S7E12: Communities: Catalysts for Change

Hello, hello my favorite people on the internet! Dr. K here, and I am pumped to be back with another episode of the Experience University Podcast! Today’s episode explores the concept of radical inclusion and its distinctions from diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. The episode discusses creating a passionate community that also encourages open discussions about differences. Dr. K underscores the importance of embracing diversity within communities, highlighting its role in fostering meaningful behavior change. Be sure to tune in next Spring for Season 8!

Today we are discussing:
What Does Belonging Mean? (1:21)
Importance of Co-Living Situations (4:01)
Science Behind Building Communities (7:55)
Facilitating Behavior Change through Communities (9:39)
Promoting Curiosity (11:20)

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Transcript

Dr. K:
You are listening to the Experience University podcast with Dr K. Season 7, Episode 12.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to Experience University, where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Dr. Kristin Malek.

Dr. K:
Hello, hello, my friends. Of course, I have to say that. This is the last episode of our season, season seven, all about behavior change design. And I have already started recording some epic podcasts for season eight. I decided that part of season eight, I'm going to talk with and interview different experts from all of these different industries that feed directly into behavior change.

That was an idea that came from actually a couple of our listeners. I think I got two or three messages about bringing in some people who are experts in these areas because obviously, while I'm trained or I can train trainers in these, it's not where I've dedicated all of my life's work. It's just as it applies to behavior change design, which is really fascinating. So I have some of those signed up. Super pumped.

I had a very specific request about a month ago, and I wanted it to be the crowning episode of this season for everybody here. The concept was, I will say loosely, on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, but I like to call it radical inclusion because I think sometimes when we hear diversity, equity, and inclusion or belonging, we hear these terms and whether it's good or bad, we have all of these preconceived notions about it already. We may automatically go to race; we may automatically go to LGBTQ; we might automatically go to socioeconomics. There's a lot of different things that we can have going through our mind when we think of DEIB.

The belonging part has been looked at a lot. I know that Google is looking at belonging in events. I know that there are some really incredible groups out there. I've had many belonging sessions at different event conferences at SEMA, and at PCMA, and IMEX. There's just a lot of belonging sessions. What does belonging mean? And I have some stories to share. I think these are really interesting. I obviously am biased, right? I did hear a quote, and I'm going to mess it up. I don't have it in front of me, unfortunately. I left that notebook at home, but it stuck with me the minute an attendee at one of my recent training said this. She said, “When you like me because I'm like you, then I fit in, and when you like me because I'm me, then I belong.” So it has to do with authenticity. No, of course, I absolutely killed that quote. But the concept, I think you can understand, is there. If I'm having to change who I am in order to fit in, then I'm fitting in, but if you truly accept me for who I am as an authentic human being, then I belong.

And I really loved that. It was just such a great one-line summary of all of these different things that we're talking about. We're looking at all the metrics and how to design for belonging and all of these things. I want to share an example, and I think I briefly touched on it in a previous episode, but I want to talk about a couple of different things that I see and I've experienced myself as an attendee and then as a designer of experiences that have really moved the needle in terms of mindset changes when it comes to DEIB, radical inclusion.

I was really surprised by how incredibly popular the co-living episode was. That episode was shared widely, very widely. I got more messages and DMs, and I got a lot of people that added me on LinkedIn and said that my co-living episode was forwarded to them and that they really enjoyed that concept. And if you haven't heard that episode, it's talking about how if you have no other way to incorporate design or even if you do have other ways to incorporate design, one of the really interesting things you can do is instead of having everyone book a room block at a hotel and have these very isolated spaces, you could give an option where you rent a giant Airbnb, or a mansion, or whatever words we want to use. And you can have your attendees who self-select to share in this co-living situation.

Some of the most drastic change that I've had in the past, since probably the beginning of 2018 or end of 2023, so five years, is because I have lived with other people temporarily. So that could be from a week-long event, up to a 2.5-week-long intensive training, up to having a roommate for six or eight months. And those have all been really unique situations because we don't have a lot of opportunities in our life to see how other people live. We're raised in our environment. And then typically we move out, and we model how the environment was when we grew up. And maybe you have roommates, maybe you have dorm life in college, and then you either live on your own, or you're still modeling the same things, or you start dating someone and then you figure out how they were raised and then you kind of figure it out and emerge them together.

But having these co-living situations has been really fascinating because you get to see a wide variety of people and how they live and people that are in the same area as you, so maybe it's the foods they eat or things that you do. And here's where I think we're doing it wrong. I have really sat there and I said, “What's been the difference between the good and the bad? What's the difference between the transformational and the – just in my own hotel room with a shared living room – right? What made the difference between – we were all hanging out in the living room talking, or around the dining room table talking, and really diving in deep – and the difference between – I just opened up the door and went to my room.”

What was the difference between them? And I analyzed probably the past 2.5 years of my events that were back in person, and I also started analyzing my classes. One of the biggest evaluation comments that I get of my class on teaching evaluations or in my training and my workshops. I only teach one class a year at the university now. And I'm doing a lot of trainings, workshops, public speaking, consulting, event design projects for organizations outside the state of Nebraska, but when I sat there and I'm looking at all my comments from my workshops and trainings and classes, it always had to either do with shifting or teaching or training mindset, and then the community, I'm a really good community builder. And it's kind of like when I first got into teaching, I was doing these really cool things that everybody was like, “This is really cool. We should copy that.” And then I would go to teaching and learning trainings, and then they would put some science behind it, and I'd be like, "Oh, I'm doing that and it works." But now I know the science behind it. This is kind of this moment now of like, "Oh, I've always been really good at building communities, but like, what's the science or the why behind that?"

