I think the shame was the thing. And actually, I was just remembering a guy called Ben Fuchs, who he did his work on advantage blindness with. And he told us this great story of, you know, some global senior executive who went on these things and he said, okay, what are all the attributes that give you advantage that have nothing to do with your professional competence? And it was all to do is, you know, think great things like height, gender, ethnicity, what university you went to, you know, one of the things that gave advantage was, did you have a stay at home wife, which meant that you could move around the globe and she would normally, she would take care of all those sort of domestic things. And he went and joined in this particular sort of know your advantage, buying the stuff. And he lined up with everybody else. At the end of the exercise, he was at one end of the room because he'd taken a step forward every time when you had something that gave you an advantage and everybody else was behind it. Ben told the story that six months later, the guy phoned him up and said, that was the most shameful thing I've really experienced because up until then, he had thought that everything he'd achieved had been solely down to his own efforts. And certainly he worked hard, he was ambitious, he was bright, but it was a real shocker for him to realize quite how much of a head start he had. And it had nothing to do with his hard work or anything like that.

Take us. And just as a qualitative researcher, I was like, damn, I nerded out on this. This was so good. The six ways that companies respond to employee activism. So number one, activism. What activism?

So this is the first that we looked at the responses that leaders and organizations seem to have had to employ activist voices. And as you say, we identified six categories. The first is non-existent. So I, for example, was interviewing a chief executive from a big, quite a big organization in Europe. And I asked him about activism. I asked him about where was the organization on things like Black Lives Matter, climate change. And I was a standard because he looked utterly baffled. And this was about a year ago. This wasn't very long ago. And he was like, well, you know, it's just not when, well, we're not really, it honestly just wasn't on the agenda. So it's kind of what activism it's not here. It's just we do what? Why would it be? So that's that exists, believe it or not.

So one is non-existent. So what activism made me laugh? I don't know why that made me laugh. I love qualitative. I love thematic analysis where it's named and then parenthetically, there's an example of what it sounds like. That's like my favorite like qualitative trick. Number two, suppression. Expell it before it spreads.

Yeah. And this isn't really interesting. There's the kind of very obvious suppression. You know, we're not going to talk about this. You're not allowed to talk about this. We are focused on our business mission and anything else we won't speak about. And then there's this sort of suppression that happens through avoidance or through this is really uncomfortable or through actually we have a feeling if we speak up about this, we're going to be labeled a troublemaker. It's that vibe you get in so many organizations that suppresses and silences, whether it's meant to or whether it's inadvertent. So suppression is a fairly big category. Yeah.

And you know, whether it's overt or covert as an employee, when your livelihood depends on it, you know, you know. Number three, I've never even heard of this word before. At first, I thought I said fascism. Oh, yes. I

was not

excited. I'm like, you're going there. But is it facadeism? Yeah. Clean up a facade?

Yeah, you haven't heard the word because we made it up.

Damn it. I love that to you. The y'all are after my own. This is like, these are my people right here. Facadeism. Let's just say the right thing. The next is defense engagement. Yeah.

Pisses me off. So facadeism is something that we're hearing a lot about is we say the right things, but there's no actual action. So it's a facade. And that's where organizations have been called out quite a lot at the moment. And lots of organizations called out around Black Lives Matter.

There was an interesting one actually just happened here at the Olympics, which is listening to an interview with a CEO of a manufacturer of snowboards. And on the company website, the company said more than a business. So the good solid interviewer then said, so how come your snowboarding in the weager area? What's the company stand on the imprisonment and slave labor of weigens? And you could see the poor guy had no idea because obviously someone had popped it onto the website and said, look, this sounds good. But he was then going, well, we're a business. And you said, but your website says we're more than a business.

Boo, man, let me just tell you this. This is where I tell people all the time when I'm working with companies and they're like, oh, man, we are into the vulnerability thing. I'm like, you got to be really careful because the fastest thing to bite you in the ass is kind of this so vulnerability. No one likes a liar. If you're not going to care, we respect you more. If you just say, look, we don't give a shit about that kind of stuff. We're looking at market cap. We're looking at our investor call. We don't give a shit. We respect that more than what does that tagline mean exactly? Oh, what tagline? You know, like, facadeism, I'm going to start using it. I will send you a quarter every time I quote you on

it. Yeah. And again, Brene, there's purposeful facadeism. There's genuinely, we're just going to say it, but we're not going to do anything. And then we're going to say it and we kind of mean it. But you know what? We just don't get round to doing anything about it. There's that sort of facadeism as well, which again is being called out.

And that gets tricky too, because that facadeism can be very difficult. So I had this incredible conversation with Icobothia, who is a facilitator in our work and does a lot of work at the intersection of kind of daring leadership plus belonging equity representation. And she didn't use the term facadeism because she will next week is I'll introduce it. But she said, when you have things like employee groups like ERGs, but the time that people spin dedicated to leading those is not compensated. So that's facadeism to me in a big way. Like, if you say you value something and the currency of the realm around how you value or not value something is money, then I expect to see resources dedicated to it. I expect time to be given to it. So facadeism is sneaky or can be on that showing

dedication on money.