The projector fan is whirring at a frequency that suggests it might give up the ghost by 3:03 PM, a rhythmic, mechanical rattle that’s currently the most honest thing in this windowless conference room. I am sitting in a chair that was clearly designed by someone who hates the human spine, watching a video about ‘unconscious bias’ that looks like it was filmed in a dentist’s waiting room in 1993. To my left, Mark is scrolling through a spreadsheet of lawn mower parts. To my right, Sarah has achieved a state of wakeful hibernation, her eyes open but her soul clearly 103 miles away, perhaps wondering if she left the oven on or if she should finally delete that dating app she hasn’t touched in 23 days.
There is a specific kind of violence in being told how to think by a voiceover that sounds like it’s selling insurance for a cat. We are here for ‘The Inclusion Experience,’ a title so grand it almost obscures the fact that we are actually here because some legal department somewhere decided we needed a 43-page paper trail of compliance. It’s the corporate equivalent of eating your vegetables, except the vegetables are made of plastic and the person feeding them to you is reading from a script that was written by a committee of people who have never actually spoken to another human being without a HR representative present.
Rethinking the Divide
I find myself falling into a rabbit hole of my own frustration, similar to the time I spent 3 hours trying to explain the intricacies of cryptocurrency to my neighbor. There is this yawning chasm between the complexity of the human experience and the simplified, condescending checkboxes we’re being asked to tick. It’s a culture problem masquerading as a training problem.
The Clinical Observer
Camille S.-J. is here too. Camille is a hotel mystery shopper by trade, a woman whose entire professional life is built on the detection of the inauthentic. She’s the person who notices if the thread count in a $553-a-night suite is actually what they claim it is, or if the concierge’s smile is a genuine expression of hospitality or a practiced grimace. She’s currently staring at the facilitator with a look of profound, clinical interest.
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She felt that the company wasn’t trying to make us better people; they were just checking the thread count on our compliance to ensure we wouldn’t embarrass them during a lawsuit.
It’s a peculiar feeling, being treated as if you are fundamentally incapable of nuance. The training assumes that until 9:03 AM this morning, we were all stumbling through life as mindless bundles of prejudice, waiting for a PowerPoint presentation to give us the gift of empathy. It’s insulting not because the goals aren’t noble, but because the method is so cowardly.
Safety Over Substance
We treat these sessions like they’re a solution when they’re really just a symptom of a management style that prizes safety over substance. If you want a diverse and inclusive culture, you have to build it in the trenches. You have to hire people who challenge you and then-and this is the hard part-actually listen when they tell you that your ideas are stupid. But listening is hard. Listening is risky. It’s much easier to hire a consultant for $15,003 to tell everyone that they should be nicer to each other. It’s a band-aid on a broken leg, but at least the band-aid has a very nice, modern logo on it.
The linguistic mashup: squeezing human dignity into the vernacular of middle management.
I remember trying to explain the concept of a non-fungible token to my brother last year. I got 53 minutes into the explanation before I realized I didn’t actually believe half of what I was saying, or at least, I didn’t believe the hype. That’s the danger of this kind of training. It creates a linguistic mask. We learn the right words to say to avoid getting in trouble, but the underlying attitudes remain unchanged.
This is where ems89 comes into the picture of how we actually communicate in these rigid structures. We are looking for systems that allow for genuine interaction, not just the broadcasting of directives from the top down.
When the communication is one-way, it ceases to be a conversation and becomes a lecture. The facilitator today keeps calling Mark ‘Mike,’ despite Mark wearing a nametag that is roughly the size of a dinner plate. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing Camille S.-J. would write a 3-page report on.
ems89.co
CONTRADICTION
The Actor in the Play
There’s a contradiction in my own head about this. I believe in the necessity of the work. I think the world is a better place when we are aware of our blind spots. And yet, I am currently doodling a picture of a cat on the back of my ‘Inclusion Workbook.’ I criticize the process, yet I sat here and did nothing to change it. I am part of the compliance theater. I am the actor who knows the play is terrible but keeps saying the lines because I want the paycheck at the end of the week. It’s easier to be cynical than it is to be the person who stands up and says, ‘This is a waste of 253 man-hours.’
The energy shifts from boredom to the panic of being forced to perform the correct lines.
The digital facilitator is now asking us to ‘break out into groups’ to discuss a hypothetical scenario involving a promotion and a biased supervisor. We all know the ‘correct’ answer. We’ve been fed the correct answer for the last 143 minutes. So we go into our groups and we recite the script. We are not learning; we are rehearsing.
The Beige Walls
Camille S.-J. ends up in my group. She spends the entire ten minutes talking about the lobby of a hotel she visited in 2003 that had a similar color scheme to this conference room. She argues that the beige walls are actually designed to suppress original thought.
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It’s a psychological suppressant. They don’t want you to think for yourself. They want you to blend into the paint.
It’s hard to have a revolutionary thought when you’re surrounded by eggshell-colored drywall and the smell of stale bagels. What if, instead of this, we just had a conversation? What if the CEO sat in the middle of the room and asked us what we were actually afraid of? But that would be uncomfortable. That would involve real stakes. It’s much safer to watch the video of the pixelated head explaining that our brains are shortcut-machines.
Real Stakes Acknowledged:
Addressing Disparity
Data representation based on observed conversational avoidance.
The Exit Script
As we pack up our bags, the facilitator gives us a final ‘call to action.’ We are supposed to go back to our desks and be more ‘mindful.’ Sarah, who has finally fully woken up, looks at me and whispers, ‘I’m going to be mindful of the fact that I just lost 7 hours of my life.’ She was treated like a data point that needed to be calibrated.
The Core Failure
Compliance
Passed the test.
Humanity
Ignored the core.
I think about how I was so focused on being ‘right’ that I forgot to be ‘helpful.’ This training did the same thing. It was so focused on being ‘compliant’ that it forgot to be ‘human.’ We are building a world of perfect policies and miserable people, a world where we can all pass the test but none of us can actually talk to each other without looking for a script.
I see Camille S.-J. getting into her car, a silver sedan that looks exactly 13 years old. She catches my eye and gives a small, knowing nod. She’s off to shop another hotel, to look for the cracks in the facade, to find the truth behind the marketing. I wish we could all spend our days looking for the real things instead of sitting in rooms being told how to pretend they exist.