In this engaging episode, Dr. Kirk Adams sits down with Paolo Gaudiano, Founder & Chief Scientist at Aleria to unpack how measuring day-to-day workplace experiences, rather than headcounts or vague culture scores, translates inclusion into business outcomes. Gaudiano traces his path from computational neuroscience and complexity modeling to a 2015 "lightbulb moment" that led him to build simulations and tools showing how inclusion lifts productivity and retention, and how focusing on diversity alone can spark backlash. He outlines the premise of his 2024 book Measuring Inclusion: Higher Profits and Happier People, Without Guesswork or Backlash, and makes the practical case for aligning inclusion with financial performance rather than sentiment.

Together they dig into method and evidence: an anonymous platform that captures specific incidents interfering with success, tagged by experience categories (e.g., respect, advancement, compensation) and sources (policy, leadership, managers, peers, clients), then linked to satisfaction, productivity, and attrition, quantified with an "impact calculator." They explore turnover and productivity costs (from months of salary at entry level to years at senior ranks), human-factor risks in cybersecurity, and simple fixes (structured reviews, better meetings) that benefit everyone, often disproportionately helping disabled employees and women. Adams adds historical data points (DuPont; Walgreens) and closes with ways to engage Gaudiano's work (Aleria, LinkedIn, TED talk), a limited-time $0.99 Kindle promotion for the book, and a promise to reconvene for a part two on building true meritocracies.

TRANSCRIPT:

Podcast Commentator: Welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams, where we bring you powerful conversations with leading voices in disability rights, employment and inclusion. Our guests share their expertise, experiences and strategies to inspire action and create a more inclusive world. If you're passionate about social justice or want to make a difference, you're in the right place. Let's dive in with your host, doctor Kirk Adams.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Welcome, everybody, to Supercharge Your Bottom Line through Disability Inclusion, which is my live streamed webinar that I joyfully host every month. I am Doctor Kirk Adams, talking to you from my home office in Seattle. And really, the premise of this monthly session is how can organizations become better, stronger, more aligned with their missions and their values and their objectives by being intentionally inclusive of people with disabilities in their workforce, which falls under the umbrella of inclusion writ large. And today I am thrilled. I'll use that word thrilled to have Paolo Gaudiano with us. He's the chief scientist for Illyria. I became aware of Illyria when I was in my role as president and CEO at the American Foundation for the blind, and a blind friend and colleague, Sara Minkara, invited me to attend a virtual event that Illyria was hosting. And I signed up for the newsletter. And I've read faithfully ever since. And what what Paolo focuses on is measuring inclusion and creating true meritocracy. And I've been thinking a lot about meritocracy this year. Really catalyzed early in the year with the terrible mid-air collision between the military helicopter and a domestic airline flight over the Potomac. And some statements by President Trump in the immediate aftermath, really linking the accident to the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration was intentionally inclusive of people with disabilities in their applicant pool and making a pretty, pretty jarring connection between disability and incompetence. And the conversations I often have with employers center around how people develop strengths. And we develop strengths as human beings by overcoming challenges and living every day with a with an impairment or impairments which places a disabling situations allows us a blind person such as myself, a person with a significant disability to develop some really unique strengths in areas that are are great assets and a wonderful characteristics that people with disabilities can bring to an organization through being employed.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So when I read the Aleria newsletter and I read about creating true meritocracies and how to measure the impacts of inclusion there's a lot of resonance with me. And I had a chance to get on a call with Powell earlier in the year and, and talk to him about some of his, his prescient thinking several years ago about the, current backlash attack on Di, which which he saw coming, and the way that Paolo and Aleria are approaching, creating inclusive environments for the betterment of all, for the betterment of society. So I'm just I'm thrilled to have you with us, Paolo. I'd really like to hand you the talking stick, and you can take this conversation wherever, wherever it may lead you. And I happily chime in with a question or two as they arise to me, and then we'll give folks who are have joined us live an opportunity to ask questions, and then we'll, we'll let those who are viewing the recording know how best to get in touch with both of us toward the end. So, Paolo, I'm so glad you're with us here today. I've been anxiously awaiting this opportunity to learn from you.

Paolo Gaudiano: Thank you. Kirk. It's first of all, it's a real pleasure and honor to be here on the show with you. I I wish that I could say that I'd known you for all these years. I only found out about your work recently and found it to be quite amazing and inspiring. I am grateful to Sarah. Sarah is an amazing person. I attended one event that she did. That really the way that she talks about disability, the way that she essentially lives out what it means to be a person with a disability and yet to be able to be contributing to society in amazing ways was was quite an inspiration. So I'm particularly grateful that you made that connection through her. And I just want to start out by again, thank you, first of all, for an amazing introduction. It was it was quite, you know, quite heartwarming to hear all these wonderful, very positive comments from you. And I hope that I live up to that expectation now. I kind of feel like maybe I should just stop here and say goodbye and, you know, let your you know, your introduction work as a kind of the core of the show. But I do like to start out. I always like to acknowledge for those of you that are only listening, or for those of you that are not able to see me, I am a white man. I'm in my 60s. I like to joke that I look like I'm in my 30s, but I'm, you know, white hair. Well, let's call it gray hair and.

Dr. Kirk Adams: I call mine silver.

Paolo Gaudiano: But there you go. Mine. Mine is maybe slightly less silver than yours, but very cool. Thank you. And the I always like to point that out because I often when I, when I give presentations, I start by jokingly referring to myself as the white elephant in the room. And I have not only my white and male, but I happen to be cisgender heterosexual. I do not have any permanent disabilities. And I, you know, people wonder, what am I doing in diversity, equity and inclusion? And I'd like to briefly tell about the history of how I came into this space, which is a space that I've now been working in for ten years or so. Since 2015. I had actually been interested in Dei on the personal level, and I first became aware of some of the what I thought were very strange things in the United States when I first came here as a teenager, and I was from Italy, my native Italy, and I was exposed to some situations that made me realize that there was some very odd ways that people in this country behaved when it came to racial if you will, tensions. And so I was always interested in that. I was intrigued by the fact that there were people that were being mistreated because of their gender, their race, their sexual orientation, their disabilities.

Paolo Gaudiano: I always felt that that was wrong. And I felt that, you know, intuitively, it seemed wrong to me. But I always felt like, you know, what can I do? I'm not an activist. I'm just a white dude. And I would go to conference sessions on, you know, how do you get more people with disabilities into leadership roles or how do you, you know, create greater employment opportunities? Or how do you get more women into into more, you know, higher managerial roles? And I was always kind of struck by the difference between the individual experiences that people shared of things that happened to them because of their personal characteristics, and when it came to solutions They were talking about very vague, general things that we talk about things like, you know, how do we dismantle systemic racism? You know, how do we change the hearts and minds of corporate America? And one day in 2015, as I was sitting there literally thinking, you know, how can somebody close that gap between the individual level experiences and what happens at the organizational level? I had a light bulb moment where I realized that the work that I had been doing for virtually my entire career had been focused on exactly that, on quantifying the link between individual elements in a system and what happens to the system as a whole.

Paolo Gaudiano: And that actually began as an undergraduate, and then later in my in my master's degree and my PhD, I studied the brain. I studied computational neuroscience, among other things, which was really about building computer simulations that would help us understand how circuits in the brain can somehow collectively combine the power of individual neurons, which by themselves are not particularly powerful devices. And yet when you combine them, you can do amazing things like speaking and hearing and learning and moving. And so I learned how to connect the individual to the collective in a quantitative way. And then later I was a professor for almost ten years. Then I became an entrepreneur where I applied those same ideas to understand at the next level up, how do you get a lot of people in an organization to contribute to the success of the organization, or people in a city, or whether it's maybe it's a team or sports teams or, or highway, you know, drivers, you know, how do they contribute to traffic jams? And so when I started to get into Dei, it was because I thought that there may be an opportunity to quantify the benefit that companies would get by treating all their employees better. And I saw that as an opportunity. I got very excited. As I said, this was in 2015. I literally dropped everything else that I was doing and started to build some of these computer simulations and proved to myself very quickly that I was onto something exciting.

Paolo Gaudiano: And in particular, what excited me was that I always felt that even though I firmly believe in fairness and justice and I don't like I don't like inequalities. I don't like disparities that are to me, senseless. I also realize that for most corporate leaders, they are ultimately judged on how much money they make and whether or not you like it. I think they're trying to convince people that they should do the right thing is a dangerous thing to do, because even if they agree with you, the moment that there is a change in in the political headwinds or in the case, like in the last few months or several months, it's more like a tornado in the opposite direction. The fact is that people will kind of give up on any notions of doing the right thing if it's not aligned with their financial needs. And so I saw an opportunity to help individual organizations figure out how can you make more money by making your people happier. And so the first book that I wrote in 2024, which was the result of having worked for several years and developed this unique way of measuring inclusion, specifically has the title.

Paolo Gaudiano: So the title is Measuring inclusion and the subtitle is Higher Profits and Happier People. And then it says also without guesswork or backlash. And and I will say, since you talked about by being a bit prescient, I want to talk about the the reason why I specifically talked about not just higher profits and happier people, but also the guesswork and the backlash. So so the guesswork. And I was very adamant about including that in the subtitle, was to acknowledge the fact that this was not about, oh, let's try to do something. Let's sprinkle some magic dust and let's see what wonderful things will happen. It's really about building, essentially tools and collecting data that helps you to make very, very careful and very wise decisions that will actually help you without having to do a lot of guesswork. The backlash was because as you as you mentioned in passing during the introduction as early as 2018. So after a few years of working in this space, I had come to the conclusion that the single minded focus on diversity as the primary, if not the only yardstick to measure progress and to and to determine how companies were doing. I saw that as a as a really big mistake because I, I saw I had the realization that diversity is really kind of a state of being.

Paolo Gaudiano: It's the outcome of everything that happens in the company. And trying to fix diversity directly is a mistake. It's a little bit like walking in a cold house in the winter and deciding that you want to make the house warmer. You look at the thermostat, it says 50 degrees, so you light a match under the thermostat. Well, in the meantime, you know, the windows are drafty and the front door is wide open, the roof is leaking, and you might burn the house down. And unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. You know, I wrote an article in 2018, you know, in April of 2018, it was more than two years before before the murder of George Floyd. And we just said specifically, if companies continue to focus on diversity alone, it will cause backlash from white men complaining about reverse discrimination. And it may spread to other parts of society like affirmative action. And it's the only time in my life that I've actually made a prediction that came out to be correct. And unfortunately, unfortunately, it was a grim prediction. And and it was quite correct. So. So let me stop there. I know I threw a lot of material at you, but but I'd love to hear your thoughts and maybe any questions or comments that you have or things that you want me to touch up on?

Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. So there's a little bit of data around disability inclusion. There's not there's not a lot as far as bottom line results go. So DuPont did a longitudinal study for several decades tracking the performance of their employees, self-identified as disabled. So things like you know, lower absenteeism, lower turnover and better safety records and things like that. And then Anderson University in Anderson, South Carolina, doctor Jeffrey Moore and his PhD students for the past 17, 18 years have been tracking data from the Walgreens warehouse and distribution center there, which employs about 40% of their workforce. 40% of their the 550 employees are people with disabilities, primarily developmental disabilities, and they've tracked the positive business results. Again lower absenteeism, lower turnover, better safety record, better employee satisfaction, better customer perception. Better productivity. Those those things. But there's there's not a lot data to to support my, my ongoing conversations that people can improve their business results if they're more inclusive of people with the unique skills and strengths developed through living with disability. So you talk about measuring inclusion and you talked about the motivations around you put it very clearly making money. So could you talk a little bit about how we do that? How do we measure the impacts of of being inclusive in And organizations.

