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Named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur. She co-founded Socos, where machine learning and cognitive neuroscience combine to maximize students’ life outcomes. Vivienne is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she pursues her research in neuroprosthetics. In her free time, Vivienne has developed a predictive model of diabetes to better manage the glucose levels of her diabetic son and systems to predict manic episodes in bipolar sufferers. She sits on the boards of StartOut, The Palm Center, Emozia, and the Bay Area Rainbow Day Camp, and is an advisor to Cornerstone Capital and Bayes Impact. Dr. Ming also speaks frequently on issues of LGBT inclusion and gender in technology. Vivienne lives in Berkeley, CA, with her wife (and co-founder) and their two children.
Jennifer Brown: Welcome today, this is Jennifer Brown, and I’m thrilled to be joined today by Vivienne Ming, Dr. Ming. And Vivienne Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist, technology and entrepreneur, and a personal friend of mine, and someone that I find incredibly inspiring, and knowledgeable, and a fellow change maker in the world. So welcome Vivienne, and I’d love to just start by asking you- you’ve shared a little bit about your bio, but tell us a little bit more about yourself in your own words. What would you like to share with our audience so they can get grounded in who you are and what you’re doing in the world?
Vivienne Ming: Absolutely. Probably if you want to understand me in the moment the best, know that I am bundled up in blankets with a warm cup of chai in my hand, feeling slightly miserable from a week long illness. That’s probably not the sort of defining characteristic anyone wants to convey about themselves, but I’m a real person. Being a theoretical neuroscientist apparently does not make one immune to getting a nasty cold. But I’m also a mom which is probably what’s most important to me. I have a couple of kids having their last day of school before the holiday break, and I have a wonderful wife who leads research at the San Francisco school system, and fundamentally, professionally I see myself as a scientist.
I started off studying the brain and now I study anything and everything related to human capital, human potential whether it’s economics, or neuroscience, or anything in between. And then I try and take the things that I discover out into a way to affect the world. Whether it’s inventing treatments for diseases, or developing companies and products to address needs in education, or in labor markets, or in diversity issues, all the way to just pure research that’s meant to identify or maybe point a direction to the kind of world that I’d love for my kids to grow up in.
Jennifer Brown: Thank you, that’s lovely and I can completely relate. Thank you for being with us given it’s a miserable day for you, but I hope you’re on the mend.
Vivienne, what resonates about your story with me on so many levels is that we do share a community of identity, and I wanted to begin my asking you to share about your history. And I think it does actually inform the passions that you’re now bringing into the world, but I wanted to bring that out today so that people could hear a little bit about the struggle you went through to reconcile your true identity and live that identity in the world. And I know that it has not been easy and it’s been a tremendous struggle and learning experience for you to bring who you are into alignment, and I think a lot of people can relate to that and to your story, but I’m not sure a lot of people really know about that story.
So would you tell us a little bit how- I was struck that you described it in one article I read as ‘ghosting your way through life.’ You were doing that- you were doing that for a time. Tell us a little bit more about what that meant, and then how did you come out on the other side?
Vivienne Ming: Yeah you know nowadays, leaping into the future that is now, I frequently encourage young entrepreneurs and students, as I say to lead many lives. And I say, ‘Look I’ve been a neuroscientist, I’ve been an entrepreneur, and a writer, and an economist, and all these different things.’ But probably the most stark transition for me was that when I was young, going way back being very young, I was very unhappy and everyone knew it around me.
By the time I finally reached high school it reached a point where I was quite miserable, and you know it’s hard to imagine I think for someone who hasn’t been through it, what it feels like to hate yourself so much that for example to relax, you relaxed by envisioning terrible things happening to you. In some ways you feel like there’s some sort of release or confirmation of all these terrible things you see about yourself. If you can just imagine people beating you up, or setting you on fire, sounds awful. And now looking back it feels so long ago but I can still remember what it was like to- I just say ghost through life, which for me was learning how not to connect with anyone, learning how to hide myself, and everything I felt about myself. And eventually after struggling through high school, that meant completely failing out of college, and then not being able to get out of bed for years… So there’s nothing particularly pleasant about that, there’s no wonderful stories of drug fueled rampages through Vegas that I can look back on with a wink. It was really just a kind of crushing sense of unhappiness, and loneliness, a belief that it would never change.
