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management education

Bias Bingo: Blending Branding and Learning

by cv harquail on November 4, 2009

I love it when basic business science can be applied to important causes. So, I was excited when my favorite FemaleScienceProfessor pointed me towards a clever website designed to teach about gender bias: The Gender Bias Learning Project.

The Gender Bias Learning Project is a great demonstration of how basic web skills, clever marketing skills, and thoughtful branding can be used for higher causes.

The Gender Bias Learning Project is a full-featured website with games, videos, interactive quizzes, clear graphics and a built in sense of irony.

The game and overall site developed from a collaboration between BayCreative and the Center for WorkLifeLaw at UCHastings. BayCreative, Inc., a full-service marketing agency, is “a nimble, results-oriented firm”. From the looks of the game and the overall site, BayCreative really delivers on their firm’s brand promise.

Gender Bias Bingo | The Intersection | Discover Magazine_1257362503755.jpeg

Engaging Learning

We all know that gender bias isn’t “funny” and that most feminists anti-gender-bias advocates are dour and humorless. That’s why the idea of turning learning about bias into a game is the first great application of branding expertise: If it has to be nutritious, make it delicious.

Although some parts of the site are serious, and some elements are ever-so-slightly dorky, overall the website is ‘light’ enough that it is pretty engaging. I watched some of the videos and I played spent my latte break testing my knowledge with the pop quiz “Sure, I Get It!”

(11 for 11, I’ll have you know. And even though I did teach Women’s Studies, I learned some new things about gender bias.)

What’s great about Bias Bingo

The standout element of the website is the game, Bias Bingo. Bias Bingo will look familiar to anyone who’s gamed played games of  irony-plus-insight. (Examples of this game genre include The ASA bingo game for sociologists, White Liberal Bingo, and Phat: The Game of White Appropriation).

But, Bias Bingo is a little bit special. Bias Bingo has two built-in advanced learning levels:

(1) Bias Bingo collects data about people’s actual experiences with gender bias, which can be shared with others. And,

(2) Bias Bingo makes you look for real-life examples– you know, the kind of examples that demonstrate that something like ‘gender bias in academe’ actually exists.

Beyond basic branding

There’s even an actual prize at the end of the game.

If you can make it through the buzz kill that is generated by writing out examples of your own experience of bias (no easy feat, I assure you), you can win a free T shirt! The T-shirt announces to all your skill at the game of Bias Bingo.

And, in another brilliant, brand-extending move, the T-shirt creates a brand community. Wearing the T-shirt makes you a brand advocate. It creates community interaction by inviting people to ask you about your experience with Bias Bingo and to play the game themselves.

Clever marketing. I hope it goes viral.

Create the missing tagline

However, there is one piece missing to this marketing strategy… Bias Bingo has no tag line. The game needs a pithy, polysemous, memorable phrase to complete its branding portfolio.

Let’s make “Create the missing tagline” the next Bias Learning Game  ….  I’ll start first with a tagline idea:

“Sexism. The problem that now has a game.”

Your turn…  Add your suggestions in the comments, below, and I’ll send them off to the scholars at The Gender Bias Learning Project.

See Also:
New Game Plays on Women’s Experience of Bias in Academe by Robin Wilson in The Chronicle of Higher Ed
Bias Bingo! at FemaleScienceProfessor
Gender Bias Bingo at Discover

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An Agenda for Management Innovation: 25 Challenges

by cv harquail on January 27, 2009

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1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose.
Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems.
There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.

3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations.
To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology, markets, democracies, and theology.

4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy.
There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.

5. Reduce fear and increase trust.
Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.

6. Reinvent the means of control.
To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within, rather than constraints from without.

7. Redefine the work of leadership.
The notion of “the” leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who work to enable innovation and collaboration.

8. Expand and exploit diversity.
We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.

9. Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process.
In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.

10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization.
To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past.
Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.

12. Share the work of setting direction.
To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed in a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

13. Develop holistic performance measures.
Existing performance metrics must be recast because they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.

14. Stretch executives’ timeframes and perspectives.
Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.

15. Create a democracy of information.
Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.

16. Empower renegades and disarm reactionaries.
Management systems must give more power to employees who have their emotional equity invested in the future rather than in the past.

17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources.
Markets are better than hierarchies are at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.

19. Depoliticize decision making.
 Decision-processes must be free of positional biases and exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.

20. Better optimize trade-offs.
Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.

21. Further unleash human imagination.
Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.

22. Enable communities of passion.
To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of communities of passion.

23. Retool management for an open world.
Value-creating networks often transcend the firm’s boundaries and can render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed to build complex ecosystems.

24. Humanize the language and practice of business.
Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to timeless human ideals such as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

25. Retrain managerial minds.
Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

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