Michael Muñoz:
Thanks so much, Simon.

Reggie Butler:
Thanks for having us. I’m a fan of your work because you’re putting good out in the world and creating sustainable change, which is certainly where I’m aligned with and as Michael is too.

Simon Mainwaring:
And Reggie, let me push on that a little bit. So, tell us how did your journey lead you to where you are today? What work kind of trajectory were you on and what role do you play today specifically?

Reggie Butler:
Well, so Michael, remember when we first met, there were some things going on in the world and that Michael being the person that he is, he just sort of looked at me and went, “We need to solve something.” And like, “We may need to be a little bit disruptive.” And so if I think of the relationship I have with Google through Michael and I’ve been there for a while, it all started with someone trying to solve a human-centered problem.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Reggie Butler:
And they need different people to actually be a part of that solution. Michael, why don’t you tell them a little bit about you?

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. Michael, tell us a little bit about your background and specifically the role you play inside Google? That’d be great.

Michael Muñoz:
Yeah. So, I’m a diversity guy. I’ve been doing diversity in corporations like ESPN and EY and Aetna for about 20 years. But Google was appealing to me because I thought it was an opportunity for us to really change the game and change the way we think about diversity, equity and inclusion. And the opportunity to work with Reggie and like he says, really challenging the status quo was something that we were really looking forward to doing. And I was excited about doing, because to tell you the truth, Simon, I was really tired of looking at data that said that people from different genders and races were having different experiences. And so, in order to fix that, we needed to change the way that their managers and leaders were thinking about them in the organization and therefore the behaviors.

Simon Mainwaring:
So, help me understand the process itself because you’ve got this 12-week, very intentionally designed course that allows people to have those experiences to reflect on it, to come back, what have you structured, or how did you structure it in a way that it would be different? Help us understand the pieces of that puzzle.

Reggie Butler:
Yeah. So, I’m going to go through one part of it, Michael, you take him through other things. So, one thing we know that in our society right now, people the way they consume content, we had to put it in a voice that was that they wouldn’t reject the premise of learning something this way. So, if you think of any episodic feature, if you think of Netflix as a season, we built it in a season format. So, their season one, season two, season three, season four.

Simon Mainwaring:
We’ve all been trained over the last year. We’re ready to binge-watch the next season, right?

Reggie Butler:
That’s right. And so what we did, which was beautiful is we did it. We created and still used art and all the experiential things to deliver it, but we wouldn’t let them fast forward.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Reggie Butler:
They had to stop and they had to go do work in-between. And, Michael, you can talk about some of the behaviors you’ve seen change because of the work part, not because of the session itself, it was the work in-between.

Simon Mainwaring:
It’s interesting. This sounds a little bit, I don’t know, like a saying, but it’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.

Reggie Butler:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Simon Mainwaring:
It’s the moments of reflection. So, Michael, what have you seen in these behavior changes? You’ve got these well-compensated people in a very privileged environment, one might say in the Googles and Apples and Facebooks and tech world more broadly, what behavior changes have you seen as a result of this process?

Michael Muñoz:
Yeah. So first of all, we took a lot of heat when we decided to [inaudible 00:04:33], because people were like, “I only have three hours. Let me just binge through this.” What’s been incredible, and it’s to Reggie’s team credit, because they said, “Trust me on this. They need to spend time in the work,” is we have folks that are emailing me, pinging me all the time saying like, “It’s my Friday night appointment viewing now.” And it’s their appointment viewing because it helps them frame how they want to show up the next week, the next one-on-one differently. It gives them another tool in their arsenal or in their quiver to be able to open up. And honestly, Simon, can you imagine this year being a manager to remote folks through everything that’s going on and to be able to have this tool that helps them frame, “Okay, this is how I want to show up. This is how I want to build.” We talk a lot about familiarity, comfort and trust. And-

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Michael Muñoz:
… you could argue that’s easier to do in person, but people are learning how to navigate that, and right now, virtually. This is the important thing when I talk about the results. A lot of training I’ve done in the past, centers the efficacy of the training on the experience of the people who have gone through the training. A lot of what we’re doing is centering the efficacy of the training on the people from underrepresented groups that report into the people that have been in the training. And so they’ll call me up, they’ll ping me to say, “I’m going to stay here a little bit longer because my relationship with my manager has gotten better. I don’t know what you did to them. When they went through the training, I don’t know, but they’re showing up for me differently. I feel like I have a voice. I have better psychological safety.” And so making sure that we’re centering on the experiences of the people whose lives and careers they’re impacted has really made a big difference.

Simon Mainwaring:
That’s really powerful sort of social proof. And one of the things I struggle with Michael, is I look at the moment in time right now, where we’re coming out of well, arguably, COVID to some degree, but the reality is that we’ve all been polarized. We’ve all been forced to stay at home. We haven’t seen each other, we’ve been working virtually. And so, in a sense when, and if it happens that we all go back out into the world, this could be a watershed moment where we reweave the social fabric inside organizations and communities all around the world with the greatest sense of diversity, inclusion and equity. That’s in the plus column. In the minus column is it’s hard not to experience this in any other way than punitive. Like you’ve been doing something wrong if you’ve been someone who’s been privileged or benefited from the way things have been done in the past. And so they’re on their back foot. So, my logic question is this, how do you make sure for everyone that this experience is positive and not a chore they’ve got to get through, or a box they’ve got a tick inside the company? How do you reframe it when you go, “Well, at this moment in time with the support of this course, this can be something that can unlock enormous innovation and ideation inside of the company. It can fortify the culture and build resilience. This can be a huge unlock for you personally.” How do you capture that time?

Reggie Butler:
What this is based on is that we’ve got to move a person from being transactional about their job and the people that help get the job done to being transformative and human-centered. So, when people come to the training, they come out, they’re more focused on their humans than they’re focused on the project. You still are going to focus on your project, your business, of course, you’re going to do that. But I’ve had people anecdotally reach out to me and said, “This is the first time I’ve ever thought about the people on my team by thinking about the people first, and not the project or the output first. We were always going to get to the output, always.”

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah, we’ve almost been commoditized ourselves as employees. We are a function of the projects and we’ve been dehumanized in a sense.

Reggie Butler:
Yeah. And that the thing that it leaves us with and which is sort of the output of this, the meta output is that we’re trying to get people to care on their own without having to have something happen that causes them to care. So if you think of 2020, you think of COVID, you think of George Floyd, all of that. Something happened that caused people to pay attention. And yet, even in that, there are still some people that aren’t showing evidence that they care.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right. Right.

Reggie Butler:
When you put somebody through an experience and you give them these levers to lean up against like the tools and the frameworks, they come out and they say, “Not only do I care, I realize this is a lifelong change for me, not a part-time effort.” And that’s the point.

Simon Mainwaring:
That is the point and everything you’re talking about, the reframing to be human-centric, to really see each other as people first, rather than employees or functions of a project is so powerful. Now, I imagine when you do this work, Michael, I’d love to ask you every company is at a different point in this journey. So, do you do an audit at first to see A, where the company thinks it is, B, where they really are, C, where are those people, the 60 people that do a workshop? And where they are in their own individual journeys? How do you calibrate it so that you can meet them where they are?

Michael Muñoz:
Personally, I think it’s an incredible time to recenter who we put at the epicenter of what’s working or not working for your organization. So for us, for so long, we look up at largely white men and we decide, we asked them, we kind of use them as a proxy to understand how the organization is doing on diversity, equity and inclusion. The impact of Black Lives Matter and kind of Me Too movement and the violence against Asians is that we have an ability, and I would argue the responsibility to recenter who we’re putting as an arbitrator, arbiter of your organization’s culture.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Michael Muñoz:
Right. Now we can look at the black, Latinx, Asian, indigenous populations and say, “How are we doing it? Building a culture where you feel empowered, where you feel a strong sense of psychological safety.” At Google, we talk a lot about a sense of belonging and how do we build that? We know that there’s a role that managers play in that, but at the end of the day, the arbiter of whether we’re doing well, can’t be the white men that are leading the organization, it’s got to be the folks that are in the organization that are experiencing the system, that are experiencing the outcomes of the system and the interactions with their managers. So, I think it’s a beautiful time for an organization to recenter how they gauge whether they’re doing well or not in D&I.

