Belonging

BELONGING

A Special Publication by ReD Associates

What does it mean to belong? How is it created? Is all of it good? What breaks it? How is belonging changing? In our research, we see the question of belonging as fundamental to understanding our present moment and where we are heading. So, here we gather our collective thinking in a multidisciplinary content series that brings together essays, interviews, flm, photography and more, to encourage refection and curiosity about a human phenomenon we believe is crucial to society and to business.

All articles are available from the QR code (use your phone’s camera to access) or from redassociates.com/belonging

CONTENTS

What is Belonging, Anyway? / Essay

How I Built Belonging / Interviews

How To Build Belonging At A 350,000-Person Company / Interview

Lost and Found In Public Space / Essay

Why Bitcoin Is Really about Belonging / Essay

One Day We Arrived in Japan / Documentary

Can Hermès Be Your Friend? / Essay

Belonging: At Home in the Crowd / Talk

Phenomena: Belonging / Podcast

Belonging: A Reading List / List

What Is Belonging, Anyway?

An introduction to our special series on belonging, by Maria

Cury and Mikkel Krenchel

Belonging is both a noun and a verb, but it’s not a human phenomenon we can easily grasp or easily do on our own. It’s given, felt, assessed, afrmed, denied – belonging requires an interaction with other people or with places or things, calling on a social world beyond the individual to come alive. It’s easier to see belonging by noticing its outline – what’s in and what’s out. We recognise belonging mostly in moments when we strongly feel it – singing the chorus line among the crowd at a concert, or standing up for the wave with fellow fans at a stadium. Or conversely, we recognise belonging when we very much don’t feel it while others do – not being invited to the birthday party, realising everyone else in the room voted for the other candidate, or being told by a stranger to “go back to where you’re from”. And yet we talk about belonging all the time. When we talk about issues like how to make sense of our post-lockdown landscape, how to build inclusive organisations in an increasingly remote world, or how to get communities to come together to tackle problems like climate change, what we are really talking about is belonging, and how to get it right. But what is belonging really, and how is it created? Is all of it good, and what breaks it? How is belonging changing, and what is its future?

Belonging is a topic that comes up again and again across the research we do at ReD. In the last two years, we’ve carried out over 10 studies that centred directly or indirectly on the phenomenon of belonging within communities ranging from the nascent to the well-established, the ephemeral to the long-lasting.

We’ve gathered our collective thinking in this special series that brings together essays, interviews, flm, and photography to drive a deeper understanding of belonging across contexts. Our goal is to encourage refection and curiosity about a topic we believe is crucial to society and to business – because brands, products, services, and spaces physical or digital can all create or break a sense of belonging.

The crisis today

It’s easier than ever to connect with one another today, yet harder to feel like we belong. There has been a fraying of our social fabric, illustrated by growing distrust in traditional institutions like schools and governments, political fragmentation, and the diminishing of local communities and shared physical spaces. We see a rise in loneliness and growing polarisation in our politics. Much of this has been reported for the past couple of decades and made worse by the pandemic. And yet, we can now bridge the gaps of physical space, time, and even aspects of our identities, by connecting with people online who are far away, with whom we can communicate asynchronously, and who might be quite diferent from the people we’d connect to otherwise. These two contradictory phenomena – the decaying social fabric and the ability to connect more than ever – happen together, and belonging gets caught in the middle, in part because belonging is not just one thing that is unaddressed in some domains of our lives and wholesale replaced by others.

What we mean by belonging

When we say ‘belonging’, we as researchers mean the feeling of acceptance, connection, safety, and reciprocity with a group or community, not just to another individual. Belonging is not the same as acquaintance or membership – we can be a member in a community without feeling like we belong. The group or community can take many forms – inherited, chosen, feeting, earned, closed or open, digital or IRL, we might know people by name or we might simply feel the presence of others without knowing who they are.

Belonging is not just one thing – there are diferent types of relationships we have to and within groups and communities in our lives, that provide a sense of belonging. Some ways in which we feel belonging take a lot of time to develop and are quite intimate, while other ways we feel we belong are much more ephemeral, quick to develop, and quick to lose, for example in the weak ties we create with others we encounter in our daily routines. We might feel a sense of belonging because we share the same memories, or because we have cultural practices we do together, whether it’s in a church or school, neighborhood or nation. We might feel we belong because we share a hobby, even though we’ve never met or done that particular hobby together, something we see acutely in the decentralised communities around cryptocurrency and the rapidly expanding Web3 space.

This distinction matters because diferent types of belonging can provide us with diferent positive benefts in our lives – whether it’s connections or knowledge to build skills or get ahead, or a space to be vulnerable or experimental or collaborative. Those benefts, when combined, give us a sense of stability in an otherwise volatile and fast-changing world – because belonging is not just a feeling, it has functions in our lives. What happens when we can’t fnd balance across these diferent ways to belong, or when we can’t tap into the benefts of belonging? Several titles in our reading list, where we note the best books from landmark sociological studies to classic literature, add depth and wider context to this particular aspect of belonging.

A signal we’ve seen across our research is that it is much easier for us to feel shallow belonging nowadays – sensing the presence of other like-minded people, but not really going beyond that to feel part of a community and also actively contribute to it. While we are given abundant opportunities for passively experiencing shallow belonging with TikTok creators, brand advertisers, and political organisers, deep belonging is increasingly difcult to come by. In the absence of traditional institutions like schools, neighbourhoods, and churches, we see people turning to informal communities tied to their hobbies or areas of interest as a source of belonging and connection in their lives, but also struggling to get the most out of these forms of belonging. In our podcast episode on belonging, we dive into this phenomenon further and ask how an overemphasis on shallow belonging might in fact be contributing to a crisis of loneliness.

Making, breaking, and questioning belonging

The feeling of belonging happens in interactions, rather than in individuals – in experiences that reveal, re-emphasise, and even expand what we have in common with one another. Sometimes we need help initially noticing the commonalities, to feel the possibility of belonging. Once we start to feel we belong, we need experiences that reinforce what we have in common – whether it’s through a shared struggle or achievement, or savouring the past together. We’ve observed that the more people feel empowered to shape the collective identity of a group, or to have a role within the group, the more we feel we belong. Connecting more intimately with new individuals within a community sometimes afrms that we belong to the community as a whole. And interestingly, we’ve seen belonging thrives when commonalities between people evolve rather than stay the same, whether it’s through new experiences or skill-building, or discovering more commonalities. When experiences like all the ones mentioned here don’t happen – or don’t happen often enough – belonging doesn’t deepen.

On the fip side, belonging breaks when we don’t feel acceptance, reciprocity, or commonalities through the experiences we have together. When these experiences reveal a mismatch in what we expected were our shared values, beliefs, identities, or norms, we might not feel we belong, as the documentary One Day We Arrived in Japan that we feature – a story of three families who migrate from Brazil to Japan – poignantly captures. When aspects of ourselves (our identities, our personalities, our personal histories) aren’t accepted, or when we give without others at some point giving back, we might not feel we belong.

But not all endings to belonging are bad – sometimes we stop feeling belonging because we’ve got what we needed from a group or community, it’s served its purpose and now we move on to belonging elsewhere. Sometimes we develop a deeper belonging with a subset of the group, or a relationship with an individual in the group, and break away together having gained something we needed more. And not all belonging is good – the force of belonging has the potential to create groupthink, the feeling of exclusion, or the pressure to assimilate. It can perpetuate misinformation or conspiracies that contribute to the decaying of our social fabric. Belonging is often a key ingredient in cults, religious warfare, racism, and terrorism.

Indeed, maybe we don’t always need belonging. Since the rise of remote and hybrid work with Covid-19, people are questioning whether we need belonging at work, for example – if so, in what ways? For employers, it’s a crisis: how do we create a sense of belonging to an ofce or a company, in an era of remote, hybrid, and gig work? For employees, maybe it’s a revelation or a revolution: do we need to feel belonging to do good and meaningful work, or does belonging at work exploit us to do more work for less? How much should we derive belonging from work versus other domains in our lives?

Belonging for business

Belonging matters for companies and organisations. We’ve observed that when businesses get belonging right, their brands, services, products, and spaces are more relevant to people. But while belonging increases engagement, it also requires engagement. Delivering on the feeling of belonging is not enough – there are diferent kinds of belonging with diferent functions for people and specifc experiences or points of interaction that make people feel a deeper sense of belonging around commonalities. We unpack this further in our piece Can Hermès Be Your Friend? that provides tools for brands to consider using to deepen their consumers’ sense of belonging.

Understanding the kinds of belonging, benefts, and experiences to deliver on, is crucial for getting belonging right. Belonging, done wrong, can feel frivolous or beside-the-point – what is the role of belonging in an organisation’s core vision or mission? It can feel exclusionary or intolerant – who is the organisation or company for, and who might not be currently considered? We put precisely these sorts of business-critical questions to executives and business leaders in our How I Built Belonging interview series – featuring Nikki Neuburger of lululemon, Jean Chatzky of HerMoney, Lynda Hammes of Tertulia, and Kim Foulds and Scott Cameron of Sesame Workshop – where we discuss the diferent ways organisations approach creating a sense of belonging both internally and among their consumer base.

Understanding how to best deliver on belonging for a particular brand, product, service, or space is also crucial. For instance, while there’s an abundance of online ways to create belonging, the deepest belonging has the potential of taking place IRL – it often can’t just live online. And perhaps counterintuitively, sometimes belonging can be transactional – we see people using marketplaces and micropayments to foster a sense of belonging. In a quickly changing landscape of how we connect and make meaning in our lives, it’s important for businesses to go beyond the trends and understand how belonging is happening in people’s day-to-day.

We hope that the following observations, ideas, voices, and images provide a starting point, a provocation, for anyone interested in the difcult work of building the invisible fabric of belonging that turns individuals into collectives. Let’s fnd ways to gather, further explore, and build community around belonging – our connection can begin here.

HOW I BUILT BELONGING

From global brands to AI-led start-ups, how do business leaders approach fostering connection and community both within their organisations and among their consumer base?

Sandra Cariglio in conversation with

NIKKI NEUBURGER

Chief Brand Ofcer at lululemon

Tamara Moellenberg and Millie Arora in conversation with

JEAN CHATZKY

CEO and Co-founder of HerMoney

Taylor Steelman in conversation with

KIM FOULDS & SCOTT CAMERON Sesame Workshop

Maria Cur y and Matthew Janney in conversation with

LYNDA HAMMES

Co-founder of Tertulia.inc

“Brands have to declare the lane that they’re in. Nobody will know what to come to you for if you haven’t said, ‘Here’s where we are and what we stand for’.”

NIKKI NEUBURGER

Nikki Neuburger is the Chief Brand Ofcer at lululemon athletica inc., a global athletic apparel company. Nikki joined lululemon in 2020 to drive the company’s global brand and storytelling initiatives and lead its marketing, creative, communications, sustainability, and social impact functions. Prior to lululemon, Nikki served as Global Head of Marketing for Uber Eats, where she led the introduction and expansion of the brand across fve regions in 36 countries. She previously built her career over a 14-year period at Nike, where she ultimately served as Global Vice President of Nike Running. Here, as part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, she speaks to ReD partner Sandra Cariglio about building community from the ground-up, the importance of two-way dialogue to foster belonging both internally and among consumers, and navigating an increasingly polarised cultural landscape.

SANDRA CARIGLIO lululemon is often cited as a best practice for building belonging. Why do you think you’ve been so successful over the years and built such a strong sense of community around the brand, especially when so many other forms of community are in decline?

NIKKI NEUBURGER I would attribute lululemon’s success to three things. The frst is product. We have a diferent approach to activewear than others – we ofer an alternative option for consumers to choose from. We started as an apparel company, so we have always had great, high-quality products to work with. Second, we’ve always advocated for taking care of yourself and taking care of your community. It’s not been about a culture centred on competitive sports and winning, which is where a lot of the industry plays; that works for them. We are instead a brand focused on ftness and well-being through the lens of health and happiness. Thirdly, we’re a brand that has always been focused on community. lululemon was a little ahead of its time – we arrived when women didn’t necessarily feel comfortable walking around in their ftness gear or being sweaty. Mindfulness, meditation, and even yoga was still a little niche and inaccessible. With everything that’s happened over the last 20 years, I now feel like other brands are going, “Oh to be healthy and happy is what’s on trend – it’s not necessarily about winning, winning, winning.” But we’ve maintained that same path this whole time; our brand purpose is to elevate human potential by helping people feel their best. That’s the foundation we’re built upon.

SANDRA To go further into that, what have some of the mechanisms been behind creating such a strong sense of community that have come from these foundations?

