An important course overview

- I'm so glad you're here. There's a lot to cover in a short period of time. Please do what you need to absorb the material as best you can. Come back to the videos anytime and invest in writing down and reviewing your reflections. I promise this will be meaningful when you put in the work. Let's explore the conceptual background of this course and highlight themes to anticipate. First off, our focus here is diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, but we're also including aspects of leadership, culture, and change that are necessary for successful D E I B efforts. Earlier I mentioned depth, breadth, and momentum. These are key drivers of achieving sustainability where D E I B is so core, so integral, that it can't be separated from our organizations. But what do they mean? Depth is about penetrating the organization to affect enough people for change, individuals, teams, and the entire organization no matter where we are and what we do. Breadth is scope how D E I B is incorporated and experienced in company systems, operations and interactions and the degree to which it's comprehensive and ubiquitous. Momentum is the motivation and energy to continue building. As your company matures in its sustainable D E I B journey, progress and results should grow exponentially but only with enough momentum. In chapters two and three, we'll focus on what you can do as individuals and teams. Those efforts feed into what can be done at scale across an organization and we'll see the whole picture with an understanding of how all the parts interact and affect each other. You'll also hear me refer to your company's unique context. This includes elements like business factors, culture, environment, behaviors, experiences, and of course the one-of-a-kind combination of diverse people. One key differentiator of our approach is the custom design for our unique context to ensure relevance, successful change, and long-term impact. A couple of final points. We're here to talk about the people side of D E I B. Programs, policies and processes are also important, but we as humans form and recall memories from our experiences, what stood out to us and how they made us feel. Our framing, especially as we scale to the discussion about the organization level in chapter four, will be around the experience design and the employee experience. The meaning people take from their experiences and the sense they make out of it feed into the overall narrative, all the stories continually shared and woven together. Lastly, this course comes with a resource guide. I highly encourage you to use the guide to reflect, explore, and understand the concepts behind our approaches. The guide also provides additional references and reading if you're as into that as I am. When you're ready, join me in the next video.