Episode 27: How Can Technology Reduce Bias in the Workplace? (Interview with Dr. Julia Shaw, Research Associate at UCL)
Our memory can lead us astray in an astonishing number of ways, including by causing us to remember things we think we've done, but actually haven't.
My guest on today's episode of the podcast, is Dr. Julia Shaw.
The psychologist, honorary research associate at University College London, author of two fascinating books, The Memory Illusion and Evil and co-founder of artificial intelligence-based reporting tool Spot, Julia is best known for her work in the areas of memory and criminal psychology. It's a fascinating topic, and as you'll learn, one that has significant relevance in the workplace.
You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation, Julia and I discuss:
The role of unconscious bias and the dangers of people using this as an excuse for their far more visible biases
The application of memory science in the workplace, and how our memories can let us down, particularly in stressful situations
How technology and analytics is helping improve reporting on episodes of harassment or discrimination in the workplace
We look into the crystal ball and ponder what the role of HR will be in 2025
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Gapsquare, to learn more visit www.gapsquare.com/accelerate.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Julia Shaw, author, scientist, and co-founder at Spot to the Digital HR Leaders podcast and video series. Welcome to the show Julia.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Great to be here.
David Green: Great to have you, can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to yourself and the various things that you're involved with.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Sure. So I am a memory scientist at UCL, and I do research in particular on the fallibility of memory. So when we get things wrong, and how that links in with bad behaviour. So basically, crime and memory. So things like eye witness testimony, things like people who are telling stories about crimes that they've seen or that they've experienced or other negative emotional experiences with the way that we normally talk about it.
And so, so that's my background. And as part of that, I've written some books. I've written a book called The Memory Illusion, where I talk about false memories in everyday life, but also in extreme cases. And I wrote a book on Evil, called The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Sides. And that's really exploring the deep dark lurking things inside each and every one of us and how they can manifest and how we can prevent it from manifesting.
David Green: We'll definitely come back to that a bit later in the conversation.
Dr. Julia Shaw: And then the final sort of hat that I wear is that of co-founder at Spot, which is a tool to report harassment and discrimination, which kind of marries my two interests.
And so, it helps prevent, hopefully, bad behaviour in workplaces. It helps people deal with harassment and discrimination when it happens and report it better using evidence-based interviewing from memory science. So, it all comes together in Spot.
David Green: Great. We've got plenty to talk about then. So, we both spoke at the CogX Future of Work show back in June, I think it was on a particularly bad summer's day in the UK where it was pouring with rain.
So we had to speak with no electricity
Dr. Julia Shaw: It was pouring through the roof. It was such a storm that it broke through the roof.
David Green: I was wearing a coat and I was still cold. But you spoke a lot about, bias. And I think this is very relevant to the workplace, obviously. And I think it'd be great to talk about some of the highlights from that now. As I think it's something listeners would be particularly interested in. So, what are the different types of bias that we would typically come across in the workplace?
Dr. Julia Shaw: I think one of the things that I often dislike about the conversation around bias is actually the term unconscious bias. And that's one of the things I was critiquing in this talk is the idea that I think it almost lets us off the hook, this idea that I don't have control over all my biases.
They're unconscious. I don't even know they're there. And so, if I act in an inappropriate way towards other people. It's not really my fault, it's my sort of broken brain. And I know that that's not always how it's used, but I think it can be used that way. And I think that's really problematic. And so, we need to be very careful because a lot of biases are actually pretty conscious.
Like, you know you don't like people, and you might not know exactly what it is, but you might even know exactly what it is. And you might have very obvious stereotypes
So I guess with bias, I'm always careful that we don't overuse this word and we don't try to categorise things too much into these sort of specific biases. But one of the fallacies certainly that I like, which is related to a bias, is what's called the perfectionist fallacy. And so, one thing that we see with, this talk around biases, everything from racism to gender-based assumptions to assumptions based on pregnancy and sexuality and sex. I mean, with all of these, I think one of the core things we need to do is change the conversation, change it towards being allies and with perfectionism I think people are worried that they're not going to do enough, that they'd rather do nothing than not do enough, or rather do nothing than do it wrong. And so what we see is that some organisations are trailblazers and they're going for it, and they're implementing techniques to tackle these issues and tackle these biases.
