Publicis Groupe - Make Some Room
Disrupting Diversity Training
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Project Overview:
Hidden biases lurk within every organization. Yet, despite good intentions, traditional, lecture-based diversity training programs are failing to affect real change. Seeing an opportunity to marry story, space, and technology in pursuit of more heartening outcomes, we designed an experiential intervention to help employees of a Publicis-owned marketing firm understand what bias feels like rather than just teaching them about it.
At the heart of the three-part workshop is an immersive experience devoted to making the invisible visible. Audio-based stories from real employees plus beacon technology turn an office into an interactive story-scape. Participants encounter jarringly candid accounts of bias––as experienced and voiced by their peers––in the spaces where the stories actually might have happened. The experience serves as an emotional catalyst for subsequent, facilitated group discussion, where we help participants unpack and process their emotions and ultimately round the corner from awareness and empathy to actions they can take in their lives.
My Role:
As the content lead, I gathered and edited the first-person stories that make the workshop so powerful. This involved soliciting employees to share their personal experiences of bias and then making them comfortable enough to let me record them. I also helped design the workshop experience, an incredible challenge which involved trying to change people’s hearts and minds in just three hours––and then packaging up a purposely intimate, bespoke experience to scale across a 20,000-person organization. During the pilot phase, I facilitated the workshop in a handful of cities around the world, leading groups of 18-20 (including C-level agency leadership) through the experience and iterating on their feedback.
“Make Some Room” became an official Learning & Development offering within Publicis Groupe and has been adapted for use in multiple countries outside the U.S., including India. The project has been honored by Digiday, the American Advertising Federation, Fast Company, and SEGD.
Immersive, first-person audio: Workshop participants told us that bearing witness to the private hurts of their coworkers while the normal workday proceeded, obliviously, around them was surreal and emotionally heightened the listening experience.
The physicality of emotion: We placed stories not only in spaces where they might have happened but also where we could use the surrounding “topography” to simulate the emotional conditions of the story. For example, here, a tale of feeling small, isolated, and powerless.
Eliciting empathy: We found that the more literally we could make people step into the shoes of the speaker (in this case, by sitting down), the more deeply they were able to connect with the story’s content.
Making the invisible visible: After listening to each clip, workshop participants were asked to name what the speaker might have been feeling. We plotted their responses on a giant floor plan of the office to illustrate the unseen emotions that clutter our everyday physical and psychic space, preventing us from seeing each other clearly.
Workshop Participant Feedback
“I’ve never experienced a workshop so powerful and so moving...
I am grateful to you and to SapientRazorfish for giving me this opportunity to open my heart, and for encouraging me to strive to be a better, kinder, and more thoughtful person in my work and interactions with my colleagues.”
“It was therapeutic telling my story and knowing it was heard in a new light.”
“The most compelling part was the mind shift that I have experienced—and I continue to be surprised by the sustained level of awareness I carry with me about the unconscious bias that exists in me and others.”
“At a time when morale skews low, it was incredibly validating and inspiring to participate in our company’s investment in and commitment to the diversification of employees, experiences and perspectives."