It’s interesting because years and years later, I was interviewed by the New York Times about one of my companies, and what was salient to them for understandable reasons was that after a long period of being desperately unhappy I went through gender transition and became a woman, and it’s undeniable the profound impact that that has had on my life. That every good thing I’ve done has largely come from that moment. But unfortunately putting the focus on the gender and the transition misses a bigger point, which was ten years before that when my life really bottomed out…
I had no job, I was living in my car, and I’d managed to find a gun which isn’t so difficult to do in America, and I had a night in 1995 (I couldn’t tell you when during the year) when I just needed- I never thought I would be happy, I’d never accomplished anything in my life, and I needed a reason to be alive and if I couldn’t come up with one then it was time to stop with the entire joke that it had been so far. Needless to say that was pretty low.
It was terrible but I found something that allowed me to move forward, and there’s nothing spiritual in what I’m about to say, it was actually some words from my father to live a life of substance. To live a life that made other people’s lives better. And the reason I think it’s important to highlight that terrible night in 1995, rather than the quite frankly wonderful if terrifying night ten years later where I came out to my fiancé, is because that was the moment that meant something. And the ten years in between where I worked hard, I pulled my life back together, I went back to school, I had suddenly tremendous success in academia, and I pushed through it for ten years still miserable but committed and working hard.
My metric was not whether I was happy but whether I made an impact on other people’s lives. And that is far and away the most impressive thing I’ve ever done. The inventions for diabetes and bipolar, the companies, the research, all of which I’m terribly proud of, nothing compares with the time between wanting to end my life and wanting to transform my life. And it led to a simple little phrase that I’ve shared with people which is that gender transition really isn’t about gender, it’s about wanting to make yourself a better person. Literally make yourself a better person. So it happens for a very small number of people like myself that involved gender, but the truth is it’s not about the clothes I’m wearing. It’s about what I needed to do to have a meaningful, positive impact on the world, and how eventually ten years later that gave me this incredible wonderful gift of being able to be me, of being able to be in love with an amazing woman, and being a mom, and it’s just simply a gift. And again for me personally I don’t mean it in a spiritual sense, I just meant ten years of incredibly challenging change ended with this amazing transformation. And I love who I am now, and I hope everyone else appreciates everything I bring to this world is the result of that.
Jennifer Brown: Vivienne I’m so grateful watching you in the world. I’m so grateful that none of those attempts to escape the situation worked, that you somehow found the strength to persevere, and that you stuck it out through that very difficult time that- and that you discovered what was really most important to you, which was to live that life of substance to quote your dad. And you certainly have. I mean I think you’re changing the world with every creation that you bring to us.
I know I find who you are, and what you talk about specifically these days really resonates with so many that feel they can’t bring their full selves to whatever part of their life that means. You’ve lived it so you have a tremendous credibility when you tell us about it. But you’ve got this tremendous skill set that you also bring to it, to be able to actually build and quantify concrete tools in the world that can help us look at how to build systems and organizations that can be safe places, and places of opportunity for people who aren’t represented or seen for all of who they are. And I think there’s that beautiful link between your story that I wanted to make sure you told in your own words and what you’re doing now. And if you wouldn’t mind I’d love to kind of segue into that…
When I first read some of your copious output, where I was very struck as many people in the LGBT community were, because I was sitting in a ballroom with thousands of people I think when you talked about it the first time, was the whole concept that you have defined as the tax on being different. And I know that that has been an animating idea for you. I wondered if you could take us back and talk about your history of working with data, and big data, and what interested you in kind of nailing this down, and quantifying it, and calling it that? And really what is it, and how does it impact a lot of us, perhaps disproportionately?
Vivienne Ming: Absolutely. So it’s interesting, I just spent some time talking about one transition, and one process of sort of reincarnating into a new life, and another one was me as an academic neuroscientist sort of stepping out of that world and into the world of first being an entrepreneur, and then new opportunities arising out of that. As an academic, a lot of what you may hear of today […] the kind of automatic image recognition that’s done in pictures through Google and Facebook, and some of the amazing things in that space. A lot of that came out of our research field, trying to build better AIs to understand the brain, studying the brain to come up with better AIs, and when I founded my first company I was taking a lot of that sort of amazing technology that had been developed in my field and some small percentage of which I’ve been involved in developing, and deploying that first in education where I wanted to see could my work studying the brain and developing these algorithms improve educational outcomes? And from there the next most obvious thing to work on was the workplace itself, and helping to discover talent that people were ignoring. Maybe I felt an affinity for that because, largely through my own actions, my potential had been largely ignored.