And other people are just saying, well, they're all unconscious biases. I can't do anything about it anyway. And so they do nothing. It's called the perfectionist fallacy is if I can't do it perfectly, I shouldn't do it at all. I think it's devastating. So we have to be very careful with that.
David Green: And I think this probably links to technology. So, a lot of people say, oh, we can't use AI because, you know, there'll just be bias that's inherent in it. But of course, that's only if you train the AI badly with the bias that's already there. What do you feel the role of technology could be in reducing and hopefully removing bias?
Dr. Julia Shaw: I mean, technology has tremendous potential to remove a lot of human bias. It's of course not perfect, and it's great that we're having a conversation about how human biases manifest in technological biases in various ways, but that doesn't mean that we can't absolutely overcome a huge plethora of these things, by using tech, by using things that can't judge, that don't care about, what colour someone's skin is, or where someone comes from.
And, I mean, that's why we built spot. Is specifically because interviewers in HR situations where someone is coming to them to report harassment or discrimination, they bring assumptions with them about things like truthfulness and what that looks like about assumptions about the particular individual or their relationship, the known relationships that they have with others in the workplace.
A bot doesn't do that. A bot just asks the questions it's told to ask, regardless of who you are and exactly the right way every single time. And it records it and it's much more neutral. So I think, yes, it can't overcome it entirely, but it can be a massive leap towards gathering better information and that better data can be used to make better decisions.
David Green: Let's say you've got someone that's a poor performer coming to tell you about reporting harassment of someone who's very senior in the organisation, very well respected, a very high performer.
Then I guess the human that may be interviewing them would immediately might not believe just because the person's a low performer, which has absolutely nothing to do with it whatsoever. Of course. Whereas the technology doesn't have that problem.
Dr. Julia Shaw: I think bias is almost seen as a dirty word, and everybody has biases.
And this is why we need to accept them and we need to then figure out how to overcome them. And that's where technology can help. And so it's not that you're bad at your job because you have biases. I mean, sure, you should be working on them ideally. But ideally you're using tools to circumvent them because we're humans.
And so that's where we need to be. Just recognise that and we are going to make assumptions about people. We are going to have that, you know, I like the boss more maybe, or I feel like I'm committed. The boss is paying my salary. And so of course we have alliances. Of course, we have these natural tendencies.
And yeah, I think it takes a lot of courage almost to accept that, I think, and to then actually say, yes, I need some help with this.
David Green: So Julia, you're a memory scientist, which sounds as cool as it is fascinating to me. Anyway. So what does a memory scientist actually do?
Dr. Julia Shaw: So a memory scientist is someone who studies memory. And so as a scientist and in particular for me, it means that I go in and I look at memories and fallibility of memory.
So I mostly look actually at false memories. So I look at when you misremember things, you think that you remember something that never actually happened. And so my entry point into this was actually false confessions. And so people who are wrongly accused of crimes and then they actually confess to the crime, even though they're innocent and potentially learned in prison or have other negative consequences.
And so the question is, how does that happen? And for me, it wasn't just how does it happen in terms of coercion? Because I could, you know, if I torture you or if I do enough terrible things to you, eventually you'll tell me you did it, whatever it is. But with some people, there's this curious phenomenon that they actually do what's called, internalise the confession.
And they actually believe that they did this bad thing. And so for me that was fascinating because I think it's such a fundamental piece of our identities on this memory. Who am I? What have I done? What kinds of things am I capable of? And so as part of my PhD, I did a study, which ended up getting... So it sort of went viral and now it's been cited in international criminal courts. It's been absolutely phenomenal what the study has done. And what I did is I implanted false memories of committing crime into undergraduate students. And so I had people who had never had police contact. I had them come into my lab under false pretenses. So they thought that they were there for an emotional childhood memory study. They knew I'd contacted their loved ones beforehand, and that those loved ones had told me information about them. So I had insight or personal information about their lives.