NIKKI Everything the brand has done from the beginning has been very grassroots. For example, the product was designed based on going into studios, seeing what people were wearing and understanding what unmet needs they had – this is a phrase we use a lot, and has become core to our product design philosophy. Early on, if you went into a yoga studio at that time, you would not have seen leggings – they didn’t exist yet. It’s hard to believe now but people were wearing sweatpants, T-shirts, and shorts and we felt like there was a better solution. On the community-building side, it was the same thing. The folks that work in our stores (we call

them “educators”), have the most important role in the company as they’re on the frontlines listening to our guests and building relationships. They know what’s trending in ftness; they know who the infuential studios and instructors are. And it is from this place, that our community and our ambassador roster was built. Our ambassador programme really started from the ground up versus the top down. We weren’t signing people and putting them on TV. It was very much neighbourhood by neighbourhood attached to where we had a physical store footprint. Since then, we’ve opened more and more stores, and you can see that credibility and community connection scaling over time. To maintain this grassroots connection, we have a beneft for all employees that we call “sweaty pursuits”. This beneft enables and encourages every employee to “sweat” in their community, to try all the new studios, to meet instructors, and to generally participate in the lifestyle and the culture that we’re a part of daily through a monthly stipend. We get really valuable insight from our teams this way.

SANDRA So they’re also social antennas for the brand. How do you then capture those insights at the scale you’re operating at?

NIKKI A myriad of ways. The meeting I’ve been in all morning is an example of what we call our “listening sessions”. We just spent three hours with twelve Paris store managers where they shared with us everything that they want to feed back. We always have questions we want to ask, but really, we just see where the conversation takes us: what are they seeing from a product perspective? What products are people asking for that we don’t have? What products do people want more of? What’s going on in the community? What types of activities are people really gravitating towards? Another example is “voice of the guest”, a process by which we track feedback we hear directly from guests via our call centres, product reviews, and store feedback. These inputs are then analysed, discussed, and actioned.

“It’s not been about a culture centred on competitive sports and winning … We are instead a brand focused on ftness and well-being through the lens of health and happiness.”

SANDRA What challenges have you faced as you’ve moved away from being a relatively niche brand for predominantly women in North America doing yoga, and expanded into an international brand that’s now also very much for men and not just yoga, but any activity? Has that transformation had any impact on people’s sense of belonging?

NIKKI Most of the choices we’ve made have been because our guests have invited us in as opposed to us necessarily identifying a business opportunity to go chase. Of course, when we get invited into a new space, we will size the prize and fgure out if it’s worth the resources to invest. But she is who said you need to make things for them. We’re still nimble enough as a brand to build in that way. But we’re not losing our authentic connection with the community because our lululemon guests were always participating in multiple activities. I would say, our broad community is built on shared values and then the more directly connected groups rally around a shared activity (like running, training, or yoga).

SANDRA How do you think about building community diferently in physical and digital spaces?

NIKKI If there was a silver lining to Covid-19, it was that we had to fgure out how to support communities digitally, and at scale because we didn’t have the luxury of gathering. How you achieve intimacy digitally with large groups of people is really through how you communicate and show up on social media. If you look at lululemon’s social channels, it’s a conversation, it’s twoway. It’s not the brand just shouting messages and then not hearing back. Being in relationship and dialogue with our community is really important. We celebrate but we also take feedback. When we make a mistake, we’ll apologise, or when we’re going to make a change, we’ll let people know in advance. We’ll engage the community in helping us to make decisions. That has historically been an approach unique to lululemon but now consumers are demanding that from all brands. Initially, I was very worried about the fallout from acknowledging mistakes, but I’ve learned it generates a lot of trust and intimacy, to say, “Hey, I made this choice, it was the wrong choice and I’m going to do something diferent in the future.” That’s all anybody really wants: transparency, growth, and honesty. That’s what we’ve been able to

do digitally with a lot more people than we could ever do in person.

SANDRA We are currently seeing that brands are being pulled into all sorts of polarising cultural conversations and as a consequence, increasingly judged on the politics and morals of the moment. How have you navigated that terrain?

NIKKI Brands have to declare the lane that they’re in. Nobody will know what to come to you for if you haven’t said, “Here’s where we are and what we stand for.” Once people are clear on this, they know if they want to join in. With regards to certain things happening in the world, as a company we frst start with these questions: “Do we have an authentic position in this conversation that makes what we have to say valuable? Does anybody need to hear from us on this topic? Or is our role here to provide a platform for people to talk and share with each other?” Through our listening sessions, we tend to have more internal conversations around what’s going on in the world than we do within our channels. We will communicate externally if we have value to add in the conversation. Other times, nobody needs to hear from the brand, but we may make space for our people to talk with one another. This what our people networks are born out of: we have a Black people network, an Asian people network, a South Asian people network, a Jewish people network, a Women in Tech people network, and many more. Our people networks are safe spaces to gather, connect, and restore based on shared identity – and they’re self-organised so if you want to be part of a network that doesn’t yet exist, you can create one. When we started the initiative, most were groups based on racial identity, but we’ve now started to move into other categories. And of course, there’s intersectionality too. Someone may belong to the LGBTQ+ network, the Black people network, and the Women in Tech network – no person is just one thing in one box. What has been most interesting is seeing the people networks get together and fnding that they have a lot in common. There are obviously very unique issues that each of them face and want to talk about, but there’s also lots of shared needs, opportunities, feelings, and emotions. These groups have identifed shared initiatives and goals that contribute to a sense of belonging and inclusivity.

SANDRA You’ve mentioned these educators play such a pivotal role in shaping a healthy culture and anticipating what may come next from a cultural perspective. How do you fnd the right profles and how do they change depending on the community you’re talking to?

NIKKI The clearer we can be about who we are, the easier it is for us to attract people with shared values. I talked about us being out in the community – a lot of folks are just attracted to people that they meet. Now, that can be tricky because that can also create bias where you’re just attracting people like you. That is why we have made a conscious efort to identify communities or areas where we don’t have a presence and work to understand who the community leaders are, build relationships with them, and support them in their goals. Once we have those relationships, we prioritise, empower, support, and invest in our educators and in our community leaders in diferent ways than other retailers. For example, the store manager is empowered beyond running the day-to-day business of their store. They’re responsible for representing their local community, supporting their ambassadors, and feeding insights and needs back into the company. We have specifc learning and development programmes so that we can provide them with support in identifying their own personal goals, even if those goals are to not work at lululemon in the future and instead to start their own business or to start a family. This gets to the heart of the company’s DNA; we believe that if you’re fulflled in your life, you will be more fulflled in your work. We’ve got educators who’ve been educators for 15, 20 years. We also have senior leaders who started as educators – there’s a pathway to grow in your career if you want to stay at lululemon. All these things contribute to us attracting really special people who are there because they believe in the brand’s purpose. They don’t believe in black stretchy pants, but they believe in what black stretchy pants enable you to do, which is to live an active, healthy lifestyle, to be an active member in your community, and to identify and work towards your purpose. This can be extremely fulflling for people – and they stick around.

Sandra Cariglio is a partner at ReD.

JEAN CHATZKY

Jean Chatzky is the CEO and co-founder of HerMoney and the host of the HerMoney with Jean Chatzky podcast. Jean spent 25 years as the fnancial editor for NBC Today and was a regular contributor to CNN, MSNBC, and The Oprah Winfrey Show before she founded HerMoney, a digital media company that aims to improve women’s relationship to fnancial management, rooted in the idea that women have diferent needs and considerations around money. Beginning with the podcast, Jean has transformed HerMoney into an empowered, inclusive, and trusting on- and ofine community through a network of digital oferings, coaching programmes, and in-person events, bringing thousands of people from all backgrounds together around the often difcult and charged topic of money. Here, as part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, she talks to Millie Arora and Tamara Moellenberg about creating judgment-free safe spaces, fostering belonging in digital communities, and the importance of leading with vulnerability and intimacy.

“You give a little to get a little… you can’t ask people to share with you unless you’re willing to share with them.”

TAMARA MOELLENBERG Jean, how did you get started with HerMoney?

JEAN CHATZKY I started her money after many years of giving speeches about personal fnance in a lot of different rooms where all the women felt comfortable asking questions and telling their stories, but also being in rooms of men and women where that just didn’t happen as much. What was really apparent to me after decades of anecdotal research was that we needed a safe space where we could have these conversations. So when I had the opportunity to launch a podcast, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to have an ongoing conversation with women about money – and a community started to gather around that. We started a mailbag segment and got tons of questions. We still get tons of questions from women about their money, about their fnancial situations, about their life situations. Because of that experience, we decided to launch HerMoney as a company. We’re now a website, we produce newsletters, we ofer coaching programmes, and we continue to be a safe space for women to come together and talk about money.

TAMARA In our work, we see how valuable it is when organisations can help facilitate people connecting with each other. How have you been able to foster that interpersonal side of belonging?

JEAN Pre-Covid, we gathered women together for what we called HerMoney Happy Hours. We created a deck of cards comprised of leading questions to get women talking about money. Those experiences are highly communal and the women who participate really enjoy them. Often they exchange phone numbers to meet up without me afterwards. Also in our coaching programmes we have built in an element of group work. We have two coaching programmes: one is called FinanceFixx, which is more about saving, smarter spending, debt repayment, budgeting, cash-fow management. Every week for eight weeks, they meet with their group and coach, and the group fosters camaraderie, accountability, shares tips, habits, hacks, wins, but also their frustrations – and that builds belonging. The other coaching programme is what we call InvestingFixx. It’s an investing club for women. Karen Finerman, who is a professional investor and appears on CNBC, and I teach investing twice a month on Zoom to a growing number of women who are voting on which investments get added to our group portfolio,

which is, by the way, beating the market. We have a portal through which they can communicate when we’re not in session, a safe portal where people can ask questions, get answers, talk to each other. And fnally, we have a private Facebook group, which is up to about 20,000 people where women come together, ask questions, help each other out. All of those things are going strong.

TAMARA Safe spaces are so critical when it comes to a topic like managing your money because it’s so loaded for so many people. How have you gone about concretely creating those safe spaces?

JEAN We’ve been overt from the very beginning that there’s no judgment. We all work really hard for whatever money we have. And we all have diferent lives with diferent needs and diferent wants – and wants are fne, right? There’s no reason for me to get judgmental about how you are using your resources. They’re your resources. It’s your choice. I just want you to have all of the information that you need in order to make the best possible decision for you and your family. We have been very upfront with our community that we’re not judging. If we see that people are getting judgmental or if they’re offering information that’s incorrect or damaging, we shut that down. But making somebody feel safe means making them feel seen and heard and doing that without allowing what you value to colour what you’re saying about what they value. I come to all this as an English major. I’m not an economist. I’m not a fnancial planner. I don’t have an MBA. I learned personal fnance on the job, and I really believe that if I can understand it and fgure it out, then you can understand it and fgure it out. Because I’ve made all the mistakes, but also because it’s really not rocket science. It’s one of those felds that has been overly complicated thanks to people who are trying to sell you stuf. And so we just clear that out.

“Every week for eight weeks, they meet with their group and coach, and the group fosters camaraderie, accountability, shares tips, habits, hacks, wins, but also their frustrations – and that builds belonging.”

TAMARA We’ve seen that online forms of connection for many people sometimes can stay at a very superfcial level and don’t satisfy that deeper need to belong – to really feel a part of something. As a digital-frst company, how have you been able to help your members fnd a more authentic connection, both with you, with the topics, but also with each other?

JEAN Podcasts are incredibly intimate. You’ve got the host, the guest, the show. They’re in your ears. You’re walking your dog and they’re with you. You’re in your car and they’re with you. You’re having a restless night and you put them on and they’re with you. They’re part of your day-to-day existence in a way that the television show that you keep on in the background while you’re cooking dinner is not. I think that’s why our listeners feel like we are family and we feel the same way about them. We know this because of the letters that they write to us where they lay out their fnances in detail, they tell me all about their lives and we try to help them with whatever it is they need help with. The same thing happens in our in-person groups and on Facebook. What I think is important to remember about the whole HerMoney universe is that there are some people who don’t listen to podcasts, who don’t go on Facebook, and there are some people who don’t want to meet a coach online. But by ofering a lot of diferent points of entry, we’re meeting people where they are.

MILLIE ARORA On that point of intimacy, I’m curious about the diferent ways that plays out between groups of women that maybe don’t know each other but also groups of women who do know each other – there are diferences there in how you foster intimacy, vulnerability, and sharing your fnances. Money can be so taboo, particularly with people you know socially.

JEAN I’m a reporter, that’s what I’ve always done, and so I know how reporters work. You give a little to get a little. When I am facilitating a group, I talk about myself: I talk about my divorce, my mistakes, my kids, the ridiculous amount of money that I spent because my dog got an ear infection. I share. I know, you know, and my listeners know that I talk about my life. I think that helps; you can’t ask people to share with you unless you’re willing to share with them.

