I'll get the very passive aggressive, well, you don't really understand what it's like for us, kind of thing. They want to play the victim card. But nobody would ever say that to me directly because they know where it would go. But I think most people believe it. I think there are leaders who generally do care. I think the problem is too many executives believe that their good intentions count. That somehow because I intend for it to be fair, I don't intend for it to be discriminatory or biased, I don't intend for people of underrepresented identities have work stuck for them. If work shouldn't suck, it shouldn't suck for anyone. You can't just say, work shouldn't suck for most people. Because now you're by default declaring that you don't really care if it sucks, as long as it doesn't suck for you.
Tim Cynova:
I think that's one of the things in my own personal journey that I realized around good intentions and around doing good by being good. And then as I started to learn as a white guy, and in particularly as a white male leader with power and privilege, that a lot of those good intentions, a lot of those things that I thought were like, this is a great policy for the organization, this is a great office innovation, who wouldn't like this, and realize, oh, right, there's a lot of people who are being left out by this. And then sitting with that discomfort of like something that I really believed in, really feel like was great, but then realizing that wasn't necessarily the case. And in particular reading Tema Okun, Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture, and looking through those lenses that are our work really brings it home and has really uncomfortable to sit with those and realize, this thing that we build that we're really proud of is not all that great for everyone.
Ron Carucci:
Well, and we were so convinced was rooted in meritocracy. We were so convinced was rooted in fairness and created the opportunity for everybody, and never bothered to interrogate those assumptions in ways that didn't account for our white male perspective on it.
Tim Cynova:
Speaking of white male perspectives and the characteristics of white supremacy culture, you mentioned your new book. The new book is To be Honest, Lead With the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose. Full disclosure here, as you know, I'm reading it, I've not finished it. So no spoilers here. But as I was starting to read it, as I was starting to reflect on my own writing in some of the things as I teach leadership and team building, sometimes I'm like, whoa, that didn't age well, or, oh, if you apply that lens to this, if you apply an anti-racism, anti-oppression lens to this really great case study, it all falls apart. I'm curious as you are writing this, really spending a lot of time, years of research on this, as you looked at the case studies you're using and the examples that were in the book and reflected on these characteristics of white supremacy culture that are often baked into the DNA of the organizations that were in, that were studying, how did that influence how you went about writing the book, understanding your findings and the direction of it all?
Ron Carucci:
Couple of ways. One, I was very intentional about centering black voices in the book. I made sure that I had those perspectives built into my work. Because the book is a book of heroes, there's plenty of villain stories out there for integrity breaches or ethical lapses. We don't need to hear any more Toronto stories or Wells Fargo stories or Volkswagen stories. I wanted to write about the leaders and organizations who were modeling things we could emulate, who we'd all be proud to have as bosses. That's what this book is about. And I chose people who I knew were committed to equity and fairness. I chose case studies of companies who I knew were doing good things for communities in which they served, were multi-stakeholder focused, were committed to racial and gender and all versions of equity that we need to think about. So I was pretty intentional about that. When it comes to centering black voices, I give myself a B, I could have done a little better.
Ron Carucci:
But there are quite a few well positioned experienced black experts and leaders in the book whose stories were remarkable, whose voices were very shaping of my thinking and of the book. We also did a TV series. During all the interviews I was very initial about recording them so that we could later turn them into a series. And in that TV series, it's called Moments of Truth, and you can find it on Roku or you can find it at the website. All 15 episodes are at the website, tobehonest.net. I did multiple segments. So I didn't want them to be all about me. So I intentionally chose two co-hosts, one of whom is a black man. And I had another guy in my firm do a segment called Everyday Justice. And so they each did segments on justice and finding your voice to a variety of guests. So I intentionally broaden the lens, which we're seeing this beyond just my own.
Tim Cynova:
Is this different than how you approached previous projects, previous books?