And then I spoke to them about a true memory first. That happened about seven years ago. So when they were about 13, 14, and then I asked them about a false one, and I said, hey, so you remember that time, that instant when you were in contact with the police and the police called your parents. That's how they found out. And you assaulted someone, you assaulted someone with a weapon, or you stole something depending on the condition. And then, three weeks later, three interviews later, you would be telling me all about it. And so 70% of my sample what they did, they had these multisensory, they're called false memories.
So they were telling me how it felt, how it smelled, how it tasted, why they were there, who they assaulted, what the police looked like. and there's tremendous amount of details. And so what that means though is I, obviously there was ethical approval. There was a whole framework for that.
There were debriefed at the end. So of course, hope as much as possible, these memories were undone, but what it was important for was to show how easily using leading and suggested interview practices and some trust you can get people to believe a completely fabricated past even one that's really negative for their own sense of self-worth.
And so from that, basically what I learned even more than before was the importance of asking the right questions. And so that's what I now do. So I now teach people how to ask the right questions. That's what it built into spot. It's also what I do with police, military and I train, especially for large investigations, I train people on how to ask the right questions of witnesses and suspects so that they get high quality information and they don't contaminate memories on the way.
David Green: So, let's link it to the workplace, because obviously that's where you're applying some of this skill and the knowledge that you have.
What is the role of memory science in the workplace? And if you're able to bring it to life for a couple of examples that'd be great.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Yeah, for me, the most important piece is again, getting high quality information. So just like a police investigation, if you have an HR investigation, you want as high quality information as possible and you want the evidence that you're using whatever it is to be high quality.
And now high quality from a memory standpoint, because often in workplaces or in police settings, you rely heavily on people's memories. So like a significant part of your evidence, perhaps all of it is individuals' memories. And so the question is, how do you know if these memories are any good?
And then what do you do with them and how do you preserve them? And so how do you know if they're any good? The first question is basically, ideally they're contemporaneous. So ideally the event happened relatively recently. Ideally they haven't spoken with too many other people, especially other people who were there because that can contaminate.
Ideally, there's all these ideals, but what that means is ideally you're recording on your own immediately after something happens. What happened? On your own, not to a human, ideally. And so this is why we created spot is because you can do it immediately on your own. You can log into the chatbot, you can record it, and you can make a timestamp PDF, which was exactly when you remember this information and it asks you non-leading neutral questions. So that's the other piece of it, is the questions. And so in an HR setting, I continue to be surprised that most people who are HR leaders even don't actually ever receive training on.... they receive training on processes, but they don't receive training on memory. And I think it's really difficult to consistently ask appropriate questions without understanding how memory works. So just like I would never train the police and just say, here, do this, here's a list of things. That's really difficult because people are going to go off script, they're going to get it wrong because they don't know what it is that they're getting wrong until you teach them some of the core concepts of the flexibility and that sort of recombining of information.
So I guess in terms of the workplace, I wish that people were trained on memory. I wish that we, focus on this. I think sometimes it's seen as like truth detecting, which is wrong. That's the wrong premise. Like you shouldn't ever be going into a situation going is this person lying?
That's not a useful starting point for anything basically. Assume that people aren't out to hurt each other. Assume that people are there because even frankly, even if they are, if something is distorted, if someone has gone out of their way to go to HR, something is wrong, right? Like you don't just randomly show up at HR and say, I need to tell you something.
They're unhappy and they need some help. And so for me, I think it's training people on memory, or at least having them understand or using something like spot in the first instance to gather information can really help.
In terms of examples, I mean, one of the key things that, even in criminal investigations, so people who are trained on what's called the cognitive interview, which is best practices in memory interviewing, which is also the foundation for spot.
When people who are trained, police officers in the UK who are trained in the cognitive interview are told to not interrupt people. Now you've been very good actually, but most people, even when given this instruction, especially doing what's called free recall phase. So the, tell me everything you can remember, which is always the first question you should ask, tell me everything you can remember.
People interrupt on average, someone every seven seconds, seven seconds. And we know that interruptions are a huge barrier to disclosing information. And so in HR settings, we know that this is also likely to happen. And in research that we've done where we compared our bots to real people who are being trained in a Masters course to be HR professionals, they got way fewer details. They got way lower quality because they weren't necessarily asking things in the right order and they were interrupting people too much. And that stops people from telling their story and it stops you from getting the details.
