Future Fluency: “In Depth: Brains and Bias” Published by the National Association of Corporate Directors

ERIN ESSENMACHER Ashley, we’ve talked to so many amazing thought leaders across this series so far.

ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME We really have. Sociologists, business leaders, researchers . . .

ERIN ESSENMACHER . . . Professors, investors, board members. And while we shared some of our favorite nuggets as they relate to the topics we’ve covered, there is so much more they had to say!

ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME And these conversations are so good.

ERIN ESSENMACHER That’s why I’m really excited about these next several episodes. We’re featuring extended interviews with some of our favorite guests.

ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME And I love that we are starting with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. Her insights on the neuroscience behind bias were fascinating.

ERIN ESSENMACHER I agree. Game changer. Her book How Emotions Are Made—which completely blew my mind, pun intended—questioned some fundamental assumptions about the neuroscience and physiology behind decision making. I’m Erin Essenmacher.

ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME And I’m Ashley Marchand Orme.

ERIN ESSENMACHER And you’re listening to Future Fluency—the podcast where we explore the changing face of America through the lens of innovation, culture, and their impact on business, brought to you by the National Association of Corporate Directors.

ERIN ESSENMACHER Our listeners may remember that Dr. Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She and I met at her home in Boston and she explained how this research applies to everyone, from baseball players to board members.

ERIN ESSENMACHER We're here in Boston with Lisa Feldman Barrett. Lisa, thank you so much for making time to talk with us.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT

Oh, it’s my pleasure.

ERIN ESSENMACHER I just finished your book, How Emotions Are Made, and I was completely floored. Maybe you could just start by talking about this idea, this long-held notion that we've had that humans are rational actors, and there's such a thing as being impartial and rational. You really kind of explode that in your book and talk about how that's kind of a fiction. Can you talk a little bit more about what that’s based on?

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT Sure. It's possible to start at many places in history, but I always like to start with Plato, because that's the clearest, I think, example. Plato was writing about the psyche which we would translate as understanding the human mind. He was really writing about moral behavior. He characterized the human psyche, the human mind, as having three parts: instincts, these animalistic instincts like hunger, the drive for hunger, the drive for thirst, the drive for sex; emotions or passions, so what we would think of as anger, sadness, fear, and so on. He described them as two wild stallions that were controlled by a chariot driver, a human, which stands in for reason.

The assumption is that a human mind is really a battleground between this sort of, your irrational inner beast, the wild stallion, and the rational part of your mind, which we then came to understand had evolved over time. You can see this narrative that emotion and cognition or rationality are in battle over your soul, over your mind, over your behavior. That's a narrative that just continues through 2,000 years of writing about the human condition.

The law embodies this philosophy of mind and that there is a rational actor, and that, in fact, our understanding of responsibility and culpability is based on the idea that crimes that we commit, harms that we commit, when the rational part of ourselves is in control. We’re more culpable and more responsible and therefore need to be punished more severely in those cases.

We also see it in economics. It used to be the case that the assumption was that there is the rational economic man or rational economic actor. The initial assumption was that individual humans were rational. Then when study after study after study showed that this wasn't the case, as if we needed studies to really show it. I think every financial meltdown that’s occurred since people have been tracking such things in the twentieth century you can trace, really, to a miss like a false belief in humans’ rationality in their economic decision making. The assumption is that they’re rational, and it turns out they're not, and that wreaks havoc basically with the markets.

I think now the assumption is that, okay, individual humans are irrational, but maybe as a whole the markets are rational. There's still this hold on this idea of rationality as cold, cognitive, deliberative, and free from sentiment of any sort. That certainly matches our intuitions and our experiences of ourselves. To us, we have moments where we feel very strongly, we have moments where there's no sign of feeling at all, it feels like, and maybe those are our more rational moments.

The problem is that that narrative doesn’t [match] brain architecture. If you were to look at the architecture of the brain and the way that it functions, it's actually not biologically possible for you to have any moment of your life that is free from feeling unless there's something structurally wrong with your brain.

At the core of your brain are a set of regions that form themselves into networks that are responsible for many things, including memory and decision making and our evaluations of other people. Also, these exact same brain regions regulate the systems of your body like your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, your immune system, your gut. Actually, it's the sensations from the inner body is where your feelings come from. It's just not possible for you to ever have to make a decision or ever engage in any action that is completely free from sentiment, from feeling.

ERIN ESSENMACHER We are talking a lot about unconscious bias, and we’re talking about it more with lots of examples of how it manifests in the workplace and other areas of life. As a neuroscientist, how do you think about unconscious bias? How do you see it working?

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT I want to take a step back and maybe continue with this narrative about how the brain evolved and what it's for and how it works because, I think, once we understand that a little bit, then our understanding of unconscious bias just becomes obviously clear about how it works. Because we're human and we are fascinated by our own thoughts and feelings and other people's thoughts and feelings, we assume that brains evolve to think or they evolve to feel or they evolve to let us see really well or what have you.

Actually, brains didn’t evolve for any of those reasons. All brains on this planet evolved for the purpose of regulating the systems of your body.

The main job that your brain has is to anticipate the needs of the body and try to meet those needs before they arise. What kind of needs am I talking about? I’m talking about needs for oxygen, needs for glucose. For example, if your brain is going to stand you up, it actually has to raise your blood pressure before you stand so that oxygen and glucose can get to your brain. Otherwise, you’ll faint and that’s expensive. That's costly from a biological standpoint.

You can think about your brain as kind of running a budget for your body. It’s trying to move resources around, so in this case, it's not a budget for money; it's a budget for glucose and salt and oxygen and water and so on. It's moving resources from one system to another anticipating what the needs are going to be and trying to meet those needs before they arise, because it's expensive to try to meet those needs afterwards. If you think about it in economic terms, just really simply you or if you’re a company, let's say, there's a financial office which, if you’re branches all over the world, attempts to move resources around so that all branches of the company are solvent.

If you go into the red and you start to run a deficit, paying that deficit back is more expensive because there's usually interest to pay and things like that. That's the same thing with your body. Your brain is basically running a budget for your body, and it's attempting to keep everything solvent. Now, that doesn’t mean keeping you calm. That means keeping everything efficient, whether you're sitting at your desk and talking on the phone, whether you're running and your heart rate is you know 160 beats a minute, whether you are asleep, or whether you're in the middle of a debate in a board meeting. The point isn't to bring you back to a set point of rest. It's to keep everything efficient whether you’re super charged or super calm, okay?

What's interesting is that your brain is doing this throughout your entire life from the moment that you're born until the moment that you die. You are mostly unaware that this is happening unless something goes wrong. Actually, there is a whole kind of symphony going on inside your own body that you're completely unaware of. All of this regulation of these by systems have sensations that go along with them that mostly you don't experience in a very direct way, because if you did, you'd never be able to pay attention to anything else in the world ever because it would be so loud and it would just capture your attention so much.

The way that the brain can keep track of that is by transforming them into simple feelings, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling calm, feeling worked up, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable. Those feelings, scientists call them affect or they might call it mood; that's a colloquial term, mood. Those are with us every waking moment of our lives. Sometimes when they’re super intense because there's a big change inside the body, the brain will make sense of that change as an emotion, but oftentimes, we don't.

Oftentimes, implicit bias what it looks like is when the cause of those feelings is assigned to another person. If you and I are talking and I am feeling bad, it's very easy for my brain to make sense of those bad feelings as you having caused them, maybe because of something you said or maybe because of some property of what you're like, maybe because you have dark skin, maybe because you're a man or a woman, maybe because you are of a different religion from me. There is a really famous study which has been debated about the validity of this study, but it's a nice illustration nonetheless that if you have the bad fortune of appearing before a judge right before lunch time when the judge is hungry and is having unpleasant feelings that come from having not enough glucose, the case is less likely to go well for you not because the judge is rushing but because the judge has an unpleasant feeling which his or her brain is making sense of as an indication that you're not trustworthy as a defendant. In fact, I believe there's one study which shows. The way that brains work, their information from the world and from the body's sensory information comes into the brain, and the brain has to figure out what it means so that it knows what to do about it.

When you're sitting with someone having a conversation, you have to know, well, should you hire this person, should you not hire this person, should you give this person a raise, how should you treat this person? Your brain is basically taking in information and making sense of it. Our brains are predicting. They're predicting based on things we've experienced in the past.

This is the really important piece. If you are feeling unpleasant for any number of reasons, any number of reasons, your brain has to figure out what that means so that it knows what to do and what is it going to draw on. It's not going to ask, “What is this unpleasant feeling?” It's going to ask, “What is this unpleasant feeling like in relation to what I've experienced in the past in a situation like this?” What I've experienced or what I've learned or what someone’s told me or what movies I've seen. What is this like? This is all happening under the hood in the blink of an eye without your awareness, but your brain is just more likely to automatically make sense of those unpleasant feelings as evidence that there's something wrong with the person who is sitting across from you.

Now, I should also say it works like this all the time. It also works like this for pleasant feelings, and it works like this even when your feelings are neutral. Your brain is always guessing and it's always asking, “What is this? Based on what I'm experiencing now, what I'm smelling, what I'm hearing, what I'm tasting, what I'm feeling, what's likely to happen next and what is that most like based on my past

experience?” This is always true. It’s always happening implicitly. To some extent, you could say, “We’re always biased in the sense that we are making sense of the world in a way that's consistent with what we've experienced in the past,” and that serves us well a lot of the time. It’s just sometimes it doesn't.

I think what I would say is the problem here is not that people are never rational. It's that we have the wrong definition of what it means to be rational. Scientists used to believe intelligence is this idea, that we have a lizard brain which is wrapped or enrobed by a limbic system which is responsible for emotion, which is all wrapped up by this big neo cortex that we just recently evolved for cognition and where our instincts are in the lizard brain and then our emotions are in the limbic wrapping and then sitting on top of that dampening, holding down all of our base feelings and instincts is there some prodigious big, neo cortex. In fact, that's actually a myth also. That's not how brains evolved. They don't evolve in sedimentary layers.

If you look back to the original creatures on this planet, before a period in the Earth's history called the Cambrian Period, if you look pre-Cambrian, the organisms that exist in the seas, which is where all organisms were at that point, we’re just kind of like floating stomachs, like they just had a really rudimentary motor system. They floated around and filtered food; there was no predation. They had no sensory systems at all; they couldn't see, they couldn't hear, they couldn't taste, and they had no internal systems at all because all they had was really a gut and that’s it; that's all they needed.

Then during the Cambrian period, there was an explosion of diversity of life for various reasons. That's when predators evolved, predation evolved. Animals then became predators and prey. That's when sensory systems evolved because you had to know what something was at a distance and so the distance senses evolved: hearing, like vibrations, which in the water is a distant sense, and even for us is a distant sense; sight; and in the water, touch, the vibrations on the skin is a distant sense. Sharks use vibrations on the skin to locate their prey.

Distance sense has evolved, but then also the animal needed to know, well, is that thing up ahead, is that a threat? Is that something that's going to eat me? Is it a reward? Should I eat it? Can I safely ignore it? How do I know? That information comes from these simple feelings that regulate the body. As the animals’ environment got bigger, it no longer only cared about what was right in front of it. It needed to know what was coming, so we would say, niche got bigger. Its body had to get bigger, which got more complex, so you needed a brain to control it, and you needed a system to control all the machinery inside the body that was necessary and that gives value to senses. That's actually true now. If you, if you had no inner body to give you these feelings, what you see, what you hear, what you taste would have no value to you. You just wouldn't care. It would be outside your niche. It would just be irrelevant. It would be like noise in the background to you.

ERIN ESSENMACHER You said when you break this down it will become obvious how unconscious bias works, and I think that’s such a great example. You talked about affect and I wanted to continue on that thread because in your book, you talk about the concept of affective realism and you say that if left unchecked, it can lead people to be dead certain and inflexible. Can you talk about what affective realism is and what you mean by that?

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT

Sure. Let's imagine that you're not a neuroscientist and you’re not a psychologist and you don't know where these feelings come from. When you have a very strong feeling where you're really worked up and you have this intense feeling and it’s maybe higher in arousal, and I'm not talking about sexual arousal here, just this sort of activated feeling that you have. People experience that as certainty. They also experience very unpleasant feelings that are highly intense as uncertainty. I can cite study after study for you, but all I think all you have to do is look at Washington right now and you see lots of examples of this.

When someone feels strongly about something they use it as evidence that they’re right and they are certain. When they're unaware that . . . We don't read each other; we make inferences. Our brains are inferring; they're just guessing all the time. A lot of times, our guesses are pretty good. Sometimes our guesses are pretty off base. If the brain is guessing at a time when it’s also having a very strong feeling, it's going to believe in the certainty of its guesses.

For example, if I, as I'm driving on the pike and someone cuts me off, as what's happening really, to us, it feels like someone cuts you off, you experience that and then you react. Actually, what's happening is as the driver is moving into your line of vision, before you consciously even see the driver, your brain is tracking that there is an object, a car, that's moving in front of you. Your brain starts to prepare you to act quickly. You will have a flood of chemicals that will allow you to act quickly. Your heart will race. The lag time between making that preparation for action when you feel it makes it seem as if you consciously see it and then you react, but that's actually not what's happening.

Just to take a step back, think about baseball, about how baseball works. It's not like a pitcher is preparing to throw and the batter waits for the pitcher throw and then looks at the ball and sees where it is and then goes to make a swing. If the batter, he waited to see the ball before he swung at it, he would never be able to mount a motor response fast enough to swing. Really what's happening is that the batter is predicting where the pitcher is going to throw and adjusting his swing in preparation for that. That's what makes baseball really interesting is that it’s a game of wits, really, between a batter and a pitcher. That predictive aspect is happening all the time.

Typically, it's the case that when people experience their own feelings as properties of the world as caused by someone else, we feel much more certain in the actions that we should take. You can see this time and time again. There are many, many examples of this in the world, tragic examples of the, of things where people act in ways that they're very certain about because they're having very strong feelings that they're really unaware of as feelings. To them, they experience them as a feeling of certainty that their actions are justified.

We call this affect realism because, to us, it's not that you see something and that leads you to believe something. It's that you believe something to be true. As a consequence, that influences what you literally see.

ERIN ESSENMACHER Talk more about that. That part is fascinating to me, and I think really relevant to the bigger conversation we’re having.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT

Yeah. We have demonstrated this in the lab time and time again where unbeknownst to our test subject, we can make them feel pleasant or unpleasant. They literally see a person as being more or less competent, more or less trustworthy, more or less honest based on . . . This is a person I've never seen before. It's a snap judgment. It's a completely neutral phase. They will actually see a face as smiling more or scowling more. It's a neutral phase based on how we've manipulated their affect. I think the more gripping examples come from real life.

There was a case in the military of an Apache helicopter which was where some military personnel shot and killed a Reuters’ journalist who was carrying a camera because they thought the camera was a machine gun. There are [sic] case after case after case where police officers will shoot an unarmed civilian, usually of color, because they believe that the person in question has a firearm when they don't.

We can do this in the lab. We can very easily make people see guns that aren't there just by increasing their affective experience to be more intense and putting a cell phone or keys in the hands of usually a man, and if it's a man with dark skin, it's even easier because people . . . Remember, the brain is trying to make sense of sensory input, so it sees, taking in visual input, it’s trying to make sense of that and what have you learned? What [have] you learned by living in this country? What have you learned by the television and by movies? You've learned the base rate, the likelihood. Whether or not it's really true in real life, you've learned that the base rate is that if somebody's holding something blurry and the person happens to have dark skin, it's more likely to be a gun.

I should say this. I'm saying this. I'm not blaming anybody. Actually, police officers are like baseball players. If they waited to see, consciously confirm the presence of the gun, if that assailant had a gun, that officer would be dead. They can't wait, right? They have to go on their gut feeling. The problem is, what is their gut feeling? Where did that gut feeling come from? This happens all the time. You can see people scowl when they're not really scowling. You can hear people yelling when they're not really yelling. You can experience someone as being compellingly attracted to you when they're not. Our brains are guessing. They’re guessing about the meaning of what's going on in the world, all the sights and sounds and smells using the sensations from their own bodies as a guide to the value without any awareness that this is happening, and it's happening always, always, always, always. You are never objective. You're not wired to be objective. You can't possibly be objective; that's a myth. You can do things to enhance the likelihood that you are . . . Let’s say you can get closer to being objective or further away from being objective in the sense that you can become aware of how your brain works and how your brain makes judgments. You can make an effort to change the information that's available, but you can never, ever be objective. This is just a myth.