MILLIE On the topic of how diferent people respond, I remember hearing Sallie Krawcheck say that when she launched her invest-

ment company Ellevest, on the one hand she was overwhelmed by the number of women who were thrilled at what she was doing, but also shocked at the number of women who pushed back against the idea that women needed a women-only investment solution, suggesting a platform for women is an “inferior product”. I’m curious about your thoughts and reactions to that, and on identity-based or gender-based belonging more widely?

JEAN I’ve had the same experience as Sally has. My friend Jane Bryant Quinn – who was a personal fnance reporter for many years and maybe the best there ever was – likes to say that money isn’t pink or blue, it’s green. And she’s right. She’s 100% right about that. If Apple is a good stock for men, Apple is a good stock for women. But that’s not what we’re doing here. We are ofering you a variety of places in which you might feel comfortable learning and asking you to come try it out. And the fact is, women need to know about money. The fact that women earn less, the fact that the gender gap is persistent and pervasive, the fact that women take breaks from the workforce to care for older parents, and the fact that women live longer – by putting that into the equation, you come out with the fact that we need to put away more for these lives that we’re going to have because we’re going to earn less and need to make it last a longer period of time. So I am a fan of what Sallie is doing. We are both very much on team woman.

TAMARA You’ve mentioned that in designing your podcasts and your newsletters, you’re always thinking about women from different backgrounds and diferent walks of life. One of the things that we’ve seen in our work is that many young people, often from minority backgrounds or people who’ve been felt excluded from the fnancial system, are increasingly drawn to TikTok or Finfuencers – these alternative spaces. How have you gone about bringing in people who are more in the margins?

JEAN We’re very intentional about helping our whole community feel seen, so when it comes to booking guests on the podcast, we are always looking for diversity in genders, diversity in ethnicities, diversity in ages. But we don’t stop there. We do the same when we are hiring freelance writers; we do the same when we’re deciding who to quote in a story. It’s all the diferent ways that you – as a brand – show up. They all matter. And I am friendly with the other infuencers in my space. I’ve mentored a lot of them, and a lot of them have worked for

me. I am incredibly proud of the fact that I have brought a lot of women along in the personal fnance arena – it’s something I feel really good about.

TAMARA I’m hearing you describe it as instead of having a competitor mindset, you actually have a community mindset.

JEAN Yes. I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. Not everybody is going to listen to me, but everybody needs to know about their money and they all need to fnd the person or the voice or the site or the podcast or the source that makes sense to them. And I want them to be able to do that. Being competitive when the topic is this important doesn’t make any sense to me.

MILLIE What were some of the lessons you learned as a selftaught personal fnance reporter that you carry with you today?

JEAN I think I’m a fairly typical woman when it comes to personal fnance. My second to last book is called Women with Money. I went out and interviewed hundreds of women about what they want from their money. That was the frst question that I asked them, “What do you want?” And I got a lot of answers. I want to buy a house. I want to buy a second house. I want to have enough money to retire. But overlaying all of these from the vast majority of women that I interviewed was this very overt need for safety and security. Women talked about wanting not to just own a home, but to own a home with a paid of mortgage; not just to own a car, but to own a car with backup cameras and blind spot indicators and every possible airbag and other safety feature. I realised in doing all of these interviews that I’m really typical. I got divorced at 40. I have a real bias toward safety and security that women like me have to watch out for, because it can get in the way of accomplishing the things that we need to accomplish with our money in order to amass enough to support ourselves through a comfortable retirement. We need to be investing, and that means taking risk. And for many of us, that is a hard thing to do. There’s a reason that behavioural fnance has become a really popular and fascinating discipline, because even really smart people make really stupid moves with money because we’re human.

TAMARA Are there any tips or principles that you could extract from your work that you’d want to share with leaders or organisations looking to help people fnd a deep sense of belonging with one another?

JEAN I don’t know that these would blow of the roof, but I would say, know who your people are. You may be surprised. We survey our listeners and our community to fgure out not only who they are, but what they want and how we can help them. Then I would say, just listen. A big part of my job is listening to the questions that people are asking. That gives me a huge window into what people actually need, where the pain points are. You can see a lot just in what people tell you about their own stories, their own lives, and if you start to pay attention, then you can discern patterns and fgure out what people want from you.

MILLIE And fnally, what are the challenges to scaling community?

JEAN Finances, right? The challenge is resourcing. The challenge is fguring out which is exactly the best platform at exactly the best time with exactly the best message. And also, the fact that there’s so much information and so much noise.

MILLIE This is the challenge that many companies face; how to cut through the noise when trying to build community.

Millie Arora is a partner at ReD. Tamara Moellenberg is a senior manager.

“Everybody needs to know about their money and they all need to fnd the source that makes sense to them… Being competitive when the topic is this important doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“We really strive to make sure that a child, no matter where they come from, what their cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial background is, sees themselves in Muppets.”

KIM FOULDS & SCOTT CAMERON

Kim Foulds is Vice President of Content Research and Evaluation at Sesame Workshop overseeing educational impact research on a global basis; Scott Cameron is Head of International Production. Sesame Workshop, the non-proft behind Sesame Street, is a community of 400+ people who provide almost two hundred million children with access to life-changing early education, critical health lessons, helpful tools for tough situations, and importantly, joy. As part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, Kim and Scott talk to ReD’s Taylor Steelman about the educational benefts of belonging, balancing culturally specifc and culturally agnostic content, and why Muppets are the perfect tools for learning.

TAYLOR STEELMAN Sesame Workshop defnes itself as a community where “creators, educators, partners and beloved characters come together to help kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder”. How do people know when they are a part of this community? Are there specifc moments or signals?

KIM FOULDS We approach community by acknowledging no single defnition for what community looks like; it takes on many diferent shapes. What we focus on from a research point of view is that a sense of community frst starts with a sense of self. For children to develop empathy and to see that there is a community that they belong to, they frst have to understand these concepts in themselves. That includes developing content that helps children understand that everyone is important and special, and so all children are able to say what makes me special is X, Y, Z. We support children’s understanding and appreciation of all the diferent ways people show up. But when we talk about community for young kids, we are really grounded in family. When you start talking about bigger, more abstract concepts like community, which isn’t always a tangible thing, it’s really tough for preschoolers. So, you have to ground community in family and again, family can mean lots of diferent things, right? Chosen family, biological family, all the diferent shapes that family can take. That’s where we ground the lessons, that you are already part of something because you belong, you are special, you are enough.

SCOTT CAMERON Part of the work is in teasing out what “belonging” to a given group means to adults and what it means to children. Concretely, for kids that means bringing it down to things like food, songs, dances, holidays, even things like pride or sense of self. Family is always relevant, too. Sometimes we fnd that to an adult it doesn’t feel like it’s enough to say we’re going to celebrate a particular food – for example, a shared love of hummus, which we focused on many years ago among Palestinian children and Israeli children. To adults, talking about hummus almost seemed too silly or too banal because it’s so basic to daily life in both of those groups of people, but when adults saw how efective it was to focus on basics, it made light bulbs go of.

KIM We talk about windows and mirrors a lot and I think that really relates to community. Children may have not had a ton of exposure to groups who eat diferent foods,

practice diferent cultural traditions, and so on. So we focus on grounding it in what they know, and then, through media, exposing them to community and connecting their norms and traditions to others’ norms and traditions that they may not otherwise have had exposure to.

TAYLOR Let’s talk about specifc mechanisms that you can wield to create belonging. What does a Muppet do to create belonging that maybe a real person can’t?

SCOTT What a Muppet can do is remove certain cultural signifers or specifcs. Our “monster” Muppets – for example, Cookie Monster, Elmo, and Basma and Jad in our Ahlan Simsim project – generally don’t wear clothes. They don’t have hairstyles that are really specifcally human in the same way that Bert and Ernie might, who are called “humanoid” characters. When you start adding any removable or changeable element, whether it’s clothing, a hairstyle or accessories , you inevitably are adding cultural signifers that can help people feel like they belong – because they’re seeing clothes that they themselves wear or are familiar in their community – but you also are risking making kids feel distanced from that character. Because our Sesame Muppets have strong personalities and are relatable and quirky, they still invite children in to relate to them and feel connected to them.

KIM When we’re creating a new Muppet or introducing an existing Muppet into a new context, we want to understand if the conditions are right for kids to develop these parasocial relationships. For example when you watch a TV show and you think that you’re friends with people on your favorite TV show, that is so powerful. We work to provide research insights to support that kind of relationship between our preschool viewers and our Muppets. Which means that it is important that the monster Muppets are from everywhere and from nowhere.That provides entry points for all children to see themselves in them, to connect to some aspect of their personality. We really strive to make sure that a child, no matter where they come from, what their cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial background is, sees themselves in Muppets. When Scott and his team are designing new Muppets like Basma and Jad in the Middle East, we test them with kids. How old do you think Basma is? How old do you think Jad is? Do they go to school? Do they live in a house like yours or is it diferent? These are the important ways that we test for it, and thinking about

our work with displaced families, it is so critical that a child can see themselves in our content, especially if they face displacement, if they face learning disruptions, because that is the frst step to impact is. That drives engagement, and through engagement, we can support learning.

SCOTT And sometimes the fip side takes precedent. Thinking about the twin Muppets that we developed for the Rohingya initiative, there were a few factors that drove us to make those characters into humanoid Muppets rather than monsters. A big one was that there had never been children’s media for Rohingya children that we were aware of, so it was important to have Rohingya children be able to see themselves refected on screen. That felt like a powerful way to boost on-screen representation. We designed humanoid characters for them with specifc clothing and hairstyles. Kim has some great stories of being in Bangladesh and doing formative testing with kids and having them hold up pictures …

KIM … and a girl we showed them to looked exactly like one of the designs. It was really incredible, seeing the power of representation. That was one of the best moments of my professional life. We want kids to see themselves in our content and to see a child literally holding a Muppet design that looks exactly like them, it was really a powerful moment. Going back to the parasocial relationships piece, the kind of Muppet is often driven by the kinds of impact we want to have. There are instances, like the one Scott just described, where humanoid Muppets best support engagement and ultimately impact. That kind of creative decision is decided through extensive discussion and partnership between my team with Scott’s team and our education colleagues.

TAYLOR What do kids get from this type of belonging? What are the benefts?

KIM We know from the literature that belonging is intrinsically connected to all of the other learning domains. Even though belonging is important on its own, it’s connected to all of these other critical child development domains. We know from research that children do see identity diferences and make meaning of those diferences from a very early age. The preschool years are critical to prevent the onset of bias and prejudice by providing environments that support a sense of belonging for every child. Having a healthy positive identity is critical for children’s development, particu-

larly social and emotional development. Having a positive sense of pride in who you are can also be a protective factor in the face of discrimination and other adverse experiences.

SCOTT The more we can help children feel confdent that they belong in a particular space where there’s learning and sharing and discovery happening, the better primed they are to be more task-persistent. The more that they feel like they belong, the more potential we have to help them stay in the game and not lose confdence. The learning journey for each child requires learning from mistakes and failures and then getting back up and trying again. But not every child responds to challenges in the same way – and that’s where character design comes in. We design our casts of characters so that, collectively, they represent diferent learning mindsets and diferent approaches to situations, along with diferent personalities and traits. That all makes for more compelling stories, because the characters are going to experience confict as they all try out their diferent approaches to problems. Basma and Jad are the perfect example of that; they’re a classic odd couple. Basma and Jad have very diferent approaches to how they engage with life. Jad is a planner. He likes to be organised, he likes to think things through. Basma, on the other hand, instinctively dives in and starts trying things. She’s much less meticulous, which can get messy, but she’s more willing to try things and fail than Jad. So, when they’re trying to do something together, there’s a built-in tension that feels really relatable.

TAYLOR You’ve mentioned there’s this ability for Muppets to be especially relatable for children. Do you have thoughts or theories about an availability to belonging among kids that might difer with adults? Sesame Street is in 190 countries across the world. Of course you customise and you tailor to the local environment. But you are able to fnd that connection to children using a single core model. I’m curious, how much does that have to do with the model and how much is to do with just kids and what they’re receptive to?