David Green: I guess with an innocuous incident that you might think, oh, I really don't want to go to HR about this because then it's on record whereas spot allows you to record the innocuous incident, you might think it's innocuous, but if this perpetrator has done lots of other of these things then this can be flagged up to HR, even if you're doing it anonymously, and they can say, ok there's a pattern of behaviour here from this perpetrator. So now we might want to actually investigate this a little bit more. Whereas all those people hadn't reported it to HR, you wouldn't know.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Correct. So, we found early on that one of the main barriers to reporting is fear of retaliation, which unfortunately is often justified because people do get retaliated against quite often. And so the only way that a lot of people will ever report, according to a vast amount of literature on this now is by having an anonymous option and people, often the HR professionals often get scared. They go, either they say, well, we have something like that. We have this whistle blowing hotline. Then I ask them how many people use it? And they say, nobody. It's very much a tickbox exercise.
I don't even want to get started on that, just because you're not hearing about things doesn't mean they're not happening. And again, it's not failure that you're hearing about things, that's a success. People are brave enough to come to you, you can then help them and that means they trust you.
David Green: So Julia, we're going to talk about the anonymity.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Yeah. So the anonymity piece for us, again, we identified very early on as a major barrier to reporting, and it makes sense. And you're absolutely right that, especially for smaller incidents to some extent. but even for severe incidents, people often feel this isn't worth it or the potential retaliation isn't worth it.
But if you give them the option of anonymity, what they can do is they can give you a heads up. And so you're not getting all the details. You're not getting necessarily even the exact perpetrator's name, but you're getting sort of a flag that in management, there's an issue with, I don't know, race discrimination.
Or in this particular situation, someone is bullying someone. And, if you hear enough of those anonymous reports, even if you just hear two, frankly, even if you just hear one, you should probably be paying attention. But if you hear multiple, certainly you might go, Oh, I can triangulate this. And you can then also respond to those people who've come forward and say, we've had, you know, three similar accounts. Would you now be willing to identify yourself? And so you can work with that limited data, but it's basically you have two options right now as an organisation. One is you have no idea what's happening, or two, you allow for anonymity and you have some idea what's happening, and I know what I would want for my company.
I mean, I don't want to be completely in the dark. I don't want to have some random press scandal suddenly because I didn't know what was going on in my company. I'd much rather have people feel safe, even if it's anonymously come to me.
David Green: So let's talk about how spot works. So let's say something's happened.
How do I actually use spot and report an incident?
Dr. Julia Shaw: Yeah. So you would go to talktospot.com and so that's the main landing page. Or if you're with an organisation that works with us, you would go through your custom link, which is usually all over the HR site and is sent out through regular emails so that people are reminded cause we all know that there's tool overload and people need to be reminded that certain tools exist. And you can do that by also packaging information. So this is the nice thing about things like harassment and discrimination education is you can build in, yso we have these micro education videos, we call them, or in, you know, one minute, what is harassment it is illustrated and it's really nice.
And so you can say, hey, little bits to help you digest this information. And once every couple of months you get an email, which gives you something to learn. Plus, here's a link if you want to report anything. So it's a nice way I think of doing it. It doesn't feel too intrusive and the company will sometimes ask, is me having this kind of tool in my company is that some sort of admission of guilt? And I think that is absolutely the wrong way to look at this. And so we found universally that organisations that have implemented spot, trust in the organisation has gone up because it shows your employees, even if they've never been harassed, that a) you take this seriously if it were to happen. And to those who have experienced these situations, you might actually listen, like there's a way to speak up that feels safe. So, you'd go to talktospot.com either to the bespoke link or just there's a free version as well for employees. And then you go through the chat. So first it gives you some FAQ so you can learn, we can build some trust basically. You can learn about how spot works, what we do with your data, and then it takes you into a chatbot. And so it feels like WhatsApp a bit, but it's with a bot, not with a human. And we make that very clear and we think that's one of the key benefits. And people say that's one of the key benefits is they don't feel like they're being judged.
