From Deep Space to the Workplace: Braiding Inclusivity into Recruitment

Can a tool originally designed for deep space communication revolutionise inclusivity on Earth? Join us on the Inclusive Growth Podcast as we welcome back Rob, the co-founder of Braided Space, who shares the fascinating journey of transforming a space-age innovation into a groundbreaking tool for inclusive communication. Rob discusses the evolution of Braiding, a tool initially created to overcome communication delays in space missions, and its impactful transition to Earth where it supports neurodivergent individuals. 

Rob explains how integrating braided interviews and meetings can enhance neuroinclusive hiring processes across various sectors, from tech giants to pharmaceutical firms. We explore the future role of AI in these processes and some unexpected applications for braided meetings, such as staff surveys and one-to-one interactions. 

If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website. 

If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.

Chapters

• 0:01 Braided Space
• 11:18 Inclusive Recruitment With Braided Interviews
• 25:14 Advancing Braided Meetings and Interviews

Transcript

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon, future proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.

Toby Mildon: Hey there. Thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I'm Toby Mildon, and today I'm excited because we're welcoming back a guest that we've had previously on the show, Rob, who is the co-founder of Braided Space. In our last conversation, Rob shared his fascinating journey of how Braided Space started as a solution for communication challenges in deep space missions. And Rob and his co-founder Drew developed an innovative tool called braiding to tackle the problem of delayed communications between astronauts and mission control, a challenge that becomes critical as humans venture further into space. What's incredibly exciting is how this technology is now being used here on earth to foster better communication and inclusivity, especially for neurodivergent individuals. Rob's unique perspective as an astrophysicist and his extensive experience working with organizations like NASA, combined with the innovative application of braiding, is transforming how we think about inclusive communication.

Toby Mildon: So in today's episode we'll dive deeper into the development of Braided Space. We'll explore the benefits and applications of braiding on earth and discuss how this tool can revolutionize the way that we can conduct meetings and interviews making them more inclusive and effective for everybody. So, Rob, it's lovely to have you back. Let's start by having you just tell us a bit more about your role as one of the founders of Braided Space and the journey that you've been on since our last interview.

Rob Brougham: Yeah, well thanks so much for inviting me back on. Really great to be here. So yeah, well, it has been an interesting journey from the very beginning as you remember from our first podcast, talking about the work you've referenced there, working with the space agencies, very exciting and then evolving from there into the work on earth around inclusive meetings. Sadly, my co-founder, unfortunately, he had to leave the business for health reasons. So about 18 months ago, I went from being well, I'm still a co-founder, but I'm the sole founder working in the business, which was pretty challenging actually. You know, having having someone to sort of share the ups and downs of growing a business with was fantastic. And without that, it did make it a lot harder. It didn't make it any less fun. It certainly didn't make it any less challenging, that's for sure. But yeah, there has been some tough and lonely moments along the way, but the business has continued to move forward and the innovation that we first came up with for the space business, which has evolved into braided meetings on Earth, has then evolved further since then. So yeah, we've made some... We've made some great steps forward as a business in the last couple of years or so.

Toby Mildon: That's brilliant. Can you tell us about how it has evolved and what you're currently working on? 

Rob Brougham: Yeah, of course. So we are still working in the space sector, absolutely. That's still a big part of our business. We're still having lots of active conversations with NASA, the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. But the focus and the volume of work recently has been around how we can work on earth. And when we last spoke, we had the... An embryonic version of a product we call braided meetings, which is the same technology we use in space, which allows us to create on earth meetings in which everyone can contribute equally. So they're highly inclusive meetings, they allow everybody to contribute, everyone gets a fair and equal turn to contribute. And when you and I first spoke, we were very aware of that. We were having some really interesting early conversations with people about how that could be inclusive, in particular, as you mentioned in your introduction, neuro-inclusive.

Rob Brougham: We've since evolved that quite significantly. A number of things, obviously with any software product, you pretty quickly find there's a couple of bugs in it, a couple of things you wish you'd done a bit differently, a couple of usage, bits of user feedback that help to guide you to make things more effective and more usable. We've also had some really interesting feedback about how some of the benefits of braiding are actually even more significant than we originally thought. So what we're seeing now is there are some amazing inclusivity benefits. There are also some amazing efficiency benefits, a braided meeting because of the way it works, because of the way it allows everyone to contribute equally and because of the way you get all of the good ideas in the room out into the meeting ends up being about eight times more effective than the same meeting running a face-to-face environment.

Rob Brougham: So you get some amazing efficiency benefits as well. So we're seeing inclusivity and efficiency coming to the fore. And then also we had this idea that our invention of braiding would be fantastic for recruitment interviews. When you look into the process of recruitment, there hasn't been much change in the way interviews are conducted for a long time. And for many people the interview part of a process is a big barrier. Many people self-select out of applying for various roles because they are fearful of a face-to-face interview. Many recruiters are aware that the face-to-face interview is a challenge for people in particular for neurodiverse individuals. But there hasn't ever been an alternative as credible and effective as a real time synchronous interview other than a face-to-face interview or a video interview. So what we did was we took braiding technology and we created a tool which we now call Braided Interviews. I'm afraid we're not very imaginative with our product names. So we've got space braiding, braided meetings and braided interviews. But braided interviews is a version of the tool optimized for an individual interviewer to interview a individual candidate in an effective, inclusive way. And that's something that's only came out now a couple of months ago, but we're really excited by some of the early feedback of that.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, I'm really interested in the interview side of things, because when we talk to our clients, inclusive recruitment is a big topic for them. How... Can you just explain to us how that that new product works? 

Rob Brougham: Yeah, absolutely. So, and you're right, inclusive recruitment is a big area of focus and for many reasons people are concerned about talent shortages, but they're also very, very concerned now about making sure you have a variety of thought. The old adage, great minds think alike. I don't think anyone believes that anymore. In fact, I've heard other people say, great minds think differently. If you have a team with diversity of thought, you're more likely to be innovative. You are more likely to be creative, you are more effective at problem solving. There's a lot of data that indicates that. So how do you go out there and recruit those individuals. And people have been looking at making sure, for example, that job adverts are not unintentionally discriminatory in any way, that the language is not ambiguous, et cetera.

Rob Brougham: That's all great. Then you do get to the point where you say, I need to actually interview this person. I need to explore their ability to think, their ability to respond to challenges, et cetera. And the classic way of doing that, of course is sitting down video or in a room face-to-face and the interviewer asks questions. Some things have emerged over the last few years that are almost givens within that process to make it more inclusive. One of them is to make sure the questions are shared in advance. And that's actually quite easy to do and many people do now do that almost as a matter of course, you probably saw the press coverage of John Lewis recently when they made a big thing about that. Again, that can happen for a face-to-face interview. If you're saying to someone or someone comes to the process says, my challenge is I struggle with face-to-face meetings.

Rob Brougham: And by the way, this role you're bringing me into, there's no requirement for face-to-face meetings. So why is a face-to-face interview part of the process? There's no alternative available. People are sending out questions on email, but then you've got a long asynchronous process of many days by which time probably a neurotypical candidate has come through the door and already successfully got the job. So what braiding does is it creates an environment where you've got, for example, say you are interviewing me for a role now you might send me an invitation to a braided interview with say five questions on it so I know what the five questions are in advance, I can do a bit of preparation. When that interview starts, the way that appears to me is I'm looking at essentially a chat window with interview question number one on it, I knew what the question was already, I then type my answer.

Rob Brougham: So braided interviews is entirely type, there's no audio and there's no video, which for many, many candidates is a huge bonus. I type my answer after say two minutes, three minutes, whatever time you as the interviewer set that question rotates on a virtual carousel to you so you can see my answer and you can ask a follow up question. Meantime, at the same instant, I have question two and I'm answering question two, the interview proceeds like that. I go through question 1, 2, 3, 4, however many there are. And when I come back to question one, I've got question one. I've given my answer ready, I can now see the follow up question that you gave me and I can now answer that.

Rob Brougham: So for me as a candidate, I've got an opportunity to express my creativity, my intellect, whatever might be important in an environment that to me feels un-intimidating because I don't have to sit across the table from someone and feel awkward, embarrassed or challenged in that sense, but I do get challenges that are appropriate to the role. Super simple actually, but non-obvious. So actually we have a couple of videos about this on our website braided.space, which show a braided interview in action from both the interviewer and the candidate's point of view. It's extraordinary how efficient but also how realistic that process can be. So we're creating an interview environment at the start time and end time to people in the virtual room together, but without any of the challenges that prevent many candidates from succeeding in traditional interviews.

Toby Mildon: That sounds really good. I mean, you've mentioned how this could benefit neurodivergent people. Are you also seeing benefits for a neurotypical folk as well? 

Rob Brougham: So we are for braided meetings, we have... We haven't yet seen that for braided interviews because it's quite new. So we haven't got quite as much much data from that. We're expecting to absolutely see that, we're expecting to see benefits from... For neurotypical individuals. You could actually... When we've talked to people about rolling out braided interviews, we are not saying to people you should always use braided meetings for everybody. What we're saying is you should give the candidates choice. If somebody prefers to be interviewed in that manner, then you should offer them that. If not, you should offer them an interview mode that suits them and their strengths. But you should do some other things that make the playing field level. So if I'm a neurodiverse candidate and you send me out the questions in advance, you should send the same questions out to the neurotypical candidate in advance so the neurotypical candidate can do their thinking and do their preparation. For them the interview mode might then be face-to-face and the follow-up questions will be face-to-face, but they know the same starting questions. And then that's a benefit also for the recruiter because you as the recruiter at the end of the process, you can compare candidates much more equitably because you started with the same opening questions.

Toby Mildon: That sounds really good. And what kinds of organizations do you think would either benefit from using braided interviews or indeed organizations that you would love to work with? 

Rob Brougham: So, a great question. At the moment we're seeing quite broad interest. There are many organizations out there who are really focused on neuro-inclusive recruitment. There was actually a report last year which you may have read called Neurodiversity in the Tech Sector. And that report was issued by an alliance of organizations, big tech companies. And clearly they're focused on how to maximize the talent they get in all sort of aspects of diversity. And so for organizations like that, being able to recruit somebody in is absolutely key. And so for them, there's certainly a level of interest. We're working with companies as diverse as universities, pharmaceutical companies, tech companies. So at the moment it seems to be largely sector agnostic, but you can obviously see from the outside which companies are actively looking to be more inclusive. I think the other thing I'd say there as well is what we see and because braided interviews is so new.

Rob Brougham: This is early days, but if you spend time and effort to make your recruitment process inclusive, that's fantastic. If you add braided interviews on top of that, that's even better. And suddenly you're gonna be able to bring people into roles which they're ideally suited for, regardless of which sector you are. But at that point you put a lot of effort, a lot of investment in getting someone in, you want to retain them, otherwise that money is wasted. And that's where we're seeing the combination of braided interviews as part of the interview process with braided meetings being available as a tool to use in parallel with all of the other tools so that those individuals come into an environment which isn't suddenly an environment in which they can't thrive.

Rob Brougham: Historically, there was quite a lot of this going on where people would work hard to make their recruitment process inclusive. And as a a discreet process, it's relatively easy to make that or to make changes to it to make it more inclusive. But if you don't then make changes in the company to make the company more inclusive, regardless of what level... What type of inclusive you're aiming for, you're gonna have almost made the problem worse because you're bringing people in who then will probably struggle and they will leave. So you've let them down and you've let your company down. So it's braided interviews and braided meetings together.

Toby Mildon: I don't know if you've put any thought into this, but do you see artificial intelligence being used in your products or do you think that it will always be a product that's only used by humans? 

Rob Brougham: So yeah, we've put quite a lot of thought into that. Obviously, we'd be rather naive if we didn't, just to be clear, at the moment we don't use artificial intelligence at all in our products. Our products to enable the communication between two people. One of the things that has been a challenge for Neurodiverse individuals on the recruitment side is if they get the questions emailed in advance and then their response is on email, then of course it's very hard to prevent them using artificial intelligence or indeed using the intelligence of a friend who's already in a similar job to help them craft an answer. And because they've then got like maybe a couple of days to send their responses back, that can be potentially a negative for that candidate because the recruiter might think, well, more chance of that candidate having used some kind of assistance intelligence or artificial intelligence. In a braided interview, much less opportunity for them to do that because they haven't got anywhere near as much time.