Paolo Gaudiano: Yeah. And actually, you I want to sort of build on something that you said, you know, when you were talking about the studies and you pointed out that there are not a lot of studies specifically that look at the financial benefits or the or the benefits of disabilities in particular. But the reality is that there is there is an interesting phenomenon, which is that I would argue that there are many aspects of work in general where often you see companies that are doing the right thing and they see positive results, and yet other people don't do it. And you kind of wonder why. And I think the reality is that when you see that something is happening in another company, you don't really know how that's going to translate into your own space. Right? Every company is like a unique ecosystem. And there's this fear that, well, just because it worked for this particular company, just because it worked for Walgreens, while my environment is different and my equipment is different and my culture is different, and I've seen that in other spaces, I've been working on a project that has to do with creating better working conditions for frontline workers. And there are some phenomenal examples of of work that shows real world case studies that show that if you treat your frontline workers better, they will actually not only outperform, but they create a superior financial return for your company. And yet people don't do it. And so I think that there is a there's a first observation, which is that it's maybe related to identity and whether, you know, does it have to do with disability.

Paolo Gaudiano: Does it have to do with race and ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation? But I think there's just a universal problem. And that was really sort of the key of what I, what I found when I was doing my research is that I found a way to go to a specific company and do two things. You know, one of them helped them to understand not just the fact that there are some people that are less satisfied or feel less included than others, but to help them understand exactly what is happening, what are the experiences, the very specific day to day experiences that happen in the workplace that cause them to be less satisfied, that cause them to be less included or feel less included, cause them to have less of a sense of belonging. And then I also was able to argue in a way very similar to what you said. I can basically show how if you have groups of people in your organization that are less satisfied than other groups. And we can show through our data that what we measure as inclusion. And I can come back and explain how we do that. But what we measure as inclusion is very, very highly correlated to self-reported satisfaction. So it's all of the factors that ultimately make you feel in the morning, like either you just don't want to get out of bed and you would rather, you know, stay home or conversely, make you skip out of bed because you're so excited about going to work.

Paolo Gaudiano: But so anyway, so what I, what I was able to do is to show how those factors of the level of satisfaction impacts the bottom line of a company through primarily through two pathways, if you will. You know, and you kind of hinted at them already. One of them is through productivity. If you have and and and productivity in its many facets, it could be absenteeism, but it could also be quality of work. It could be how many widgets you're creating at an hour, how many clients you're supporting in your sales department and things of that sort. But really, any level of productivity and those impact your top line. If you have people in your organization that are producing less than they could be, simply because they're not being treated the same way as another group, you're losing money. And then on top of that, if these people are less satisfied, we know that they will also depart. They're more likely to leave the company. Right. And and in fact, it's universally known that companies that have low levels of diversity take take any identity group. And you will find that if their level of diversity is low, that's always accompanied by lower levels of retention. And so you can actually put numbers on that. And we built a little calculator that's on our website where a company can enter the size of their workforce, they can enter their top line revenues, they can enter a couple of other very simple aspects of their business. And we can do a ballpark estimation of how much money they're losing today invisibly, simply because of the fact that they're treating some or they're allowing the experiences of some people in their organization to be less than the experience of other people.

Paolo Gaudiano: And I want to just ask people to reflect about this for a moment. I think that one of the profound problems that I've had with the way that Dei has been pitched, and I think that one of the reasons for the backlash is that you get these somewhat vague promises of improvements, if only you become more diverse, and then you find that becoming diverse is incredibly difficult, and you don't see any, any financial direct financial impacts, and you get people that get pissed off about it. And now all of a sudden, you have more people in your company that are dissatisfied, and that unfortunately creates a lot of problems. Whereas the way that we look at it is to say, you are losing money right now, you're being inefficient and you're doing it by not applying the same practices, policies and processes to all of your employees. And so we're not asking you to sprinkle again this magic diversity dust and things will get better. We're saying we're going to help you spot where you're losing money. It's like we're going to help you find those drafty windows and that open front door and maybe that furnace that is not burning very efficiently. And we will help you to save money doing something that you already know how to do. And that is much, much.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Let me ask. So is is the most obvious financial driver of not being inclusive? Is is it turnover? Is it the cost of recruiting, recruiting, retraining, bringing on I would say inefficiencies of that.

Paolo Gaudiano: Yeah. There's so in our calculations we see that depending on the type of company and on the type of of workers, etc., the loss of productivity and the loss of, of retention are fairly even. You know, if you're losing a, you know, according to Gallup and other sources, if you're losing a entry level worker, it may cost you anywhere between 3 to 6 months of their salary to rehire them and retrain them. If you lose a senior executive, it could be a year and a half or two worth of the salary. So. So there is a bit of a it's not an even formula. But you know, on the other hand, in terms of productivity and productivity too, because in some organizations the level of productivity of an employee and again, it depends on the type of organization, the type of employee, etc. in some cases it's very directly tied to revenue. So if you're talking about a company that has large sales force, for example, well, if you have 20% of your sales force that is producing 20% less, that would be 4% lower revenue. If my math is right, 22.2 times two you're losing 4% of your revenues, right? So so in some cases it's one, in some cases it's the other. And there's actually other factors too. We did a project for a an organization in cybersecurity. They're a called the Women in Cybersecurity or ISIS.