And it's a neutral non-leading nonjudgmental interview based entirely on memory science. And so it's very neutral. It's not your therapist, you're not there for emotional support. You're entirely there to factually record what happened. But that in and of itself can be a really nice thing. So you go through, it asks you these questions and it uses natural language processing, which is like baby AI, so it recognises certain words and phrases that you have used as the employee and it pulls them out and says, you mentioned this. Can you tell me more about that? And that's best practice to get more details. And so you go through it, you create a timestamp PDF, that PDF you can then decide to keep. Or save in your dashboard.
And so, if things escalate then, and this is like most people, I'd say not as many as we thought. It's like 40% of people stop there initially at least, and save it. And that makes sense, because if you're not sure if something might escalate. You can just keep it. And I mean the person might apologise the next day and it might be resolved or it my escalate and a week later, you know, something worse happens or something worse happens.
And then you go, okay, now I've got these three reports, I'm going to send them off to HR. And so it makes sense that that's how people are using it. And it's nice for people. They need that power, I think. Otherwise it goes too quick and you go, oh, but I wasn't ready. And so then when you are ready, you can send it to your employer. You can do it anonymously or not. Again, there we find about just over 50% choose to not be anonymous and just under 50% choose to be anonymous, that sort of depends on the person, and then HR can respond regardless. And so even if the person is anonymous, it sends them back into a custom chat that you've selected, asking again, evidence-based questions.
So even if you're in a rush, as an HR person, you just select the questions, sends them back, they answer more questions, get back to you. It's all managed in the dashboard. In the dashboard we also have our training that you can manage and send out. We have our educational videos that you can send out automatically and that's the tool. That's how it works.
David Green: And you set up spot in 2017 is that right?
Dr. Julia Shaw: Two and a half years ago. So it was about four months before the me too hashtag took off, so it was when the Uber scandal happened and we were so appreciative that people were talking about this issue though, or related issues and our tool is for all kinds of harassment and discrimination, not just sexual but it's absolutely amazing what's happened.
David Green: The world's changed really.
Dr. Julia Shaw: It really has. And there's laws coming in now that are, you know, making it mandatory that we can pay more attention to these things that we get better options, that we do better training. It's wonderful
David Green: When we were preparing last week you said that that actually two and a half years on. People aren't using the tool how you thought they would use it, and you've dug into the data a little bit more and you found out some quite interesting things, which I guess is helping you shape the future path.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Oh, certainly for me, I can't speak for my cofounders, but my original impression based on the literature, so it wasn't totally just guessing, but based on the literature, I sort of thought if we can crack this anonymity piece. We've got it, and we'll get sort of a 10 X reporting. So like not more harassment, but more reporting.
Right. And because it was so dramatically under reported. I mean, if you look, I mean the most conservative, so the highest figures for these things say that about 30% of incidents are reported, but a lot of numbers are closer to like five. And so I mean, the overwhelming majority, you're just not hearing about.
And so I thought, well, great, if we build anonymity, if we can make it clear that people have control over their own data for as long as they want, boom, solved. Not enough. Turns out that is only one part of the problem. And you do get more reports, you get different kinds of information using that, but it does not go up 10 X, it goes up about 50% it goes up a little bit basically, and you get some that you probably wouldn't have caught before.
But what's really key is building trust in the organisation, and this is something that we can't do for you. We can help you with, but we can't do for you. But with things like training and education and basically much bigger campaigns, which is now what we're helping with. That's how you can build trust.
Plus you need leadership buy in. And that's something that's again, something we can't do, but you can do. You need to show that this again isn't a tick box exercise. We actually want to know, we want a culture of discourse. This doesn't mean you're blaming people. It's not a call out culture, you're not policing each other.
You're just making sure that when things go wrong, you stick together. That's it. And that's a beautiful culture that we should all be fostering. But you need people to repeatedly say that and to actually live that from leadership. Otherwise it's never going to happen because a company is a direct mirror of its CEO and its leadership board.
And if they're not like that, it's never going to be like that at the company. And so that's why we built out all these other pieces is because we're hoping that by doing things like micro surveys, we get much bigger data. We get people who wouldn't go out of their way to go to HR, but we get people as part of training.
