Using creativity to make both meaning and money

GamesBeat: Megan, how do you think the industry needs to change the way it leads?

Gaiser: The past few years have told us that unconscious bias is holding us back. It’s the reason why, in my 15 years, I’ve seen a lack of diversity in leadership and in content. I left the gaming industry angry. I couldn’t believe how we’re still seeing the white guys running these companies—They’re not taking risks.

We’re all leaders. Leadership is behavior. By the way, unconscious bias is something we all suffer from, men and women. That’s a thing I believe has to be addressed, and I don’t think it can be addressed just by taking an unconscious bias course. That’s not bad, but it’s a band-aid. Or now they’re using quotas in some places. That’s another band-aid. It’s making the end more important than the means.

Above: Speech by William Wulf on the importance of diversity in engineering.

Image Credit: William Wulf

GamesBeat: We’ve made a leap in our panel topic, from creativity to diversity and inclusivity. Is that what you’re saying, that creativity is closely connected to diversity and inclusivity?

Gaiser: Integrating creativity into leadership is the answer to genuinely welcoming diverse people and perspectives. It’s using all of our senses, not just the literal, linear, and logical way of thinking. Creativity takes courage. Taking a risk takes courage. Also, creativity is the most important skill set in the 21^st century, so it’s obviously the most important competitive advantage that leadership can employ. This is such an opportunity for transformation of companies, to help guide all leaders to tap into that creativity.

It’s good for everyone. It’s good for the industry. This industry has such an opportunity to become a beacon of inspiration. The last couple of years have been the opposite of that. Now is our chance to design things differently.

GamesBeat: This is a quote from William Wulf, who gave this speech on diversity to an engineering society. A lot of you may wonder: “We’re engineers. We’re programmers. We’re making games. Why do we need diversity? Why do we need to be particularly creative?” This quote is pretty on the mark about addressing that. He’s saying that the more diverse experience you bring to an engineering problem, the more likely your team is to come up with the elegant engineering solution.

Bernstein: That’s exactly it. A lot of these companies have all the firepower you need to bring diverse forces to the fold and make decisions that are better than they’ve made before. But their inability to listen to these voices, fully listen to them, give them a chance to speak—The suppression of these voices in a homogenous corporate culture keeps them from being expressed. That’s the downfall. The firepower is there. It’s just not being used.

Above: Roz Hudnell, the chief diversity officer at Intel, has been at the company 19 years.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: I didn’t come up with this myself. I interviewed the chief diversity officer at Intel, Roz Hudnell. She says that she goes into every meeting with her engineers taking this quote, in order to try to convince them, as Intel has seriously been doing in the past year, that they need to bring more diverse engineering talent into the company in order to ensure that the company stays creative and leads in the future. The world’s biggest chipmaker is on board with this particular notion.

Could you show us your exercise on unconscious bias?

Gaiser: This is a quick exercise. It takes a couple of minutes. If everybody could stand up and find your neighbor as a partner? We’ll do this too.

One of you is A and one of you is B. A’s job is to tell B the best idea you have, or something you care about, a cause, your husband, something you really care about. B, your job is to ignore or dismiss this person with every part of your being, body language and all. We’ll do this for about a minute. Does everybody have something they care about? Okay, go!

First of all, way to go, ignorers and dismissers. That was awesome!

Bernstein: Now we’ll flip. B, express your deepest, greatest idea, and A, completely dismiss it in any way possible. Criticize, criticize, criticize.

Gaiser: Next up, let’s switch roles again. A, you’re going to retell that same exciting idea. B, your job is to be fully present, to listen with every part of your being, and to respond to whatever it is they’re saying. We’ll do this for a minute. Go!

GamesBeat: I’m going to go out on a limb and say that listening is a good thing?

Gaiser: When I first did that exercise, I could remember how many times I’d been dismissed, ignored, or criticized completely. What I didn’t remember until I did the exercise was how many times I’d done that. It was a revelation. I was distracted. I was thinking about something else. Whatever. It just jarred me. Experientially, what I think all of us need to do is not just take an unconscious bias course or read a book. We need to take steps to transform ourselves one moment at a time.

In my time, girls were raised to defer to men and please men, only to end up in a leadership system that didn’t value us because they didn’t understand the complementary value we could bring. Boys, conversely, are taught to shut down their emotions at 13. No wonder we’re like ships in the night. It’s a human transformation that I believe needs to take place to genuinely welcome diverse people, perspectives, and products. Not just having quotas. It’s disingenuous. When people really feel valued, you feel that. That’s when they open up and the genius ideas, the crazy ideas come out.

Bernstein: By a show of hands, when this exercise happened, how many of you folks had that nagging feeling in the back of your head? “Wow, this has happened to me a lot.” And how many times, when you were being listened to and engaging and having that connection, that last part, how many of you felt you’ve also had that experience with somebody? How many of you have had that experience professionally? There you go.

The problem is, that experience, we relegate that to our personal lives. We want to be great listeners with husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends. But in a professional scenario we feel like we need to raise up a boundary between us and the rest of the world, and this culture has been created that’s not the most productive thing in the world.