The key point here is that the problems with implicit bias and other sorts of things related to, like, affective realism, it's not that we’re ignorant. It's not that we don't know how this works. It's that we believe that we know certain things which actually aren't true.

ERIN ESSENMACHER It really strikes me as you're talking, the example of the gun, for example. We’re filtering everything through what we we've learned to be true, our perceptions, our media. It really strikes me that when we talk about things like representation matters, you're really getting to the science behind why that matters.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT

Absolutely. I can give you another example of why representation matters. For many years, and in fact, you can still find articles like this. There will be an experiment which will show that there is an increase in amygdala activity which is a little almond-[shaped] nucleus in the brain and deep in the temporal lobe of the brain and that increases in activity when test subjects view African American faces.

The assumption is that that's a marker of implicit bias, except that the amygdala doesn't detect threat. It doesn't detect fear. It's not a fear . . . It doesn't compute fear. The amygdala's job is to alert the rest of the brain when something is a novel, uncertain, sort of like we don't know what prediction to make here, so let's learn about this thing as much as we can so we can predict better the next time. If you are living in many parts of the US you are not exposed to dark faces on a regular basis and they're more novel to you, and that's why you’re going to have an increase in amygdala activity.

If you are faced with a woman CEO and you start to feel a little unpleasant and jittery, it's not necessarily the case that you don't like her, don't trust her. It could be that you don't know how to predict. When you don't know how to predict, what happens? You have an increase in arousal because your brain is now flooded with norepinephrine which makes you feel aroused, like jittery, because that facilitates learning.

You don't have the past experience in order to predict well, or you predict and you predict wrong, you have an opportunity to learn. That is to take in the information that you didn't predict, so that then it's in there. It's in your brain. It's in your model of the world so that you can predict better next time. That's a really important part of the story, I think, that really hasn't been told. I think diversity and representation are important for other reasons.

As younger people look to CEOs and politicians and professors and, like, leaders basically, they are trying to imagine themselves in those roles, which they can't do. Where does imagination come from? Predictions. It’s exactly the same. Your ability to imagine yourself, concretely imagine yourself, in a role is largely influenced by whether or not there's anyone who is similar to you in that role.

If we're going to compete well globally, then we have to cultivate contexts where our young people, our children, learn to innovate, to be creative, to think outside of the box. In order to do that, in order to cultivate that context, we need more people who don't all see the world in exactly the same way, which is an ironic thing to say at this political moment in time when everyone is trying to surround themselves.

Why are people trying to surround themselves with other like-minded people? Because then you predict really well. There's no metabolic burden on you. What are the two most expensive things that your brain will do? It will move your body around and it will learn. Learning, when you have to learn something new, it’s expensive and it can feel bad. When you surround yourself with like-minded people and all your CEOs are men and you don't have to deal with anyone across the aisle, so to speak, whatever dimension of similarity and difference you want to talk about, it’s easier to interact with people who are similar to you because you predict extremely well. It's less metabolically expensive. You don't have a lot to learn and it feels better; it feels more comfortable.

I think there are many things that companies think about doing to diversify their employee base, their board of directors, whatever, and all of those are great. Sometimes people will think about reaching down into high schools and into middle schools and that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. If you

really want a diverse workforce, if you really want to enhance innovation, if you really want creativity that comes from people thinking about things in different ways, you have to reach really far back.

Let me just give you a little example of this. Let's say you have a little girl baby. Babies don't have a predictive structure in their brain; they have to grow one. They don’t know what's important and what isn't, so everything is important. We talk about having a flashlight of attention, meaning we can pay attention just to focus on some things that are super important and ignore everything else. That's because our brains can predict what’s going to be important. We’re not always right and then we have prediction error, and we have to learn. Babies are all prediction error all the time.