Rob Brougham: And if you've only got two or three minutes to type an answer, if you suddenly paste in three pages of prose, it's pretty clear that the candidate has not been writing that themselves. And actually one of the things we'll probably do in future is compare candidate answers against the answers that are generated by AI and give the interviewer an indication of whether or not there's a likelihood that the candidate answered themselves. That's the future, we haven't got that yet, but we've begun to spec out how to do that. So it'll be part of it, but it's not there at the moment, at the moment as I said, we don't use AI, we support people to talk to each other in a... Communicate to with each other in an effective way.

Toby Mildon: That's brilliant. And what other developments have you got in the pipeline? Is there anything else from working in deep space inspired you to do some projects here on earth? 

Rob Brougham: So there are some things we're working on in deep space that are very much sort of cutting edge that I can't really share now, but also it is not really the subject of this conversation. So it would be a little bit left field. Those at the moment are so cutting edge, they haven't yet spawned any terrestrial equivalence. But I think what we are more excited about on Earth is the way that the products are being used together as I mentioned just now but also the way that people are starting to explore really exciting new use cases for braided meetings. Of course, you know, we developed our own thinking about what the use cases are. As soon as you put that out there in the wild, people start using it in ways that you never thought.

Rob Brougham: So there's one organization that used it, that... A big recruitment company and they were trying to get feedback from staff following a staff survey. And the challenge there was the staff were really nervous about kind of giving more detail in a face-to-face environment, yet putting a braided meeting in the way they felt more confident, more able to share. So that was one use case that really surprised me. Another one is we're seeing people using braided meetings a lot for one-to-ones. I never expected that obviously. Well, not obviously, I just never expected that. Some organizations started to do that and it was a more effective way of having part of a one-to-one. You'd certainly have probably have a conversation on Zoom or Teams or whatever you choose. So you have this sort of hybrid meeting where you start there and you can talk about the football or whatever might be happening, and then you go into the detail of your meeting, which if it's a one-to-one can be a very short, sharp focus conversation and then you come back onto the the video platform to close everything off.

Rob Brougham: So that one-to-one. And also actually that hybrid model seems to work quite well. And in fact, that's something we've now adopted internally within Braided. So we're still very small, but some of the meetings we have internally as one-to-ones are now run as braiding... Braided meetings. And even though we kind of invented it, we didn't really think of that one ourselves until other people externally showed us how to do it.

Toby Mildon: That's really interesting what you're saying about getting feedback from employees, so employees feeling perhaps a bit more confident in sharing their thoughts and feelings in a braided meeting. Can you just tell us a bit more about why you think that might happen? Like why employees might feel a bit more confident to disclose more in a kind of braided meeting using your software rather than a more traditional meeting? 

Rob Brougham: I think, and this is think. This is... You know, this... We haven't done scientific academic research on this. This is just some talking to the people in the company and talking to others who've been in similar situations. Some of the benefits that make braiding inclusive in the first place are what enables this. So because braiding is entirely written, there's no audio and there's no video, then first of all, people don't feel the sort of, the intensity of the stair from across the table of someone who may or may not disagree with you. Or the anticipation of, well that person is the most senior, I bet. I think what the answer is that they want me to answer. All of that is removed within braiding. So people have this environment which is less challenging to them, so they're better able to state their answers.

Rob Brougham: They also, there's a little bit of an obligation the way braiding works. Each person has their chance on each braid. If you don't type anything that's fine. You can leave it blank, but of course everyone can see that you left it blank. In a meeting it's quite easy for people to kind of keep quiet, wait for the meeting to finish, and they're normally someone who talks a lot and you let that person do the talking and you can kind of hide your way out of the meeting. In a braided meeting, you kind of can't do that. So there's a little bit of an obligation as well as an opportunity to contribute. There's a bit of an obligation to contribute as well, but when you have that obligation, you've got the time and the space to think. So instead of someone suddenly sort of turning around and saying, what do you think Rob? Well, I don't know, it's like, okay, I've got a bit of time and space actually I do really want to say X, Y, and Z. So all of the benefits that support inclusivity apply in some very strange environments. And that particular one, I think is where that really applied. Probably also the efficiency benefits, the fact that everyone had the chance to contribute, whereas normally you have to wait sequentially for each person to contribute in turn.