And again, just building cultural pieces. It's all so crucial.
David Green: Good. Now let's talk about the two books. So first I'm going to ask, I really want to talk about evil, but we're going to start with memory illusion. If people listening to this podcast want to find out more about Dr. Julia Shaw and the stuff that you publish.
Start with the memory illusion. What can readers expect to learn from investing time in reading that book?
If you read the memory illusion or you listen to it on audible, it's come out in lots of languages too. So if English isn't your first language, there are options, but the most likely thing you'll get is an existential crisis.
So I think that's step one. it basically makes you hopefully doubt whether any of the memories you have are accurate. But then it also, it's soothing to some extent because you go, oh, I thought it was just me who was misremembering or forgetting things or bad with names. And it helps offer some explanations for these kinds of errors that we make on a regular basis as human beings and shows that even the most amazing minds in terms of memory in the world that we know of, what are called highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. So HSAM, that even they have false memories. And so nobody's immune. And again, this is probably this core piece of being human and it's probably overall beneficial rather than harmful.
Dr. Julia Shaw: But I think for me it's a really identity challenging book in a good way. Like, I think everybody should have an identity crisis at least once a year. So really think like, who am I, what am I? And I think it's a real call to live in the present because the past is mostly fiction. And so it's a call to live forward looking rather than backward looking, which I think can, in and of itself be quite freeing.
David Green: Well, we're recording this podcast very close to a general election in the UK and Id be very interested if you did this memory science on some of our politicians. I'd also be even more interested if you did your study around evil with some of our politicians, without calling out any particular colours although they might have blonde hair, what can readers expect to learn from evil?
Dr. Julia Shaw: Evil is, so my books in general focus a lot on the reader. So it's always an exploration of yourself most, but it's always going on to sort of more extreme cases. And so with evil as well, it's a manifesto against the word evil. It's a manifesto against monsterising people and saying, those people over there, they are evil. And I am good because obviously I am always good, whoever I am.
And so it's challenging that and it's saying, no, we're all hypocrites. We all do things that are unethical, even in our own moral compass. Like, why do I eat meat, I mean, that is completely against... I shouldn't do it, but I do it and so it's questions around why that happens, how we can be competitive people, if you will, but by using really extreme case studies and then sort of zooming in, zooming out. And so you get things from serial killers to. I mean, Hiltler is, in fact, in there, I do sort of a thought experiment where I break down Hitler's brain and some neuroscience. And then I move up to things like compliance and social things and business settings. And there's a whole chapter on tech because I think a book on evil that doesn't have a chapter on tech right now is immediately outdated. I mean, cybercrime is massive. And so, and then trolling and political hacking, I mean all of these things, probably the biggest threats to humanity right now are online. And so we need to understand that as well. And so the question is sort of why do we all, what can lead us all to do terrible things?
Why are we already doing terrible things? And what, if anything, is the difference between us and really extreme cases.
David Green: And have you done a study on leaders and their propensity to maybe do more bad things? I'm talking about CEOs here as well because there's a, it's quite a lazy comment and it might be true that a lot of CEOs are narcissists or pyschopaths?
Dr. Julia Shaw: So statistically likely to be psychopaths. Compared to the general population. One of my chapters is actually called snakes in suits, which is the corporate crime chapter. And it talks a bit about, it's actually a chapter, it's a title from a famous book written by Dr Robert Hare, who was actually the person who coined the modern version of psychopathy.
So he created the checklist we use, and this was a couple of decades ago now that he wrote this. And, people who are cutthroat, which in some business settings is useful and maybe don't have as much empathy, sort of functional psychopaths, if you will, and aren't off committing crime because lots of psychopaths don't commit crime. They might well be your boss and, they might well be not treating humans the way that other humans treat each other. But even with the word psychopath, or narcissist too, I mean, narcissism, there's two different kinds. So there's, narcissism, which comes from a deep insecurity, which is what we normally think it is.