Ron Carucci:
Dramatically, dramatically. I mean, sadly, I don't know that I would have given it a thought or have known to give. I mean, I was sort of numb. I would say Rising to Power, the last book, which was seven years ago, we were very focused on a specific type of marginalization, a typical type of leadership failure, very centered on the research, we done that. That was the 10 year mark of our data on leaders who are failing on the way up. And there were some factors we disclosed around marginalization or identity privilege in there, but it was because the research found them, it wasn't because we went looking for them. In this case I was particularly intentional about wanting to make sure that the lens of justice shown on organizations in ways that whatever you believe a microaggression is or whatever you believe your own good intentions are, I wanted you to recognize that you could be better.
Ron Carucci:
I think that was probably the biggest finding, one of the biggest findings of the research is that honesty isn't a character trait, it's not some moral set of principles. It's a muscle, it's a capability you're either good at or need to be better at. And for the people who say to me, well, I'm kind of really for the most part already an honest person, so I guess the book isn't for me. To whom I say then, it's mostly for you. The person who believes they've arrived and who thinks they're honest enough is the person most likely to be impacted by what I learned. And that was me. I thought, well, I'm a good guy, I'm honest, I'm straightforward. But sure, do I have moments that I'm not my best version of myself? But of course I said, white guy can dismiss those and have them hide in some vague place because my halo outshine them. But the reality is that, we all have moments where we're not our best versions of ourselves, and someone has to pay a price for that. And we often don't calculate those consequences very well.
Tim Cynova:
What did that look like in practice, in reality, for those moments for you?
Ron Carucci:
In some moments where I embellish information or withhold information I think someone doesn't need to hear right now. Or when I'm a little bit short with the barista at Starbucks or when my white male entitlement comes screaming out in a drive-through lane or sitting in traffic or in an airport where I'm wanting to get in line. I think now more than ever I am just so conscious of privilege, mine. I know guilt and shame is not a helpful response to that. And finding ways to be generous and share those privileges is really what I need to do.
Ron Carucci:
Which I'm not always that good at, I have to sort of work a lot harder to figure out what those moments are. But I have become much more attuned to others, to how, whenever I'm in the presence of a person of color, how do I respond? How do I participate? How do I center them? How do I respect, show them respect? I have clients who are people of color. What do I do to make sure they know my goal is and intention is to be an ally, even if I fall short on that? It's just so much more of a consciousness now. Not that I've arrived at any place or that I'm good at any of it, but I'm just aware, when I wasn't before.
Tim Cynova:
This a generational work and the lifetime. And the arrival is just to learn that we've got so much more to go.
Ron Carucci:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Like you make some progress and you just realize, oh, it's so much more. What has this personal journey been like for you, to get to a place where there's two white guys on a podcast talking about race and racism and what this means to us in the workplace?
Ron Carucci:
Gosh, it's been so rewarding, Tim. When I first discovered White Men for Racial Justice through the research for To Be Honest, people that I interviewed in the book introduced me to Jay. To that point in my life I felt alone and isolated. I felt like, am I the only crazy white guy that thinks this is really important? My convictions about justice, especially racial justice, are born deeply from my own values and my own faith. That justice is a deeply important expression of those values and that faith. Brian Stevenson's work has been foundational in my life. When people say, who's your hero, he's who I say. Most people in the white community who would share those convictions, did it from a charitable point of view.
Ron Carucci:
So that pity kind of thing, not some deep conviction that we are all part of the problem. And so it was always this very awkward discomfort for me, but I felt very isolated and that I didn't have a whole lot of places to talk about it. So when I found white men for racial justice, it was like a homecoming for me. This place of, oh my gosh, I'm not by myself and I'm not crazy. What I'm seeing really is a problem and we can do things about it. I was fairly confident that there was a lot. The pile of what I don't know what I don't know was large, I didn't really know how large it was, but I discovered that it was far more accepted than I even thought.