Paolo Gaudiano: And we did a study in which we basically hypothesized or not hypothesized, but we know, for example, that cybersecurity incidents very often depend on human error. So we built another version of the calculator where we kind of estimate the increased probability of a cybersecurity breach as a result of the fact that some of your people are less satisfied. And we did it by looking at research that shows that, yes, in fact, a lot of problems arise from, you know, you got caught by a phishing scam because you were tired, or maybe you're a member of the cybersecurity team and somebody sent you an alert that there was a breach, but you were kind of cranky or tired, or you got home early and all of a sudden what could have been stopped very quickly becomes a major security breach that cost millions of dollars. And so virtually everything that an organization that an employee does in an organization can have an impact on the productivity of the organization. And satisfaction plays into almost everything that we do at work. Now, we think that productivity kind of as an umbrella term and retention are the two biggest ones, and we can put numbers on them that are very easy to verify. And the other ones, it kind of depends on the organization.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So that makes me think of quiet quitting and some experiences I had when I when I was placed in a leadership position in an organization that had gone through a long period of chaos financial stresses and strains and kind of the, the, the, the lethargy, I would say, of people who had been battered about within the organization doing, doing, doing the least, doing the minimum. So you know, that clear clearly a lot of dissatisfaction. Absolutely. With, with with the workplace, which resulted in you know, yeah, the opposite of spirited, active mutual support. Yeah.

Paolo Gaudiano: And and, you know, this is also another thing that, I mean, there are so many complexities that I think that people tend to sweep under the rug or overlook, you know, satisfaction. Satisfaction is is a Complex result of the combination of things that happen in the workplace, but also personal things. So if we're having problems with your marriage or your relationship, or you have a bad commute to get to work, you know all of those things might impact you. And then, of course, once you get to the workplace, if your manager is a jerk or if your reports are jerk to their manager or or if you don't have the resources that you need because you know their software does not have accessibility or, you know, whatever the case may be, all of those things contribute to your satisfaction. And, you know, people talk about, oh, you know, I'm less satisfied because I don't feel like I belong or I'm satisfied. I'm less satisfied because my company does not do meaningful work. But but what I try to tell people is that those are like elements of satisfaction. And what I really try to emphasize to people is that at the end of the day, why do you. I don't it's not very useful to do what companies do, which is to ask people about their level of satisfaction or their level of inclusion or the level of belonging, because you're again, you're you're asking about the thermostat.

Paolo Gaudiano: You want to know why do you not feel included. What are the very specific things that happen to you at work that make you feel excluded? What are the specific things that happen to you at work that interfere with your ability to do your work, to get promoted, to get compensated? And so one of the keys that we sort of the moments that we had is that inclusion itself is kind of invisible, right? I mean, we don't we don't experience inclusion. We tend to experience we tend to notice exclusion. It's a little bit like health. We tend we're less likely to notice that we are healthy, but we're more likely to notice that we are unhealthy. And so when we realize that, we thought, well, look, how do doctors treat people? Imagine you went to a doctor and they just said, on a scale of 1 to 10, how healthy do you feel? Right? Well, when we ask people on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied do you feel? That's that's exactly what we're doing. Or even better, one of my favorite ones, you know, a companies that ask about, you know, how would you rate the level of inclusivity of our culture? That's like going to a doctor that says, how would you rate the way that our that our hospital treats your patients, our patient or patients and then try to heal you based on that.

Paolo Gaudiano: It's like it doesn't work that way. Instead, you know what a doctor will do is they they want to understand, first of all, what kind of disease do you have? They want to understand sort of the symptoms, you know, is it something is it a vascular problem? Is it a muscular problem? Is it is it a whatever, you know, a psychological problem, whatever the case might be. And then they want to ask about so they want to know kind of the clusters of symptoms that you have. And then they want to know what are the causes. So if you go in and you say my arm hurts, they might say, well, did you bump it? Did you happen to it? You know, if your stomach hurts, did you eat something weird? Right. So what we recognize is that when, you know, when we think about the way that people live their day to day, we want to find out two things. We want to find out what are.

Paolo Gaudiano: So we ask them for specific experiences. And we have a platform where this is done in a completely psychologically safe environment. We don't know who they are. They're going on an online platform that is completely anonymous. We ask them if they want to optionally to share some basic demographic and work related information, but they can skip that. And then we say, tell us stories of specific things that happen to you in the workplace that interfered with your ability to succeed. And we're very careful. We don't want to load it by saying things that made you feel excluded, because different people may feel excluded by something that somebody else may not feel excluded by. So it's more things like, you know, you know, my manager has now postponed our next performance review by three months. Well, if you do that and you hear that a lot of people complain about that, and then you find that it's it happens to 60% of all women, but only 20% of the men, or it happens to 80% of people with disabilities, but it only happens to 10% of the people who do not identify as having disabilities, disabilities. Then you know that there is a lack of inclusion on the part of the organization. So I think of it as.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So, so exclusion being the opposite of inclusion. So you're you're asking for people to give stories examples, instances of why they have, why they personally have felt excluded. And that's qualitative research. So is is the feeling or the experiences of exclusion. Is that the key dynamic that you're exploring?

Paolo Gaudiano: Actually no. No. And I didn't explain myself very well. So we're very careful. We do not ask about the feeling of exclusion. And in fact, we don't ask to measure feelings or inclusion at all. We we're using to explain the idea. But what we talk about is the following. We say the inclusion that we care about is the inclusion from the point of view of the organization in the following sense. If you are allowing things to happen to people, they influence their workplace experiences differently because of their identity traits that have nothing to do with how they work. Then we're saying the organization is not inclusive, okay, the level of individuals, we just want to know. Tell us about things that interfered with your work. Right. So the qualitative aspect And as I said, if you if something is like I took my laptop to the IT department and it took them four weeks to fix it, that's not exclusion. But if you find that this company is systematically taking longer to fix the laptops of black people than white people, then it is a form of.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Yes.