How do they know what's important or what isn't? Gaze. It turns out that when adults or other kids share a gaze with the baby, that tells the baby what's important. You and I are talking and if a noise happened behind my head and I turned to look by my head, you would also look behind my head. Then we will look back at each other and then that gaze has, we've communicated something about importance to that gaze, or maybe we both looked at that noise and we would continue looking at that noise. If a noise happened behind my head and I didn't turn to look, you probably wouldn't turn to look, either. We regulate each other’s attention by what we look at.

With a baby, let's imagine that you’re the little girl baby. Here's what happens more often with girl babies. The girl turns her head and looks at something and the caregiver entrains the girls gaze back to him or her. Your daughter turns her head and you get the girl to turn back and look at you.

A boy turns his head to look at something and the caregiver also turns their head to look at something. Let’s imagine that that happens 100, 200, 500 times in the course of a couple of years or even more. How is that brain being wired differently? Little boys will be adventurous, and they will be exploring things because the fact that a caregiver turned to basically follow the gaze of the boy indicates to the boy that that's a useful thing to pay attention to.

Whereas for a girl, what are you teaching that girl brain? You’re teaching that little girl's brain that she has to coordinate with other people. She's got to care about what other people think, things she doesn't need to be exploring. She doesn't need to be adventurous, necessarily. I'm painting a stereotype here. It's like I'm painting a black-and-white picture. I'm hoping you can get the hint of what I'm saying, which is that parents with girls use a lot of emotion words. With boys, they use a lot of action words. Those words help to wire those babies’ brains. It helps to set the predictions that those kids are going to make out later on.

ERIN ESSENMACHER If you were talking to somebody who is on board, whether it's in terms of board diversity or even just oversight of the organization’s culture, talent, innovation, long-term value creation, what are one or two things that you would say that they should be thinking about that could actually make some kind of a positive change, given everything you’ve just laid out?

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT I do think that having one of the things that I learned when I was in graduate school is that decision making is always better when you follow a set of rules consistently. You write them out and you follow them and you don't use intuition, don't imagine that you have some kind of intuitive ability, that you’re

really consistently following the same rules. There is probably about 40 or 50 years of research in decision making which suggest that this is the case.

If you want more diversity in your teams, in your company, or whatever, you have to actually follow a set of explicit rules in order to diversify. There may be few people of dark skin color, few people of color, there may be a few women or fewer than you need, but you know there are some, and you can make sure that you do everything possible to make sure they're on your list of people to consider. I think that's one thing that you can do. A second thing you can do is ... I’m not saying training programs are not useful to make people aware of bias and implicit bias. For example, when you're evaluating people and you want to evaluate emotional maturity and women are socialized to be more expressive than men are and they’re also usually labeled as less emotionally mature. Because they’re more expressive, when, in fact, that's completely a bias. If you look at a female face and she’s scowling . . . We have evidence to show these experiments. You'll look at a female face who’s scowling, people are more likely to say, “Oh, she's unhappy. She isn't a happy person. She's a bitch. She's . . . ” If they look at a male scowling face, they're more likely to say, “Oh, he's had a bad day.” His expressions represent what's going on in the situation. Her expressions represent the fact that she's a witch. That's really pervasive.

The science matters, and the science shows us really clearly that when you explain things to people and you make them aware and you get them to actually use that information and reward them for using it, reward them for using it, they will.

ERIN ESSENMACHER Lisa Feldman Barrett, thank you so much. This was a transformative conversation.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me on your podcast.

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ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME That’s all for this episode. Join us for another in-depth conversation next time, when we’ll chat with Catrice Jackson.

CATRICE JACKSON I think that there’s a misconception that if there are diverse groups of people in the room, at the table, then we’ve solved the problem. Just because you’re included doesn’t always mean that you feel a sense of belonging. And so I think there’s a big misnomer that if we just get enough people in the room, sitting at the table, to show that we have these diverse faces, then we’ve solved the problem.

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ERIN ESSENMACHER For guest bios, more resources, and a link to this episode’s transcript, check out the show notes or the episode page at NACDonline.org/podcast.

ASHLEY MARCHAND ORME

Future Fluency is produced and edited by Bruno Falcon with production support from Kerri Sheehan. Special thanks to Jeannette Woods. Our theme song is composed by Kyle Oppenheimer. Future Fluency is a production of the National Association of Corporate Directors. For more information on NACD or to become a member, please visit NACDonline.org.