Ron Carucci:
But the education has been profoundly transformational for me. It has given me tremendous hope. I know that there's lots of places in the world we still suck at this, but my gosh, it has given me tremendous hope that if 60 white guys come together every week and talk about this and are eager to find ways to incorporate it in their own life and can even with our own circle make the world a little bit better, a little bit more brighter, a little more hopeful for the people of color we interact with, that's not a bad thing. It doesn't mean that there isn't extensive distances to still travel, but every inch of ground we gain is worth it.
Tim Cynova:
Let's talk a little bit about how this shows up in the organization, in Navalent? As the leader, as a white guide, doing this work personally, you also work at an organization, leading an organization. What does that work look like?
Ron Carucci:
So there're three managing partners, three of us own Navalent, and all of us come from a deeply values and principled center place in life. So the pro bono clients we take on, like for example, Black Lives Matter, one of the Boston Chapter is a pro bono client of ours, which has been incredibly formative for me. From that have come a couple of executive coaching pro bono projects. All of our pro bono clients and places we both give our profit to as well as our time to are places of people who are marginalized, who have been cast aside.
Ron Carucci:
And whether it's racial issues or victims have you been trafficking. As a firm there's a deep sense of values and principles around giving back in the firm. So it's not weird at all, we all support each other in those endeavors, whether they're collective as a group or individual. Every year we give a good chunk of our profits away to charity. So this year it went to Equal Justice Initiative. As a community it's sort of part of who we are, it isn't weird at all. People I think are happy and supportive of each of our individual and our collective efforts to do our small part in making those marginalized worlds a little bit better for those people.
Tim Cynova:
I had a session that I led maybe about a year ago or so, I'm talking about the work that we were doing at Fractionalist, the organization that Neb was a co-CEO of the anti-racism work that we were doing. And at the end of this session, it was for mainly a bunch of white guys. And someone said, that was all great, but like could you like talk about some tangible things that you've done?
Tim Cynova:
And I got to them and I'm like, oh God, I think the whole thing was tangible examples. Then it's like, where have I failed this? Where have I failed this group? As I came back to the office and I was talking with my colleague, Courtney Harge, who's now the CEO of the organization, wonderful organization called OF/BY/FOR ALL, and I was like sort of recounting this to her. And she said, I think people confuse tangible with impactful and impactful with visible. And she went on to say, adding pronouns to an email is tangible, ending gender discrimination is impactful and increasing gender diversity at an organization is visible. As you think about the work, I mean, approach at Navalent and sort of these different distinctions, what resonates with you?
Ron Carucci:
Well, I think though it's easy for us to sort of put those in a hierarchy. As though, you should aspire to go from tangible to impactful to visible. And I think that would be a dangerous thing to do. You have opportunities to do any number of those things in your path every day. The question I would ask people is, when those opportunities exist? As an example, I may, if I see a microaggression happening, and this happened to me in a bank. I was walking into the bank and ahead of me was a black man, and I noticed the woman at the, little greeter lady at the door was saying, hi, so do you have an account with us? And he said, yeah, I do. And she showed him to the front of the line. I went in and she said, hi and I could see his shoulder slump. And I could feel my neck getting red.
Ron Carucci:
And I was, oh, okay, if I say something to her now it's not going to go well. So I'll just give it a minute. I walked up to that black guy and I said, I'm so sorry that happened to you. And I think he was surprised that I noticed, and he didn't say, he just nodded his head. And afterwards I went to the manager and I said, hey, I'm sure she meant well and she probably doesn't even realize she did it, but here's what happened, and I'd like for you to say something to her. It'll be better coming from you than it will for me. Now, you could say that was a tangible thing, but for that black guy that could have been impactful. And for that bank could have been visible, if in fact she stopped doing that. How do you measure that, right? I think a lot of white people especially struggle with the notion of, because their comparative lens is so bizarre, right.
Ron Carucci:
So we want to compare things today to the '50s and think, well, look at all the pro... I mean, how could you say we haven't made any progress? We're not hosing people. That's all true. If you're comparative, and certainly if you're comparative lenses to 250 years ago when Lincoln signed the document, my gosh, it's night and day. Well actually, it's not. Sure, you can point to very tangible, impactful and visible progress, societally, in the last 50 years, in the last 200 years. That's interesting. That does not discount... What people don't understand Tim is that, in the evolution of long tales of change, we're actually at a more painful moment than we were in the '50s.