Paolo Gaudiano: You're the company, right? And so so the qualitative is that is the is the description. But then what we do is to go back to the medical analogy. We ask them for two bits of data. Actually three technically, but two primary ones. One of them is we say we have a list of what we call eight categories of experiences. And there are things like work life balance, compensation and benefits, career advancement recognition for your work. And so we asked them to identify which category most closely fits their experience. And then we also ask for the sources. And the sources in a typical company would be a policy or your leadership, your management, your peers, your reports, maybe your clients and other external entities. And then we also asked him about whether, hey, was this a one off incident or is this something that happens on a recurring basis? And the first two bits are the most important ones, because what we do is that as we collect data from several people in a company, we find the data immediately tells us, okay, this company has a big problem with respect, or this company has a big problem with compensation and benefits. And then we can look at.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Can you can you please restate the two, the two bits, the two most important bits.

Paolo Gaudiano: So let's say for example, we see in many companies a kind of experience that seems to be cited very often, especially by people who are not members of the majority, is what we call respect. And we're very specific about saying respect is literally either when somebody insults you or attacks you, or says negative things about you or makes an insensitive remark. Let's say somebody that makes a joke about people with disabilities, like, you know, a president of the United States accusing the, you know, the pilots or the air traffic controllers at DCA to have a disability, right? I mean, that would be an example of a of a clear lack of respect. And we find that unfortunately that's a category that in many, many, many companies especially we find in technology companies tends to be a problematic area. And then another area in some organizations, we find that compensation and benefits could be problematic. But in other compensation, in other places, we find that maybe career advancement could be a problem or recognition for your efforts could be a problem. And so the data tells you where to look. Like, where are you losing the most money? If I find that 40% of the people in my company complain about lack of respect and that has an impact on their satisfaction, then I want to then read. We read the comments. We don't provide the raw data to the clients because we want to preserve psychological safety. But we'll read the qualitative data, the descriptions, and kind of look and say, well, what is the biggest problem? And we find, oh, look, you know, there is a It's apparent that a lot of people, they go into meetings and they start talking about sports, and then they make bad jokes about people, and they never let some of the people grab the microphone and speak up.

Paolo Gaudiano: And if that's if that's the case, you can say, okay, well, here's what you can do. You can instate some policies that are going to essentially watch what happens in meetings and ensure that that better behaviors are are followed. You know, so and so the combination of the quantitative which tells you where to look, and then the qualitative which tells you what exactly are the problems that people are experiencing, give you much, much better data. And it gives you and it gives you an opportunity to focus on problems instead of focusing on identity buckets, which is a key key to the backlash. You know, we can drill down by identity, but we don't need to. And what we've always found is that the biggest problems will always impact people who come from, quote unquote, diverse backgrounds or non-majority backgrounds more than they impact the majority. So if you find a problem with the way the meetings are organized and run and you fix it, you're going to benefit a lot of people in the company. But you will particularly benefit women, people with disabilities, LGBT members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and so on and so forth. And so we kind of flipped that on its head and say, let's bucket the problems. Let's use the data to figure out what the problems are. Let's use the qualitative data to tell you what you need to fix. And then when you're doing that, you're not saying, oh, I'm going to do this for people with disabilities or for black people or for Hispanics or Latinos. I am fixing a big problem with a fair degree of confidence that it will have a disproportionate impact on the people that I was inadvertently excluding the most.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So let me let me talk about that. Inadvertently excluded for a second. So when you when you hear terms like dismantle institutional racism. Yes. Or eliminate institutional institutional barriers to disability inclusion. So these institutions were created and built and evolved and formed by people, and historically, certain groups had more power and influence in our society than others, disproportionately. And they're they're the groups of people that design these institutions, built these institutions, evolve these institutions. So I guess there's a difference between unconscious and conscious bias. But does that figure into your thinking? How how were these companies formed? What what's their history? Who who made these decisions that brought us to the point where we have these policies and practices and these, these, these behaviors that are either either reinforced or discouraged in an organization. Yeah, by the culture.

Paolo Gaudiano: Yeah. So so I want to be and this is, you know, my thinking about the individual level versus the kind of system level. And I notice in what you said, you do something that everybody does, which is that we mix and match in level things and company level things. And I think that that's one of the biggest problems that we have. Right? So

Dr. Kirk Adams: When say, say, say that I'm here to learn from you.

Paolo Gaudiano: So no, no, no, I appreciate it. So so.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So the mixing and matching.

Paolo Gaudiano: So the mixing.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And matching.

Paolo Gaudiano: So when we talk about, you know, you were talking about company, you know you started off by talking about people with power that create company, you know, in their thing. And then you talk about systemic, you know, company wide systemic discrimination. And then you talk about unconscious biases, which typically refer to individual behaviors or individual.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.

Paolo Gaudiano: And here's the thing. There are sometimes and by the way, I'm not at all an apologist. There are many situations in which the biases are not at all unconscious. In fact, I think those are the more dangerous ones. But there is a very big difference between what happens to an organization versus how an individual behaves. And very often in an organization, the things that happen are not necessarily because somebody decides to do something mean so. And what I tell people is the following. If I build a house for myself and let's say I have an opportunity to create a new home for me, I'm going to build a home that is going to be comfortable for me. Now, I'm not going to sit there and think about, like, every possible visitor that I might have in the next 20 years. And what about the people that might buy the house? After I pass away? I'm going to build a house that is comfortable for me. That doesn't mean that I'm being exclusive about it, but I may do some things where someone who is blind, or someone who has a mobility issue, or whatever the case might be, they may have a very difficult time in my house. Now, the problem that a lot of people don't realize and this is, you know, I talked about this idea of inclusion being invisible. I, I extend that analogy a little bit, and I hope you'll see where I'm going with this.

Paolo Gaudiano: Yeah. If you are a very healthy individual, you tend not to know anything about diseases. If you don't have a disability. Like one of the things that makes disability so difficult for so many people to wrap their heads around is that for those of us who do not have a permanent disability, it's incredibly difficult to understand what they are. We don't know the symptoms. We don't know what the disease. Sometimes I don't even know the names of some of the some of the health issues. And so what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that people who are healthy tend to not know what the disease is all about. They may not know how severe the symptoms are, and they surely are not qualified to heal people. Now inclusion works the same way. Okay. The people that are most included are the ones that are least aware of what exclusion means. They do not understand the severity of the symptoms, and they sure as hell are not qualified to fix the problems. But but whereas health can impact anyone in an organization who are the most included people, well, it's the typically white, often white male, cisgender, heterosexual men, you know, people with no disabilities who therefore are the ones that are the least able to see exclusion. They're the least able to understand the severity of it, and they're the least qualified to fix it. And the problem is that those people are making the decisions for everybody.

Paolo Gaudiano: And I can tell you that I've spoken to a lot of leaders who look like me, who are white, male, cisgender, etc. who would love to do the right thing, but they just don't know how. They don't have the data that tells them, you know, they hear complaints from people. But just because you hear complaints from people, it's very, very difficult to sort of think, oh, well, this must be a really serious problem. Maybe it's not a serious problem. Maybe it's just the person that is being whiny about it, right? Maybe it's the squeaky wheel problem. And so part of the mission of what I am trying to do is to give all leaders the visibility that they need so that they can actually make the right choices so they can say, hey, you know what? I've I've built a house that was designed for me. But as a result of being blind to the problems that I'm creating, it's costing me money. I'm making my house unwelcome, unwelcoming to a bunch of people, and I'm going to give them the data to understand who are the people that are being impacted and what can they do about it. And to me, this is, you know, when I hear people saying, oh, you know, the backlash is because white supremacy is trying to hold on to its power. We create these artificial concepts. But honestly, there are some people that I would describe as white supremacists who are clearly doing evil things.

Paolo Gaudiano: I happen to think that they're a tiny minority, but they're very good at manipulating the masses. But the large majority of the people that I know, and I deal with a lot of people who look like me, as I said, you know, they're not trying to be they're not trying to grab on to power. They're not trying to do anything evil. They're not trying to do anything differently than anybody else is doing. But it's just that by virtue of their their blindness, the lack of data and not being aware of the impact of what they're doing, they're just they don't know what to do. So so it's a very, very again, you know, I'm trying to avoid that confrontational like, you know, people talk about systemic racism or systemic biases. Here's a problem that I have with that. You hear a lot of times it's a circular definition okay. I was impacted because of systemic systemic disparities. Well, what was systemic disparity? Well, look at the number of people like me. There was fewer of them. Therefore there are systemic disparities. That proves that there is something, you know, you we create these definitions of these macroscopic, these emergent behaviors, and treat them as if they were something tangible that is actually, you know, like what is systemic racism? Is it like a bird that's sitting on a perch waiting for a person of color to go by? So what I try to do is I try to build kind of the causal links that go from, okay, this person is at work today, and she was insulted by her manager in a way that was completely inappropriate.

Paolo Gaudiano: Problem one. Problem two the company did not have a policy, did not have a process for the woman to report that problem. Or maybe they did not have a policy to manage it effectively. Problem three she was frustrated, didn't go to work for a couple of days, and when it was time for promotion, the manager gave her low marks because of the fact that she was not at work that one day. Right. So I need to understand what are all the pieces. And, you know, it might have been that maybe the manager was not a jerk. Maybe he was just in a bad mood himself that day because something happened at home, right? But whatever the case may be, it's the combination of the little day to day activities coupled with the lack of proper processes, policies and systems in the organization that eventually get amplified. And they lead to these massive disparities that we see. And so that's what I'm trying to and trying to kind of deconstruct that and understand the root causes, the root elements rather than trying to, you know, pointing fingers and talking about high level things like systemic biases.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Right. So earlier you said something, a couple things either die or inclusion is hard or difficult. I believe the comment you made and then the other is it's hard for company A to envision how they can implement what company B has done because of different circumstances. So it sounds like your approach is to look at each organization, a company. What whatever organization you're looking at as an individual, unique set of dynamics. And to really look at experience at people's at real people's real experiences.

Paolo Gaudiano: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And in some cases, we've worked with industry sectors. I mentioned cybersecurity earlier. We did essentially what we call a state of inclusion benchmark for the field of cybersecurity, where we had altogether about 1000 people that participated and shared data. And we were able to kind of do a mapping of kind of the state of inclusion of that particular field. But but the most valuable and that has some value. But but what's particularly valuable was the fact that then each company has its own data and can figure out what they are doing. And by the way, I think, Jeremy, I don't know if you were trying to ask a question or not. I I saw you come off mute for a second there, but.

Jeremy Grandstaff: Okay. Lots to unpack here. And obviously we don't have the time to get into it, so clearly I've already sent you a thing on LinkedIn. But I'm intrigued by your approach. There is a guy, and I will make the connection for you, if you wish. That publishes something called zip code Stories. And I really think he did such a great job of kind of taking it away from systematic racism. But talking about where do you come from and what does that impact? So I'm going to use myself as an example here. So I come from a very small town in Ohio, and when I was growing up, I had to depend on people to get places as a blind person and had all these, you know, challenges that were probably not things I would have faced had I lived in a city. Right. I could have grown up a little bit more independently, but my parents also told me that in order to get the life that I wanted and to be as independent as I wanted, I was going to have to be a smart guy. So when I applied to colleges, I was accepted at Cornell and I was accepted at Case Western, and I was also accepted at Bowling Green State University.

Jeremy Grandstaff: And I have to tell you, hello. Up until about four weeks ago, I always thought I'd chose Bowling Green because that's where I really wanted to be. But as I look back on it and have done a lot of work on me and choices that I've made throughout my life, I also discovered that the reason I chose Bowling Green was because I was afraid that the people at Case Western and the people at Cornell We're going to have way more money than I ever had, and I wasn't going to survive there. And I was more concerned about not being able to survive around people who had money than I should have been. Right. And so one of the things that I want to and again, I want to talk more about this, this is not me telling you you're wrong. Right. Because I'm not saying that I love your model and I want to learn more about it. But one of the things that I want to be very careful about is that we have to acknowledge that there are systematic challenges in the way things happen that do drive performance, experience and expectation. And I'll carry that just with another example.