I don’t blame anyone for that, I was born a straight white male so I had every advantage, yet nonetheless it’s interesting to see in my life with all of those advantages, and all of the proof points that I really am capable, and can build these amazing things in the recent years of my life, that it was virtually lost. If I had pulled that trigger way back in the nineties, nothing I’d ever done later in my life would ever have happened. All of that potential would have been lost. And as I began looking back at that I realized how many people didn’t start with the incredible advantages I did, the incredible chances, and if I came so close to never realizing my potential, how many people are just fundamentally lost to us? Not through any of their own fault such as mine, but because they- let’s be really blunt, they’re the wrong color, they’re the wrong gender, they have a disability, any number of things that immediately takes them out of the space, out of our own internal model of what makes a great engineer, or what makes a great leader, what makes a great salesperson.
And so I became Chief Scientist of a company called Gild, and our goal was to take bias out of the hiring process, and our approach was to collect massive amounts of data. We built a database of over 100 million people, 122 million when I finally left Gild. We collected data from hundreds of different websites, pulled it all together to learn about each individual person to see what really truly predicted their potential for a particular job whether it was as a software engineer, as a designer, as a salesperson. And we built these models, these algorithms to try and make these predictions. And it was hard but we made some real progress on this, and we were able to discover talent that was going ignored often for some very straightforward reasons. Because you had the wrong sounding last name, because you didn’t go to the right college, because you’d never worked at a brand name company.
Our focus was on predicting the quality of work rather than your pedigree, and it was amazing to see how often those two things diverged. Often in some of my initial work we found that for every highly qualified, highly credentialed person in a given job vertical, there were ten to a hundred times as many people that were equally qualified but didn’t have those same credentials.
Jennifer Brown: And Vivienne I remember- if I could interrupt, I remember reading about the contrast that you drew between Joe and Jose. I mean you really brought it down to concrete terms in terms of one tax being paid on one side of the equation and not the other. And I talk about it in my book in chapter seven, I share some of your research on Joe and Jose. But could you describe that?
Vivienne Ming: Yeah, so this is where this work eventually started to lead, is we built these models that could tell us kind of as best we could do, and nothing was perfect but trying to abstract away from all the misleading signals and say, ‘What is the quality of work that this person is doing?’ I was contacted by USA News and World Report about a blog post that had gone viral. This guy named Jose Zamora had blogged a blog post about how he was sending out a hundred resumes a week and getting essentially no responses. And he talked about how he drops the ‘S’ out of his name, and how Joe instead of Jose was getting job offers that he was never getting before. This got picked up by Huffington Post, and then USA News, so they contact me and I was frustrated that someone felt they needed- I could cite a hundred research papers about identical name at the top of- or a different male versus female name, and an African American name versus Caucasian sounding name at the top of an identical resume. There’s so much research about this that I have to admit it’s frustrating to me to be asked, ‘Is this real? Is this legitimate?’ Particularly in the world of fake news, a real news story came along and people needed verification. Okay I get it, we’re in a world that doesn’t respect research as much as it ought to, so I thought I would do something very different.
I took this massive database we’d put together, and all of the research we’d done on the quality of work people did, and I said, ‘What does it take for Jose to get the same probability of a promotion for the same quality of work as Joe?’ And in this case not an experiment, all of the actual Jose’s and Joe’s working in a professional context in the USA and Canada. So we had hundreds of thousands of these people that we could put into this model to look and see what was different. And the differences were stark. Just along one dimension, education, Jose typically needed a Master’s degree to be competitive with Joe with no degree whatsoever if they were both pursuing jobs in the tech industry. So that’s six years of extra education Jose needs, six years of the additional tuition, of the missed salary of being a software engineer. Even though they’re already doing equivalent work, just for Jose to be recognized as equally capable as Joe. And what was interesting, the outgrowth out of those comparisons was that we were able to quantify in strong financial terms what it cost for Jose to be competitive.
And I called this the ‘tax’ on being different. This is what Jose needs to do, this is what a black woman on Wall Street needs to do, this is what a gay man working in London needs to pay for the same outcomes for the same work. And in the case of Jose this was essentially three quarters of a million dollars. Not to grow, not to expand his skillset, three quarters of a million dollars in additional education, and higher degrees, in more brand name companies, and fancier awards simply to prove who he is.
