If you’re planning to hold an internal discussion during IP Inclusive Week, you could do worse than tackle the difficult but important topic of unconscious bias.
This is an area where it really helps to make the discussions interactive, to allow people to experience directly the way that their own biases and assumptions affect the judgements they make. So we’ve put together some ideas for workshop exercises you could use to kick-start the discussions, and some resources you might find useful to inspire your event.
You can download our ideas here; please feel free to make use of them in your organisation. We’d love to hear your feedback – and of course please tweet about any events you hold during IP Inclusive Week, using the tag #ipinclusiveweek.
Our thanks to Ben Buchanan, a Deputy Director and Diversity and Inclusion Champion at the IPO, for putting these ideas together for us. Those of you who attended our November 2017 workshop on unconscious bias may remember some of the games and how engagingly they illustrated the biases that affect us. You can read a report of that event ​here, and also access the unconscious bias “toolkit” we created as a result.
​Finally, don’t forget that these types of meetings can be valuable training exercises and as such, can count as CPD.