Jeremy Grandstaff: I have been in a role where I was told that the expectation of me was that I was going to have to learn how to work for no money or the expectation of me was as a blind person. I would never ever be to do able to do the same job as a sighted person. And that was told to me by business owners who felt that there was no way I'd ever push back on them. And I have to be on with you that in some cases I didn't push back on them because I'm so poor and I grew up that way, that I was afraid that pushing back against these people who had money would put me in a worse position. That's a systematic thing. And so I just want to and obviously we can talk more about this. Right. But I just what what made me want to weigh in is systematic racism does exist. We don't have to call it systematic racism, but we do need to talk about systematic challenges that we have. That drive people to maybe not go after things like somebody who came up in the world with millions of dollars in their trust fund account.

Paolo Gaudiano: Yeah, no. And look, you're I completely agree with you and I, and I always, always remind myself, and I, and I like to usually talk about the fact that my privilege prevents me from seeing things that others would see. You know, I do not have I do not know what it's like to be, you know, a lifelong blind person. I do not know what it's like to be black in America. I do not know a lot of things that that, you know, the kind of experiences people have. So I always try to be humble about that. But I also use that as a power in the following sense. It gives me the flexibility to try to look at things from a somewhat detached standpoint, and to try to think about it in a way that is not influenced by my personal experiences, either in a positive or a negative way, and that allows me sometimes to think in a what may seem like a cold and calculated way, and it is a cold and calculated way about what can I do? What can I contribute that will have the greatest impact for the greatest number of people? And one thing that I that's similar to what I said before about fixing focusing on the problems first rather than focusing on identity first. The idea of creating an environment where every single person feels welcome, or where every single person has the ability to contribute to their to their best, scares the living daylights out of leaders because of two reasons.

Paolo Gaudiano: One of them is because it's just a monumental amount of work, and you never know when somebody is going to be dissatisfied about something. And the second thing is because is because ultimately you you run the risk of upsetting, you know, you do something for one group of people. You might end up upsetting a different group of people. What I try to do is I try to say, look, I can show you as a leader the fact that there are a lot of things that you could be doing better, but there are some of them that are particularly negatively impacting your company in a financial way. And what I believe is that if I can convince those people to make the right choices and fix at least some of the bigger problems, a they will have a positive impact on a lot of people, which is already a heck of a lot better than things are today. But b it's going to engender a different way to think about the workplace that will encourage more companies to become more welcoming to more people, and that will create kind of more suction through the economy, and it will create even more interest in expanding the kinds of problems that they're fixing so that they can cover more and more and more members of the population. But so it's kind of backwards, right? So instead of focusing on the symptom, which is look at all these people that are having problems, let's try to find out one by one what problems that we can fix it.

Paolo Gaudiano: I am flipping that upside down and saying, let's find out what are the best practices that we can adopt. What are the things that we can do that will start to take big chunks out of this problem? And then let's work on the more and more and more chunks so that we start with the biggest possible positive impact, you know, and it may be that it's not there's going to be some segment of the population that will not be positively impacted at all. And that may happen. But ultimately, as a leader, if you're demanding that I have to absolutely fix everything for everyone, it's a non-starter. You're basically making it such a daunting problem for people that it scares them. And I think a lot of people have been scared, you know? And I have to say, I read a lot of books on Dei, and I get so frustrated, so frustrated when I open the book. And the first paragraph is like, imagine you're standing in front of a dark forest and it looks like it's it's going to be really daunting and scary. But on the other side of the forest, there's a green patch and like, really, you know, Oh, you know, die is not a sprint.

Paolo Gaudiano: It's a marathon. And by the way, after you've killed yourself trying to improve, die in this one little aspect of your company, now you got to repeat it for every identity group. And you have to do intersectionality, and you have to do it for every department. It's like, if you're a CEO, you're like, what the hell? You give up, right? It's a marketing problem. You know, I go to people and say, look, there's this one big thing. You're wasting your energy. Your your utility bills are 30% higher than they should be. And I can fix them just by changing one subscription or one utility company that you have. Yes or no. It's like, oh, okay. So you see the point, you know? Yeah, I have the luxury. I have the incredible privilege of being able to think about things from that perspective because of the fact that it does not impact me. It does not it's not something that that, you know, I don't come at home feeling frustrated every single day of my life because of my skin color or because of my disability or because of my sexual orientation and things like that. So it's an incredible privilege, and I try to take full advantage of it by figuring out what is it that really matters to people like me, and how can I put it in a way that is aligning their interests with my interests?

Dr. Kirk Adams: So a couple of things just popped to mind. And we're coming to time. This time is flying by. But I of 27, 28 years ago, when I was earning a master's in not for profit leadership, I for my, my capstone project, I, I wrote a book called Beyond Race and Gender, and it was about it was about kind of the early stages of Dei and doing kind of root cause analysis and things. And there was one story about a dysfunctional engineering department, and the author had gone in and worked with the group, and it turned out that it was located in Alabama, and all the engineers had gone to University of Alabama, and they hired someone who'd gone to Auburn. So there was all these. They were all white males, but there was all this tension because of this alma mater. They were becoming dysfunctional and less than productive. So when you say you look at the big chunks, that that seems like a small chunk. I don't think we need to have a probably a big focus on alma mater and sports loyalties in companies. But when you look at the companies and industry clusters you've worked with, kind of what are there, are there common big chunks that you identify? Is it around gender? Is it around age? Is it around race? What are the big chunks?