And there's narcissism because you think you're great, which is different. So a teenager posting a selfie on Instagram going look at my cute hair can come from either, but if it's actually coming from, I want to share this, I look cute today. That's great. That's fine. They're not more likely to be aggressive. They're not likely to be nasty. They're not going to be terrible leaders, but if it's coming from insecurity, that's where you get viciousness. That's basically where trolls come from as far as I understand. And that's where you get the dark side of narcissism. And so all of these things need to be unpicked a bit more so that we can use them and understand them. I think on a better level.
David Green: Without getting on the political side? We've probably covered a couple of really good examples of not that great narcissists who have very big jobs on the world stage at the moment.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Certainly. I mean saying things like that you want to be a leader because they don't build statues of journalists.
I mean, there's so many things that point to narcissism being unfortunately a core feature of quite a few politicians, not just now, but always same as I'm sure royalty or other versions of leaders in the past. So that throughout human history, I'm sure this has been an issue. But what matters is also, going back to business and organisations is to understand structures and how power can corrupt and you can create structures where dehumanising others becomes the norm and where things like harassment or discrimination flourish because we're not looking out for each other because we're not in this together. We're all in it for ourselves. That's a culture that you are creating and you have control over as HR, but also as leadership in general. And so. That's, I think where we need to pay real attention is making sure that we don't forget the humanity behind numbers. Because it's really easy to have enough tiers to evil, it's not my responsibility. It's this person or that person instructed me to do it I don't have a choice. You always have a choice. You can't outsource your morality, you shouldn't outsource your morality. And so I think that's where structures matter. And you as an individual should always remember I think, what does my job actually represent? Who am I representing? Is this in line with my moral compass? And how do I make it more in line with me?
David Green: Well, we could probably talk about this all day cause it's an absolutely fascinating topic and I'm definitely learning a lot, in our conversation. But we do have to start to wrap up.
This leads on to the question we ask all our guests on the show, and I'd be really interested how you answer this actually.
What do you think the role of the HR function will be in 2025 which is only five years' time now?
Dr. Julia Shaw: I think in 2025 HR leaders are going to be utilising more technology even more than they already are, and that they're going to be using this to overcome some of the fundamental biases that everybody brings into HR settings and into workplaces in general.
And I think it's going to overall have an absolutely revolutionary impact on workplaces, on people's ability to speak up, on amplifying voices that we've never been able to hear before. And I think that that combined with a focus on inclusion and diversity, which luckily we're seeing tremendously as a movement right now.
I think we'll start seeing the payoffs. So I think in five years, those organisations who've been trailblazers now will really start seeing monetary and cultural payoffs, and they'll be thriving compared to their competitors. And so I think that is my hopeful vision for 2025.
David Green: Yeah, and I think you're right.
I think we're seeing more and more now the business value of inclusive and diverse organisations. And I think some, unfortunately with some people, even though it's clearly the right thing to do, I think the only way to get some leaders in some organisations to actually change is to show them the business value of it
Dr. Julia Shaw: And start funding women and people of colour.
And the fact that less than 2% of funding goes to female led companies is frightening. Get it together people. it's bizarre to me that, we don't see the obvious and correct calculations and go, well, obviously we should be investing in these people who've been under invested in before because they have all this potential that we haven't tapped into.
And now there's this treasure trove that we can actually go into.
David Green: They represent 50% of the human race so why wouldn't you invest..
Dr. Julia Shaw: So yeah. So hopefully I think people will get it together and see this as a real business case and drive up better future companies.
David Green: So thank you for being the guest on the show. Julia, how can people stay in touch with you via social media? And obviously we'll provide links to the books and some of the Ted talks that you've done as well when we publish this podcast.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Sure. So I'm on twitter @drjuliashaw.com. So just that Dr. Julia Shaw, I'm pretty consistent with my brand. So my LinkedIn is also Dr Julia Shaw. My website is also drjuliashaw.com. and, generally if you Google me, you should be able to find some videos and other things that I've talked about.
Including some political videos, especially when we were trying to make Britain great again. I had a lot to say about that.
David Green: I'm surprised we haven't heard that line during the election.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Yes.
David Green: Dr Julia Shaw. Thank you very much for being a guest on the show. It's been a pleasure.
Dr. Julia Shaw: Thank you so much.