Diversity needs to be an inside job

Lazzaro: You did this great game with prison culture, a very different culture from outside. How did you get people to uncover unconscious bias? How did you work for them?

Ramer: There was a woman who was named Evil. She changed her name to Tinkerbell, and still kept that after the games. [laughter] It was amazing to be in the presence of this. But when you take away everything that we need to survive, everything that’s left is culture.

Dieterle: As we were asking this question, thinking about how to apply this — brutal honesty is one of the things that I really appreciate. When we talk about unconscious bias, talking about the environment you’re in, there are two things, two stories or thoughts that come to me. We’ve had a lot going on with the #MeToo movement. It’s huge, when you hear how women feel in the workplace, that they’re afraid to come forward. But it’s how you actually lead.

For us, or for me, we get a lot of questions from people as articles started coming out in the New York Times. They were hearing about confidentiality agreements, and how people are being paid hush money. We have things called AMAs, Ask Me Anything, like on Reddit. We allow people to ask questions as individuals or send them anonymously, and people ask how Insomniac handles sexual harassment.

That’s huge, but it gave me the opportunity to talk about the fact that we have not experienced that to a great degree, because of how we are transparent in our organization, how we encourage people to speak up. We talk about trust and respect and how you need to have compassion for the people you’re working with. Our whole thing is a hashtag of #NotHere. We want people to know that it’s not okay, and we want to hold people — men, women, genderfluid — accountable for treating people the right way.

You don’t always know. When I came to Insomniac Games, if we had a happy hour, I hired the young, pretty bartenders, right? I wanted pretty girls at the bar for the mostly male employees. Would I do that today? I wouldn’t do that today because I’ve learned and grown and evolved. We’re trying to actively change the culture within the games industry itself. I’m getting a little off-topic on unconscious bias, but I feel like it’s about how we interact with one another, every day, that changes things.

Lazzaro: You talked about culture and how you were changing the culture at Insomniac.

Dieterle: We’re participating in this really cool project right now. It’s in its beta phase, but it’s called “Pro Habits.” You can pick a track — pro innovation, pro empowerment, pro leadership, whatever it may be — and you as an individual try, over 20 days, to commit to make a change in your behavior through habits.

I chose pro leadership, and I shared with this group — because I think it’s really relevant to leadership for diversity — that yesterday my micro-activity was to commit to lead with love. What that meant was, I needed to express gratitude to someone within my team, or someone within the company, for something they have done. Lead from a more human, a more heart-centered place.

That’s how we start making a cultural shift. The cool thing is, this app has a leader board. You get to see and share and follow what people are doing. There’s a gamification to it. People get excited about it. You build this enthusiasm, and all of a sudden you notice that these positive habits are coming into your workplace and changing people.

Lazzaro: What strikes me as interesting about that — there’s a lot of talks that have been given by myself and others about gamification in the workplace. But just having the presence of a game or game elements brings it into prominence in terms of the importance of that for your organization. You’re giving language and ways of thinking in terms of leadership. How do we talk about this? We’re identifying that this is an important value, that is an important value. You’re walking the talk.

You have your mission statements, but if those then become cultural goals, if you create activities around them specifically, or the language of these things is reflected in your mission statement, that really brings it full circle. That way you’re actually — it seems to me that you’re actually changing the culture.

Dieterle: You’re not just leading by example. You’re living by example. It’s becoming a better you.

Peloquin: It’s important to see similarities. It’s easy — the way the mind works, we’re naturally lazy. It’s easier to see the differences in someone than to get to know someone. You find that a lot of people, though, regardless of the differences between us, we have a lot of similarities. I have a friend in a little Nubian island in Egypt, the middle of nowhere. We probably have as different a life as you can have. But when I met him we just hit it off. We found so many similarities – our passion for our families, our kindness, food, so many things. We talk every week on Facetime from Egypt. He sends me coffee. He’s a very special person. He changed the way I see the world.

If you just look at the similarities we have, you find that most of us as human beings, we want to provide for our families. We want to have a good life. We have some differences, and we just have to respect those.

Ramer: My favorite rule of thumb about this thing is to connect through our similarity and innovate through our diversity. The difference becomes a source of strength. When you have the right context in which you’re willing to be called out when maybe you have some of those biases, you also have an environment in which you can respect those differences. Differences not just in the way look, but in the way we think, in the way we make choices, in our priorities.

That’s really the moment — when you say, let’s rank these things according to what’s most important, that’s where politics shows up, the question of who has a voice. It’s the abuse of power. I think we’re getting at how we need a different kind of culture.

Again, from the indigenous world, there’s this idea of co-creative, situational leadership. Even though my power is in my job title, there are moments when you know better than I do. I need to have enough of what it takes to say, hey, this is where you should be making the decisions.

Dieterle: If you are in a leadership position, recognize the fact that you are potentially — I would say I have a strong sense of self. I tend to be very assertive. But in my role, that means I can sometimes be intimidating. I need to take a step back and understand the impact or the power that my title or my role may have. I need to be more humble. I need to let my defenses down. I need to be sure that someone sees me as a human being, so that we can create together.

Fries: It’s a power to both create and destroy. You can make someone feel really happy by just noticing their work and complimenting them, mentioning them. You have to use that power carefully.