Paolo Gaudiano: So so at the at the highest level, there was an interesting something that we found was very interesting when we as I said, we collect data that voluntarily people can share. And we actually get very high response rates. And companies inevitably want to like, you know, what's the problem? What are having this problem with women or with Hispanics or with disabilities. And so we sometimes find that, okay, well, we don't have enough data to tell you about 20 different races and ethnicities. But what if we just compare the overall level of inclusion or exclusion as we measure it for white people versus everybody else, for people with no disabilities versus anyone that has a visible or invisible disability for people who identify as male. So in other words, we say, what if you're not a member of the majority against a particular identity trait, and that is some benefits of doing it that way? Well, it turns out that what we found is that the the ratio between the majority and non member of the majority is always most pronounced for two traits. And those are gender and disability okay. So and we thought initially so race what we found is some organizations race is an indicator. In other ones it's not. Also there is a confounding factor that in the last several years a lot of white people are complaining about Dei. And so that shows up in our data. And so we see in fact, in a couple of companies recently, we've seen a reversal where the level of exclusion for white men is higher than it is, for which I'm going to refrain from making snide comments about that. But but let's just say that the complaints.

Dr. Kirk Adams: I admire your restraint.

Paolo Gaudiano: Let's just say that some of the complaints that we read, I would just like to find out who they are. Just go and kind of like, set them straight. But leaving that aside. Gotcha. So, so a universal finding disability and gender are always, always, always, always in every company that we've measured they're always there's always a big. And when I'm talking a big difference like an overall exclusion score that might be 1.5 x 2.1 x, meaning that when we when we calculate the scores, the exclusion score for people with disabilities is two times higher than it is for people without disabilities. And then when you look at and then when you look at specific categories like, you know, work life balance, etc., some of them are enormous differences. Like we see women with recognition and respect always, always an enormous problem. And so I would say that's the biggest thing that we found. And then beyond that, I'll tell you the other thing that we found that is almost a universal finding. A lot of the things that create problems in companies are stupid things that would be really easy to fix. You know, you don't need to hire McKinsey and spend millions of dollars to do a, you know, pulse surveys and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Paolo Gaudiano: And then nothing happens. You know, these are things like a lot of managers are doing very, very casual performance reviews, and that's allowing biases to creep in. Or the way that we do interviews for recruiting processes is creating biases in stupid ways, or people are forgetting to invite other people to meetings, and that's causing big problems. Stuff like that. You look at it that it's happening 20 times. You say, okay, fix it. It's very easy. Tell all the managers they have to have a spreadsheet of everybody that should be in a meeting, and you're going to actually measure the performance based on that. And so that's really that was another finding that really kind of blew my mind was that yeah. You know there are a lot of really simple things that we're doing that are impacting a lot of different people, including members of the majority, because, you know, maybe it's also the the introverted white guy who in other in every other way, is a perfect member of the majority, fully privileged. And yet they may benefit from a better process, from running meetings and organizing meetings. And so those, I think are the two macro like at the high level, those are the things that really, really kind of caught our attention.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Super interesting. So how can people work with you? I will, I will say anyone who's listening to this sign up for the Aleria newsletter. Thank you. Fabulous. I like the silver linings and golden nuggets when we can find them. I like that section a lot.

Paolo Gaudiano: And by the way, I have to thank you because you very kindly and politely pointed out to us that we had broken the system that was doing the captioning, the alt text on the images inside the newsletter. And I'm very grateful that you pointed that out. And now we fix that.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And I see I saw that you fixed that. Thank you for acknowledging me.

Paolo Gaudiano: Yeah. No, I appreciated that, I appreciated that. So so I would say in general if people come to our website aléria. So, you know, it's a I'm sure there will be links. I know and I know you always. Yeah. But aléria tech, tech. That's a great way to get Ahold of us. I'm on LinkedIn. Luckily, there are not a lot of Paolo Galliano's in the world. And so if you look me up on LinkedIn, I'm very easy to find. I see, I see, Jeremy, I saw you shaking your hand as if. Yeah, you just found me. You found me on LinkedIn already? Yeah. And I mean, other than that, also, I encourage people. I give a talk. It was a TEDx talk in November of 2023, in Harlem. And and the TEDx organization liked it enough that they called me up and said, hey, can we rebrand it as a full TEDx talk and put it on our website? And of course, I was like, yes.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Yes, please. Yeah.

Paolo Gaudiano: So if you go to actually to TED.com and you look up my name, you'll find there's, there's a talk that I gave that sort of touches on, you know, it's, it's a 12 minute talk. So it gives some of the key ideas of the measure inclusion. And And the last thing I'm going to say is that you're going to need to invite me back, because we didn't talk about meritocracy at all. And that's my next.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Oh. That's true.

Paolo Gaudiano: You'll have to invite me back some other time, and we'll talk about meritocracy.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Let's let's do that. I would love to do that. Let's let's get that on the calendar. Wonderful. You have a book.

Paolo Gaudiano: I have a.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Book.

Paolo Gaudiano: Titled Measuring Inclusion, Higher Profits, and Happier People without Guesswork or Backlash. And for those that happen to listen to this episode before mid September of 2025 we have a promotion right now. My book is now one. Recently won a third award. And to celebrate that, my publisher knocked the price of the Kindle version down to $0.99. And one thing that I always tell people is on Amazon, you can buy, let's say, 100 copies on Kindle, and there's a button that says buy for others, and you will get 100 individual redemption codes that never expire. So what I tell people is go out and buy a bunch of copies and give them away as holiday gifts, or to people that think they might be interested in this. It's a phenomenal opportunity to get a book for only $0.99, and then make you look smart when you give them to your friends and they read it and hopefully they'll like it too.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Perfect. And for me, you can find [email protected]. I'm also on LinkedIn Kirk Adams and join me sometime before this year ends for Paulo Gaudiano part two how to Create True Meritocracies. And thanks for being here everybody. Have a wonderful day.

Paolo Gaudiano: Thank you.

Podcast Commentator: Thank you for listening to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Don't forget to subscribe, share or leave a review at WW Academy.com. Together we can amplify these voices and create positive change. Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep making an impact.