And I'm finding that when I bring together groups around what I will call a grouping variable, and then you stay and live in that grouping variable. I'll give an example. It's almost never effective. It's kind of like when you join a Facebook group. Say you join a Facebook community group for crafting, and then you go in there, and then all you do is talk about crafting.

You don't have any actual different thoughts or opinions or diversity of thought in completely different mindsets; you join that group because you love it and then you all talk about it. So in my intro to events class that I used to teach before 2021, I had every single student in the class write down essentially if they had to do one thing for the rest of their life. It's kind of like this stuck on a desert island thing. If you had to do one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? And if people said, like sports, or being outside, or food, or design, or whatever they said, I would group them into their groups based on that variable. And I'll tell you, we had absolutely incredible groups in that course because they knew that they were passionate about it.

It didn't matter what anything else in your life looked like. You knew you were super passionate about that area, and that's where you bonded. And it's always been very effective of like, "OK, these groups are super tight." I've had people in their groups that have ended up becoming roommates. I've had people in the groups who ended up hiring each other. I've had people in groups twice, well three times, if you include a recent one, who have met and started dating and gotten married, and two of those couples now have children, all because I put them in a group together. And so this was around their grouping variable: great for community building. But is it really good for mindset change? And I argue that the answer is no.

I always joke with one of my colleagues. I say, "Who goes to the teaching and learning sessions?" It's only people who care about teaching and learning, which are oftentimes not the people who need to be there. You're taking great teachers and making them excellent. But all the people who need those sessions, I say, "All,” that's a generalization, right? But they're the ones that maybe really need those sessions, and they're not going.

Who goes to diversity, equity, and inclusion sessions? They're the people that really, really, really care about diversity. But the people who really need to be in the room are the people who don't care or they're apathetic, and how do we get them to care? And when we sit there and we talk about this in terms of mindset change and events and designing events and experiences, you need to do the first thing, but you need a twist.

So can you bring together a group around one common passionate variable but then get them to talk about the other things in their life? For example, I was at this training, and this is the one I briefly touched on in a much earlier episode this season. I was in this training, and we were all grouped together on neurolinguistics. So we were all there trying to figure out how to have neurolinguistics be part of public speaking.

It was a speaking academy specific for neurolinguistics, so there were very strict certifications and training you had to have before you were even eligible to join this and then joined. So we already had a very shared understanding of like, "Okay, we all know that we have been through the trenches and this, this and this. We all know that we're certified in hypnosis. We all know we're certified in neurolinguistics. We all know that we want to be public speakers. We all know we've had some level of success in public speaking." So we already had a lot of shared variables. We really felt like this was our community. And when you feel that way, when you feel like you're part of a community and you have this shared interest, then you're more open to listening to what others say and being curious about it.

So if I just walked up to somebody, and it was somebody I wasn't really talking to or didn't really know, and they sat there and said something completely opposite of what I believed, historically, I would have been like, "Okay, it's cool that you believe that. I believe this. We're going to go our separate ways." That's not creating a dialogue. That's not healthy conversation. That's like, "Okay, cool," and you've prevented an argument. That's a great avoidance strategy. But in this particular training we had that shared community and that shared understanding, and then we started talking politics, and it was fascinating because instead of shutting down, I was like, "Okay, here's this person over here who's essentially ‘Q anon.’ No, I'm going to say it wrong. Like this person over here, you have someone who's super pro-Trump, you have someone who's super anti-Trump. You have someone who's super liberal. They're all over the place independent. Some people who didn't care about politics," and the conversations that came up were fascinating. Instead of shutting down, instead of getting up and leaving the room, we started getting curious of like, "Well, what's the support for that? Or why did you believe that? Or how did you get to that conclusion?" And we just started getting curious, and I will tell you, from that one conversation, I have shifted some of my viewpoints because I was open to the conversation because these were people that I trusted. And then we got to get real into the details.

Other things that are related to this but not done as effectively is when you have those, they're not quiet conversations, but when you see those two people who have completely different viewpoints and you bring them into a room, and they have a really in-depth conversation, but they've signed up for this, right? So they've signed up for this difficult conversation, or you bring them into a room, and then there's a barrier between them so you can't see them. So you're talking to them about their life, and then when you see them, you recognize you would have had all these preconceived judgments or biases based on what they looked like, like "Oh, I didn't know that she'd be Hispanic, or I didn't know she'd be so young," or whatever. The problem with these is that if your trust isn't built up, you might not be planting the seed of curiosity. And without that seed of curiosity that gets nurtured and watered over time, real behavior change doesn't happen.

Real mindset change doesn't happen. So I can have an interesting conversation and then say, "That was an interesting conversation," and go about my day in my life and maybe never think about that conversation again. So I do think there are some really interesting elements when we're talking about designing mindset change. And I will tell you one of the interesting things I'm facing in almost all of my current clients right now. When we're identifying what our behavior changes between our entering and exiting behavior of the experience, apathy has been in the top five every single time. We are dealing with a world, society, individuals who are highly apathetic right now and trying to take someone from a 'don't care, don't want to know, don't care to know' into a 'I'm curious about knowing,' into 'I want to apply this into like I want to change the world' or whatever we're doing. That is a really interesting design challenge that I've been having so much fun with.

So anyways, I hope you really got a lot out of this and you're thinking about how you can design these experiences to be more effective. I think that we do a really great job of building communities in some ways in some industries and some events, but I don't think that we do a great job of utilizing these communities for real and effective mindset change. So try that on. Try it out.

I will be releasing season eight in the spring of 2024. I hope that you all have wonderful holidays of all the holidays that you celebrate and that you have incredible time with families and friends. If it's cold where you are, stay warm. If it's warm where you are, I'm jealous. Go enjoy the beach laying outside, and I will talk to you all in the spring.

Speaker 2
Thanks for listening to The Experience University podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode.