Use a See an Elephant exercise to surface unconscious bias.
technique — attributed to Caitlin Walker
Walker's warm-up for a session on bias is operational. She gives one instruction (see an elephant) and asks what kind of elephant, where is it. As participants realize their answers differ, she goes to the next level. When someone says it is a circus elephant and they are having their photo taken on it, she asks the rest of the group what they are inferring. One person says they think the elephant is sad and feels judgmental. Another imagines it is brightly colored and the children are having fun. The group learns that humans are always making things up. From there, it is a shorter step to surface unconscious bias and reduce assumptions in higher-stakes contexts. The exercise is small and produces a metacognitive frame the group can use for the rest of the session.
For facilitators running bias, diversity, or perception sessions and for trainers thinking about how to introduce metacognitive work. The technique is most useful as a non-work-related warm-up that opens the substantive work without triggering defensiveness.
see-an-elephant, unconscious-bias, inference-vs-evidence, warm-up