Ron Carucci:
In the '50s when racial of segregation was normal, when mistreating people of color and treating them as less than was normal, it was painful, but it's all we knew. Today, when you have so much more evidence of equity, so much more evidence of people making equity an issue, of organizations committed to it, and you seeing tangible evidence of representation in leadership and representation in high professional ranks, it actually makes the gap more painful. Because when our psyches have to live in the cognitive dissidents of two different worlds of, it's much more fair and it's still unfair, it's more painful. And so we actually feel the gap more intensely, even though technically the gap is smaller than it was 40 years ago, it feels actually bigger.
Ron Carucci:
Because the way our brains process that is that, well, if we made this progress, why didn't we make this progress? If we ended this, why is this still a problem? Those are great questions, and sometimes they don't make sense. And so the unfortunate conclusion many white people draw is, well, this is as good as it can get, and can't they just be thankful for how far we come. Rather than saying, no, it just means this last part of the gap that hasn't closed yet is much harder to close because they're rooted in such systemic entrenched systems that keep those parts of the gap in place. And it wasn't that the rest of it was low hanging fruit, it came at a huge cost, but the cost to close the gap we closed so far came on the backs of black people. The rest of it has to come on the backs of white people.
Tim Cynova:
What does that look like? What's the next piece of that?
Ron Carucci:
Where you stand depends on where you sit. I think in the workplace we've got to translate all of our George Floyd era statements of I won't tolerate, I won't talk about, whatever into, okay, then will you go out and root out privilege in your organization, wherever it exists? Appointing a chief equity officer is interesting, will you make that part of your strategy? When you see microaggressions happen right in front of you, will you be brave enough to make sure somebody says something or that you open your mouth? When you look at your recruiting policies, your promotion policies, when you look at how... I mean, look in governance, how do you allocate resources? Who's invited to what meetings, who's voices are heard? How do you treat when you're on the hunt for, I want a diverse candidate in the job.
Ron Carucci:
Do you want a diverse candidate because it checks the box off and you get to be a clip art? Or is it because you believe that they are the most qualified candidate, but when you hold up their underrepresented demographic to others it's actually like an extra light on my resume. It's like an extra advanced degree because they bring that point of view and you realize it will make the work much richer, which is it? Because if it's check a box off, you're going to set it up to fail. It's a constant continuing to dig deeper into ourselves, Tim. Yes, in our systems. My gosh, if in our generation we could at least see some significant dent in the prison industrial complex. For me, at the core of one of the biggest systemic evidence of racism is for-profit prisons, whose quotas are filled by policemen who are probably in some way benefiting from the gain of that, because some of that money goes back to local municipalities and law enforcements.
Ron Carucci:
We've entrenched this system of making sure we fill cells with black people. And so if we could just end that some way. And I don't know that it would require deprofitizing the prisons, but it sort of requires dissenting them being full. That to me would be like a massive cut of like an ephemeral artery of racism. Those are the places I think we have to lean in harder. I think in the workplace, we have the luxury of a credible amount of resources, a mandate, so from society, and a workforce that's becoming less and less tolerant of the crap that they've seen of inequity, of injustice. And today we're standing them up with their feet. I would think that the business world, who can also be an incredible beginner of change in other parts society, would be the place where we have the greatest frontier on which to continue to produce change. Because we have the resources and the brains and the expectations to do it. And we're now creating these jobs called chief equity officers, of people who presumably we're hiring to help us do it.