KIM I think it does speak to the Sesame Workshop model. There are fundamentals we’ve learned over 53 years about what works for kids’ media, for engagement and learning. That guides the process. We want to make sure that for

“We design our casts of characters so that, collectively, they represent diferent learning mindsets and diferent approaches to situations, along with diferent personalities and traits.”

kids to see themselves, the context and the storylines have to be relatable and easily digestible, and that content is fun and engaging. The question then is how do you make relatable content within all of these diverse contexts? And that’s really where we rely on our research process and get ideas directly from parents and kids, and we share those with the creative and education teams. We don’t make any assumptions about what is relevant, relatable, or appealing to diferent contexts. When we ask kids and parents in our needs assessments questions that help us better understand a community and also inform the creative and curriculum process. These questions include things like what is your favorite game to play? Who do you like to play with? What kinds of stories, songs, and cultural traditions are important to your family? What is the best part about being a parent? What is the most challenging part of being a parent? What role models do you want your child to look up to? These kinds of questions provide the insights that allow us to make recommendations to drive receptivity.

SCOTT There are so many inherent contradictions in Sesame Street that are helpful to remember for this. For example, I grew up in Southern California but when I watched Sesame Street as a kid, I saw a New York street with stoops and brownstones. This was less relatable to me – in terms of the kinds of trees, the weather, the style of homes – than parts of South Africa or Jordan would have been. But the way the Sesame characters interacted – the way everyone was welcome – felt fun and safe to me. I felt like, “Oh, I can be friends with the people in this neighbourhood.” We made an episode in season one of Ahlan Simsim, our Middle East production, where some writers wanted to have snow fall in the neighborhood, even though many children in that region had never seen snow. So we were asking, should we even show snow? But the snow stories that we’ve done have proven to be some of the most engaging or highest scoring episodes. It’s not always about being totally relatable to a child’s lived experience, but there has to be enough familiarity and fun and sense of belonging in other elements. In these particular stories, Basma and Jad were the ones experiencing the snow; the viewer is on a journey with them as they’re discovering snow for the frst time. They’re the viewer’s proxy, their way into learning something new.

TAYLOR What would you like to learn about belonging? What questions do you have that may be valuable for informing what you do?

KIM I think for belonging, as we’ve talked about, the questions are still focused on better understanding diverse identities and how we can best support children’s understanding of their identity. It’s something that we continue to navigate, particularly as we work with children afected by crisis and displacement. We want to support both children who have been displaced as well as children in the host community, because that supports a more collective sense of belonging.

Scott We’re in many diferent cultures around the world, including the U.S., where there isn’t agreement within the society about which identities are “okay” and which aren’t. And this often leads to violence; people don’t feel safe asserting their identity with pride because, sometimes, they can be killed or their families can be put in danger – the implications are really serious. So, in any given culture, there’s never one hundred percent agreement on what “belonging” means. Recently we did a segment about a cultural dance that had its roots in a particular military history and had then been distorted by outside groups. So, that dance, which seems on the surface like a simple and beautiful tradition, means very different things to diferent people within the same culture. And so the questions we’re asking ourselves are: do we try to stay away from those kinds of things, even though they’re a really important cultural element that people take great pride in?

KIM The more work we do in this space, the better our questions get about how to make impactful content for kids.

Taylor Steelman is a senior manager at ReD.

“In any given culture, there’s never one hundred percent agreement on what ‘belonging’ means.”

“I hope the future of books looks a lot like the past of books – it’s really the best technology there is.”

LYNDA HAMMES

Lynda Hammes is a co-founder of Tertulia, alongside Sebastian Cwilich and Robert Lenne, who both were pivotal in growing Artsy, the online art marketplace and discovery platform. Tertulia launched during the summer of 2022 as a new, personalised way to discover and connect around books. Starting out as an iOS app, the company has enjoyed early success both in terms of media coverage – including in the New York Times – and its strong user base of readers. Tertulia.com now sees hundreds of thousands of visitors per month – many of whom are co-owners of the company through the Tertulia Co-op – and is accessible on all platforms. As part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, Lynda speaks to ReD’s Maria Cury and Matthew Janney about the power of books in community-building, how to use AI to go beyond personalisation and towards belonging, and her future vision for Tertulia.

MARIA CURY Reading is such a personal activity and, at the same time, we tend to gather around books. What role do books and reading play in how we feel a sense of belonging?

LYNDA HAMMES Books are the DNA of our culture. They capture and encode our living history in a way that I don’t think other media can. While I think all forms of art – music, visual art, flm – can engender a sense of belonging, what’s special about reading books in particular, is our deep investment of time, our deep focus in a world ruled by an attention-based economy. Books are the original immersive experiences, right? They require such focus that we become hostage to them – and there is a phenomenon that occurs between hostages bonding. That bonding surfaces when you’re talking to somebody and you serendipitously fnd out you have both been taken hostage by a book. Even if you hated the book or you felt ambivalent about the book – and certainly if you loved the book – you have this sense of joy and togetherness with somebody that you spent that time alone together.

MARIA We’re living in this age of niche-interest and hyper-personalisation, where we can curate what we read or watch or listen to precisely according to our preferences. How does that impact our sense of belonging with other people?

LYNDA When I was younger, there was always a summer jam, the unequivocal hit of the summer. This past summer maybe it would have been Beyoncé or if you ask somebody else, it’s Lizzo or another might say Bad Bunny. The same thing goes for TV, if you’re really into food, last year’s big show was The Bear, and everybody in the sphere that you belong to is talking about The Bear. The monoculture has faded with the rise of digital platforms and streaming. While algorithms and personalised platforms can drive homogeneity – in some cases, in nefarious ways – the reason we delight in Spotify Wrapped at the end of the year is because each person has their unique playlist even when they may share overlapping interests and tastes, which aids in discovery but also gives us a feeling of belonging. I would say that book discovery is not where it should be in this regard, due to some outmoded aspects of book publishing, consolidation in the industry, and mostly because of Amazon’s power over the retail landscape afecting how most people now experience books. There will always be bestsellers, but I

think Tertulia has an opportunity to address book world Blockbusterism by enhancing the reader’s experience of fnding the right book for them and capturing the enriching conversations about books that bring meaning to what we choose to invest our time in. When we started Tertulia coming out of the pandemic, the books industry was booming and it still is very healthy. While millions of books are published each year only a very few sell millions of copies. On top of that, there are infnite backlist books to choose from as well. With so much choice, we still have difculty discovering books that are right for us. I think personalisation can help if it avoids relying on sales-based collaborative fltering and captures the many data points around these books – the cultural signals –and unpacks those for you in your discovery.

MARIA I’m hearing you describe the problem as one where we have all of these backlist books or books where there are small communities that are creating a lot of buzz around them, but I, as one individual reader trying to navigate what to read, end up going with whatever is at the top of the shelf in a bookstore; I don’t have access to those little pockets of conversations around books that might be relevant to me. It’s like walking around a cocktail party overhearing conversations and fnding which conversation you want to slip into.

LYNDA Totally. There’s a feeling that some of our users play back to us in our research, which is that there’s water, water everywhere and not to drop to drink – they actually feel paralysed by choice.

MATTHEW JANNEY Who is driving these conversations? Where do you put your social antennae to capture this social chatter?

LYNDA Understandably, there’s a media bias to the new and the hot and the bestseller. But there are so many great books that come out each year and many of them don’t get coverage. There are pockets of people talking about books through authors who have a loyal or growing following, pockets in academia, pockets in local book

“That bonding surfaces when you’re talking to somebody and you serendipitously fnd out you have both been taken hostage by a book.”

clubs and libraries, pockets on social media. And those conversations don’t necessarily overlap with the critics’ picks. Where do we put our social antennae? It’s a very epic project that we’ve undertaken. But one way we thought about it is looking at communities of interest and trying to go deep into those communities of interest. So take food books, for instance, everybody knows when the new Ina Garten cookbook is coming out, you can’t get away from it. But people who really care about food and cooking are interested to hear what chefs or restaurateurs are reading and talking about. So we mine chefs interviews, in podcasts or Instagram posts where they’re taking maybe a dusty backlist book of their shelf that’s a cookbook, or maybe it’s a new cookbook that’s about food ecology that is quasi-academic. Sometimes it’s a very mainstream book like a classic novel; it doesn’t need to be obscure. So the antennae have been placed by those communities of interest. We’re able to do that at scale because of AI. It’s not about using AI to personalise in the Amazon sense, it’s more about reading the conversation and then picking up whether this person shares something emotional, original, or substantive about the book.

MARIA So Tertulia is using AI not just to hyper-personalise to your taste, but actually fipping it to understand how people are gathering and communicating and forming around books. How are you thinking about AI and belonging?

LYNDA We’ll take it as a given that AI will continue to get better at personalisation and gathering relevant information and prioritising that information, which is immensely valuable. But I would say beyond recommendations or algorithms in the current construct that we are used to, there are profound changes to come, and we don’t know yet how that will afect belonging. I fear that artifcial intelligence creates artifcial belonging and we could end up talking to machines more than real people. I think the foundation of belonging is trust. Trust for Tertulia is the North Star. It would be meaningless for us to help you discover something that you’re going to spend the next 10 hours of your life on without trusting that it’s coming from a human or that it resonates for you on some human and emotional level. And so we have to be very careful how we capture this next stage of the technology.

MARIA How does Tertulia specifcally go about creating belonging on the platform? Are there certain moments or types of interactions that you’re really seeking to foster?

LYNDA One way that I see people gathering is around the phenomena of certain books, so we try to capture why people loved it or hated it or talked about it a lot. Sometimes this is most interesting when a book is not trending in the culture at large; we can capture traces in a particular community of interest. So that presents a picture of how people are talking about it, who is saying what about it… We have a very robust roadmap of features we are building to spur author-to-reader engagement as well as reader-to-reader engagement. If you’re a person who doesn’t want to join a book club and you prefer reading alone, you still may have a text thread with that one friend from college who loves the same books as you. Enabling that conversation and connection is also really interesting to us. So we’re looking at tools to aid that. If you are going to create Goodreads in the post-Web-2.0 era, it’s not going to look exactly the same. I think people still care about self-expression as they did when the concept of web reviews frst came about, but we’re thinking about how to roll things out in a way that’s a little bit more up to date with how we talk, how we exchange and communicate. Something I’m really excited about is author pages which we are releasing soon; people follow authors like rockstars. So how do you make author pages come alive and allow authors to feel like their work is represented in a way that is inviting to readers? Most authors I talk to deeply want to connect with their readers, and in a world where we all have screen fatigue with online events, we’re looking at how to help readers connect. Overall, the goal of Tertulia is to be your home for books.

“I hope the future of books looks a lot like the past of books – it’s really the best technology there is.”

MATTHEW I’m interested in your approach to curation. Do you see yourself as driving conversations or is the focus more on refecting what’s going on?

LYNDA Both. We are refecting what’s going on out there in streams and in pockets of conversations about books. But of course we have a curatorial prerogative. We have staf picks, and we choose these very authentically. My team is looking at books all day, reading them, reading about them, and looking at the connections between books. I used to work at an indie bookstore and that’s exactly what I was hired to do. Our picks are in that same spirit of putting trust in avid readers. The team is there all day capturing that knowledge about what books people love and why they love it, so that service is defnitely an input to the product and content coming from Tertulia. We are doing editorial coverage where we invite an author or guest contributor to curate books and our team is regularly curating reading lists where you’re going to see books that are bestsellers and prize-winners on there, but also university press books or indie press books that maybe you’re less likely to come across. To the extent we can be another voice in making recommendations, we should, and we work hard at trying to put thought into how we’re doing that to be additive to online book talk.

MARIA And fnally, what do you see as the future of books?

LYNDA I hope the future of books looks a lot like the past of books – it’s really the best technology there is.

Maria Cur y is a partner at ReD. Matthew Janney is editorial director.

How To Build Belonging At A 350,000-Person Company

A leader’s perspective on making belonging a top priority in a giant people organisation and putting the S in ESG on the leadership agenda

A conversation between Jacob Aarup-Andersen, CEO of ISS Group, and Mads Holme, managing partner of ReD Associates

ABOUT

Jacob Aarup-Andersen has been CEO of ISS Group since 2020. At ISS, Jacob has led a fnancial turnaround and the development of the ‘One ISS’ strategy with a core focus on technology and digitisation, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion. Prior to ISS, Jacob had senior leadership roles at Danske Bank and Danica Pension. He will soon take over as CEO of Carlsberg Group. Here, he talks to ReD about making belonging a core part of ISS’s story, embedding diversity and inclusion in a company’s enabling structures, and why the S in ESG should be a key focus for the leaders of tomorrow.

ISS

ISS was founded in Copenhagen in 1901 and has grown to become one of the world’s leading facility services companies ofering a wide range of services such as cleaning, catering, security, property and support services as well as facility management. ISS operates in more than 30 countries across Europe, Asia Pacifc, North America and Latin America, serving thousands of both public and private sector customers. Working from the core idea that “people make places and places make people” ISS strives to build excellent customer experiences through technology, sustainability, and diversity and inclusion.

