We know we all have biases – it’s our brain’s way of speeding up decision-making and keeping us safe. We also know these quick decisions and snap judgments often don’t reflect today’s real world challenges and dangers.
Destigmatizing bias is an important step toward acknowledging and then interrupting bias, but how might that work, exactly? And how might we help our report-tos, leaders and teammates sit with, challenge and unravel their own biases so we might all be better designers and create better, more equitable experiences for our visitors and audiences.
This week we sat down with Dr Nicole Marie Ortiz, EdD, with Denver Zoo to learn more about how her team has transformed recent learnings about bias into regular practices to embrace and interrupt it. Nicole tells us what role ‘small moments’ plays when seeking to create a culture of bias interruption, and how you might develop similar practices with your team, institution or organization.
Links to resources discussed in episode
Brofenbrenner’s Ecological Model
Book: Community by Peter Block
Adreinne Marie Brown talks about ‘small is all’. This can be found in a two part series on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2
Three I’s: Introspection, Interdependence and Intentionality (no link for this one, these are part of the internal practice at Denver Zoo)
- Am I holding space for introspection for myself and for others?
- Am I seeing that this work is deeply interdependent and I am connected to other people..and we can help each other see the world from different viewpoints.
- What will I do purposefully? What intentional steps will I take to try and do something different – to try and hold another thought? And how might that other thought impact how I might behave?
Karpman’s Drama Triangle – (not Cartmans Drama Triangle!)
& the Circle of Reciprocity, and the line between the two is the Line of Regulation
Deb Dana’s work on polyvagal theory & how to become regulated
Book: Love & Rage by Lama Rod Owens
Book: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Podcast: 10% Happier
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