What is going on? Unveiling Workplace Bias, with guest Buki Mosaku

Sep 19 2023 • 33 mins

How can we look at unconscious bias in the workplace from a different perspective, so that we can address it more effectively?

Buki Mosaku is the founder of DiverseCity Think Tank, workplace bias expert, and author of ‘I Don’t Understand: Navigating Unconscious Bias in the Workplace’. We talk with him about what’s working and what isn’t in terms of addressing workplace bias.

His big eye-opener message: rather than a one-sided, siloed approach that splits people into camps, choose a multidirectional perspective.

In this conversation, we dive into navigating the inevitability of workplace bias acknowledging that we all have bias. Every human brain has bias. Typically, people and organisations try to compensate for its negative impact, mitigating behaviours to reduce the impact of bias with change programmes and policies, and that is fine. It’s also a unidirectional, top-down approach.

Since we’re all biased, and this is a dynamic going on all the time, Buki invites us to instead give all people the wherewithal to deal with bias in the moment, as and when it happens. Let’s not be reliant on ‘the people upstairs’ to change things to make people less impacted from bias.

Everyone has a role in changing bias.

Buki breaks bias down into

directional bias, happening towards you, because of an element of your identity (race, gender, age, socioeconomic background, disability, sexual orientation, etc.). And
reverse bias, where you may misinterpret unfavourable decisions towards you as driven by unconscious bias. Misinterpretation based on very real past experiences, on hearsay, and/or a wider narrative about people. Which can lead to an additional sense of disempowerment.

How do you distinguish actual biased decisions from misinterpretation – and how do you address it – without demeaning yourself or demonising the other person? Buki worked specifically on finding a way to address that sense of injustice towards you, and he proposes to create dialogue in a framework of dispassionate developmental inquiry: