Universal Design In Life And Work

Valuing #CognitiveDiversity in your team will enable you to create more #innovative solutions to complex challenges. #inclusion #equity #inclusiveinnovation

So in what ways, Anthony, do you think we can be more inclusive to include new voices? And what are the key opportunities in promoting diversity and inclusion? Over Do you? No,

thank you totally. I mean, that's the multi million dollar question right is, how do we crack that nut? How do we find ways of bringing new voices into the discussion? I recently, even in my age, joined Tik Tok? And would you believe that when I was scrolling through all these amazing content creators on tick tock, I came across a new concept I'd never heard of called decentering. And so I just quickly started doing as much research as I could to try to figure out what does this mean? What does this mean for me in my career, how can I practice the centering in my work, basically, decentering just comes down to someone in my position, someone in a position of power, someone in a position of authority, taking themselves deliberately with intention out of the spotlight, and refocus recentering, the spotlight on people who are from marginalized backgrounds, people who are excluded people who experience any sort of barriers to accessing technology, leadership positions, digital skills, and anything else you can imagine. And so I quickly started going back through my own history, my own career and thinking, in what ways have I have I manifested that? In what ways can I continue to try to think more critically about my work? And in what ways can I activate this, this decentering approach. And one of the things I happened upon, and you've already alluded to it, that I've worked a lot with youth, I've worked a lot with young people, and especially with young women, to try to find ways of bringing them into areas of innovation, bringing them into the spaces where new ideas are formed, where careers are started. And so I came upon this basic basic principle in practice, which is surround yourself with diversity. I work in a computer science department, the absolute easiest, most low threshold thing for me would be to work with other people who have the same background characteristics as I do, because I'm almost surrounded by them. It takes intention, it takes an active approach to identifying individuals with different experiences than I have, and bringing them into my work and finding ways of collaborating, finding ways of supporting finding ways of advocating for their work their ideas, and, again, recentering the spotlight on their work. So if I could implore anyone out there who is watching this, and who is thinking, Well, I'm in this position of power, but I'm not quite sure what to do. Number one thing, surround yourself with diversity. And in doing so, you will have the opportunity to mentor and support individuals whose careers can absolutely be made, because of that support because of that effort. And when you give them those opportunities, when you shift the limelight, when you shift the spotlight to them, there's nothing that they can't accomplish. And in doing so, you'll also and this may be the part that's a little bit more sensitive, is you'll become aware of your own limitations, your own biases that you possess, that you were raised with that you you know have from your own background. And so when I do make that effort to surround myself, I become uniquely aware of the limitations, or the opportunities that I've experienced, that the same opportunities haven't been shared by women with disabilities, women of color, women who maybe come from rural areas, women who grew up and raised in the Global South. And that also gives us a chance to create multilateral part

#agile #agilemethods #innovation #entrepreneurship

No matter what your background, if you work as an entrepreneur, you're going to have to work in an agile environment. Now, you might have heard about agile methods before. But I want to talk to you about what I think about when I think about an agile working method. So let's go back to when I was opening my first business, I had this brilliant idea to take sheet music that musicians would use and digitize it and create a sort of custom piece of hardware that would allow them to flip between the pages. And this was before tablets were even around. And so when I thought about the product that I was going to create, I thought about it in linear terms, I thought about it as a starting point and an ending point, I begin the process of creating it, manufacturing it, distributing it, and the end point was getting it into the hands of the customers. But this is a very old fashioned way of thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship, innovation. And entrepreneurship should never be a linear process, we have to think of it in a way that's non linear. And all that means is that we have to approach the design and development process as a cycle. And it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over and over again. Now there are an infinite number of ways that you can use an agile methodology when you're designing and developing a new product or service. But one of my favorite approaches is to think of it in three parts, build, measure, learn. And like I said, it's a cycle. So you're going to build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn, until you have something that's ready to roll out to the market. So let's start with the build process. Building just means creating. So what are you going to develop? What ideas are you going to create? What products or services are you going to come up with, it's about putting something into some kind of tangible form, even if it's just a short presentation, even if it's a prototype, even if it's the simplest version of your idea, but getting something ready getting something prepared, so you can move into the next stage, which is measure. So now you're going to take what you've done, you're going to take whatever it is you've created in that tangible form, and you're going to evaluate it to understand how it's working, whether or not it's doing what it's intended. And whether or not your idea actually has value. Now, when you're measuring a great way of doing this is to approach the communities and stakeholders that might have an interest in what you've created. And this gives you a chance to validate what you've done. And make sure that the stakeholders and the users or the customers actually want what it is that you've created. A good way of failing as an entrepreneur is to create something within your own narrow framework of understanding and never talk to another person about it. I'll give you an example. One of my colleagues had a PhD student, and the PhD student came to the supervisor and he said, I have a great idea. For my PhD, what I'm going to do is innovate a new operating system that is customized for people who are blind or partially sighted. Now my supervisor took one look at him and said, Are you sure this is what you want to do? He insisted This is the best idea he's ever had. And it's going to be a great and revolutionary thing. And so the supervisor came back to him and said, Hey, why don't you talk to some people who are blind or partially sighted and just see what they want. So of course, he approached the disabled people's organization. And he asked them, What do you think of my idea, and they immediately dismissed it, because they didn't want a customized operating system just for them. They wanted a operating system that works for everyone. They want to use the same operating systems that everyone else uses, but they wanted to work for them. So he quickly had to completely reformat his idea and go a diffe