Jennifer Brown: And Vivienne, yeah I talk about this all the time, just the effort that we expect some people to make every single moment of every day. To show up, to excel, to- that sort of meritocracy which I find really frustrating when I hear that pushback to say, ‘Oh everybody has equal opportunity here. I’m the kind of leader that is welcoming, and people just have to work hard.’ You really quantified I think what we all can come back to that with, which is there is a very real difference here in terms of the experience that some people are having, and I’m just so glad to be equipped with it. And I know the last time you and I spoke, we sort of flipped the conversation and thought about what a deterrent it is on behalf of the talent coming into these organizations. When they look accurately at this tax it’s like they know- they know how difficult it’s going to be, and I actually think it kind of keeps that talent away from engaging because they have knowledge that this is going to be a hard road, and I actually think it’s kind of hurting the pipeline no matter maybe how much companies understand this dynamic is going on, and they really want a different outcome. The truth of what it’s going to mean for that emerging leader that’s looking to enter that system, it’s kind of like how crazy would they need to be to take that on? Because it’s expensive vis a vis the tax, but it’s demoralizing and it’s really difficult for our sense of self to feel that we’re constantly having to push every day. Is that what’s going on?
Vivienne Ming: Absolutely. I mean if you take that- it’s almost a mantra among a lot of policy oriented economists, but if you want to discourage something, put a tax on it. If you want to discourage women from pursuing an executive level career, put a tax on it. Or if you want to discourage young people of color from going into the professional world, put a tax on them. And I recently wrote an article for the Financial Times about some extensions of this work where we said, ‘Well rather than just treat this as maybe it seems self-evident that if you have to work so much harder for the same outcomes, then you won’t try.’ So we actually built the micro economic models necessary to explore these ideas. So if we ignored all of the actual demographics of the world but simply had these taxes, as we had computed them from our research work, so roughly half of people had the taxing associated with being a woman in the workplace, roughly 10% of them had the tax associated with being African American in the workplace. And then we just play these out, but more importantly we play them out essentially modeling a whole lifetime’s worth of experience. And what we found is every time a women drops out of the workforce nominally to be a mom, every time- this profound phenomenon, every time a black kid gets a full scholarship to Harvard but goes to the local community college instead, and we look at it and say, ‘Oh that’s crazy, that’s irrational.’ … But it’s not.
These people are making rational decisions. They are looking at a world where they will have to work twice as hard, three times as hard, and never reach the same outcomes, at least if you will in a statistical sense. And they’re making these decisions in the context of their life experience to not pursue, and it’s amazing to me that so many companies say, ‘Oh we love to have women on our boards and in our C-suite. We’d love to have an amazing black lesbian engineer in our company,’ to quote one specific person. But we can’t find it without realizing that some of the best strongest marketing they’re doing for their brand is telling all of those exact same people not to bother. That there are no jobs for them in their company.
I will share an experience without naming any names, but I was at an event recently immediately post-election. It was a very tech, a very wealthy crowd, and they were lamenting of others, and they were talking about the racism of the vote, and the irrationality of it. A young mom stood up at the end of this big conversation and not coincidentally she was black, and she says, ‘I don’t want to hear any of you talk about the racism of these voters when none of you have someone that looks like me working in your leadership with your companies.’ And because she saw what they were missing. I’m not saying that they’re bad people, that they’re doing anything deliberately, but what they’re missing is the incredibly strong statement they make to the world about the composition of their companies. And if you can’t address issues of inclusion at the top, you will never change them at the bottom.
Jennifer Brown: That’s right. That’s right Vivienne, I couldn’t agree with you more. I was fascinated to see the kinds of communications that were coming out from the C-suite after the election because I know for my world there was so much angst and fear in the workforce in so many companies. Concern around ‘will I be safe in my interactions with my colleagues and my co-workers? Will I be safe when I step outside of the four walls of the company?’ And I know that some of the communications that came out of the C-suite were a little vanilla for my taste, it was sort of like speaking in code. They knew they needed to say something but it didn’t really say much substantive and it kind of left people with a- I don’t know, sort of a bland or a confused feeling about what they were talking about. And others were very explicit to say, ‘We believe in diversity, we value you, you’re important to us, we want you to stay here, we want your contributions, and we know that you need to feel comfortable to make those contributions.’ And so kind of opening the door for a further conversation if that’s not what people are feeling every day in the workforce. But it was interesting, I thought most companies stayed silent and I thought it was a real missed opportunity to kind of ameliorate some of the impressions that our talent is getting from their experience in the workplace. Would you agree with that? And do you want to share any other advice?