Tim Cynova:
I'm writing a piece, and I don't know if it's going to be published by the time these episodes go live. The question is, does your organization need a chief whiteness officer? As a starting place before you can even get to chief diversity officers, chief equity officers. But like what predominantly white organizations are often trying to do is, they need to wrestle with their whiteness before they can even get to the next steps. The questions are like, what is it that we're trying to "solve for in hiring"? And getting to your point really of uncovering, like what are you actually trying to do here and is that in aligned with just window dressing or is it like deeply held beliefs? Because one is going to be much more successful than the other.
Ron Carucci:
Well, I think until we get off the representation as an end, versus a means to an end, it won't change. And I think the cruel thing is, can we set people of color up to fail when they check a box for us to make us look like the clip art, and it by no means actually represents diverse thinking. I did a work for a client a couple years ago, so women's care products. And I mean, talk about the clip art, her executive team, female CEO, she had black, Asian, LGBTQ, Hispanic. I mean, she had like one everybody. And this company pride themselves in a diversity metrics and a diversity commitment.
Ron Carucci:
And I was in their executive team meeting for a day and a half, and by the three quarters of the way through the first day I said, I'm sorry to tell you some bad news here, but there's not an ounce of diversity in this room. And of course they were all defensive and in shock. And I said, let me just rewind my tape here. And here are four moments in your conversation where you stumbled upon conflict, stumbled upon places where there were some real tensions. And here's what you said, let's take this offline. I don't think we have enough data for that, let's just defer this to the next meeting. That's probably not a conversation for today. And each of the four times you punted.
Ron Carucci:
What that's telling me is that heterogeneous was really your goal, not homogeneity. So what is it? Is it, you want to look diverse or you want to actually be diverse? But right now you are all one thing. And what I would ask each of you to think about is, what did you edit? In the moments where that tension came up, what did you wish you could say that you didn't? Because when it comes out of your mouth and you freely exchange, beneath this cosmetic illusion of diversity, what you really think, that's when you know you're diverse. The question you have to really ask yourself is, is it actually there? Or in fact, did you create a groupthink filter here so strong that you really are all the same.
Tim Cynova:
Earlier in my career I was a part of a 10-person leadership team, all white. And it actually, this anecdote led to training as a mediator because I was reading about trace of high performing teams, and healthy conflict is one of those things that's on the classic list. And I was realizing that our team was not getting better at having healthy conflict, engaging in it or getting better to, I think the team you're describing it, knowing what would lead to conflict and avoiding it. This was as we were starting to talk about racism and oppression and privilege in the workplace and realize that that team and that configuration without the ability to have those conversations wouldn't be successful in a commitment that was going to, at least for the white people, include a lot of really uncomfortable conversations. When you talk to teams like that, what's your advice, what's your step that you would engage them in?
Ron Carucci:
The first thing I do, typically I put up on the whiteboard a bunch of language. And I say, here's the two things I think... One of the reasons I think we're not making progress, Tim, in the racial or the systemic racism part of the composition is we lack two really fundamental ingredients, skill and language. And so we have all these shortcut words, white fragility, white supremacy, Marxism, revolutionary, radicalization. And so they're all trigger words and they all are a shortcut for so much that they shut conversations down. So I tell people, we're going to have a conversation about racial equity right now, here 20 words you cannot use. So you have to do one form division and own your discourse and explain what you actually mean.
Ron Carucci:
And it really disarms the room because now I don't have to worry about being triggered by a word that I don't even understand in the first place anyway. Most people have no idea what those words mean, but they've made meaning of them or they've had some part of their echo chamber on social media make meaning of it for them. And so when people have to sort of explain what they feel, what they see, what they think, why they think it, it suddenly changes the conversation. Because now it's personalized, it's vulnerable and I have to bumble through it. I have to sort of stumble my way through something that I don't really have a lot of understanding of. I know I have a point of view, I have convictions, I have thoughts.
Ron Carucci:
I can't go quote my own source in the room, because now it becomes me versus you and your source versus my source. So we just have these dueling binaries that just become a type of war. And nobody has to hear anybody, nobody has to listen. So I find when I take all that language off the table and I slow the conversation down and I make it one question at a time, where have you seen evidence of things being unfair or people of color being mistreated in ways you felt were unjust? When people ask you why you aren't someone who disparages others for their skin color or looks down for them, what evidence in your own life do you typically produce? I have friends who are, I grew up in a way that.
