A data-driven, actionable guide for executives, community leaders, and individuals invested in fostering a culture of...
Field-tested advice on implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in one’s community and workplace.
In Taylor’s previous book, Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World (2017), she created the categories “Frames” and “Filters” to help readers see the mostly conscious and almost entirely unconscious perceptions that shape our interactions with others as well as the communities we create, from classrooms to cities to corporations. Here, she returns to and expands upon these concepts. Frames she explains, are informed by objective facts. How one chooses to respond to an objective fact, however, will be affected by one’s Filters. These are patterns of belief that may or may not be objectively true and they are so ingrained that we don’t think about them or question them. And, as Taylor explains, we are more likely to attribute negative qualities to a whole category of people if we’re reacting to someone who we regard as not like us—especially if their identity seems unfamiliar and even threatening. This is unconscious bias, and it’s not difficult to see how this sort of stereotyping or othering perpetuates inequity at individual and systemic levels. What is difficult, though, is recognizing and interrogating our own unconscious biases in order to unlearn them. In this book, Taylor continues the work of helping readers do exactly this by applying Frames-and-Filters analysis to such phenomena as polarization and microaggressions. The author supports her work with useful insights from psychology and social science research. For example, her model for the stages of cultural competence is a synthesis of the work of three different researchers who study cross-cultural communication. Despite the bullet-pointed summaries and useful infographics, this text is sometimes dense and maybe not best suited for a training handbook. However, the discussion questions at the end make it a good choice for a book study group.
A data-driven, actionable guide for executives, community leaders, and individuals invested in fostering a culture of belonging.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781523006762
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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