Vivienne Ming: I think although some companies were certainly vocal before the election, there’s been a pretty profound silence since then beyond some internally focused support, and that is really surprising to me. I mean I understand the fear of going against a bully, but I am surprised that an industry that has stood up so strongly for at least the idea, the aspirations of diversity, have not continued to stand up and be heard going forward.
And I say this not as a moral statement or as a political statement. I have some new research coming out that I’m truly excited about, that shows the profound causal relationships between having an inclusive economy and having a growth economy. Now that research is about regions, it’s about states like California. Why is California’s economy so powerful? Why is it that so many jobs have been created in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland? Why do Berlin and London stand out in Europe? And it is not the entire story, but a big portion of it is that these are cities where people believe they can go and be successful. That their efforts to change the world will be embraced. They’re not perfect, Silicon Valley is far from perfect, kind of profoundly so in some ways, but there’s this real belief that you could come from anywhere and be successful. And it’s fascinating to see how other cities, even though it’s with nominally strong industries, don’t show these relationships. And you know, I began this line of research about inclusive economies, about how in fact it’s respecting human capital, not cutting taxes and dismounting regulations. It’s respecting human capital that actually drives outcomes. But you know, that’s only going to hold true inside companies if they are continued to be seen as a place where people can make this change.
If they don’t stand up and say, ‘Listen you- you anyone anywhere can come here and together we’ll do something amazing,’ then they will lose that edge, they’ll lose that ability to stand out and innovate and continue to grow. So to me, this isn’t just a lost opportunity in terms of, ‘Boy I wish they had done the right thing.’ I wish that they had done the thing that’s going to make their company strong in the medium and long term going forward, which is to continue to celebrate every member of that company that has made them who they are.
Jennifer Brown: I couldn’t agree more. I wondered if you have any advice for the individual in these companies, someone that doesn’t have the platform and the voice and the stamp of being an executive that has this like huge opportunity to communicate what is important to the company from a values perspective. What can that individual do from wherever they sit in the organization when these things- when they don’t hear that these values are important to their employer? When they are trying to lead, and be courageous every day, and to actually be change agents within their organizations, what can they do from where they sit, do you think?
Vivienne Ming: You know the first thing I want to respect is not everyone’s in a position to do these sorts of things. Let’s take transgender individuals for example. I’m in an incredibly privileged position. Most people who’ve gone through gender transition and want to raise money for a startup, it would be irrational for them to be completely open about themselves because it is so much harder to raise money. And I respect the simple realities that individuals can’t opt out of paying the tax. You can’t just go sort of- you can’t just get yourself a shotgun and move to Wyoming and saying, ‘I ain’t paying the tax no more.’ It just doesn’t work that way. And so I respect the fact that not everyone’s in a position to be vocal. But the simple truth is power aggregates, and some of the work I’ve done on inclusive economies have shown that affinity groups are incredibly effective at essentially being force multipliers. Both in terms of the goals of diversity and inclusion, but also in terms of more fundamental goals. So having LGBT groups, affinity groups within your company, or economic groups.
So for example I’m the Vice Chair of Start Out, which is a national LGBT entrepreneurship group and we have evidence that where we operate and where we can make connections, we can actually advance the cause of the entrepreneurs that are our membership in terms of their entrepreneurship, in terms of their ability to raise money. So inside of companies this is true also. Finding a voice is the start, but bringing those voices together, making your leadership hear that voice is powerful. And you know, there’s no great substitute for having allies in this world, and so being able to show that this actually matters because I think many of our co-workers innocently, if naively, don’t perceive that this is the case. They don’t understand that there is a cost to simply being who you are, and the research on this is- we could go on and on for the next three hours going through the neuroscience, the psychological research on bias, and how deep and fundamental it is. I actually like to do it often before I speak to say, ‘Listen nobody here is a bad person. We’re all biased, it’s just the way our brains work. Where we fail is when we refuse to acknowledge.’ And when individuals going forward I think can find some strength coming together, can acknowledge that there are very few explicit villains in these stories. There are always some, but very few, and most of it is people honestly perceiving the world in the way they were raised to. And I’m not saying that to let anyone off the hook, but you can’t start these discussions until you actually can show people the experience. So binding together and finding other voices that can confirm it. Now of course I’m a scientist, I love numbers and I think it’s very possible to show these numbers, it’s really in fact fairly straightforward to see that we often make irrational decisions in the workplace. And much of what I build nowadays in this domain are tools to help people make better decisions sort of in the moment. But a starting point to get people interested in that is to really recognize that the problem is there and that there are missed opportunities, and profound opportunities.