Ron Carucci:
You have evidence and you believe that's all evidence of your innocence in this. I find that if you sort of put some guardrails around the conversation and you take away some of the limitations of it, you try to speak a foreign language here and you're barely conversational, you're not fluent. So we're going to bumble through this together. You level the playing field a little bit. I also find that interestingly enough, white people are better behaved when they're with people of color, than when they're on their own. It's because they're more cautious. And even when they slip up and say stupid things, they're a little bit more owning of those. So I find the egg shelliness of that a little bit of an asset.
Ron Carucci:
Because when they were just with white people, it becomes a venting session. They don't appreciate. I had to work for everything I own. All that white privilege stuff that they don't even realize that they're saying. We've got to get better language, we've just got to get better language, and stop looking for shortcuts. We don't have to have a two word phrase that describes a concept that's 400 years old. With all due respect to Ms. DiAngelo for her book, the word white fragility hasn't helped us help white people see their own sensitivities to the conversation. White supremacy unfortunately has not helped us see the privilege we have. We think, oh, I don't wear a white pointy hat, I don't burn crosses. What does this have to do with me? So we just have these concepts and language that are just not helping us. It doesn't make them untrue and make them irrelevant, it just makes them unhelpful.
Tim Cynova:
That's a really great exercise and really great frame. And I think that slowing down, it feels like kind of like what's happening with the pandemic through which we're living. It's causing us to have to think about things differently that we wouldn't have given that much thought. It's like, you just go into a conference room, you do that thing and then everyone leaves. Or you like do that thing but like, okay, we can't do that thing, we have to try something else. And it's giving us that opportunity to say like, all right, how can we co-create that in a way that works for everyone? I guess it's one of the positives of a global pandemic as it relates to this work. But I really love that exercise. Have you included all of the words publicly someplace and people have that or you would recommend people create that for themselves?
Ron Carucci:
I start with all the obvious ones. Sometimes it's even, find a disservice to start the conversation with, what are all the words and language that have derailed you in this conversation? And then you add the ones and they leave out. But usually it's about 30 or 35 terms or phrases or words. And it's amazing how hard it actually is, how much it reveals, we really don't know what we're talking about here. My gosh, I had a debate with somebody very close to me in my life about critical race theory. And I said, well, have you read it? Have you read the original papers? Well, no, but so and so said. Okay. Well, just so you know, it doesn't say that. You can figure out what you want.
Ron Carucci:
And oh, by the way, just in case you wondered, there's not any evidence of any school in the United States, K through 12, trying to teach that material. It's a college level content. So just in case you're wondering why they're protesting outside the middle school. There's no evidence of critical race theory there. If you ever like actually go read what the theory actually says and come back and talk about it, I'd welcome the chance to do that. It doesn't say, let's make all white children feel bad for being white, in case you wondering.
Tim Cynova:
Well, that's further difficult too when it turns into an acronym, CRT or DEI or JEDI. Rather than like, these are four different things, justice, equity, diversity. Those are four really different things and we do a disservice by lumping them into an acronym and it's using that.
Ron Carucci:
I think the neuroscience gives us great clues into that, into why that is, Tim. Our brains are miserly organs. They are very lazy. They will process as minimal amount of information as they have to. What our brains do is they look for shortcuts. The neuro pathways of our frontal lobe that process information are looking for ways to rinse and repeat. It's the classic explanation of why you can drive to work and not remember how you got there. Our brains create templates, they create frames to say, this is how you explain that. And so every time you see it, you explain it the same way, whether it's true or not. Our brains look for shortcuts. That's the definition of bias. A bias is a template. It's nothing more or than ability for your brain to explain something so that you don't have to actually work hard to think it through. Oh, black person in a hoodie, dangerous, walk the way, right?
