Just about every major higher education institution or Fortune 500 organization has used some form of unconscious bias training as part of their effort to make their company more inclusive of diversity.

If unconscious bias training were the solution to all that divides people across demographics, you would think the organizations that put big dollars into this training would be the models of inclusion.

They will honestly tell you that they are not.

A team of researchers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania recently conducted an experiment to test the outcomes of unconscious bias training and published their findings in the Harvard Business Review. They found little evidence that these training programs had a major impact in changing the behaviors of White male employees, who typically hold more power in the organization and tend to be the target of these interventions.

Why is it that the most popular approaches for addressing biases stored in the subconscious seem to have little impact on changing behavior?

For starters, formal classroom or workshop-style training programs are designed to educate the conscious mind. Participants listen to short lectures and do some exercises to raise their awareness of what their sneaky subconscious is driving them to do.

Meanwhile the engine behind all of this behavior, the subconscious, remains basically unchanged. After a full day of becoming aware of these generally hidden processes, they are sent away with advice that essentially amounts to this idea: Be on the alert, and don’t trust that gut instinct coming from your subconscious.

Unfortunately, the subconscious mind works about 17.5 times faster than the conscious mind, and it is certainly more powerful. So it’s not surprising behavioral change results are not that great despite all the money and energy that goes into bias training, and despite efforts to arm the conscious mind with tricks and techniques to moderate subconscious impulses.

According to scientists, the average person makes about 35,000 decisions every single day. You may be stunned by this number and think that if this were true, it would mean that you had to make at least 25 or more decisions in the time it took you to read the first 300 words of this article.

Why don’t you remember making all those decisions? Most, if not all, of your decisions during this time were made for you automatically by your subconscious mind.

What can we do?
A big missing piece of the puzzle in addressing bias and creating more inclusive organizations is recognition of the subconscious.

The design of these trainings, as demonstrated in our thought experiment, would require leaders to live in a constant state of hyper-vigilance, which is unlikely to be sustainable for a busy person.

What we need is a program that directly retrains the subconscious mind so automatic decisions become more supportive of inclusive behaviors.

Unlike the conscious mind, the faster, more powerful subconscious does not learn by logically examining and storing information. It picks up information constantly from the environment around it and creates speedy interpretations and decision shortcuts that drive behavior.

The plasticity of our brains enables us to continue to add, modify, delete, and correct rules as often as needed. That’s how I am able to drive on the left side of the road according to British rules and shift back to my right-driving American model as soon as I’m back in the United States. That plasticity is the key to turning your subconscious into your inclusion ally.

Marisa Chambers, EEO and diversity manager at Structure Tone, a global construction management company, recently told me about an approach she used in a company she worked at previously. After reading a book on how different cultures use sayings to convey meaning, she decided to develop an affinity-building game called “We are more alike than not.”

In the game, Chambers shared sayings like this one from Iran, “Trust in God, but tie your camel.” She then asked her participants to decipher the lesson and come up with an American saying that conveys the same meaning. Participants realized this message sends the same lesson as the old saying “God helps those who help themselves.”

As participants from different cultures went through this exercise, they became increasingly aware of how similar they all were despite expressing ideas in different ways. This exercise led to their subconscious generating greater feelings of affinity and connection with people otherwise deemed different from them.

Other organizations use a gaming approach. Contestants learn about other cultures and practices, and the winners are selected based on depth of new experiences and how quickly they reach the game goals.

So where do you go from here?

Continue with unconscious bias training to raise your team members’ awareness, but don’t stop there. Look for ways to make their subconscious an ally in driving inclusion. Use proven techniques for training the subconscious. Examples of techniques include the following:

Address who team members associate with — e.g., making White males part of a Black Employee Resource Group (ERG), or setting up multi-racial or ethnic mentoring relationships.

Provide interactive exercises such as games or surveys that help participants see their similarities with other groups despite their differences.

Inclusion is a state that can only be truly achieved when we remove both the conscious and subconscious obstacles that separate us and build automatic decision-making processes that draw us together.”

Joseph Santana is an INSIGHT Into Diversity Editorial Board member. He is also president of Joseph Santana LLC, a boutique consulting practice. This article ran in the November 2019 issue.