Are you having a difficult time finding female engineers to join your teams? Are you currently working on a project which seems to be going nowhere? Have you ever engaged in what you thought was customer-driven work only to later discover it was stakeholder-driven? When it comes to designing products or software that people use, or when trying to uncover precisely what’s wrong with our workplace, studying the decisions we make is critical. Surprise! Many of our decisions are not made consciously. Examining five common unconscious biases seen in development, Catherine Louis helps us explore the unconscious decisions we make. She presents a hands-on exercise which focuses on the affinity bias. Only when we successfully move from an unconscious to a conscious bias can we begin to tackle the sticky problems—and find those female engineers to join our teams.

1. BW4
Concurrent Session
11/8/17 1:30 PM
The Five Common Unconscious Biases
Affecting Your Team
Presented by:
Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
Brought to you by:
350 Corporate Way, Suite 400, Orange Park, FL 32073
888---268---8770 ·· 904---278---0524 - info@techwell.com - https://www.techwell.com/

2. Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
A Certified Scrum Trainer™, independent agile coach, and founder of CLL-Group
and PoDojo.com, Catherine Louis has more than twenty years of experience in
complex product development. Catherine's focus is on product discovery and
delivery—using design thinking, agile methods, and agile R&D—and managing
organizational agile transitions to build speed and flexibility in business. Her
specialty is accelerating innovation by enabling agile transitions. Catherine helps
small start-ups as well as large enterprises inspect and adapt, evolve and
improve, accelerate delivery, and delight their customers.

3. 5 Common
Unconscious Biases
Affecting Your
Teams
Catherine Louis
@catherinelouis
cll@cll-group.com
prepared for DevOps East
Suggested schedule for
the next hour:
-Sharing story - 5 min
-What is unconscious bias? - 15 min
-5 unconscious biases seen in Product
Development -10 min
-Affinity Bias exercise - 20 min
-Q&A - remaining time

4. •mental shortcuts we make
•prejudices we have (but aren’t aware
of)
•biases might be based on skin color,
gender, age, height, weight,
introversion versus extroversion,where
someone went to college, city vs
country….
If you can name it, there’s probably
an unconscious bias for it
Unconscious Biases are
•it’s how our brain evolved to mentally
group things together to help make
sense of the world
“Human beings are faced with around 11
million bits of information at any
given moment” ~Timothy Wilson, author of “Strangers to
Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.”
Unconscious Bias

5. •from a survival point of view, this
mental grouping helped the brain make
quick decisions
Which of these business women
might have a salary advantage?

6. Which of these business men
might have a career advantage?
Which one might be a CEO?

7. •“Blonde women see 7% increase in
salary over brunette/redheads”
1
•“Mature-faced” people had a career
advantage over “baby-faced” people
2
•More CEO’s named “John” than there are
women CEOs
3
Scores of studies document how unconscious
bias affects workplace decisions
1.http://amosyang.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/physicalappearanceandwages.pdf
2.https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Media/2010/VS_April_27_2010.pdf
3.https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/upshot/fewer-women-run-big-companies-than-
men-named-john.html?_r=1&abt=0002&abg=1
Unconscious Bias
•Affinity Bias - a tendency to warm up to
people like ourselves
•Bandwagon effect - believe something
because other people believe it
•Confirmation Bias - interpret/favor/recall
information which confirms one's preexisting
hypotheses
•Ikea effect - when the labor leads to love
•Sunk cost fallacy - justification of
increased investment in a decision, based on
the cumulative prior “sunk cost”
5 Biases commonly seen
in Product Development

8. •An inclusive workforce is needed to be
able to hire top talent, drive innovation,
foster creativity, and guide business
strategies.
•Multiple, diverse perspectives lead to
new ideas, new services, new products, and
encourage out-of-the-box thinking.
Assertions
agree? any to add?
•Feb 2015 McKinsey study of 366 public
companies analyzed, those in the top
quartile for racial and ethnic diversity
were 35% more likely to have financial
returns above national industry medians.
Bottom line
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-
matters

9. •The kid on the team from Missouri
•The boardroom full of men
A couple of examples
How do folks find jobs?
Source: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#work-job-discovery, 2016 survey, over 50,000 developers participated
“Affinity Group” referrals??

10. How do we find people?
Close on
compensation
Post on job
boards
Target those
with skills
we need
Find as
many as
possible
“Weed out
the weak”
Formal
interviews
start: more
weeding
Assess,
vote,
select
Warning: Hiring strategy for a talent surplus
Capture
referrals
Affinity bias exercise

11. High Trust Gender
Race/
Ethnicity
Foreign
born
Age
Sexual
Orientation
Disability Education
Marital
Status
Religious
denomination
Other?
Affinity Bias Exercise
Affinity bias exercise for teams. Contact cll@cll-group.com for more exercises like this. www.cll-group.com
Circles of trust

12. Questions:
•Looking at diversity and inclusion as
a business strategy, how would
embracing diversity and inclusion,
i.e. embracing diverse perspectives,
have an impact on
• customer empathy?
• worldview of markets?
• potential customers?
• opportunities?
• possibilities….?
In a Feb 2015 McKinsey study of 366 public companies analyzed, those in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were
35% more likely to have financial returns above national industry medians. http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/
organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters