Unconscious bias trainings - Sense, criticism and a new approach

Content of unconscious bias trainings

Organisations want to change and develop new behaviours.

A traditional tool in many companies is to hold lectures or trainings, often limited to managers.

Unconscious bias trainings are often centrally organised, with a standard agenda and possibly mandatory. The most common context is usually diversity and inclusion and the negative effect of unconscious biases, stereotypes and prejudices.

Basically, such trainings are meant to create more awareness, to deal with different biases and to achieve behavioural change.

The question arises as to the usefulness of these trainings and how de-biasing differs from them.

What can go wrong

Unconscious biases training has often been implemented (and previously sold) as a measure for more diversity and inclusion, starting from the Anglo-American field.

To achieve this goal through a training measure is overly ambitious. In many cases it has not been achieved. In England, for example, it was decided in December 2020 to no longer provide unconscious bias training for civil servants.

Since then, there has been a lively discussion between the sides pro and contra unconscious bias training.

The clear statement of Mind your business is:

One cannot expect a change in behaviour through a single training measure!

This is one of the reasons why the de-biasing concept is much broader and more modular. 

Trainings, workshops & webinars are at the beginning of changes. They give impulses, create experiences with one's own biases and thus contribute to raising awareness of this important issue.

Effective changes, however, need more and must be surrounded by a more comprehensive package of measures. This must be oriented towards concrete goals, copy / paste does not work!

This is an essential point that distinguishes de-biasing by Mind your business from other offers.

A new approach with de-biasing

The criticism of unconscious bias trainings is justified and addresses valid points.

Mind your business workshops and webinars differ from "classic" unconscious bias trainings in several ways. 

• Scope
  • More breadth instead of a very frequent focus on recruitment, promotion or equal treatment
  • The practical system of unconscious biases is action-oriented, the concrete topics are easily derived from it
• Approach & methodology
  • Focus on practical implementation instead of psychological theory - this makes it easier to transfer to everyday life
  • Interactive workshop with varied gathering of experiences instead of frontal training
• Anchoring
  • Concrete measures of all participants as a goal including implementation plans
  • Connection to further de-biasing measures and anchoring of the measures in the change process

Another difference concerns language - the aim of dealing with unconscious influencing factors is to reduce or ideally eliminate their effects. This corresponds to the definition of de-biasing, which is why this term is used for the Mind your business formats.

Unconscious bias trainings often focus more on the cause, the bias itself, and less on concrete and practical implementation in an organisation. Why? They are usually not individualised, but standard trainings.

Mind your business is also different in this respect and always takes the concrete context into account, for example in the impulse series or functional de-biasing formats. 

Feel free to contact me to discuss your suitable concept!

You will also find that there are few publicly bookable events where you can deal with Unconscious Biases - especially outside the topic of diversity and inclusion. 

One of the aims of Mind your business is to create more awareness of unconscious biases. Therefore, there are regular publicly bookable introductory lectures or online short workshops - free of charge or at low cost.