Simon Mainwaring:
There are so many brands showing up and either doing public-facing statements as to their commitments to DI&E or JEDI, these different acronyms for diversity, inclusion and equity. And there are those who are doing the heavy lifting internally. And I got to ask you both. If we’re sitting around somewhere at a pub having a drink, and like I would say to you, “Is it different this time? Do you see people showing up on the strength of BLM and the continued violence against people of color and multicultural backgrounds? Do you think it’s going to be different this time and why?” Michael, let’s start with you?

Michael Muñoz:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I look forward to being in a pub with you or anybody. So let’s-

Simon Mainwaring:
Right. Fair enough-

Michael Muñoz:
… hope we get back there soon.

Simon Mainwaring:
… Six feet apart, masks on, it’s going to be great.

Michael Muñoz:
It’s phenomenal. I think it’s going to be really polarized. I think you’re going to have a couple of organizations that really get it, have a few leaders that are willing to invest in the resources, understand that this is a long-term effort. We’re not going to fix this in 2021 or 2022, or maybe even in the 2020s, but you have to be willing to commit to the long-term. And you’ve hired people to lead your organization who have the skill set and the discipline to be able to do that and shepherd your organization forward. There’s another set. And I don’t mean this in the most positive way, but how we’ve hired people to be there externally-facing person, or they’ve hired people who are in sales to run who are people of color in sales or in marketing, or in other parts of the thing that don’t have the discipline, they don’t treat it as a practice. They haven’t hired people who have built or cultivated cultures in other organizations. And in two years when they don’t see the progress that they hoped to see, it’ll be the first job on the chopping block and the culture will not change. So, I think we’re going to see a really big divide, a chasm show up pretty quickly. And you, going back to who we center in this equation, we’re going to see by how people move their bodies from company to a new company, how well companies are doing it, that should be the new barometer.

Simon Mainwaring:
Sure. Sure.

Michael Muñoz:
Are you able to retain the talent that you have and acquire new, diverse, underrepresented talent moving forward? That’s going to be the new barometer for us.

Simon Mainwaring:
It makes a lot of sense and I want to come back to that in a second, the sort of the business case for it. But Reggie, what do you see out there? You get the pattern recognition of working across different organizations and having that visceral experience of their employees and the teams. Do you think this time will be different, and if so, why?

Reggie Butler:
Yeah. So absolutely. So, I have to believe as an aggressive optimist, that it will be different. So I have to believe it, but what I am seeing across whatever industry I’m actually in is that this time is different because they witnessed a different event in a different way.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Reggie Butler:
So to witness what happened in 2020 to your own families, you were there when someone was sick and then someone died, you were there when George Floyd was murdered. Like you saw it on repeat over and over and over again. People are changing because their morality is staring at them, where there’s the morality at the individual level, the morality of a community it’s like things are being threatened and people are trying to do what every species has done for centuries is evolve and thrive. So yes, it’s absolutely different. And what I think people are starting to get toward is, “I don’t have to be guilty for not trying as hard in the past, but I certainly can do more moving forward because I can’t do anything about that.” I’m sorry it happened and whatever thing you need to say about that, but there are a lot of people right now, and I’m witnessing it across every organization that I’m in, there’s somebody within the organization. Somebody that’s going, “Enough is enough.”

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. Yeah.

Reggie Butler:
Like, “I’ve seen it. I know what it’s doing to my people. And while on my watch, it is not going to continue.” And that’s what I’ve seen over and over.

Simon Mainwaring:
I think the universal experience that everybody’s had and how it’s played out so visibly and viscerally in front of people over the last year is unprecedented in some way. And I also think the younger demos coming through that really do look at life in a more inclusive way without the unconscious biases are helping. And I’m very optimistic like you about it, but it’s also a long-term commitment and hard work. I want to ask you, Michael, being a older white guy myself, you often probably come up against resistance at a board level and so on whether they articulated or not, because they feel like they’re being attacked or accused, or they’re going to get some reputational damage. So they’re on the back foot. So, I want to ask you, how do you address that when you’ve got some resistance at a board level or a CEO level? And then secondly, what business case do you make for them to say, “Hey, listen, this is a value add to your organization,” if they are resistant? So, what do you do in that circumstance?

Michael Muñoz:
Yeah. So, I really believe that everybody has a role to play. And I think that it’s not my job to determine necessarily what your role is to play. I think you have that narrative already, and I’ll give you an example. I had a conversation with a very senior leader and I said, “Tell me about your diversity narrative. Why do you care about this? What does it matter to you?” And he said, “Hey, I watched this movie and I went to school in Michigan and we’re super diverse.” And I was like, “Well, I’m just going to pause you right there.” Because it was very clunky and it was very contrived and it felt like he’s giving me an answer that he thought I wanted to hear.

Simon Mainwaring:
Sure. Michael Munoz: And I said, “Let me just stop you here really quickly for a second. I noticed that you’ve moved three or four times across country in support of your wife’s career.” And she’s a big director of a large hospital system. And I said, “Can I ask you, are you proud of that?” And he said… I’ll clean it up a little bit. But he said, “I’m really proud of that. I’m really proud of that.” And I said, “Then that’s your narrative. You have an opportunity to lean in in support of greater equality for women and you don’t have to do this thing that you think I need you to do. We need you there too.”

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Michael Muñoz:
And so I spent a lot of time with our leaders, trying to figure out what makes them tick? What happened in their lived experience that is going to make them show up and use their organizational capital on behalf of somebody that doesn’t look like them?

Simon Mainwaring:
It’s interesting. I’m hearing a theme where it’s sort of like you’re shifting the center of gravity time and time again from the project to the person, from the professional to the personal, from the corporate narrative to the human narrative. So, it’s almost like you’re kind of constantly reaching into people and organizations and turning them inside out and saying, “Come on, let’s elevate the humanity.” Would that be fair?

Michael Muñoz:
Yeah, absolutely.

Reggie Butler:
Yeah.

Michael Muñoz:
I think that you asked the second part of that question is like, why should they be doing it? Right?

Simon Mainwaring:
Sure.

Michael Muñoz:
Because I fundamentally believe… People ask me all the time, “Why is diversity important?” And for me, the answer is, “It’s not.” It’s not important unless you built a culture of inclusion. You built a culture of empowerment with strong psychological safety, because I can promise you one thing, Simon-

Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah.

Michael Muñoz:
… if you have an organization that has a lot of diversity and no psychological safety, no sense of belonging that company either has currently, or will soon have a retention problem.

Simon Mainwaring:
Sure.

Michael Muñoz:
Right?

Reggie Butler:
That’s right.

Michael Muñoz:
And so you need to focus on the people first. And when we start to do that, when we start to do it consistently, and Reggie talks about this all the time, when you start to do it when times are tough, right? It’s easy to do when heading into holiday or vacation or whatever, but when a project deadline is up against and you have to make that deadline do you still care about your people? Do you still put them first? And that’s going to be the telling tale of how effective these managers and leaders are in their organizations.

Simon Mainwaring:
I want to ask you Reggie, something based on that. It’s one thing to elevate this conversation to humanize the experience, but none of this is happening in a vacuum. It’s not like we’ve got a clean slate and nothing, but opportunity ahead of us. There are still headwinds. Well, the rising awareness of existing white supremacism in the country, and it’s played out quite dramatically in the political front, but there are forces working against the type of goals that we’re talking about here on this conversation. So, how do you contextualize that in this broader conversation, because it’s complicated and it gets very emotional very quickly for people. Help me understand.

Reggie Butler:
Some of it has to do with… I’m trying to get leaders to understand fundamentally not to be scared of the ambiguity and complexity that it takes to actually solve any of these issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Reggie Butler:
So, I have a lot of people who sit in positions of power and influence that are afraid they’re going to make a mistake, and because it’s so public-facing, they don’t want that to happen. I was like, “Well, then you’re not willing to do what it takes to make progress occur.”

