R/GA Innovation Exchange Spotlight: Meet Elise Smith of Praxis Labs
As part of our Inclusive Innovation series, we interviewed the female founders participating in our 2019 R/GA Innovation Academy with Kinship at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. We spoke with Elise Smith of Praxis Labs about how VR is a better medium for diversity and inclusion trainings and creating more access and opportunity in the workplace.
Me Too. Black Lives Matter. Times Up. These movements are the basis for any interviewer asking someone about the changing times we live in where underrepresented groups have taken their voices and personal stories to create digital beacons of hopeful, intentional conversation.
While these movements exist in crowds of protest marches, the red carpets of celebrity affairs and in the thousands of hashtagged tweets, the workforce combats discrimination in a different space using the term diversity and inclusion (D&I) as its mantra.
Yet to get diversity and inclusion right it has to be more than just a buzzword or a company-wide, day-long seminar or a belated reaction to a larger problem.
“For many years, we’ve told people what biases are, we’ve told them that people have different experiences but I think it’s really hard to know what that feels like and understand that unless you’re able to really take someone else’s perspective,” said Elise Smith, CEO of Praxis Labs, an enterprise SaaS training company that advances diversity and inclusion outcomes through Virtual Reality (VR)-based learning experiences.
Elise and her team know that diversity and inclusion is both a challenge and an opportunity since turnover due to bias and discrimination, or employee unfairness turnover, costs companies $64B a year. U.S. companies also spend $8B each year on D&I trainings yet 63% of company leaders believe their trainings are ineffective.
Praxis Labs believes that VR is a better medium for these types of trainings than current options. Research has proven that first person perspective-taking in VR can increase empathy, reduce bias, and encourage the adoption of more inclusive behaviors. Participants using VR were 22% more likely to adopt an inclusive behavior than those who read content on the same topic, and VR trainings have shown an 80% retention rate a year after training, compared to 20% a week after traditional training. Using VR, Praxis Labs is reimagining diversity and inclusion trainings to create sustainable change for individuals and organizations.
“I was exploring VR as an emerging technology for learning and got connected with Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford’s Human Interaction Lab. Through that connection, I got to experience ‘A Thousand Cut Journey’ which is a VR experience created by Jeremy and Dr. Courtney Cogburn out of Columbia. In it, you become a black boy that grows up in America as a black man and experiences bias and discrimination at various stages in the classroom, at the hands of the police and in the workplace. It’s an incredibly moving experience, and it showed me how powerful VR could be. From there, I got more into the research around VR’s ability to enable perspective taking, increase empathy, reduce bias and create sustained behavior change. I just felt very compelled by that.”
Praxis Labs will be piloting their trainings with companies this summer, most of whom will be leveraging their predesigned content although companies can inquire about more customized content.
“We pair our VR-trainings with a learning and reflection tool that enables people to take a moment to first, reflect on what they just experienced, second, understand the context, research, and data behind the pattern of bias or discrimination in VR, and third to ask questions and identify if this is something they’ve seen in their workplace, and if so, how to mitigate it.”
For Elise, the pursuit of education has been a constant source of inspiration, influencing both her personal and professional take on how diversity and inclusion serves a greater purpose, especially for underrepresented groups it ultimately benefits. She is currently pursuing an MBA and a Masters in Education at Stanford University, where she originally formed her team and began building VR experiences for empathy development and more specifically unconscious bias training.
“I’m from Chicago and find a lot of inspiration for what I do now from my parents. My parents were very fortunate in that their parents, my grandparents cared deeply about education and saw the value of it. My mom was integrated a white high school on Chicago’s Eastside and my dad went to one of the best black high schools in the city but had to use a family friends address to enroll. So the fact that education systems and more broadly that access and opportunity weren’t distributed equitably was very much instilled in me at a young age and I thought should be changed.”
Generations later, the world is still hungry for more ways to create access and opportunity. And companies are seeking more success stories in creating cultures of inclusion and belonging. Praxis Labs is hoping to be a part of that solution.
“Through my eyes and the eyes of my team, being a person a color, being a woman and going into the workplace, it’s clear that we all have implicit or explicit biases that dictate the way we interact in the world. And unfortunately, due to systemic oppression, we’ve found ourselves in a society that isn’t necessarily set up for everyone to succeed equally,” Elise explains.
