Podcast: Virtual Reality And Your Company Leadership Upskilling
Podcast with guest Kelly Fitzsimmons on why virtual reality is the answer to unconscious bias leadership upskilling
Posted on 06-02-2020, Read Time: Min
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Have you ever wondered if Virtual Reality (VR) could help shape leaders in your organization? This week, I sat down with Kelly Fitzsimmons and talked about how VR is the answer to unconscious bias leadership upskilling.
Kelly Fitzsimmons is a serial tech entrepreneur, artist, and author who recently published her best-selling book, Lost in Startuplandia: Wayfinding for the Weary Entrepreneur. She is the Co-founder of Custom Reality Services, a virtual reality production company that had two projects, Across the Line in 2016 and Ashe 68 in 2019, premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Also an active angel investor, Kelly serves on the technology committee for Bell USA, a venture fund and best in women-led start-ups.
Read on to see the highlights of our conversation:
Disruption is when there’s something ineffective or inefficient and, in our day and age, also inequitable. We’ve got to change the status quo. So, my first question is when we think about all that, in disrupting diversity and inclusion essentially the unconscious bias that really amplifies the imbalance of power, why should we care about virtual reality? How is that helping?
So, VR today has gone through a series of different iterations. We’re finally at a place where the processing power is enough that we can start doing things that up until now we’ve never been able to do in storytelling.
Prior to VR, we weren’t able to put people fully into immersive experiences where they were having a first-person experience. So, what we can do now in storytelling is to let people choose their own adventure and be able to walk in the steps and literally in the shoes of somebody else. The best we could do is being an omniscient observer. It’s very different to see something bad happen to someone else versus seeing it when it happens or when it feels like it is happening to you.
Prior to VR, we weren’t able to put people fully into immersive experiences where they were having a first-person experience. So, what we can do now in storytelling is to let people choose their own adventure and be able to walk in the steps and literally in the shoes of somebody else. The best we could do is being an omniscient observer. It’s very different to see something bad happen to someone else versus seeing it when it happens or when it feels like it is happening to you.
That is so true and it’s like putting yourself in my shoes. Virtual reality is not new and it has been around for a few years. What makes it so dramatically different today?
In the first two iterations of virtual reality in the 80s and 90s, we just didn’t have the processing speed to do what we can do today. So, today it’s much more of a compelling experience; it feels genuinely immersive; it feels like you’re there. As we move past these technical barriers, we are now able to create this first-person experience, and what’s so dramatically different is you get to choose your own adventure. There is no real director other than a person who’s watching it at the time, so the viewer is in the director’s chair.
When you have your own experience, you can start to draw your own conclusions. That’s what makes it so compelling particularly for education, because we’re now able to scale first-person experiences.
When you have your own experience, you can start to draw your own conclusions. That’s what makes it so compelling particularly for education, because we’re now able to scale first-person experiences.
Whether it’s unconscious bias or anything, it’s amazing. How has your work in VR made a difference?
We made a conscious choice early on to focus on social justice virtual reality, which from a business sense meant that we’re walking away from a lot of venture capital. There’s a lot of money coming into the space, but we chose not to go in that direction. Our perspective was that this new medium is really perfect for social justice.
The direct experience is a different category and what we’ve been doing is allowing people to experience these things, wanting their reactions, and to know how it impacts them. We all think we know how we’re going to react in a given situation, but the truth is, we’re clueless. We can’t really know until we’re there and that’s what virtual reality allows us to do. It’s also allowing us to take people to situations that they would never be exposed to otherwise and allow them to walk in the shoes of somebody else.
From our perspective, this unfiltered first-person experience is what’s so dramatically different and also important to us as filmmakers and storytellers.
This gives us a chance to really be in territory that up until now didn’t exist.
The direct experience is a different category and what we’ve been doing is allowing people to experience these things, wanting their reactions, and to know how it impacts them. We all think we know how we’re going to react in a given situation, but the truth is, we’re clueless. We can’t really know until we’re there and that’s what virtual reality allows us to do. It’s also allowing us to take people to situations that they would never be exposed to otherwise and allow them to walk in the shoes of somebody else.
From our perspective, this unfiltered first-person experience is what’s so dramatically different and also important to us as filmmakers and storytellers.
This gives us a chance to really be in territory that up until now didn’t exist.
Mindset determines what we value to be true, what we believe. The challenge is really not necessarily just in the mindset but not only doing things differently. Not only that we’re experiencing it, we’re seeing it in a form of action and that’s massive, it’s amazing! Here’s the thing, you and I have been studying implicit bias, unconscious bias for a really long time. I’d love to know from your perspective what have you personally found about this that’s something new or something different?
All of our work centers around implicit bias. We are always dealing with it in some way. With our first piece, Across the Line in 2016, we had Planned Parenthood as our executive producer and they decided to do something really important which is they contracted with Sea-Change to track attitudes before and after seeing our piece.
They looked at us at a sample size of 284 viewers. What they realized was that everyone became a lot more aware of the situation and it didn’t shift fuse. We saw that people were incredibly less tolerant of the harassment that was happening outside of clinics because of experiencing our piece, which outside of this context, almost none of the people who had gone through it ever experienced first-hand.
Once they were there, seeing what there was to be seen and understanding the dynamics that happened, particularly in the scale. The participants were in a woman’s body so they could see the difference in terms of height and scale of these other individuals that were talking to her, quite frankly harassing them. We got in their bones with this experience. It did impact their mindset.
They looked at us at a sample size of 284 viewers. What they realized was that everyone became a lot more aware of the situation and it didn’t shift fuse. We saw that people were incredibly less tolerant of the harassment that was happening outside of clinics because of experiencing our piece, which outside of this context, almost none of the people who had gone through it ever experienced first-hand.
Once they were there, seeing what there was to be seen and understanding the dynamics that happened, particularly in the scale. The participants were in a woman’s body so they could see the difference in terms of height and scale of these other individuals that were talking to her, quite frankly harassing them. We got in their bones with this experience. It did impact their mindset.
This is incredible! Virtual reality really enables you to experience the reality from that person’s perspective who’s most impacted and then to be able to see that something has to change; that’s when change starts and then your next job is enabling them to change. This is fascinating stuff. We’ve heard about simulation training especially with pilots, but when it comes to the rest of us HR professionals, who are ultimately responsible for most of the change management training and we hear a lot of words around empathy and compassion for our people and for our customers. How can HR professionals engage with VR?
So, the good news is that today in 2019, we have lots of different works that address implicit bias, relationships, and interpersonal skills that are available and can be curated. So, you can get an Oculus Go, you can get a headset, and set up shop in the office and in the conference room. Look, people curate their experiences, and that is a very low cost and pretty straightforward way to go today by just using materials that already exist. We have been commissioned to do pieces specific to a certain company where either implicit bias is a huge issue and it’s really impacting the bottom line or where, for instance, they might have a patient population or a customer population they don’t really understand. There’s a disconnect between the outside world and the inside world.
We worked with a company that worked with rare diseases. So we reached out and did a day in the life of one of their patients so that the programmers who are working on the interface for the portal could get a sense of what it was like to be one of their clients, creating that empathy and compassion so that it would translate into the design. It also gives them a sense of meaning and purpose as to, “Why am I doing this day in and day out?” I think that’s something that is really missing today that virtual reality can dramatically change.
We worked with a company that worked with rare diseases. So we reached out and did a day in the life of one of their patients so that the programmers who are working on the interface for the portal could get a sense of what it was like to be one of their clients, creating that empathy and compassion so that it would translate into the design. It also gives them a sense of meaning and purpose as to, “Why am I doing this day in and day out?” I think that’s something that is really missing today that virtual reality can dramatically change.
Kelly, this is fascinating! Do you have a call-to-action for our folks listening in today?
You are more than welcome to check out our website. We are at C R S V R L A B .com, and I highly encourage you to also go to the Ashe 68 website which is ashe68.com. We’ll put a link up on the site for you. Also, I highly recommend doing some searches on Google Scholar. There is so much good research that’s happening around virtual reality in HR particularly around cognitive biases, and I highly encourage you to take a look at that. Our piece and our research were just one of many studies that have been done over the last three years. To learn more about how virtual reality can help shape leadership upskilling in your organization, you can listen to the full 15-minute podcast here:
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Dr. Patti Fletcher Chief Equity Advocate & HR Disrupter, HR.com |
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Kelly Fitzsimmons Co-founder, Custom Reality Services. |
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