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Reggie Butler:
And every now and then, I get a leader who goes, “I’m not worried about the mistake because I have enough. If progress means I have to lose something so that other people can gain, then I’m going to do it.” And what we’re trying to push people toward is don’t be paralyzed by the effort. Simon, you know what the credibility is and leadership spaces right now? Evidence of effort.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Reggie Butler:
It’s like, “Let me see you try. I don’t care if you mess up. I care whether or not I see you try.” And if you’re trying and it’s coming from a, “I want progress to occur,” you’d get a lot of people that are having different lived experience, different lived experiences that are actually saying, “At least I know I’m in a place with at least a liter or two that is showing me evidence of effort and that will make me stay.” So, I also believe that the polarization that you talk about it’s been there for centuries, will continue to be there. The subjects will just change. What we need people to do is get involved and stay engaged, not part-time. Get involved, stay engaged. You’ve been through how many careers right now and you’re still engaged.

Simon Mainwaring:
Sure.

Reggie Butler:
That’s the point. I need more of you at scale that want to care about what’s happening not now, but what happens next. And that’s really different. Really different.

Simon Mainwaring:
It is a long-term commitment. And how do you elevate it as a priority inside the organization? And I’m getting a little bit tactical about it. For example, a lot of brands have woken up the need to be more purposeful. And then you hear things like ESG, environmental, social, and governance issues. And DI&E, diversity and inclusion often sits within governance and social to some extent. How are you framing this work inside the business and brand priorities, all the organizations who are attuned to the larger conversation about capitalism, about business, about climate, about our future, how do you approach it from a sort of strategic messaging point of view? Michael, why don’t you help us there?

Michael Muñoz:
One of the things we focus on is making sure that we represent our users authentically, right? And I think a lot of brands, a lot of companies have missed that. They throw a Brown person with Brown skin and into an ad, or they rely on stereotypes and everything like that. And I think we got to make sure that we are getting as proximate to folks. And by that, I mean having folks that don’t necessarily speak to the entire communities but can give us a level of insight into communities so that we can authentically represent them in our products and tools. So for us, that’s a kind of a starter for us in terms of how we’re thinking about the Google marketing and what we’re trying to do.

Reggie Butler:
Yeah. I’ve seen it play out in a couple of other different ways, Simon. There are some people that when you look at scenario planning about the future of the business, one thing is always a common thread, what’s the healthy way for our business to prosper and be relevant and make a difference to our communities. And sometimes I can get a leader to say, “Here’s the things we paid attention to. We paid attention to climate change. We paid attention to two green initiatives. We paid attention to that.” And I always look at them and go, “Ah, okay, what about your internal workforce and your people? Have you made that a priority yet?” And they all go, “Of course, we have.” I’m going, “Doesn’t seem to be that way, because you haven’t shown not just the evidence of effort, but you haven’t shown the investment at a level where there was a return that your people think that you made it a priority.” Because I believe there’s a lot of leaders who are making it a priority, but the messaging and the signaling that occurs is falling on deaf ears because they can’t see the progress. So, you have to prioritize not only the effort but the message along with the effort to let people know we are doing something.

Simon Mainwaring:
I want to ask both of you. If you’re talking to an executive, they could be a founder of a small company with a relatively small staff. They could be a high growth company, or there could be a very complex enterprise. What is the first thing you would say to them as to why they should invest in this work and how they should think about it? What is that starting point that triggers them to go, “This is a necessary step I need to take?”

Michael Muñoz:
That’s a great question. I think that one of the things that we want folks to do is put their people first, right? And understanding that they need to empower their leaders, hold their leaders accountable in a way that uplifts them and really takes them into a place where this isn’t compliance training. They’re doing this you for the intrinsic value. And because of that, everybody’s going to benefit from it. I believe that right now, one of the best catalyst is that everybody wants to… Most people really want to do better, right? They want to be a better leader. There’s like grasping at straws for resources, right? But they also need to be freed up to be the human beings that they can be. And so this training… Giving them the opportunity, giving the frameworks, giving them the shared experiences is going to catalyze and free up these teams. You talked about diversity in innovation and creativity. Imagine when everybody’s working well together, that’s that sweet magic sauce that is going to unlock the innovation, unlock the creativity that we’ve talked about for years, right? So this training is really about giving them the tools to be able to do that, the shared experience and the freedom and the latitude to make some mistakes because they are doing that and showing evidence of effort, that is going to allow them the latitude to be able to not have that pressure to be perfect at all times.

Reggie Butler:
Michael, so first of all, applaud you, yourself, the human for taking on the hit to try to get something like this to happen. And Simon, the reason I say that is there a lot of people in organizations that won’t take the risk. There’s just paralyzed by the risk of what if it doesn’t work? And it’s like, “No, somebody’s got to take the risk.” So that something she can create traction and momentum. And I remember in one of the sessions because rich dialogues is a part of it. Somebody came out and said, “I had a conversation with somebody black on my team. And it was the first time I heard that it’s because of me, their manager, that their life is different. And I never view myself as that. I’m just a normal person doing things like, no, it’s because of you.” Like, “If you didn’t check in on me, if you didn’t speak to me,” and I don’t mean like say hello? “If you didn’t notice me as being human, if I weren’t visible to you, I would have left a long time ago because I am dealing with a trauma. My community’s dealing with trauma.” And there is a bunch of workforce studies that are out there now that are supporting this, the one place people want to be able to talk about who they are and what their experience is, they want to be able to talk about it at work with those people. When you have that context and that construct set up, amazing things actually happen because you’re bringing people together. Because I truly believe this for leadership capabilities, you have a job, you’re always supposed to help others. And if you figure out what that looks like, it’s going to look different to different people, but you’re supposed to be bringing people together, not leaving people alone. So, helping others and bringing people together, that’s what your job is on any given day. I don’t care what the business performance is.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right.

Reggie Butler:
Way too many people spend time and they go, “I need to look at my business performance. I need to make sure we’re healthy, have a healthy organization, healthy business, profitable,” all the things. And I just look at them and go, “When are you going to make one of your targets, one of your goals, human performance?” Like, “You look at business performance really well and man, you can interrogate that and make sure all these process improvement things are happening, but do that with the humanity that is in front of you called your workforce.”

Simon Mainwaring:
And it’s the biggest line item on your P&L, you invest in it every day. People walk in the door or they log on and log off nowadays. How can we not invest in that? And I want to end in a sort of expansive note. We’re slowly embracing the responsibility, this conversation and behavioral change and so on, but from both of you, I’d love to hear just how far can this go? What is that promise when you really do embrace it? How much can you transform an organization? Like, Michael, if you could really just cast your eye down the road and say in the spirit of aggressive optimism that Reggie mentioned, what is possible when you really do this well?

Michael Muñoz:
The other thing that Reggie and I bond on is this optimism because I don’t know. And I think that’s the beauty, right? We don’t know what the possibilities are because there’s so few environments, work environments that exist that enable that creativity, that enable ideas as they’re thought of in people’s heads who are black or brown or trans or othered in some way to get out into the world because we haven’t created those atmospheres, those environments, where I can conceive of something as a Puerto Rican, Jewish, diabetic, and it gets into the world without somebody muffling it or changing it or scripting it. And so, that’s the possibility that I don’t even know that we… Like the optimism in me doesn’t know that we have a firm grasp of yet.

Simon Mainwaring:
I love that. We don’t even know what’s possible when we deeply connect and celebrate everything each of us bring to the table. Reggie, what are your thoughts?

