Elizabeth Churchill

And she helped me understand one other thing, which I think is very important for all of us. She said, you're afraid that you can't do this.

Liz Gerber

Welcome or welcome back to technical difficulties podcast where we celebrate the careers of amazing female designers and technologists. We are so excited to welcome Elizabeth Churchill. Elizabeth is a global leader in technology and design. She's led teams at Google, eBay, Yahoo, Xerox, and now she is starting the department of human computer interaction.

at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi. Not only that, she's a distinguished scientist and former executive vice president of the Association of Computing Machinery. We can't wait to hear from you, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Elizabeth Churchill

Thank you so much for having me. It's absolutely wonderful to be here. Really looking forward to this conversation and just very flattered and excited that you've invited me.

Liz Gerber

Okay, well we're gonna start with a silly question just to get us warmed up, which is your favorite way to start your morning. What do you, how do like to start each morning?

Elizabeth Churchill

With a cup of tea. I have a cup of tea now because I drink tea all morning. It's not the early morning right now, but always start every morning with a cup of tea.

Liz Gerber

Okay. What kind?

Elizabeth Churchill

Well, this one is actually a white tea, which is rather lovely, but usually it's a little grey. I usually do little grey, but today I've got a very, very nice white tea.

Liz Gerber

Separate question. What's your favorite creativity tool? And we'll define creativity very broad.

Elizabeth Churchill

The pencil.

Liz Gerber

Why?

Elizabeth Churchill

I like sketching. I like writing. like sketching. And I really, there's a particular kind of pencil which is very soft and it allows me to write words but also just sketch a little bit around your shade. And so I think the pencil is the most versatile of tools and the most interesting. And also you can wrap your hair up with a pencil and stick the pencil in.

Liz Gerber

Multi-use. you willing to reveal the brand of your pencil? Or is that top secret?

Elizabeth Churchill

It's a black wing.

Liz Gerber

Okay. And has it been that way for years?

Elizabeth Churchill

Yeah? Yes. Yes. I don't know, you can also stick a pencil behind your ear and look very intelligent.

Liz Gerber

Yes, you can point at somebody, can tap it on the table.

Elizabeth Churchill

You can do so many things. Yes.

Liz Gerber

So many uses. Excellent, thank you. And the last warm up question, favorite way to end your day. How do you like to end your day?

Elizabeth Churchill

That's such a good idea, such a good question, let me think. I mean, I tend to do lot of sort of meditation breathing exercises. I think the most important thing for anybody, especially for me, is to turn off all of the screams. I also love audiobooks and I listen to a lot of...

murder mysteries and detective stories. Typically set in Britain, to be honest. I just listen to audio books or something that'll take my mind away from screens and work. A little bit of meditation, breathing exercises, contemplation for what the next day will bring. I tend to try and really slow down.

Liz Gerber

That's beautiful. And how does that work with the mystery? If the mystery doesn't, the mystery speed your heart up? Does that? No, not so much.

Elizabeth Churchill

No, not so much. Especially if you know it's a sort of, you know, British accent set in a village, Miss Marple kind of style. Because he always, well, not always, but mostly, I'm sure you feel the same, but with these detective murder mysteries, you kind of knows done it.

Liz Gerber

Yes, yes, yes.

Elizabeth Churchill

You know where it's at. They're very self-surprising. And if there's a lot of really great character development, I mean, that's what I really focus on. I sort of get into the mind of that person. I feel like I'm that person. So it doesn't alert me. It's usually I'm deeply empathizing with whoever it is that's being described. And it takes me out of myself.

Liz Gerber

Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you. I love that. I feel calm just listening to you talk about that. Now we will turn to your career, your illustrious career. Now the question here for you is how you got started in technology and design. And in particular, was there a moment when you said, I'm a designer, I should be in tech? Or was this only in retrospect?

Elizabeth Churchill

Not so much a moment, but I've always been fascinated by people. I I went into psychology first. And, you know, I think when I think back to school, one of the things at school for me was I wasn't very good at certain kinds of maths problems. You know, those problems where they say there are 15 people digging a hole for 25 days.

Liz Gerber

And a bee is flying backwards and the wind's going at 10 miles per hour. Yes.

Elizabeth Churchill

Yeah. Yes. I always felt those were, I just thought I could never work them out. And I think again, because I'm a very empathic person. So I was always like, well, are they wearing wellies? know, it's raining. And, you know, when I was at school, I would ask these ridiculous questions and teachers would, you know, look at me like I was bonkers because I couldn't do the abstraction without being interested in the people described in the story that was being told.

So if you think about the psychology of how people do sense making and reasoning, I was very early interested in how people reason differently and how I could reason in some ways, you know, but not others. And then of course, I went on to think about, you know, human problem solving with tools. And so, you know, my undergraduate work was very much around how does the human brain work? How does human reasoning work? What is sense making? What is problem solving? What are differences that people have in how they approach things? And then went into my master's was in AI for early AI, symbolic.

Liz Gerber

Was it called AI?

Elizabeth Churchill

It was called knowledge-based systems, but it was basically AI and getting how you have a computer reason. And that master's was basically intelligent tutoring systems where you're modeling what the student knows based on the errors they make or based on the path they take to solve complex problems. And then my PhD was looking at cognitive architectures and a specific cognitive architecture called SOAR, S-O-A-R. And what I was looking at was how do people solve maths problems using different kinds of calculator? So a standard calculator or what was called what is called a reverse Polish notation calculator. And basically I was looking at what are the mental models and how do you build tools to support people solving complex maths problems. And at that moment it was, you know, essentially personalization, modeling the knowledge of

they quote user, the person, and supporting them in how they solve a problem. so, you know, fast forward from that. And basically it's sort of, you know, if you look at Doug Engelbart, who talked about human augmentation, I always see tools as human augmentation, design tools to help people. So if we go back to the pencil, you know, what does that tool do for you? What is a multifaceted tool, although apparently very simple. And so I've always been interested in how you design the world to support people doing complex problem solving in different ways. And we talk about that in terms of screens and interactive artifacts, but it's any kind of augmentation really. I mean, I recently, unfortunately broke my toe and I've been hobbling around and you have no idea how important that little pinky toe is. And I've got all of these augmentations on my foot basically. So around until it kind of heals. So I'm interested in all kinds of augmentation obviously as a, you know, problem solving, reasoning, psychologist, sense making, person of interest around sense making, most of the tools are cognitive support aids or education aids, but I'm also very interested in the physical.

Liz Gerber

Hmm. So, so many questions that go from here. The first one, I can't help but note that you struggled with math and then you went on to create tools to support, support math. Am I correct in making that? Was there any, any intentionality there or is that just where, intelligent tutoring tools were focused at that time?

Elizabeth Churchill

Yes. Well, the actual intelligent tutoring tool was based on, it was about programming. It was about teaching students the concept of the variable and how you understand variables and constants in programming. But my PhD was in math and calculators. But I've always had this belief that, I don't know, maybe I'm just contrarian, but I think people still see the things that they are the worst at.

Liz Gerber

I agree.

Elizabeth Churchill

And to come back to my maths, you know, like school, I only began to excel at maths when I had a different teacher. She was the best, her name was Mrs. Brown.

Liz Gerber

Thank you for naming her. I think it's very important to name teachers.

Elizabeth Churchill

She's fantastic. I think she's not with us anymore, but she was fantastic. And she sat me down and she said, you know, Elizabeth, it's not that you're bad at maths. It's that, you know, you're, you're not approaching it the way that works for you. To me, understand that. And she helped me understand one other thing, which I think is very important for all of us. She said, you, you're afraid that you can't do this and your emotion is getting in the way of stepping back and understanding again. I don't think she used this word, but that maths is a tool for you.

And I think that's a really important lesson for us all to have is that emotion and cognition are so intertwined and identity and cognition are so intertwined. So if you tell yourself, I am the kind of person who can't do maths, you've already started a deep, you've created a distance between your cognition, yourself and the problem and it just, it makes everything harder.

I was talking to someone the other day actually about somebody who's a very, very, very, very brilliant statistician and you know they were telling me about their sister and they said their sister is also a brilliant mathematician and statistician. However, when it comes to,doing ledgers for money or working out their own finances. It's just like blind. Because of anxiety around finance. And I think it's very important for us all to remember that the emotion, anxiety, identity are very much part of cognition and how we solve problems. And if we think about women in the tech sector, you know,

the way women have historically been treated and trained and excluded from conversations and the way in which the relationship of communication act women to women, for women, typically by other people who are male identified, it can set one up for not thinking clearly. So the whole...

the whole conversation ends up with one being sort of back-footed for want of a better term. Because you're so busy kind of going like, why am I not included in this conversation? That you stop thinking about what the content of the conversation is.

Liz Gerber

Okay. Mm-hmm. So back-footed is a beautiful description. It strikes me, we talk so much about cognition and rarely talk about emotion. I see that particularly in the conversations we're having around AI right now. It's all around cognition, cognition, cognition. And I think we're forgetting about the emotional experience that goes with interacting with AI as well as the identity. I think these are spot on, what you just said.

Elizabeth Churchill

Absolutely. Absolutely. you know, the uncanny valley, I mean, think everyone talks about the uncanny valley, right?

Liz Gerber

Yeah, will you explain what that is?

Elizabeth Churchill

Yeah, sure. So, you know, when you're interacting with any kind of online system, AI system, agent, AI agent, and that might be a visually embodied one, like an avatar, or it might be just text. And you think you're talking to a person. And then there's that moment where you go, that was really weird. What just happened? That uncanny valley is that moment where you're like, thought, and that, that's a beautiful concept because it's a couple of things that are going on there. One is you start to realize that this isn't another person and then you start to go, huh, so what are you?

And at that moment you start to realize that something is a little off and people have described feeling shame that they were tricked. And I think that's a really important thing that we often forget. Now, there's a sociologist, I'm thinking, who was it, that set up what were called the breach experiments? And what that sociologist did was have students, for example, go home and then act like they were in a bed and breakfast, because they are challenging the social contract of anticipated behavior.

And I think the uncanny valley is that kind of moment where you realize that you are in a contract with what you thought was a human and now you're realizing that may or may not be a human. But humans can do it to each other. You know, we were just talking about communication and the tech sector and gender. And I think there's that uncanny valley where you start kind of think, I thought you thought of me as an equal and yet I'm not being heard. I am not being listened to.

So think these kinds of breaches are really, really interesting. And especially when it comes to something like AI, but back to emotion. I think people feel shame. They feel what happened, what just happened to me. Who are you? What are you? What did I tell you? What is the contract between us?

Liz Gerber

So interesting. It makes me wonder, we go around the world interacting with so many people assuming we know what the contracts are with them and they're often not what they we actually expect them to be but we don't even know that the contract is broken because there's never an opportunity to realize that there's that's been broken.

Elizabeth Churchill

Right, right.

Liz Gerber

So we're maybe overconfident in our understanding of the contracts we have with people.

Elizabeth Churchill

Yeah, and I think, you know, that's that moment when you realize or you think somebody was being disingenuous, but actually they were just pursuing a different contract.

Liz Gerber

Right. That's exactly right. Exactly. I want to go back to something you were talking about earlier. You were talking about augmenting decision making and I wanted to ask, and you also talked about augmenting physical activity. How do you make decisions about what kind of decision making you want to augment? There's so many kinds of decision making or cognitive support tools that we could make. How do you make the decision about which ones you want to pursue versus which you do not?

Elizabeth Churchill

I think that's again a great question. I don't really know. I just get kind of nosy about certain things. I think underlying a lot of what I do is looking for where there are opportunities to support people that are not terribly pursued. So if we look at design tools, and I mean kind of visual graphical interaction design tools,

Right now I'm really fascinated with a lot of this generative products that are coming out because I'm interested in thinking about how do we support people whose ideas are kind of trapped in their heads but they don't have the tactical technical skills to execute.

You know, I talked about loving the pencil and sketching before. I want to be really clear. I can't sketch at all. I mean, I'm useless when it comes to that evaluation of what is a sketch.

Liz Gerber

Well, you can sketch, it just might not appear in the Museum of Modern Art.

Elizabeth Churchill

Exactly. Exactly.

Liz Gerber

I make a big deal of this because sketching, anybody can sketch. Everybody can sketch.

Elizabeth Churchill

Yeah, yeah. But if you look at my sketches, you wouldn't think that they were modern art. And I know so many great designers who are so amazing.

Liz Gerber

But if you can write your name, I argue you can sketch. If you can write your name, you can sketch.

Elizabeth Churchill

All right, fair point. All right, well, I won't beat myself up for it. I have so much joy with my sketches. And then I look at what tool could I use as a design tool to take one of my little sketches about if we do this, then we can do that. And if I want to, for example, code a new app, I don't have the time to really learn how to code at that level or to do that. And now with these new tools, I know, for example, I might want to build an app to help somebody with understanding their finances in a different way. Now, can I use some tool to help me build that and just prototype it? Yeah, I can. And so I'm very problem centered.

So I will see, for example, this person who's terrified of finances. And I would say, what would be a good way to represent that for you, that you could approach thinking about this? Is it, you know, we go onto one of our banking apps now and it's like, should we just take the color red out? Would that be as red as an alert for you? So I tend to find problems.

and think about problem solving tools to support people, especially around where I see somebody not able to do something that's important to them, not able to, where there's that gap between what they want to do and what they're currently doing, where that facility is blocking them, that perceived lack of facility around something. So I don't know, just, I look at where people...

are struggling and I try to about how can we improve that. I mean it could be something very technical. For example, you know we were talking about

Well, look at what we're doing now. We've got a video conference here. We are talking now.

If there's a delay or the internet isn't working properly, what we know is that you and I will have glitches. And what we know is that that will really get in the way of our communication and conversation. And that will cause emotional distress and it will break the connection between us. And we will get frustrated probably with each other as much as with the technology because the mediation is so poor. Now, I'm really interested in...

You know, how do you make sure something different happens than just packets are dropped and the communication is broken? You know, how do you make sure that two people know that this is not about them? It's about the technology. How do you create a tool that will come up and say, you know, dear people, this is not about you. This is about me. I'm not doing a very good job here. I'll get back to you. Sorry to frustrate you. You know,

This is sort a bit of a silly example, but when I see people struggling, I like to think, what is the tool that we can give them that will help?

Liz Gerber

Yeah. And I do appreciate you laying out the fundamentals, which people tend to inability to use a tool on themselves, rather the designer or the tool itself. that's a, that's a, that always upsets me when I see that happen.

Elizabeth Churchill

We beat ourselves up and then I just did ask that I can't sketch and you corrected me appropriately. But I think we do, get very upset with ourselves.

Liz Gerber

So I have to ask another philosophical question is, especially now that you're in higher education, but you've been working with teams and young adults for many years, which is, do you see an increase in the expectation that people can do many more things well? Are we being harder on ourselves that we think we need to be able to be a great sketch artist? We need to be a great programmer. We need to be a great, you name it. How do you think that's playing out culturally in our society?

Elizabeth Churchill

I think that as always there are opposite approaches. I think young people put so much pressure on themselves. If we look at high school, what is it that I have to do? How many clubs do I have to be part of? How many sports teams do I have to be part of? Do I have to be in the debate team? Do I have to be top of the class of everything? And you see burnout in young people, terrible burnout.

Or you see the opposite. You see people just abdicating and saying, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to pursue my expertise, my dream because I just can't compete. And, you know, that's tragic as well. So I think as, as leaders, you know, most of my career has been hiring early stage career people into teams and helping them build their skills and develop.

And that is a joy to me, an absolute joy. And one of the things I see in the UX profession at the moment in industry is young people, early stage career people, should say, this age is not really the most relevant year.

Liz Gerber

Correct.

Elizabeth Churchill

So much expectation and not enough dedication in industry to understanding that these people who work for you, are, for want of a better word, you are lucky to be borrowing their time. And your job is as much to deliver to whatever the product is right now as to make sure they have a career going forward. Because as a leader, your job is to shape the industry, which means supporting and shaping the people who will be the industry next. I always have said this, you know, my job as a leader, or now an educator, is to train the next generation. My job is to give a platform to the people who will be the next leaders like you and me. My job is to help them and help them understand how they can shape the industry going forward. And I find it very tricky when I interact with senior leaders in any place who think that their job is about making themselves better, bigger, richer, whatever. It's not, sorry. I mean, that's part of it, but if we are part of a society, our ethical and moral code has got to be about the next generation of the society that we want to shape. And I think in a lot of workplace situations at this moment in time, too little emphasis is put on training leaders and managers to understand that this is their role and responsibility, not just the product, the ROI of the bottom line of the product.

The ROI is the future of the industry, not just the quarterly accounting budget right now. And I just, I didn't see enough. That's not true. see, I was going to say, I don't see enough people with that emphasis. And that's not true. I know a lot of people like that, but I worry, I worry that that is not being emphasized in the narrative of success.

Liz Gerber

Yeah. Yeah. Two things I want to pull out from what you just said that were interesting. One is that you, you seem to talk about your role in, just recently made, for years you were working in the tech industry and you just recently made a transition to working in a university. But to you, what I think if I heard you correctly, it sounds like you're doing similar work. You're, you're raising, you're developing people in both roles.

Elizabeth Churchill

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I took a university role because I think it's an AI university. It's I think it's one of the first. Now, very prescient because this university was established five years ago. So if you think about the Emirate leadership, the Emirati leadership, they knew that this was going to be big before tech industry exploded, which I think is extremely prescient. Now, I was very honored to be offered this role and I thought, I'm not sure I can do this, but I'm going to try.

Liz Gerber

Of course, you can do anything.

Elizabeth Churchill

I wanted to do it to try because I really do believe that we need to teach differently in the world of AI. And I do believe that I've been in Silicon Valley for three decades and moving to Abu Dhabi was also global change at a different context. And I wanted to understand, what do we do for the next generation of design with AI, through AI, for AI, designing AI, designing with AI, designing for AI? What do we need to teach that's different? What do we do to help the next generation? And one of the things about the university, it's very small university, just five years old, very, you know,

about 300 or 400 students, PhD and master's. It's about 40% women.

Liz Gerber

Awesome. That's amazing. And international, what is the population like? International?

Elizabeth Churchill

Yeah. It is international. It is international. Not so many Europeans. India, China, not so many Americans, but there are some. Yeah, as I say, a lot of the students are women and these women are amazing. And in all of the stuff that we grew up with, too few, mean, my masters. I started my master's twice for personal reasons. The first time my master's, the first semester was, it was something like, know, five women and 17 men or something. It wasn't accurate numbers, but you know, something like that. And then when I came back and started again, the senior leadership at the university I was at, which was the University of Sussex, had determined that they were going to take, it's going to be more or less 50-50, the best women, the best men for the, I cannot tell you, it was so different. And it's not because the first cohort of men had been bad people, it was just the imbalance.

Liz Gerber

Yeah, absolutely.

Elizabeth Churchill

You know, the second cohort where it was, you know, a lot more women, it just, back to the emotion, back to the identity, back to belonging. I just felt like it was fine to walk in and talk about my haircut, whereas with the first one, it hadn't been, you know? There were just different things on the agenda, right? So anyway, back to the university. So one of the reasons I joined was because I really do want to train the next generation and I want to opportunity to the next generation. And how Eric, President Eric Jing, he has a vision that human-computer interaction and design is important. Now, if you look at an AI university, we have computer vision, have robotics, we have machine learning, we have all of the classics. But he believes that without a human-centered approach, the application of those, incredibly deep technical skill sets and tools and technologies and capabilities are not going to evolve into the next iteration with the right value system. So I feel very, very honored that he has taken a risk, taken a chance on me and on our disciplines, social science, you know, it's not STEM, it's STEAM and the humanities.

When we look at ethics, one of the things I have been invited to teach a bit over there at the university, before the department has been set up, I've been working with a professor there called Professor Ian Reed, who's fantastic, a professor who's very interested in ethics. I've been teaching, what does it mean? What are ethics? What are the philosophies? That underlie ethics? How do you think about technology and tools and AI from an ethical perspective? And one of the things I've been researching over this holiday break has been all of these courses on ethics that I know in university, what does it mean in a different region? Does it change? All of the examples that I was teaching, I realized after I taught the class was they're all based in medical ethics that is based mostly in the UK and the US, particularly.

Liz Gerber

Yes, absolutely.

Elizabeth Churchill

So now when I go back, how do I teach an ethics class for a different region with different examples?

Liz Gerber

Yes, we all have. Like this goes back and we connect it back to the earlier conversation about the contracts. We go around the world assuming other people have similar worldviews to us. And they don't. And we are grossly naive and miss out on many opportunities for connection and create many opportunities for miscommunication, I would say, by making that assumption. I want to be respectful… Oh, go ahead.

Elizabeth Churchill

I'll just say, you know, it's so interesting because people have been very curious about my desire to move to the Emirates.

Liz Gerber

Yes.

Elizabeth Churchill

And part of it was, you know, in some ways, you know, I've always been a bit of an anthropologist. you know, a of my early research was on cross-cultural communication between Silicon Valley and researchers and designers and technologists in Japan because I worked for Fuji Xerox.

So cross-cultural communication and miscommunication has always been something that I really deeply care about. And so, you know, being in the arts and learning about what are the values there, what are the communication styles, what are the things that matter over there? How does the expat community fit in with the Emirati community, fit in with the people who are working there?

These are all fascinating to me and my assumptions are being challenged every day in really interesting ways. And, you know, especially around gender, those questions that everybody asks me, which is why I like to say, you know, so many of the student population are women. There are many women who, you know, dress like you know, California style, Western jeans and t-shirts, many women who wear the abaya, many women who have somewhere in between. And, you know, your challenge, your assumptions will be challenged.

Liz Gerber

I love that.

Elizabeth Churchill

You know, it's, so important. I'll give you a concrete example. I like to be very respectful of other people's boundaries as much as I can. And we were at some event and I, I'm, I'm a hugger. I hug people if they, and I would say, it, may I hug you? Is that okay? And we were at an event and I was hugging folks who were from the States. And there's a woman who's very much, she had the abaya on and everything. And I just, and I went to sort of bow to her, like I can bow when I'm in Japan. And she looked at me and she said, I don't get a hug. And I said, of course you get a hug. I just wanted to be respectful. And she's like, I'm a hugger. I had assumed that because she's a devout Muslim woman that she wouldn't want me to hug her. And she was like, I want to hug. But that was my assumption.

Liz Gerber

So what will you do differently now? Will you do anything differently?

Elizabeth Churchill

I will ask people, I will say, may I hug you? Is that allowed? And I'm fine if it's not allowed. I want you to be comfortable. But I was like, wow, that was a projection I had upon that wonderful, amazing young woman. And I think...

Liz Gerber

Thank you.

Elizabeth Churchill

And I think one of the things I also really love about being there is it's a very family-oriented society and it is very safe for children, very safe. And people will go to the shopping mall and routinely there will be an announcement which is, has somebody lost their child? We've got their child here. Because children will run around free, not with the kind of fear that I see in other places I've lived.

Not without the helicopter parenting around.

Liz Gerber

That's beautiful.

Elizabeth Churchill

I love it. I love it. And, you know, I love talking to the children and, you know, they will be running around doing that thing and I get to chat with them. And I don't feel like anybody's afraid of this, you know, white lady talking to their kids, this British American lady, you know, I love it. It's safe for children in a way that I think allows them to be free and to play and to talk to adults and to be, yeah, just free.

Liz Gerber

That's beautiful.

I could go on and on talking to Elizabeth, but I want to be respectful of your time. I knew this was going to be a hard conversation to end because there's so many threads I want to pull off on, but I want to respect. So I'm going to conclude with two questions. The first one, you covered so much already, but is there an additional unexpected piece of advice that you wish to share with people entering tech and design fields? Anything unexpected.

Elizabeth Churchill

I think, well, these are probably not unexpected, we talk about needing to have a thick skin. Now, I think I have a rhino hide, but I think that's not the right way to think about it. I think it's very important to be attentive to when you feel nervous, anxious, we talked about that earlier, shut down, shut out. It's very important to be attentive and it's very important to reach out to other people. The one thing I think that has sustained me throughout my career is the support of others, the sponsorship, the mentorship and the support. Early in career I always had allies who were men who would stick up for me. It's very important in meetings when you see someone else not being heard to bring back the conversation and say, by the way, did you hear what Liz said about five minutes ago? Because I think we want to come back to that. Those kinds of tactics and communication styles really important. Self-awareness, allyship, and building your network of people and being able to feel free to express sadness, disappointment, frustration, anger, and talk through how to address things. I think that's really, really, really important for us, especially as women. Not just women, though.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm. Everybody.

Elizabeth Churchill

Everybody. But I know plenty of incredibly brilliant men who, you know, also have that kind of being excluded. Interestingly throughout my career I've seen that often men who are very very supportive advocates for women get shut down by men who are not. So we have to elevate each other in very thoughtful ways. The other is we talked a bit about empathy. Another thing is

you have to get into the head of the other person and see that they don't necessarily mean to ignore you or put you down. They just haven't been told. So I think also educating people to say, you not you made me feel like this, but I wanted to just point out to you that when you said this, you actually misunderstood me.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Churchill

And when I said that, I don't think you're hearing me. So being a little stubborn, stubborn for each other and being self-aware. You don't have to be self-aware in the moment. Like I said at the beginning of this conversation, of an evening I'll sit and meditate on the veil. And if I go, you know, I just don't feel okay about that conversation. I want to acknowledge that and I'll take my pencil and write it down and say, I'm going to come back to that.

So I think there was something probably not surprising, but I do want to emphasize them. There's one other thing, you we were talking about my mentorship and my leadership style. One of the things that I think is very hard for people is to give up on something that they thought they wanted. And one of my mentorship roles, I think, has been to say to people, you know, don't...

that, you know, when I was a manager, especially, I don't think you're doing yourself the best service being in this role. Now, my job isn't to just make you productive in this context. My job is to help you find the thing. Maybe, you know, you've learned as much as you can in this team with me. I see you being frustrated. What can I do to change your role so that you will continue to learn, which might include me helping you get a different role? I'm not firing you, but I'm seeing opportunity for growth for you. What can I do to help that happen? Either within the team, change your role here, or somewhere else. So I think it's very important for us as leaders to see potential that is not being fulfilled and help people fulfill their potential, even if it means elsewhere. And I think it's very important as an employee to be able to go to one's leadership and say, I'm frustrated. I want a growth opportunity. I might need to move on. Will you help me? Too many people stay in roles that are not satisfying to them. Life is very short.

Liz Gerber

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Life is very short. We can't do that.

Elizabeth Churchill

We can't do that. We can't do that to ourselves. And now I do acknowledge that people have responsibilities and they need income and all of those things, but it's very important to build up your allyship and sponsorship team that will allow you to think about how you can move on to other things if you need to. And we all end up frustrated and needing the income for a while, but it can't be, it's not sustainable and it shouldn't be.

Liz Gerber

Can you distinguish between allyship and sponsorship?

Elizabeth Churchill

Absolutely. Great question. An ally is somebody who is on your side, will speak for you, will support you, will help you reflect, will critique you in a gentle, supportive and constructive way. A sponsor is somebody who will go and find the opportunities for you. They will, excuse me, they will speak up for you in a meeting and they will ask for resources for you. They will give you, they will open doors actively for you. They will work with you to figure out what those doors might be. And then they will go and actively advocate for you and get resources for you. An ally may do that because you might have an ally who's also a sponsor, but it is not incumbent on an ally necessarily to do that. And they may not have the ability to do something like that. But, in my last role at Google, you know, I was certainly an ally for a number of people. Excuse me. But my sponsorship role was anytime I got into a meeting to say, I'd like to remind you all that, you know, Liz has this skill set and I see an opportunity there for her. And I would like you to give her an opportunity for 20% on that project. I will help supervise. I will help manage. And I will put some of my funding and resource against it. Can you give her that role? Just very straightforward, explicit. I will use some of my social capital presence in a particular forum that this is not in and some of my own funding to make sure that she has this opportunity. And then we can look at, maybe we should get her that full time or elevate her or promote her because we're looking at what she's managed to do in this contest. So that's a sponsor.

Liz Gerber

Elizabeth, I don't know whether to call you a mentor, a sponsor, an ally, or just an amazing human being that I lucked upon, has crossed, but whatever you are, I am so grateful. Thank you so much for spending this time sharing these stories with us. I am incredibly grateful. I'm so grateful for the audience who's listening, for the Technical Difficulties Podcast which is produced by the Center for Human Computer Interaction and Design and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. Thank you all for listening and for being with us today.