In his new book, Anu Gupta explains how bias hurts businesses, and offers tools that can help teams save costs and enhance inclusion.
Bias is the building block of most challenges we face individually, locally, and globally. It shows up in our interactions with coworkers, family members, and strangers. It impairs the services we provide in our professional lives, such as healthcare, education, or policing. It compromises the products we design, such as apps, clothing, and the code for artificial intelligence. It limits the cultural narratives we construct in film, theater, and the arts. It hinders the success of policy solutions we recommend for issues like climate change, disinformation, and public health crises. Most strikingly, it shows up in how we treat ourselves and one another.
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari advises that “For every dollar and every minute we invest in improving artificial intelligence, it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in advancing human consciousness.” In other words, dedicating our resources and efforts toward breaking bias.
Breaking bias is one of the most important work we each do in the 21st century. This is because breaking bias goes to the core of who we are as humans: how we live, how we work, how we commune and interact with others, and, most important, how we relate to ourselves and others.
The Cost of Bias
Research has shown that holding on to biases is bad for our health. Biases impair our ability to make decisions, and they increase our stress, anxiety, and general frustration levels. Socially, bias creates workplaces, communities, and societies that are unfair and in which people lack the skills to deal with conflict, disagreements, and misunderstandings, which create numerous costs, such as attrition, litigation, and poor performance.
Read the complete Fadt Company article BY Anu Gupta: https://www.fastcompany.com/91191522/racial-bias-costs-the-u-s-economy-2-trillion-annually-here-are-5-potential-solutions