Reggie Butler:
Yeah. I think what’s possible is if I could get people to stop trying to make seismic changes and do individual changes, and everybody decided to do that, the possibilities you cannot calculate. And I view it this way. If I can save a life, it mattered. And I think people are trying to say like entire generations and populations knowing I can never be able to do that, but I can save one. I can save one life. And again, I’m taking this from a conversation that a leader had. And he said, “It was quite telling to me when I heard about saving a life in the correlation to a car accident.” So, Simon think about this. If you’re about to get on a highway on an on ramp and you can see the traffic has slowed down and you can tell up in your view that there’s an accident or something, what do most people do when they see that accident? And you’re on an on-ramp trying to go somewhere. Most people get super frustrated. It’s like, “Oh, I’m going to be late.” You immediately make it about yourself immediately. I’m going to be late. The closer you get, imagine this, the closer you get, you start to notice that it’s a pretty severe accident. It transitions from I’m going to be late to I hope everybody’s okay. Now, let’s say you get almost parallel with the accident and you see people, meaning there’s someone in the accident. You can see them, the more of your humanity starts to come out. It’s like, “What can I do? What can I do? What can I do to be helpful?” You know what the difference is between the past and racial unrest and all these kinds of things is that because of 2020 people were paralleled with the accident and they recognize that person. And when you recognize a person, you don’t just drive off, you stop, you get out, and you do what you can in that moment. And this leader looked at me and went, “All I’m going to do is spend my time making moments matter when I can.” So I have to look for it first and not be frustrated that it’s taking time away from my day or my life, and actually to Michael’s point call in to be helpful. I think it’s so powerful that the possibilities and I’m not using the possibilities are endless. Possibilities are real, but you have to care and you have to get involved.

Simon Mainwaring:
I think that’s so powerful. And it’s so true. That sort of analogy you shared there. This humanity is innate within us, and it’s just about unlocking it and living it and bringing it to our work and to our teams. It’s so powerful. Google sponsored and funded this program Enlightened Human and Digital Human, Michael, when somebody wants to go and find out more about the program and really wants to level up their teams and their organizations, what should they do? Where should they go?

Michael Muñoz:
Well first… No, no. I was going to say the first thing they can do, if they want to learn more about Examined Human, they can go to YouTube. We built a video about the making of Examined Human, and they can learn a lot more about how it came to be, what exactly it is, because it’s really, really hard to describe it to anybody until you see it. So it’s about a six-minute video to check out what Examined Human is. And Reggie can talk a little bit about Digital Human and where you can find out more about that.

Simon Mainwaring:
And we’ll include the link to that video in the show notes. So, that’s fantastic. Thank you. And Reggie, what about Performance Paradigm? Where can they go to find out about the course and how they can get involved?

Reggie Butler:
Yeah. So you can go to the performance paradigm website. You can also find that same video. And there are other videos there that sort of talk about equity, inclusion, diversity, and leadership as potential solutions, especially rich dialogues. There’s a lot of people who want to use it right now to help build stronger teams and to skill people up. So you can go to my website for that. The other thing I would suggest, and this is for everybody. Because the world is consuming things like you’re delivering right now, Simon podcast, there’s so many resources out there right now of people offering really awesome solutions for how people can get involved and stay engaged. And I’m saying all of you pay attention to podcasts. There’s a ton of information that you can learn where you’re doing your own pre-work versus trying to learn about the experiences of others by burdening the others, by asking them what it’s like to be them. There’s a whole other way to do that. So, visit my website. I’ve got a… It’s called Care More Podcast. And I try to do inspirational things for people to have positive messages. So, there’s a lot of ways to get in touch with us, YouTube, our website and things. But I really thank you for having us and allowing us to amplify our voices.

Simon Mainwaring:
Well, thank you for the fresh thinking, the destructive approach and the true passion for this topic at a time when it’s needed more than ever. So, Michael, Reggie, thank you for your time. And I would encourage everybody out there to go and check out these programs because they make a truly transformative difference. So, thank you to you both.

Michael Muñoz:
Thanks so much, Simon. I appreciate it.

Reggie Butler:
All right. Thanks so much.

Simon Mainwaring:
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Lead With We, where I spoke with Google’s Michael Munoz and Reggie Butler of Performance Paradigm who shared with us how your company can approach the important and sensitive issue of diversity and inclusion in business and how you create transformational experiences to better your employees’ lives and your company’s performance and how we can all work together over the long-term to make sure this time is different in terms of creating a truly diverse and inclusive world. Our show is produced by Goal 17 Media, and you can find more information about Michael and Reggie in the show notes for this episode. Make sure you subscribe to Lead With We on Apple, Google, or Spotify, and do share it with your friends and colleagues. And you can also watch our episodes on YouTube WeFirstTV. And if you’d like to learn more about purposeful branding, checkout wefirstbranding.com where we have lots of free resources and case studies. I’ll see you on the next episode. And until then, let’s all lead with we.