All of my work, whatever I might feel in terms of social justice, all of my work is about the economic argument. My work is about how companies that show bias in their hiring process are more likely to go out of business. About how companies with more women on their boards return greater shareholder value among four different measures. About how companies with more women in leadership positions perform better often because they don’t make these catastrophically bad decisions, because they demonstrate better creative problem solving. You know you could go on and on as I said with this profound space of research, but I think people need to see it inside their company. They need to feel it so that those numbers carry the weight not just of the numbers and the data but the numbers of people you work with, and you can build those allies and that leadership by it.
Jennifer Brown: And Vivienne, yeah we have to talk about the business case so much, sometimes it just drives me crazy that we spend so much time convincing around an argument that now is quantified with so much data. Yours and what’s available in the public domain. And those of us who do this work spend so much time arguing if you will and justifying the why this is something that should be paid attention to. And last time I think diving into the how to say, ‘Okay let’s roll up our sleeves and really tackle it.’ And so that was one thing that you brought to mind, and the other that we don’t have a lot of time to go into this now, but I loved the work that you’re pondering and thinking about around changing behavior in a minute-by-minute way, and building new habits around bias.
Every day there are multiple times that bias creeps into our behavior in leading people, and partnering with people, in teaming, in making selections, in deciding who to hire. It’s everywhere around us and we’ve been kind of steeped in it and it’s our wiring as well. So I really am excited to see what you will be building in the future and hopefully we’ll be building that together at some point to shortcut bias at all the points that it happens in workplaces because I think we’ve got to raise awareness, build new habits, reinforce those habits, and make it very simple for people so that they become aware on a micro level that all of these little decisions we make add up to the fact that we can’t attract and retain and grow a more diverse workforce that then we can see kind of blossom into senior leadership, which is really what- where I want to see the change that I am definitely not seeing yet. So I’m really excited to see your work there.
Vivienne Ming: Well there’s still clearly so much to be done, and so much to be done not for us but because again, this is the world I want my kids to live in; a world where everyone is contributing and right now we are simply not tapping enough of the world’s potential to create this sort of idyllic world that we might someday have in mind that we all want to live in. So if I could throw out one last thing that I would beg people to do is- and this may sound strange, don’t be data driven. Be experiment driven. It’s so easy to go to your leadership with a bar chart and have them read what they want into it. We need- if we want to look at these, if we want to measure the impact, if we want to run programs that we know make differences, then engineer experiments. These don’t have to be scientific experiments, that’s not what I’m talking about, but it’s a test of a hypothesis. ‘I think this will make a difference, and this is what the outcome will be. Now let’s run this experiment and see what happens.’ I think if we don’t do that, we will always be under the foot of bias. And it’s not that people are intentionally hiring the wrong person, they’re not intentionally promoting the wrong person to sabotage their own companies, they think this is it. We need to be able to show the right decision and the only clear way of doing it is to turn your company into a giant lab that’s always testing new ideas, and really drive that process forward.
Jennifer Brown: That is so actionable and exciting to imagine, and Vivienne you’re just an inspiration and such a unique thought leader on this topic. And I hope everyone will read- in my book I highlight Vivienne’s work, so in chapter seven, I hope you all pick it up. And follow Vivienne in all of the amazing places she’s writing and experimenting, and really think about what she has shared around the data versus I think the practice of changing behaviors and establishing a different reality through experimentation I think is an incredible thing to really wrap our heads around.
How might we do that regardless of how large or small our organizations are? Can we prove a concept in a certain arena, and can we then take that and use it as a tool for change to shift entire institutions, and to ultimately shift the kind of working world that we would be proud to have our children come into?
So I just appreciate your time Vivienne, thank you so much for joining us today. And Vivienne, where can people follow you and find out more about your work?
Vivienne Ming: So you can learn more about my work in education at www.SocosLearning.com. And if you just want to follow my publications and my speaking events, I am @NeuralTheory on Twitter. Neural as in the brain, theory as in ‘I had this crazy idea and we’d see if it worked.’
Jennifer Brown: That’s wonderful. Thank you Vivienne so much.
Vivienne Ming: It was a real pleasure, thank you, and I didn’t cough once.
Jennifer Brown: Yay! And get better soon.
Vivienne Ming: I make a Christmas gift to myself of being healthy before the New Year.
Jennifer Brown: Good, we need you to be healthy. Thank you and happy holidays.
Vivienne Ming: You too, bye.
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