MADS HOLME Why is belonging important for ISS, your strategy, and your story?

JACOB AARUP-ANDERSEN: ISS has always been a people business, ever since we were founded in 1901. For the past 122 years, the DNA of our company has been to grow and develop people. Our belief has always been that our people add a human touch to create places that deliver experiences and productivity – whether in cleaning, food services or workplaces. I would say that we have always been a company focused on belonging – but it wasn’t until recently that we started being more explicit about using the word and talking about our story. To put things into perspective, ISS global today is a business with more than 350,000 people – and we hire 125,000 new employees every year due to the high turnover in the industry. We want to do everything we can to make every person feel they belong.

Why did we want to put so much emphasis on belong ing? We are already facing an extreme war on talent, something that will only intensify in the coming years –especially in the industry we are in. And this is despite the many technological and automation advancements we see. Just to give an example, 50% of the service workforce in the US today is above 60 years old. But the primary drive on belonging actually came from inside the company. When I frst joined ISS a few years ago, I came into a company with a culture that was strong but quite tacit and unarticulated. At the same time, it had a culture and leadership that had been too focused on performance and fnancials. Plus, we had an executive team that wasn’t global enough. Simply put, there were too many 50-year-old white men around. We asked ourselves: how can we take our great company culture into the future and to the next level? How can we be more explicit about our purpose and our belonging agenda while driving stronger commercial performance? I wanted us to better solve this in the way we lead, communicate, and operate the company – especially by creating better enabling structures around fairness, diversity, and inclusion. A central step to accelerate this was to hire a new global head of diversity and inclusion to lead our agenda. Together with the executive team we identifed fve priorities around how we can improve our enabling structures as a company. These have been formulated in areas around pride, gender balance, generations and age, cultures, race and ethnicity and fnally (dis)abilities.

MADS: What are some of the ways this diversity and inclusion agenda is implemented and safeguarded at ISS?

JACOB: In some companies, people use belonging and DEI interchangeably but they are actually diferent concepts for us, even though they are connected. DEI is the foundation for being able to deliver on our belonging ambition. In ISS, DEI is about addressing structural and measurable challenges around issues like diversity and gender balance. On the other hand, belonging is a social frame, it speaks to something emotional and experienced – a feeling that you belong. It is about emotional safety. This is also why we at ISS call our employee value proposition: “A place to be you.” As a global company with more than 350,000 employees op-

erating in more than 30 countries this is a big ambition to deliver on. We want to be the world’s best company on belonging, which means being a place where every employee feels included, respected and heard. An important part of this ambition is to be bigger than the company. It is about being a thought leader on building a better society for all, by fghting for implementing living wages in many of the markets we operate in, for instance. We do this because we believe it is important to lift the agenda for the many people that are critical to make society and workplaces function. Many of our people are immigrants or people who have moved to a new country; people who often are hidden, under-represented or not heard in public debates. This is also why we do not use the word blue-collar or service workers because there is a slightly negative tone associated with it. We call all our employees placemakers because we believe in the value they deliver. Another important initiative for me to mention is that we increasingly partner with organisations supporting causes we deem worthy from around the world. One of the organisations we are proud to be working with is Tent, a nonproft that mobilises the business community to improve the lives and livelihoods of refugees all over the world. Tent’s 250 members include Amazon, H&M, Adidas, Hilton, L’Oréal and Pfzer.

MADS: How do you measure and see the results of your DEI and belonging agenda? What are some of the specifc initiatives or investments that have enabled you to deliver on this – and what results are you most proud of?

JACOB: Many of our diversity and inclusion priorities are driven by passionate employees, in other words, from the grassroots of the company. This has been an important learning for me: initiatives should not always be driven from the top. But it was and is important for me as CEO and for the executive team that we are all measured on how well we deliver on belonging. It is our shared responsibility to lift the agenda together. In

addition to being measured on business performance and sustainability, we as leaders are also measured on how well we are delivering on the belonging agenda in our respective priority areas. And while we are still on a journey, we have seen a number of important results. When we frst started, only 3% of leadership positions in the revenue generating parts of the business were flled by women; today we have more than 50%. We also worked hard to change the composition of our global board, and today we almost have an equal split between men and women. More broadly from a business perspective, when I look at our customers and the way we run our business, we are now starting to see a change in how they think and what we ofer. More and more we see requests for proposals from big corporate clients specifying the importance of DEI. While our competitors haven’t prioritised this as much, we can really see that this has become one of our unique selling points tied to our key account structure and business model of self-delivery. Every ISS person in every customer facility is trained, equipped, motivated and working to our high standards.

MADS: What were the defning moments during this transition?

JACOB: One of my key CEO priorities has been to lift the belonging agenda by communicating much more both internally and externally; in town halls, on LinkedIn, with journalists, on investor calls, and in training sessions. But I’ve also learnt to be mindful and honest about what agendas you want to lead and be involved in. If you only let your social media activities guide this you will end up disorienting yourself. You can easily post every day on this world day or that world day but is that really sincere? We have become more deliberate about our position and what agendas we support and want to speak to. It has been a humbling journey, and we as leaders have been very clear that we are constantly faced with dilemmas. One of the things that was difcult for us was when we announced the opening of

“We want to be the world’s best company on belonging, which means being a place where every employee feels included, respected and heard.”

our new headquarter hub in Poland. Many employees reacted critically to this because of the Polish government’s homophobic policies. There were intense discussions about this within the company so we decided to bring people together and openly explain our rationale and that ISS will not compromise on our global standards on belonging. But I think as a CEO, it’s important to go into these dilemmas acknowledging that I don’t know all the answers. We will all make mistakes on this journey. Navigating these social and cultural dilemmas while building better enabling structures is something I’ve wanted – and needed – to educate myself on.

MADS: What do you see as the CEO’s role today and what mindsets will be most important in the future?

JACOB: Over the past fve years, as CEOs, we have come a long way when it comes to prioritising the E in ESG and building better structures to measure how we comply with the environment and climate agenda to make this a more integrated part of our business. But we’re not done. To me the next big thing will be the S, social, and fguring out how to deliver on the people, culture, and belonging agenda. I see many executives who are uncertain or lack understanding, processes or methods for how to really deliver on this social agenda and connect it clearly to their competitive edge as a company. We already have strong, upcoming leaders. The superstars are no longer just the fnance wizards. You still need to be able to drive results and performance but how you do it will be diferent. I think we will see a future generation of leaders that will have more focus on creating whole organisations, while still being deeply ambitious. Leaders will have a much stronger focus on talent development, attraction and creating high performing teams who are both physically, ethnically and cognitively diverse.

MADS: It has just been announced that you will soon become the new CEO of Carlsberg Group. What leadership and cultural learnings will you bring with you from ISS?

JACOB: As a person and CEO I am driven by four key principles: be value-based in the way you lead; be positive; bring energy; and always be ambitious. I will bring these principles with me in my new role.

MADS: What do you see as the CEO’s role today and what mindsets will be most important in the future?

JACOB: Over the past fve years, as CEOs, we have come a long way when it comes to prioritising the E in ESG and building better structures to measure how we comply with the environment and climate agenda to make this a more integrated part of our business. But we’re not done. To me the next big thing will be the S, social, and fguring out how to deliver on the people, culture, and belonging agenda. I see many executives who are uncertain or lack understanding, processes or methods for how to really deliver on this social agenda and connect it clearly to their competitive edge as a company. We already have strong, upcoming leaders. The superstars are no longer just the fnance wizards. You still need to be able to drive results and performance but how you do it will be diferent. I think we will see a future generation of leaders that will have more focus on creating whole organisations, while still being deeply ambitious. Leaders will have a much stronger focus on talent development, attraction and creating high performing teams who are both physically, ethnically and cognitively diverse.

MADS: It has just been announced that you will soon become the new CEO of Carlsberg Group. What leadership and cultural learnings will you bring with you from ISS?

JACOB: As a person and CEO I am driven by four key principles: be value-based in the way you lead; be positive; bring energy; and always be ambitious. I will bring these principles with me in my new role.

“To me the next big thing will be the S, social, and fguring out how to deliver on the people, culture and belonging agenda.”

Three recommendations for other leaders looking to make belonging a core part of their organisation

• The belonging agenda needs to be led and owned by the CEO. You cannot expect it to drive change if it is only driven by a department or function.

• Belonging has to become part of your value proposition. It has to be real for it to deliver business results.

• DEI and belonging have to be programmatic, embedded in your company’s enabling structures.

Use the QR code below to read more interviews in our leadership series

Lost and Found in Public Space

A series of vignettes into the impact of physical space on belonging

By Ian Dull, Gabrielle Borenstein, Maria Salgado, Astrid Ingemann Breitenstein, and Alexis Jakubowicz

Belonging often conjures up images of close family and friends, or tight-knit friendship groups – not to mention shared histories, common traits, the warm-and-fuzzies of togetherness. But that represents only a fraction of where and how we belong. We also belong at local dive bars and cofee shops; on the train during our morning commute; we feel a part of something in the crowd at a concert. And we can just as easily not belong: we can feel uneasy in ofces or government buildings, downtrodden in grim subway stations, pushed out of once communal spaces or out of place in a luxury boutique or haughty hipster cocktail bar. While these moments of ‘background belonging’ or un-belonging might seem trite, they are incredibly important: extensive research has demonstrated how belonging locally, through weak social ties, makes us happier and more empathetic by widening our worldview1 .

But what draws the line between success and failure of a space to enable belonging isn’t as obvious as it might seem: is it something in the physical dimensions that makes it better suited for belonging? Does it just come down to the specifc fan or bartender you happen to run into?

Social scientists and architects have long observed how the spaces we occupy shape what we do in them – how the physical fabric of a space infuences, intentionally or unintentionally, whether we’re friendly or combative, productive or relaxed, and yes, whether or not we belong. With belonging – or its absence – emerging as a growing societal concern, and increasingly a consideration for brands, retailers, events, governments, and NGOs, and many others, we now need to think even more intentionally about the power of physical spaces to amplify belonging.

Meanwhile, public places are back. After the seesaw of opening-up and locking-down, many people are back to prior routines: the US census bureau2 reports that appetites for dining and drinking out are surging, with spending up more than 40 percent from 2020 to 2023. Similarly, Live Nation3, parent company of Ticketmaster, reports they had their highest ever quarterly concert attendance in Q3 of 2022.

Our relationship to space appears to be changing. In ReD’s recent ethnographic research, we are seeing a re-awakening of spontaneous social interactions, collective efervescence, and the ‘background’ belonging that comes with moving through spaces and places alongside others. TikTok-addled young people are now eager to attend PRIDE parades, IRL meet-ups organised by online groups, and in-person concerts to soak in the power of in-person gathering and physical togetherness – and to have something to document and cherish later. Electric vehicle owners are turning charging stations into an opportunity to connect with other drivers – a thousand times more social than the gas station – by virtue of the chance encounters that happen when tethered to a charger for a minimum of 20 minutes. Though feeting and seemingly superfcial, people are looking to places – and the social opportunities they provide – as a solution to the dislocation and disconnection past years have brought.

Physical places become social spaces as they shape behaviour, reinforce social norms and practices, and frame social relations – and we, in turn, layer them with meaning. They have the capacity not only to structure activities but also relationships – between humans and their things, but also among humans. Take the McKibbin Lofts in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Once a factory that manufactured textiles and garments, it evolved into an artist collective – or an art dormitory – known to throw raucous all-night parties for twenty-something year old creatives. As a result of its industrial origins, the layout supported communal gatherings at grand scales for residents and walk-ins alike – the presence of large open spaces and smaller side rooms supports spaces for dancing and those for conversation. This example is but one of many where architectonics foster interactions.

Public spaces and their material confgurations can have profound power to orchestrate opportunities for community, togetherness and social connection. Belonging is in crisis for many people today, and public places and the worlds of social ties they open up have the power to be an antidote.

REFERENCES

1. See Granovetter (1973) and Sandstrom & Dunn (2013, 2014) on the importance of weak social ties

2. Americans Won’t Let Infation Steal Their Appetite, Richter, 2023

3. Live Nation Entertainment Reports Third Quarter Results, 2022

With belonging – or its absence – emerging as a growing societal concern, and increasingly a consideration for brands, retailers, events, governments, and NGOs, and many others, we now need to think even more intentionally about the power of physical spaces to amplify belonging.

PLAZA REPUBLICA Lost in the Crowd

A gaggle of gringos found themselves in Mexico City during the World Cup and I was one of them. It was game day and we were looking for a lively place to have some breakfast beers. We were directed to the heart of the city, to Plaza Republica where the game was broadcast in the open square. Standing in the sea of green, I was confronted by my overtly outsider status. The space was entirely open, yet the large screen directed everyone’s attention in a near militant fashion. The crowd was entirely comprised of strangers – thousands of them. There were observable codes of conduct – clear rules of engagement for how to act, react, and relate to those around me. For me to belong here would mean a clear assimilation and I was torn. Do I put on the Mexico hat my friend brought for me and take a part of the fervour? I wanted to participate in the camaraderie, be present in the space, high fve strangers, shout. Belonging would be easy but it would also be surface level – a lie. After twenty minutes as an awkward bystander, I decided to put on the hat.

THE EIFFEL TOWER A Beaming Presence in Paris

My frst apartment in Paris was a chambre de bonne, or maid’s quarters. Mine was nine square meters and charmless, but cheap; I nicknamed it la bohème. Other than the price, its main redeeming quality was a French balcony at the end, which opened onto a view of other picturesque rooftops. On the frst night, I discovered the beam of light from the Eifel Tower. I couldn’t see the Eifel Tower itself, only its sweeping light. Even so, many nights, typing away for my third job, I watched the beam go past my window and felt its hulking iron presence like a friend watching me over my shoulder. It was an odd symbol to feel attached to – the most photographed object in the world – when I wanted to be anything but a tourist. I suspect it was because I knew everyone else in Paris occasionally focused on it too, with equal parts wonder and blasé. One night at a friend’s, I realised his kitchen had a similar, but much better view – down a hill with the Tower visible and bathing the whole city in light with each turn. We talked in the open window, and I thought of myself across the city looking at the same light too.

– Ian Dull

– Gabrielle Borenstein

NYC CLOUD KITCHEN

The Anonymous Restaurant

A friend and I went to get takeout when I was visiting New York last year. He found a Thai place on Google Maps, we picked a few dishes, and clicked order, nothing out of the ordinary for two Millennials. But we realised something was of when we showed up: there was no restaurant. Behind two opaque glass doors facing the street lay one giant industrial kitchen, churning out Thai food and burgers, Indian, Italian, Vietnamese – anything a hungry person with a smartphone could want. There were helmetted UberEats riders charging their phones in the waiting area, ten or twelve chargers crowding into a socket as they idled around. It was a ‘cloud kitchen,’ I realised. But it was as far from Cloud 9 as could be – the architectural and culinary expression of choice times convenience times speed. It was strange to see a restaurant – really ten restaurants in one – with no buzz of diners, snarky maître d’, or (seeming) camaraderie in the kitchen. Even ordering takeout, I wanted to visit a restaurant, not a counter.

– Ian Dull

THE AUTOMATED LIBRARIAN An Unexpected Welcome

When I frst moved to Copenhagen, I spent my night bike rides home gazing into warmly lit Scandinavian windows. One of these was the façade of a public library. One evening, I spontaneously decided to venture in. I stood in front of two automated sets of doors and made useless gestures until noticing a sign that read “scan your yellow card here”. Inside, I found a community of habitués: a lady returned a book with the help of a self-service system and a retiree read the newspaper. I inspected the place, intrigued by the reigning silence in the absence of a visible authority – there were no staf. As soon as I began reading, an announcement sounded that the library was closing in 15 minutes. I left with a bittersweet impression. At frst, I had been startled by the anonymity and lack of human interaction in this automated bubble. However, the simplicity of the ritual, once mastered, granted nearly instant assimilation. There had been no librarian to judge my newcomer demeanour, but a single machine that greeted everyone equally.

– Maria Salgado

GALERIES LAFAYETTE Generational Echoes under the Dome

Growing up in Lyon, I would visit my grandparents in Paris a couple of times a year. One thing my grandfather Francizek liked the most when we came in late fall, was taking us to the Galeries Lafayette. As a Polish immigrant, a Red Army war hero, a concentration camps liberator, and a Jew, being able to take us there and blend in the crowd was an ultimate victory. Fast forward to late 2013. I’m 27, working as an arts editor, called for a job at the newly established Galeries Lafayette Foundation for contemporary arts. Mr. Houzé, whom I’m interviewing, pops into the room. He starts telling me about his grandfather, former CEO of Galeries Lafayette, Resistant and war hero, prisoner at Buchenwald, and Righteous among the Nations. Houzé took me through the origins of the department store founded by his great grandfather Theophile Bader as a universalist promise to democratise “le beau, le bon, le bien”, a promise that is symbolically expressed under the dome of Galeries Lafayette, a home for everything and everyone. I feel the urge to go back from time to time under this massive dome to connect to hear again those various echoes of history.

– Alexis Jakubowicz

NOURISHING HUB Designing for Commensality

The colourful murals of the Nourish Hub stand out against the grey façade of the surrounding estate, with the window-panelled front inviting passers-by to peek in at curious activities unfolding within. The Hub’s mission is unique, aimed at breaking down barriers between those in need of help or a free meal, and those who are not. Unlike a traditional soup kitchen or food bank, often held in church halls or opportunistically in other vacant parts of the city, the space is thoughtfully designed for its purpose: communality and commensality across the whole community. Spending many afternoons chatting, eating, and observing at the Nourish Hub I got to know many of my neighbours whom I would likely never had spoken a word to if were it not for our lunches together. I noticed how, forced to face each other as they tuck in, the large communal tables break down the Londoners’ usual aversion to speaking with strangers. Unlike the traditional boundaries that often delineate space in restaurants and other food charities, the hierarchies between the hosts and guests, donors and recipients are challenged and blurred by its design. The kitchen is completely visible from the dining space and conversation often fows across it between the chefs, volunteers and visitors. This buzz of familiarity created, at least for me, a true sense of intimacy, trust and reciprocity rarely present in other hospitality experiences I have had, and many told me, the soup kitchens they otherwise go to.

– Astrid Ingemann Breitenstein

Why Bitcoin Is Really about Belonging

What fnancial institutions can learn from the hidden cultures of crypto, by

Tamara Moellenberg and Ian Dull

FTX: FUD or HODL? If you don’t understand the question, it’s a sign that while the crypto community has been shaken by the collapse of FTX in November 2022, it is alive and well as a cultural phenomenon with its own set of behavioral norms and self-contained lingo. (For the record, FUD is cryptospeak for “fear, uncertainty, doubt”; HODL, to hold one’s assets even when the price dips.)

When millions of dollars simply vanished from the exchange FTX, many experts began to wonder, will the crypto market recover? But who are the people actually hurt by FTX’s implosion? What drew them to it in the frst place? And what makes them stay, as many do, even through the FUD?

Contrary to stereotype, the average crypto investor is not the Patagonia-vest-wearing, Ivy-league-degree-holding white ‘bro’ – the picture is much more demographically complex. In fact, a recent Pew survey found that Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans were more likely than White Americans to have invested in crypto, while the NORC reports that 44% of crypto traders are non-white and 35% have household incomes below $60k a year.

For these investors, crypto holds the promise of a plausible path to wealth building in the face of historical exclusion. As social scientists, we’ve been digging deep into

how crypto communities actually work and found that wealth building is only one, if a major part of crypto’s appeal to these ‘outsider’ investors: what many fail to realise is that it also provides access to a community of like-minded people with similar experiences and backgrounds – a sense of belonging.

So why has crypto, of all places, been the place to turn to for fnancial inclusion? For one, the history of fnancial services is one of often explicit exclusion. “For too long, we’ve been left behind,” as Jacinta (not her real name), a Latina we met as part of our study into fnancial behaviors among young non-white Americans, put it. Red-lining practices have left a devastating legacy and major wealth gaps among minority communities; fnancial products are couched in vague or intimidating terms; branch ofces are located far from under-resourced communities; service staf lack cultural competence and diverse representation; and inherited cultural norms can cause discomfort with certain types of asset classes. For non-white, under-resourced, and otherwise ‘outsider’ investors, crypto holds an appeal as an opportunity to build wealth, expertise, and a sense of control over fnancial futures. “It’s giving people a chance to make a living for themselves in a separate arena than traditional fnance,” said Jared, a 20-something Taiwanese-American Bitcoin and Ethereum investor, who we met as part

of our deep dive into crypto cultures. Self-styled ‘places of the people,’ online crypto communities are accessible from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection; employ an informal, self-created lingo (e.g. HODL, tendies, diamond hands, and rug pulls), which anyone can learn fairly quickly and informally; are positioned as ‘anti-establishment’ against the very banks and investment frms that historically excluded non-white Americans; require little fnancial or credit history to access; and, for many, are visibly populated by people who look like and share these outsider investors’ backgrounds. For example, the Black Blockchain Summit draws hundreds of attendees every year, while the Black Bitcoin Billionaire club has 152k members “and growing.”

Crypto then becomes a way of deepening social ties, and sometimes building new ones: vacation updates bleed into trading discussions and vice versa, for instance; moderators and ‘mentors’ in online spaces play avuncular roles in welcoming new members; the lingo and acronyms help ‘newbies’ signal afnity and reify a sense of shared culture and connection. All this gives (often) young investors a way to feel a part of not only a fnancial space from which they have often been historically shut out, but something even bigger: a counter culture, a social movement, even, the global future. Lazano, a young Cypriot living in the US who we met, put this most succinctly when he said, “I want to be a part of where the future is… something revolutionary.” These bold aspirations are, of course, all well and good until an event like the collapse of FTX hits. What crypto tells us, then, is that fnancial inclusion isn’t about the simple acquisition of bank accounts or improving savings behavior, it’s about building better belonging, something far from how traditional fnancial institutions view their own remit. As we see it, belonging needs to be a part of the experience of fnancial services – not only a pathway to a product, but a way of helping customers fulfll a fundamental psychological need. One lesson from crypto communities is that a powerful form of engagement comes from helping customers connect to each other, providing access to a community of people among whom they feel seen, accepted, motivated, challenged.

What might this look like for fnancial institutions (FIs), concretely?

First, FIs will need to get smarter at identifying who they want to build connections between. Any eforts to foster a sense of community among “HODLers” (crypto holders) and “Normies” (crypto skeptics), for instance, are likely to fall fat. FIs should seek to connect customers based on shared values and attitudes, not just basic demographic or purchase-led characteristics.

Secondly, FIs will also need to be better at galvanizing clients through a common sense of purpose or counter-purpose. Much of the energy of crypto culture, for instance, is defned by its techno-futurist optimism (often playfully communicated through slang, gifs, and memes), not only by its dialectic against centralized fnance, governmental control, historical exclusion, the proverbial ‘man’ and so on.

Thirdly, FI’s should also, sometimes, simply get out of the way. Real connection tends to come from the kismet of spontaneity and discovered shared experience –“You got stung by that rug pull? So did I!” – rather than from top-down, forced interactions. In fact, customers are often drawn to online or IRL communities because they want to learn from or share what they’ve learned informally with others – not to interact with formal or ofcial authorities. Providing ways for members of the community to signal their status as either eager to learn or deeply knowledgeable can be a powerful way to help community members quickly recognize the value of each to the other. Crypto communities often do this well, for instance, with leaderboards and quizzes that allow experts to identify themselves. At this point little can be done to save FTX or its hapless founder. But by getting belonging right, FI’s stand to win not only morally, in repairing ties with historically-excluded, under-served populations, but also commercially, building bonds with and between customers that go beyond the product, embedded in their social lives. That way, we might all be saying WAGMI (“we’re all gonna make it”).

Sara Lopez Marin and Ariel Abonizio contributed research for this piece.

ONE DAY WE ARRIVED IN JAPAN

Original documentary by Aaron Litvin and Ana Paula Hirano from 2018

One Day We Arrived in Japan is the story of three families who leave Brazil in search of a better future in Japan. Told mostly through on-the-ground interview footage, the flm is a raw, intimate window into the complex experience of uprooting one’s life and adapting to new – sometimes alienating – environments. In the flm, co-directors Aaron Litvin and Ana Paula Hirano (a consultant at ReD) trace the families’ experiences over ten years, artfully revealing the ways in which our expectations of the future rarely line up with reality.

“We wanted to see how people adjust and feel a sense of belonging when transported into new ecologies, cultures, and countries,” says Ana Paula. “We saw that the families struggled to belong to this new culture in many ways: language, food, clothing, music, new routines, prejudice, race, body language, climate, visas, social structures, social rules, norms – there was an overload of new dimensions. Many of the migrants worked in factories – where most other workers were also from abroad – so it was difcult for our participants to build bonds with Japanese people.”

Brazil has the largest population of Japanese descendants in the world outside Japan. In 1990, the Japanese government passed a law allowing second and third-generation Japanese descendants and their families to live and work in Japan, which for many Brazilians looking for better economic opportunities was an attractive option. As the flm lays bare, however, the transition is anything but simple.