Toby Mildon: That sounds really good. And I think we mentioned this in the last interview that we did together, it's... This could work really well with the thinking environment that was created by Nancy Kline. I don't know if you've come across her work, but she has created a framework for running inclusive meetings. There's lots of different techniques, but one of the techniques that she uses is called rounds where if you imagine loads of people have sat around a table, you start with one individual who will speak, nobody else speaks, then they move to the person next to them, and you go around the table like that. We do a lot of this with our clients and what... We find so many benefits because what it does is it creates an environment where people have the space to think, so... Because you're not trying to talk over one another, you're not trying to muscle in quite often when somebody in a meeting is speaking, you're not really listening. You are trying to formulate the reply in your own head. And then obviously in meetings, you often find that there's a few people that dominate the majority of the airwaves. So I just think that braided or braiding meetings, braided meetings, sorry, are really good sort of technological solution to what Nancy Kline is talking about in her methodology.

Rob Brougham: Absolutely. We are very aware of that actually. We've worked probably a year or so ago now, it may even longer with a consultant who actually works heavily in that. A fantastic lady called Mitzi Wyman, who works in that environment. She's very enthusiastic about using braiding. She has been talking to some of her clients about it. So I think you're absolutely right. I'd also add onto that as well, when you look at the way some of the organizations that are starting to run meetings differently. So Amazon is famous for this, you know, Amazon have got some famous things about you have to do some planning, you have to write notes, you don't turn up with PowerPoint slides. Rules like, what was it called? The two-pizza rule. Never have a meeting which can't... Where everyone can't be fed by two pizzas.

Rob Brougham: Obviously that's an... More American reference and our reference because it's however many cups of tea we can have, but the point is that focus is important. And also when you look at some of the ways they've implemented that, it's also been about making sure the most senior person in the room speaks last. All of those things are very, very much sort of embedded within the way braiding works. So, you know, what braiding creates is this environment in which everyone can contribute and we're continually amazed when we start to explore it, just how similar it is to other techniques that people have tried to create to make meetings more effective over time. So, certainly the thinking environment is one of them. People using the thinking environment and applying that in their business would certainly benefit from using braiding occasionally. And the same with people who are trying to emulate the way that Amazon has historically run meetings.

Toby Mildon: That sounds really cool, if the person listening to us right now wants to learn more about your products, so braided meetings, braided interviews, what should they do? Because it's... I think it's quite hard for you and I to describe what the product is in a way because it... There's a visual element to it as well. So if you imagine you are conducting a meeting or an interview through for a carousel it's probably easier to see it rather than describe it. Where can they learn more about it? 

Rob Brougham: You're absolutely right. I do describe it, but it is much better when people see it, either see the video or do a demo. So the simple thing to do is to go to our website, which is simply braided.space. So https: //braided.space. On there you can see videos and more information about braided meetings and braided interviews and you can get in touch with us, book a demo. So yeah, if anyone wants to know more, please get in touch through the website there. Or if you prefer to go onto LinkedIn, you can find us on LinkedIn as well. But yeah, get in touch, love to understand from people their reactions, love to see their reactions and love to organize demos for people. So please do.

Toby Mildon: Brilliant. Thanks Rob for joining us today. It's really exciting to see how the product has evolved since we spoke to you about a year ago now, I think it was, how you've gone from braided meetings to braided interviews and in the years time there may be another product online. So it'll be really exciting to see how the technology evolves and how the different end user use cases evolve as well, because like, as you say, people are using it in ways that you maybe didn't imagine at the beginning. So for example, like facilitating one-to-one conversations or getting, getting feedback from employees, engagement feedback. So thanks ever so much for joining me. It has been lovely to catch up with you.

Rob Brougham: Thanks ever so much. Yeah. Really exciting time. So thanks a lot for having us back on. I think it's a lot more than a year since we last spoke, but you know, happy to come back on again in future if you want... If you want us to, if we do find new ways to take braided meetings to different places and use cases. Thanks so much.

Toby Mildon: You're very welcome. And thank you for tuning into this episode of the podcast with myself and Rob today. If you do want to look into braided meetings or braided interviews further, please do go along to Rob's website where you can see a demo of the product in action and obviously connect with him on LinkedIn as well. Until next time I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, which will be coming up very soon. Cheers. Take care. Bye-Bye.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website at mildon.co.uk.