Last month, LeadWomen hosted a conference in Kuala Lumpur on Rethinking Leadership and Tapping into the Subconscious. LeadWomen are doing really important work, encouraging greater awareness in decision making for women in leadership and in the boardroom. I was delighted to be asked to participate in and speak at the conference.
Here’s my 5 learnings from this conference:
- Never in history have our brains worked so hard. We’re bombarded with 34GB of data on a daily basis – enough to shut down a laptop in a week.
- Mitigating data overload requires processing information through filters and mental shortcuts. And, guess what – these filters are filled with unconscious bias.
- Unconscious bias operates at the subconscious level – we don’t know that we have them – which makes it difficult to address. None of us like hearing the word – bias – or thinking we we have any sort of bias. Most of us don’t hear the word ‘’unconscious” we only hear bias.
- Many of us believe we’re rational decisions makers but often we don’t know what we don’t know. Yet, we often rely on instinct or intuition which is rarely impartial.
- Tapping into our subconscious requires self-awareness and the ability to slow down to make conscious decisions.
As the conference highlighted, “Unconscious bias does not just affect the decisions that we make, but it also affects how we communicate with people every day. This bias can unknowingly shape an organization’s culture, which if not made aware, will hinder inclusivity at all levels.