“There is often a disconnect when higher, bigger institutions make decisions without considering more cultural aspects,” says Ana Paula. “For example, the decision taken by the Japanese government to accept second and third generations of Japanese descent to work in Japan for their blood relation and ‘cultural proximity’ without looking more deeply into the diferences and challenges that Japanese-Brazilians would face to adapt to the new culture.”

In the flm, the three families do not speak much Japanese or identify strongly with Japanese culture and society, and that is a major reason why they have such a challenging experience. In spite – or perhaps because –of this, small moments that signal positive connection to individuals and Japanese society more widely become even more charged and provide illuminating snapshots into how a sense of belonging, connection or feelings of togetherness can be activated. For example, Paulo sees a possibility of career growth inside the Japanese factory system, and Bruno fnds moments of belonging with a Japanese friend. “We didn’t want statistics or quantitative data,” says Ana Paula. “We wanted to be immersed in the lives of others. We wanted to go beyond the macro-socioeconomic perspective and use the lens to fnd the ‘micro stories’ that spoke to these larger truths.”

Watch the documentary

“In an era where belongings are increasingly politicised and dragged into fast-changing cultural battlefelds, the options to express oneself with ambiguity and nuance have narrowed. How will the shapeshifting symbolic value of objects alter norms and behaviours around self-expression and how we signal membership to diferent groups and communities?”

CAN HERMÈS BE YOUR FRIEND?

By Charlotte Vangsgaard , Eliot Salandy Brown, Lara Casciola, Johanna Li, and Olav Stavnem

What can luxury companies learn from a soft drink campaign and a Berlin nightclub about belonging?

Three things: brands cannot replace a true sense of deep belonging, exclusivity matters when it comes to luxury, and by focussing on enabling a sense of belonging between people brands can strengthen their role as builders of community.

Brands cannot replace a deep sense of belonging

Through our research, we have identifed three ingredients that contribute to a sense of belonging: feeling accepted, shared values, and reciprocity. We want to feel accepted by our family, friends, and social networks1. Our values guide how we share and reciprocate our time, emotions, thoughts, money, or presence with people with whom we want to belong. These values are not stable. For instance, as we age, we continuously renegotiate with our families and friends what it means to be a husband, a daughter, or a confdant. We negotiate what we should reciprocate.

Companies can never ofer the same emotional depth and instant responsiveness as human beings. But when companies stand on a deep understanding of their customers, they can ofer us much more than a product or a service. They can ofer us a refection of who we are and who we want to be. Their brand can mimic a feeling of belonging. Most often, this feeling of belonging is weak, if there at all. However, the most refned brands have recognised that forging true belonging between brands and humans is impossible.

People want to be accepted by exclusive groups

One lever that brands utilise addresses the human drive to feel accepted by others. For it to be most desirable, it should feel within reach but not be immediately accessible, a contradiction famously captured by Groucho Marx when he said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” Belonging must be verifed by others in the group through acceptance.

Although they sit on opposite ends of the brand spectrum, the Birkin bag and Berlin nightclub Berghain, both excel in the game of exclusive acceptance. The Hermès sales associates create hurdles for eager Birkin fans to jump over until they fnally receive a stamp of approval via a coveted bag, perhaps even, if extremely “lucky” in the colourway listed on their wishlist. You cannot simply walk in and buy the bag regardless of how much money you have. The sales associates have to deem you “worthy” of the bag, which you may achieve through purchasing other Hermès products over years and years while patiently displaying both loyalty and passion for

the brand. Acquiring a bag becomes a symbol of acceptance – acceptance into an exclusive group of people who embody wealth and class as defned by the French luxury house.

At Berghain, the Hermès sales associate is replaced with a heavily tattooed bouncer, and similarly, you cannot simply walk in. Seeing the bouncer wave their hand towards the door is the Birkin of Berghain, a wave of acceptance into an exclusive social group. This form of acceptance, experienced both by the woman who has been ofered a Birkin and by the young person stepping into Berghain, is a lever in activating a sense of belonging. However, where the two difer is that behind the doors of Berghain is a place designed to enable community, whereas behind a Birkin the community remains imagined. It is not to say that a fashion item cannot be a conversation starter but luxury brands such as Hermès do not act as a host of real life community building in the way that a physical space such as Berghain might.

Companies should focus on enabling a sense of belonging between people

While it may seem unfair to compare the ability of a nightclub to that of a luxury bag to enable a sense of belonging, it highlights a second lever that companies –luxury or not – can activate: enabling opportunities for their customers to build belonging between one another.

The immensely successful Share-a-Coke campaign, where Coca-Cola replaced its own logo on the bottles with the most popular names embodies this. In the U.S. alone, the campaign incentivised 1.25 million young people to have their frst sip of the soft drink. Many people would gift or – if far away from each other – send digital pictures of bottles with their friends’ names on the label to each other. Coca-Cola realised that it could be the intermediate link of belonging – that it could be the enabling factor between people. Simple: buy a coke and share it with a friend. The campaign reminded us of our social bonds with friends and made it easy to do small, unexpected acts of kindness for them. Recent research shows that this means much more to the receiver than the initiator presumes2

Luxury brands are well versed in the arts of exclusive acceptance. This is the frst lever and Hermès knows better than anyone how to use it. However, the second lever is yet to be pulled by luxury brands explicitly: enabling belonging between people. Learning from institutions designed for communities like Berghain and brands who position products as conduits of connection like Coca-Cola, luxury brands, in their own way can play an active role in strengthening communities. Amid our crisis of belonging, companies should ofer a real community behind the gates of exclusivity.

• How does your brand play with exclusivity and acceptance?

• Does (or could) your brand facilitate belonging between customers?

• What might your customers get out of a deeper experience of belonging through your brand?

REFERENCES

1. Here we draw upon our own research and the work of Alison, Cobigo and Stuart (2012) in their meta-study “Conceptualising belonging“, Disability and Rehabilitation, 35:12.

2. Liu, Rim, Lauren Min, and Kate Min (2022), “The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, https://www.apa. org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000402.pdf

Refecting on your own brand’s values and its relationship with belonging, here are three questions we recommend that you consider:

Belonging:

AT HOME IN THE CROWD

Over the past few decades there has been a fraying of our social fabric, illustrated by growing distrust in institutions, political polarisation and the diminishing of local communities and physical spaces. We are more lonely and fragmented than ever and yet at the same time, we see the rise of so many seemingly easy ways to connect with one another, especially online. When we talk about issues like how to make sense of our post-lockdown landscape, how to build inclusive organisations in an increasingly remote world or how to get communities to come together to tackle problems like climate change, what we are really talking about is belonging, and how to get it right. But what is belonging really, and how is it created? We put this to author David Sikorjak and musician Clyde Lawrence – as well as ReD partner Maria Cury – to understand belonging in sports, in music, and beyond, and to discover what lessons we can learn and apply in our work across industries and in our lives.

A Conversation with author David Sikorjak, musician Clyde Lawrence and ReD partner Maria Cury, moderated by ReD Partner Mikkel Krenchel

This conversation took place at ReD’s NYC ofce on Tuesday December 6th, 2022, as part of our ReD Dialogue event series. The following text is an edited and condensed transcript of the event.

DAVID SIKORJAK

David is the co-author of Fans Have More Friends (2022). Prior executive at Publicis, NBC, and Madison Square Garden, he now heads Dexterity Consulting that blends research, analysis, and empathy to transform how brands think. David is a husband, father, yogi, little league coach, and Yankees/Knicks/Jets fan.

CLYDE LAWRENCE

Clyde is the co-lead singer and songwriter of Lawrence, an eightpiece soul-pop band comprised of musician friends from childhood and college. The band has gained a devoted following for its highenergy, keyboard-driven sound, which features tight, energetic horns and explosive lead vocals. Their latest album is Hotel TV released on Beautiful Mind Records.

MIKKEL KRENCHEL Let’s start with the power of belonging. David, what’s special about sports fandom?

DAVID SIKORJAK When I was at Madison Square Garden, I wanted to understand what this ecosystem of fandom was about. Later, when I started consulting on my own, whatever space in sports I was studying, the same thing came out; fans were doing this not because of adoration for LeBron or the Cowboys or the Yankees, it was because there were other people involved. There was a connection that was fuelling their engagement. So my co-author [Ben Valenta] and I had this thought: ‘Well, if this is true, if social relationships are incentivising the crazy behaviors we see in sports fans, then fans should have more friends’. We ran a bunch of surveys, and that translated to the bigger the fan, the more friends. But it’s not only that, the bigger the fan the more they interact with those friends, the more they value those relationships, the closer you report being to your mom, to your dad, to your spouse, to your kids, and so on. From this early insight, we saw that really what’s going on underneath this is actually a social good, a device in our culture for connecting with other people through something that most people have some command of. We can all talk sports.

MIKKEL Clyde, you have built a thriving community around your band, but it seems like not all of that is driven by a love of music. How have you thought about building your community and fan base?

CLYDE I think that we strive to create a community of people that are hopefully really enjoying our music, but are also enjoying the story that our music is telling. Once in a while

when I check our fan chatrooms, so much of what’s being discussed on there isn’t our music, even though the only reason why those people arrived at those places was our music. What they’re talking about are natural extensions of our music, like funny TV shows or things that feel in line with the brand of our music. So it’s almost this ofshoot community that forms and we try to do as much as we can to foster that. I think the natural course of the trajectory of our career and how we’ve chosen to build it contributes to that in a lot of ways. We’re an independent band, I think that’s a massive diference. By just having the trajectory of our career be this slow burn where each fan is coming to us by literal word of mouth – obviously there’s a million ways you can fnd us on Tik-Tok or on TV – but the fact that it has been this slow burn, I think has a natural way of engendering people into a community because they don’t feel like something’s being forced upon them. If you have a song that blows up overnight, when you haven’t built that upon the foundation of a big fan base, then what you have is a bunch of fans of a song and not a bunch of fans of an artist.

MARIA CURY I think part of what you’re describing is precisely what we’ve seen in work that we’ve done recently around these moments where you feel you have a commonality with others, and that commonality is made visible to you. What becomes really fascinating is pinpointing the commonalities that in that moment are really relevant and important to know, reinforce, or double down on. One of the things that we’ve been unpacking is that belonging is a feeling, right? We know it when we feel it. But it also has certain functions in our lives. It ofers us diferent things. It could be that it provides us with a safe space to be vulnerable or experiment with diferent parts of our identity that we’re not ready to broadcast out into other spaces. Or it could be that it provides us with knowledge or connections. But there are these diferent ways in which belonging really serves a function as well as a feeling in our lives.

“We saw that really what’s going on underneath this is actually a social good, a device in our culture for connecting with other people.”

– David Sikorjak

DAVID If you’re a sports fan, you have a tool. It is a device you have to just say hello to somebody. But it’s not actually just hello, it’s: ‘Should Ronaldo play the next game?’ and that leads to a conversation. You talk about these things because we just want to connect – that’s all we want to do as humans – and these are just easy ways into a deeper conversation about life.

MIKKEL Clyde, a high proportion of your fans don’t just follow you, they love you. How have you and your band members managed to actually build those superfans?

CLYDE We’re always trying to fnd ways to pad what we know is an incredibly awesome layer of super fans with a massive amount of other fans. But ultimately, the people we care most about are those superfans. A lot of it is about maintaining a really close, direct connection with your fans. Me and my sister are the two lead singers of the band, so there’s already this inherent family dynamic. I think that people fnd that they really know us as people through both our music and our social media channels. There are a lot of bands or artists who aren’t always themselves: they’re wearing crazy outfts and everything about their brand is intentionally inaccessible in often a very appealing and artistic way. That’s just not what we’ve chosen to do.

DAVID One recommendation when we did the MSG project was that you shouldn’t worry as much about communicating garden to fan, as fan to fan connection. So how can you accentuate that experience for them? So I love that you guys came to that. They’re bonded by each other and they’re connected to you guys so much more than if it was just the music.

MIKKEL We are living in a society that’s more fractured than ever, where people feel more alone than ever. How do you see sports playing a role in these bigger challenges?

DAVID Where writing the book got interesting for us was when we were tapping into issues of polarisation. We were thinking about how divided we are as a country, about the hate between Democrats and Republicans, about how we have grown separate. There are things that have nothing to do with politics that signal whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, and that’s kind of funny, but also really dangerous because it creates a deeper in and out group. Many issues of polarisation were hot at the time in 2020. Take something like mask wearing; that was polarised for obvious reasons. We saw Democrats up here as adherents and Republicans down here. But when you cut underneath that and break them out by how big of a fan they are, you saw movement within both groups. The same held for when we looked at issues or perceptions on race; you saw Democrats up here, Republicans down here. But when you broke them out by how big of a fan they were, the bigger the fan, the more open they were. So the higher the approval of Black Lives Matter amongst Republicans, the bigger the fans they were. Long story short, sports breaks those two stacks. There’s not many things in our culture that allow us to connect with other people that are diferent than us and that the softening that we see around polarisation is happening partly because of that contact and partly because your obsession with sports diminishes those things that might be polarising us.