Ron Carucci:
So your [inaudible 00:36:49] kicks in, off you go. And those biases often exist at unconscious levels, thus the word unconscious bias, but anything more than compass headings. It's like your brain's GPS. And if you don't take the time to interrogate those directions that your brain is giving you to say, what assumptions is this based in? Where did I learn this? Because it's all learned. It don't come installed in your brain, you install them. They're all aftermarket add-ons. If you don't interrogate people will think, I'm not biased. No. Okay. I can prove that you are. One of my favorite exercises to do people is, it comes from classic behavioral science research in the '60s. But you basically, so have people write down the names of five people that they work very closely with, two or three that they're really, really close with and one or two that they're less close with. And take those five names and put them in every combination of groups of three you can.
Ron Carucci:
So if you give them A, B, C, D, it's a ABC, CDE, ABE, every combination of trio. And then you have, right to have all the names out. And you say, go through every trio and circle the names in that trio the two people who are most alike, just do it. And they go through and circle all the names. And then I say, great. Now I want you to go back through that list and decode, what criteria are you using to determine a likeness? And then you watch the color drain from their face as they realize, oh my gosh. And sometimes it's really overt. Like it was gender or it was race. For me the first time I did it it was intellectual snobbery. I picked the people who I thought that was the smartest. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm an intellectual snob.
Ron Carucci:
All of a sudden people realize, oh my gosh, I have yardsticks that I walk around with and I hold them up all the time. And I measure and I collect data, and I collect data that proves my yardstick is right. That's the definition of bias. So now when you tell me you're not biased, you can just say, except for that, except for this exercise right here. Where you clearly are walking around screening everybody around you through those same lenses. And you have to decide one day, are those lenses A, sufficient, B, accurate or C, based on assumptions that may or may not be helpful to the relationships you're trying to build with them.
Tim Cynova:
Ron, I could chat with you for much longer, but our time is coming to an end. As we prepare to lay on the plane, where do you want to land it?
Ron Carucci:
I hope that your listeners, especially for my white male peers out there, I hope as you think about 2022 and the year ahead, if you could just be a little bit curious. I'm not asking you to become a convicted anti-racist zealot. In fact, black people have asked us not to do that. But I'm asking you to just be a little bit curious. What is it that I've learned in my life that I may not be aware that I learned. Just listen to one episode of the Seeing White podcast. Just read one article. There's a fabulous article, if you find it on LinkedIn, it was undoing for me, I sobbed. It's called Reflections From a Token Black Friend. And it's probably a 12 minute read, but it changed me. Just get curious.
Ron Carucci:
I'm not asking you to change your life. I'm not asking you to sort of throw away white friends and go replace them with black friends. I'm simply saying, could you just wonder a little bit about what life is like for people who aren't white? Have you ever walked into a store, what would it be like if all the faces on all the products were black? When's the last time you were in a room of people where you really were the only one like you? Maybe it was in a foreign country where everybody spoke a different language, or you were in a room, if you're a guy, you were in a room full of a lot of women, or you're a guy you walked into the women's room by accident.
Ron Carucci:
Think about the moment you were someplace you were really other. And I want you to bring to mind that temporal ilities discomfort you felt. And of course, I'm sure you quickly corrected and got out of there. But I want you to imagine what it would be like to live your life with that feeling 24/7. What would you do now? Now, you would say, well, I'm a white guy, I wouldn't climb the walls, I'd fix it. And good for you for having the privilege to be able to do that. But imagine if the very reason you can't fix it is because of your skin color, because of your gender, because of the difference that you bear, that you or I have never had to bear. Just wonder about that. If you could just do that, that'd be a huge win.
Tim Cynova:
Ron, thank you for that invitation. Thank you for the time today. Thank you for all your vulnerability and for your insights. It's been, briefly, awesome and a joy to get to spend this time with you.
Ron Carucci:
Glad I got you, Tim. Thanks for doing these episodes and thanks for helping get the word out there. I really appreciate your work on the world.
Tim Cynova:
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