Lazzaro: A number of women in the game industry, we woke up because we were getting death threats and stuff online. We realized that our leaders, the people we had traditionally looked to for leadership, weren’t, in this particular situation, really leading. There was no help that was going to come. We were the help that was coming.

We came up with this idea that we wanted to essentially model the behavior. As a leader you become a model for the behavior you want to see. We wanted to open opportunities to other folks. We also wanted to put a spotlight on success, on feedback. If we as leaders did those things in those very dark times, that’s all we really needed to do. Moment by moment, person by person, attack and response, we have made and weathered those changes.

The women and the men, as allies, that were part of all of this are not the same anymore. They’re so full of confidence and joy and self-determination. The world is changing, but we’re also becoming more human. It’s a process of revealing our inner selves and becoming more genuine.

Audience: What are your thoughts on — when those initiatives were announced by Intel about trying to build a more diverse field in the game industry, one of the groups that I felt was left out was the disabled community. I’m executive director and founder of the Able Gamers charity, and one thing we’ve found that, as with all diversity, you get better end products when they’re built by diverse groups of people. But people with disabilities have been left out of this conversation. Intel spent $115 million toward this initiative and left disability off the table. I know several gamers with disabilities who’ve left the industry because games just aren’t willing to support their differences.

Lazzaro: There’s a really interesting quick analogy, and then I’ll hand it over to the panel. I do VR games. I have a company, XEODesign, that’s been running for 25 years, and I’m working on a game called Follow the White Rabbit. I go to these VR meetups all the time, and I was meeting this guy — I’ll call him Mike. He was a great guy. He was in a chair. He had a big bushy beard, this cool steampunk hat, a lot of VR equipment with him, and as we got to talking, what he said to me was, “You know the reason why I have this big bushy beard and a hat and all this equipment people can try? When I’m in a chair, I’m invisible.” That was interesting.

An hour later I was talking to some other folks, and we were starting to form a little circle, and then literally a guy walked right in front of Mike, closed the circle, and Mike was on the outside. Okay, I’m aware of that unconscious bias now, and so I opened the circle to let Mike in. It isn’t unless we as leaders take that position of recognizing what it is we want, that we want that inclusion, that things will ever change.

Fries: I just want to say really quickly that disabled people are one of the categories of people we support through the IGDA Foundation, which is partially funded for Intel. We need to get more clear about communicating that, but it is part of the groups we support.

Ramer: There was a TED talk I saw recently, where a woman was talking about a school in which nobody fails. Instead of getting the mark that you fail, it was called “Not yet.” We’re here talking about diversity, and the grade is “Not yet.” I’d like to believe the folks at Intel, if that was pointed out to them they would say, “What were we thinking? How could we be so unconscious?” Again to that unconscious bias issue. That’s part of the compassion in all of this. Of course, when we say diversity, it has to be inclusive. Our definition of inclusivity needs to be a moving target.

Megan Gaiser: I love a phrase that goes, “Earth is the school for slow learners.” God has a real sense of humor, in my opinion, because the funny thing about blind spots is we can see everyone else’s. We just can’t see our own. Which bodes well for the idea of a group, leadership for diversity, supporting each other to see those blind spots, as John said, to feel trust, so you can listen to constructive feedback and let it sink in. Then you can change your behavior.

My question would be — sometimes we’re not listening, not realizing what we’re doing. We have to hit a big failure before we can see that we have to do something different internally. Does anybody have something they’d like to share about that? How something happened that caused you to learn from a failure.

Ramer: The election, for me, was one of those moments. How could we do that? I’m from New York, and I had a pretty good feel for what was coming, but when all was said and done I thought, the only thing I could do was up my game. Get more conscious, be more respectful, and be more aware of the difference that it makes, that voting does matter.

That was, for me, like Pearl Harbor was for my dad’s generation. I think we’re all in that place. We’re in a new world. I know the phrase that Megan used, or one version of it: “Planet Earth is the place where the souls of slow learners are sent.” If that’s true, it kind of explains everything.

Fries: For some of these kinds of change, it takes a while, especially in a big company. For me, the fact that another programmer became a vice president was super important to be becoming a vice president, because I could see a path. There was a way to become a VP without having an MBA or being a marketing person, that kind of thing. Likewise, now, in my old group, Shannon Loftis the head of studios. How many women does that set a guide for? “I can become that someday.”

Lazzaro: Has failure made any of you a better leader?

Peloquin: I’ve had a lot of practice in failure. It’s a whole different talk. But I hate the word failure. I like to say that I’ve learned another way not to do something. What I’ve found is that if you take responsibility and own up to your actions, a lot of times you can resolve conflict. I’ve had cases where I blew up at a client, and it was maybe not my fault, but I was leading the team. If you take responsibility, apologize, and make sure it’s not going to happen again, people appreciate that. I think all the times I’ve made those mistakes, just owning up to it and taking responsibility is the key.

Ramer: When I was a kid I used to watch these movies of early attempts to fly. Guys jumping from heights with propellers and wings. I would laugh, but then I realized, at the time those were really serious attempts, before we understood the principles we needed to learn. I like to think one day we’ll look back at our efforts now and we’ll laugh in the same way. What were we thinking, until how we figured out how to live in a diverse way, how to treat each other with respect? That’s the kind of hope I bring to this conversation. Perhaps there’s something we don’t know that can make that difference.

Disclosure: The organizers of Casual Connect paid my way to Anaheim, California. Our coverage remains objective.