From Deep Space to the Workplace: Braiding Inclusivity into Recruitment

This week’s guest is Rob Brougham , Co-Founder of Braided Space. We’ll be exploring the benefits and applications of Braiding on earth and discuss how this tool can transform the way meetings and interviews are conducted to support inclusivity.

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. Rob and his Co-Founder, Drew, developed an innovative tool known as Braiding to tackle the problem of delayed communications between astronauts and mission control, a challenge that becomes critical as humans venture further into space.

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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 organisations like NASA, combined with the innovative application of Braiding, is transforming how we think about inclusive communication.

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To get started, I asked Rob to tell us a bit more about his role as one of the Founders of Braided Space and how Braided has evolved since our last interview.

?‘It’s been an interesting journey from the very beginning, from working with the space agencies and then evolving into the work on earth around inclusive meetings. Sadly, my Co-Founder had to leave the business for health reasons. About 18 months ago, I became the sole founder working in the business, which has been pretty challenging. It’s hard not having someone to share the ups and downs of growing a business with. It didn’t make it any less fun, but it certainly didn’t make it any less challenging, that’s for sure. There have been some tough and lonely moments along the way, but the business has continued to move forward. The innovation that we first came up with for the space business has evolved further since then. We’ve made some great steps forward as a business in the last couple of years or so.

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We’ve remained working in the space sector, that’s still a big part of our business. We’re having lots of active conversations with NASA, the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. However, the focus and the volume of our work, recently, has been around how we can work on earth.

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When we last spoke, we had an embryonic version of a product known as Braided Meetings. It’s the same technology we use in space as it allows you to create highly inclusive meetings in which everyone can contribute equally. We’ve evolved Braided Meetings quite significantly. With any software product, you quickly find there’s a couple of bugs in it and things you wish you’d done a bit differently. A lot of user feedback has helped guide us in making things more effective and accessible. We’ve had some interesting feedback about how some of the benefits of Braiding are more significant than we originally thought.

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Now we’re seeing there are some amazing inclusivity and efficiency benefits. Due to the way Braided Meetings work, they allow everyone to contribute equally so the meeting ends up being eight times more effective than the same meeting ran in a face-to-face environment. It helps you get all of the good ideas out into the room.

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We think our invention of Braiding could be fantastic for recruitment interviews. There hasn’t been much change in the recruitment process or how interviews are conducted in a long time. For many people, the interview part of the 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. Plenty of recruiters are aware of the fact that face-to-face interviews are particularly a challenge for neurodiverse individuals. However, there hasn’t been an alternative that is as credible and effective as a real time synchronous interview, other than a face-to-face or video interview.

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We took Braiding technology and created a tool known as Braided Interviews. I’m afraid we’re not awfully imaginative with our product names. Braided Interviews is a version of the tool that we optimised for the recruiter so they can interview individual candidates in an effective and inclusive manner. It only came out a few months ago, but we’re really excited by some of the early feedback.’

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I think the creation of Braided interviews is really interesting because inclusive recruitment is a big topic for our clients. To follow up on this, I asked Rob, ‘Can you just explain to us how this new product works?’

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Rob agreed that inclusive recruitment is a big area of focus, adding ‘For many reasons, people are concerned about talent shortages, but they’re also very concerned about making sure they employ a variety of thought. Great minds think differently. If you have a team with a diversity of thought, you’re more likely to be innovative, creative and 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?

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Recruiters get to the stage where they say, “I need to actually interview this person, so I can explore their ability to think and their response to challenges.” The traditional way of doing that, is a sitting down video or an in room face-to-face interview where you ask questions.

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Over the last few years, some options have emerged to make the recruitment process more inclusive. One of them is to make sure the questions are shared in advance. That’s actually quite easy to do and many recruiters have adopted this. This supports inclusivity within the interview process; however, it doesn’t tackle the challenge when a candidate says, “I struggle with face-to-face meetings. This role you’re bringing me into has no requirement for face-to-face meetings. So why is a face-to-face interview part of the process?”

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There’s no efficient alternative available. Recruiters may send questions out on email, but then you’ve got a long asynchronous process of many days, by which a neurotypical candidate has come through the door and already successfully got the job.

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In a Braided Interview, the interviewer sends you an invitation with questions on it. It allows you to know the questions in advance and to prepare yourself. When the interview starts, a chat window appears with the question on it and a box for you to type your answer. There’s no video or audio. After the allotted time the interviewer set for the question, they’ll rotate on a virtual carousel back to them where they can ask you a follow up question. Whilst the interviewer is reading your response and writing a follow up question, you would’ve moved on to answer the next load of questions. When you go back to question one, you’ve given your answer already and can now see the new question from the interviewer which you now answer.

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As a candidate, it gives you an opportunity to express your creativity and intellect in an environment that is a lot less intimidating. You don’t have to sit across the table from someone and feel awkward, embarrassed or challenged in that sense.

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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, the process can be. We’re creating an interview environment with a start and end time for people in the virtual room together, but without any of the challenges that prevent many candidates from succeeding in traditional interviews.’

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I thought what Rob said was intriguing, it sparked my curiosity as to whether or not Rob had seen any benefits for neurotypical individuals, in addition to those who are neurodivergent.

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‘We haven’t seen benefits specifically for neurotypical people yet. Braided Interviews are quite new, so we haven’t gathered as much data for those individuals. However, we expect that everyone will be able to benefit from Braided Interviews whether they are the recruiter or candidate, neurotypical or neurodivergent.

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We’re not saying to use Braided Meetings for everyone. You should give the candidates a choice. If someone 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 ensure the playing field is level. For example, if I’m a neurodiverse candidate and you send me out the questions in advance, you should also send the same questions out to the neurotypical candidate in advance. This allows both candidates to do their thinking and preparation. That’s also beneficial to the recruiter because at the end of the process, you can compare candidates much more equitably as you started with the same opening questions.’

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I wanted to know what kind of organisations Rob believes will either benefit from using Braided Interviews, or organisations that he would love to work with.

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Rob shared, ‘At the moment we’re seeing quite broad interest. There are many organisations out there who are really focused on neuro-inclusive recruitment. There was a report last year called ‘Neurodiversity in the Tech Sector’ which was issued by an alliance of big tech companies. Clearly, they’re focused on maximising the talent they get in all aspects of diversity. For organisations like that, being able to recruit somebody in is absolutely key. There’s certainly a level of interest.

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As well as those tech organisations, we’re also working with universities and pharmaceutical companies. At the moment, it seems to be largely sector agnostic, but you can see from the outside which companies are actively looking to be more inclusive.

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If you spend the time and effort in making your recruitment process inclusive and add Braided Interviews on top of that, you’re going to be able to bring people into roles which they’re ideally suited for, regardless of which sector you are. At that point, you’ve put a lot of effort and investment into employing someone, so you want to retain them, otherwise that money is wasted. Using Braided Interviews as part of the recruitment process and then making Braided Meetings available throughout their employment within your organisation, helps to ensure that individuals come into an environment where they can thrive.

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It’s relatively easy to make the recruitment and interview process more inclusive, but if you don’t apply changes to the company, then you aren’t addressing the issue. You’re going to have almost made the problem worse because you’re bringing people in who are likely to struggle and leave. You’ve let them down and you’ve let your company down. You need to combine Braided Interviews and Meetings together.’

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My next question for Rob was, ‘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?’

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Rob answered, ‘We’ve put quite a lot of thought into the use of AI. At the moment, we don’t use artificial intelligence at all in our products. Our products exist to enable communication between two people. One of the issues is, if you get the questions emailed in advance and their response is on email, it’s very hard to prevent them from using artificial intelligence or the intelligence of a friend to help them craft an answer. They often have days to respond back on email. That can potentially be a negative for that candidate because the recruiter may believe the candidate has used some kind of assistance or artificial intelligence. In a Braided Interview, there is much less opportunity for them to do that because they haven’t got anywhere near as much time.

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If you’ve only got two or three minutes to type an answer, and you suddenly paste in three pages of prose, it’s clear that the candidate has not been writing themselves. One of the things we want to do in the future is compare candidate answers against the answers that are generated by AI. This will 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 to that yet, but we’ve began to spec out how we can.’

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I thought their plan to incorporate AI was brilliant. I wanted to know what other developments Rob has in the pipeline and whether there was something whilst working in deep space that inspired him to do some projects here on earth.

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‘There are some things that we’re working on in deep space that are so cutting edge that they haven’t yet spawned any terrestrial equivalence. On Earth, we’re most excited about how our products are being used together and people are starting to explore exciting new use cases for Braided Meetings. We developed our own thinking about what the use cases are, but people start using it in ways that you never thought of.

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We had a big recruitment company use it when they were trying to get feedback from staff following a survey. The staff were nervous about giving detailed feedback in a face-to-face environment, but within a Braided Meeting they felt more confident in their ability to share. That was one use case that surprised me.

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We’re also seeing people use Braided Meetings for a lot of one-to-ones. I never expected that. Some organisations found it was a more effective way of having those conversations. They create these hybrid meetings where they start off by using Zoom or Teams, where you can have a more relaxed and broad conversation, but then you go into the detail using Braided Meetings which allows you to have a very short, sharp, focused conversation. Then, you come back onto the the video platform to close everything off.

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That hybrid model seems to work quite well and is something we’ve adopted internally within Braided. We’re still very small, but some of the meetings we have internally as one-to-ones are now run as Braided hybrid meetings. Even though we invented it, we didn’t really think of using it like that ourselves until other people externally showed us how to do it.’

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I like how the tool has been used to receive feedback from employees due to their increased confidence within a Braided Meeting. This led me to my next question for Rob, ‘Why do you think employees are more confident sharing information in a Braided Meeting, rather than a more traditional one?’

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‘We haven’t done any scientific or academic research on this. This is just from 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. Since Braiding is entirely written, there’s no audio or video, people don’t feel the intensity of the stare from across the table of someone who may or may not disagree with you. They don’t feel the pressure of answering what the most senior person will want you to answer. All of that is removed with Braiding. People are in an environment which is less challenging, so they’re able to comfortably state their answers.

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There’s a little bit of an obligation with 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 everyone can see that you left it blank. In a meeting, it’s quite easy for people to keep quiet, wait for the meeting to finish, and fly under the radar. There’s normally someone who talks a lot and you let that person do the bulk of the talking so you can hide your way out of the meeting.

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In a Braided Meeting, you can’t do that. You feel obligated to take the opportunity to contribute. It gives you the time and space to think. Instead of someone suddenly turning around and putting you specifically on the spot by saying, “What do you think, Rob?” Braided Meetings give you the time to identify what you want to say. Everyone has the chance to contribute, whereas normally you have to wait sequentially for each person to contribute in-turn. This is where the inclusivity and efficiency benefits come into play.’

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Rob’s point reminded me of the Thinking Environment that was created by Nancy Kline. She created a framework for running inclusive meetings. There’s lots of different techniques, but one of the techniques that she uses is called Rounds. 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.

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We do a lot of this with our clients, and we find so many benefits because it creates an environment where people have the space to think. You’re not trying to talk over one another. It avoids certain individuals dominating the majority of the meeting. I think that Braided Meetings are a fantastic technological solution to what Nancy Kline is talking about in her methodology.

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Rob agreed, ‘Braiding creates an environment in which everyone can contribute. We’re continually amazed when we start to explore it, just how similar it is to other techniques that people have used to make meetings more effective over time. Certainly, the Thinking Environment is one of them. People who use the Thinking Environment and apply that in their business will certainly benefit from using Braiding occasionally.

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Rob recommends that you visit their website at braided.space where you can watch videos, learn more about Braided Meetings and Interviews and even book a demo. You can also get in touch with Rob on LinkedIn .

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If there’s anything that Toby and his team can do to support you on your diversity and inclusion journey, then please do reach out through the Mildon website.