MARIA These days, we typically congregate more around individuals as opposed to institutions or movements. What does this say about the means of building community today and how it’s changed over time?

CLYDE I think that a lot of it has to do with being a fan of a song or being a fan of even just the music specifcally versus the people surrounding it. Like those people that were huge Bob Dylan fans in that time, many of them were as big of a fan of what Bob Dylan represent-

“If you have a song that blows up overnight, when you haven’t built that upon the foundation of a big fan base, then what you have is a bunch of fans of a song and not a bunch of fans of an artist.”

– Clyde Lawrence

“There are these diferent ways in which belonging really serves a function as well as a feeling in our lives.” – Maria Cury

ed as his music. It’s an interesting question of whether that’s able to exist more then or now, because now you have more access to those people through social media and there’s more of an expectation that those people are putting themselves out to you every day. On the other hand, maybe in an earlier era where those artists or those individuals were less accessible, there’s more of an opportunity for fans to mythologise them a bit.

MARIA I think it speaks to some of the broader shifts that we’ve seen societally around there being a decline in a lot of the institutions that we would normally feel a sense of belonging to, whether that’s declining enrolment in universities and colleges or feeling like you can’t trust the healthcare system. And so turning more to these individuals – whether that’s online creators or a particular artist, or even just an interest or a passion – we see people turning to them to fnd a source of community because those more traditional institutions are just not quite what they used to be in terms of being able to source a sense of belonging.

teners we have to determine where we should play. And yes, that is a good idea. But the person that listens to you on Spotify is a totally diferent level of fan than the person who is going to come to your show, and diferent again to the person who’s going to come to your show early and buy a shirt. You might have more casual fans in one place and more serious ones in another. For us, the only great predictor of how many people will come to our next show is how many people came to our last show and multiplying it by some assumed amount of growth.

DAVID What we found in sports is the compounding factor of fandom. So it matters. I can predict your engagement in the NFL by your engagement in college football, college basketball, the NHL, and baseball. The more of those sports you check of, the bigger fan you are; one leads to another. You have baseball friends, you have football friends. You and they might overlap and they might give you incrementally more friends. One provocative thought I have is that if NFL want to deepen their fandom in this country, what they should do is help their casual fans be NBA and MLB and NHL fans, because if you plug them into other networks that’s going to get them into fantasy leagues and get them deeper into NFL.

MIKKEL How are developments in the metaverse and the rise of NFTs and Web3 shifting behaviours and norms around fandom?

MIKKEL A sign that we’ve seen across our research is that it is much easier for folks to feel shallow belonging nowadays; you have this sort of shallow ability to follow individuals at your fngertips right? You can sit there at 2AM and scroll through TikTok and feel part of something. But that doesn’t actually connect you to other people. You get a dopamine hit from that initial sense of, ‘Oh, there’s something here where I’m part of,’ but you don’t actually build fans, you don’t actually build community.

CLYDE Something we experience difculty with all the time is the ability to use analytics to predict how one metric of a certain type of fan could lead to a diferent type of fan. People that are very analytically minded are always telling us to look at exactly how many Spotify lis-

CLYDE I think that there are increasingly easy ways for artists to gamify their fans. And I think that those are amazing tools and they’re also things to be a little bit wary of. Something I spend a lot of time thinking about is how to take advantage of this incredible ability to gamify the idea of being a Lawrence fan and stratify the diferent levels of fandom without taking the artistry out of it, because I think there is something so intrinsic about that that is important to people actually connecting with the music. Our inbox is flled with a new tech start-up every day that’s like: ‘Oh, I’m turning your everything into an NFT’, and you can do all these diferent things that are all really smart individually, but the saturation of that could create some challenges for artists.

MARIA I’m skeptical about people wholesale moving into these virtual means of connecting and completely disregarding in real life connection. One of the sur-

“The person that listens to you on Spotify is a totally diferent level of fan than the person who is going to come to your show, and diferent again to the person who’s going to come to your show early and buy a shirt.”

– Clyde Lawrence

prising things that we’ve seen across studies with young adults is how much of a premium they really place on engaging with communities where there is the opportunity or the promise to potentially connect IRL. They may engage in a light way with these more ephemeral or virtual-only kinds of communities or groups, but it’s the in-person ones where they say: ‘Okay, I’m going to invest more, even if I just feel the potential that one day I could meet in person with this group.’

CLYDE In terms of the digital versus real life divide, at least for me, I like to think about ways to make digital engagement with fans something that’s not a replacement or a worse, less connected version of what could have been a real engagement, but instead something that’s only made possible by digital. For example, when Covid-19 happened, I was four shows into a 35 show tour and we went home and cancelled the rest of the tour. But then we thought, what do we want to do? I think we were the frst band to go on what we call a virtual tour. A lot of other bands were doing virtual concerts, but they were kind of just making them feel like a concert that you were seeing a livestream of. But we decided to do something that doesn’t resemble a concert you can come to in real life at all. We decided to do something that’s an entirely diferent thing that could only be done digitally. And that’s something that even once the world is back open, people might want to see us do digitally again and then come see the show in person.

“I like to think about ways to make digital engagement with fans something that’s not a replacement or a worse, less connected version of what could have been a real engagement, but instead something that’s only made possible by digital.”

– Clyde Lawrence

ReD Dialogues are events that bring together voices from the humanities, business, and the arts for curious and explorative conversations on the world’s most business critical issues.

PHENOMENA PODCAST S02E4

Belonging

Belonging is in crisis. While it is seemingly easier than ever to build connections with people – either online or IRL – we are lonelier and more fragmented than ever. When we talk about the mental health crisis, political polarisation, or how to build a meaningful workplace culture, what we’re really talking about is belonging. In this episode, Eliot is joined by ReD partners Maria Cury and Mikkel Krenchel to unpack why our sense of belonging is in decline, how the sources from which we derive belonging are shifting, and what businesses need to know and consider about these changes. We are also joined by David Sikorjak, author of the recently published Fans Have More Friends, to unpack what we can learn from the sports industry about fandom and building community across the social divide. What are the priorities for businesses who want to cultivate a sense of belonging for their consumers? And how can focusing our eforts on cultural understanding help us build deeper bonds between individuals and communities?

Host: Eliot Salandy Brown

Guests: Maria Cury, Mikkel Krenchel and David Sikorjak

BELONGING: A READING LIST

From sci-f novels to ancient philosophical meditations by way of classic sociological studies, our staf picks on the best books about belonging.

Fans Have More Friends

by David Sikorjak and Ben Valenta

In an era when a sense of belonging appears to be in crisis, Fans Have More Friends ofers a possible antidote in the form of fandom. Authors Sikorjak and Valenta demonstrate a host of non-obvious correlations between those who are devoted fans and positive characteristics such as happiness, confdence in institutions, optimism, and strong family ties. Fans not only have more friends, they also seem to have all the other markers of a robust sense of belonging.

The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

by Casper ter Kuile

In this fun and lively book, ter Kuile invites us to deepen our ordinary practices – such as walking the dog or attending a spinning class – as intentional rituals that nurture connection and well-being. In an age of isolation, the ancient social technology of ritual, a cornerstone of anthropological study, can imbue our lives with meaning and purpose while fostering our connections with others.

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human by

Tom Boellstorf

Second Life is an online game and platform that allows users to explore an open online world and interact with others. Boellstorf’s book provides a detailed ethnography of Second Life and the people who inhabit it, ofering insights into the virtual world’s social norms, culture, and relationships. The book highlights how people use Second Life as a platform for self-expression, experimentation, and identity construction, and how they build communities and connections with others in the virtual space. Additionally, Boellstorf examines the implications of virtual worlds for our understanding of what it means to be human and how we perceive our own social and cultural identities.

We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We, a dystopian novel written by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, takes place in a future society called the OneState where people’s lives are strictly regimented and controlled by the government. The protagonist, a mathematician named D-503, begins to question the society he lives in when he falls in love with a rebellious woman named I-330. The book explores themes of individualism, free will, and the dangers of totalitarianism. We was one of the frst dystopian novels ever written and has had a signifcant impact on the genre

Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks

In this work, the inimitable bell hooks explores the importance of place and community for human fourishing. She argues that true belonging can only be achieved when individuals are deeply connected to the natural and built environments around them, and when they are able to participate fully in the life of their communities. Through personal anecdotes and insightful analysis, hooks makes a compelling case for the transformative power of belonging, and ofers a roadmap for those seeking to cultivate a more rooted and meaningful sense of connection in their own lives.

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Émile Durkheim

The elementary forms of religious life, as described by sociologist Émile Durkheim, refer to the fundamental practices and beliefs that are present in all religions. Durkheim argued that religion is not just an individual or personal experience, but a social phenomenon that is integral to the functioning of society. These elementary forms of religious life include the belief in supernatural beings or forces, the presence of sacred objects or rituals, and the establishment of a moral code. These elements create a sense of community and provide individuals with a shared sense of purpose and meaning, which strengthens social cohesion and fosters a sense of collective identity.

The Art of Gathering

by Priya Parker

In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker, a facilitator and expert on group dynamics, explores the importance of purposeful and meaningful gatherings, whether it be for personal, professional, or community reasons. Parker provides practical advice and insights on how to design and lead gatherings that create authentic connections and experiences for participants. The book is a useful guide for anyone interested in creating more meaningful and impactful gatherings, from intimate dinners to large-scale events.

Dancing in the Streets

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets explores the history and significance of collective joy and celebration in human societies. The book traces the evolution of public celebrations and rituals, from ancient tribal rituals to modern music festivals. Ehrenreich argues that these collective gatherings and expressions of joy have played a critical role in promoting social cohesion, building community, and fostering creativity and innovation. She also examines how political and economic forces have often sought to suppress or control collective expressions of joy and the implications of this for society.

Alone:

by Robert D. Putnam

Bowling Alone explores the decline of social capital and civic engagement in America. Putnam argues that the rise of individualism and the decline of community-based organisations have led to a decline in social trust and cooperation, resulting in a range of social and political problems. The book has had a signifcant impact on public policy and has been widely cited in discussions of social and political issues. Putnam ofers suggestions for how individuals and communities can work to rebuild social capital and foster greater engagement in civic life.

Alone Together by Sherry

Turkle

Written by MIT Technology and Society professor Sherry Turkle, this book explores the impact of technology, particularly social media and smartphones, on our relationships and sense of self. Turkle argues that while technology has the potential to connect us, it often leaves us feeling more disconnected and alone. Through a range of case studies and interviews, Turkle highlights how technology has changed the way we communicate, form relationships, and understand ourselves. She suggests that we need to be more mindful of our use of technology and fnd ways to balance it with faceto-face interaction and human connection. The book provides a thought-provoking look at the ways in which technology is shaping our lives and relationships in the modern world.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Afropean: Notes from Black Europe by Johny Pitts

Afropean by Johny Pitts documents the lives of black people living in Europe through a combination of original on-the-ground photography and frst-person reporting. Pitts visits black communities in Paris, Lisbon, and Brussels, as well as students in Moscow to document the ways in which black communities have both established themselves and been marginalised across Europe. “Afropean,” he writes, suggests “the possibility of living in and with more than one idea… That being black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant.”

The Doctrine of the Mean by Confucius

by Anne Case and

Angus Deaton

Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton explore the rise in “deaths of despair” among working-class white Americans in recent decades. The authors argue that economic and social changes, such as declining job opportunities, income stagnation, and social isolation, have contributed to rising rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths among this demographic. The book provides a detailed analysis of the data and trends behind these phenomena and suggests policies that could address the underlying causes of despair and promote better health and well-being. The book is a sobering look at the challenges facing working-class Americans and the urgent need for policies that support their economic and social well-being.

The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations

by

Eva Illouz

The End of Love is about the abrupt termination of close bonds – an increasingly common phenomenon. Illouz argues that modern society places signifcant emphasis on individualism, self-expression, and personal fulfllment, leading to the breakdown of traditional relationships and the rise of negative emotions. Through a range of case studies and sociological analysis, Illouz highlights the ways in which negative emotions are expressed, managed, and interpreted. The book provides valuable insights into the complex dynamics of modern romance and similarly close connections as well as the challenges of maintaining healthy relationships in an increasingly individualistic and emotionally charged world.

The Doctrine of the Mean is a Confucian text that emphasises the importance of achieving balance and harmony in all aspects of life. It suggests that the key to living a virtuous life is to maintain a middle way between excess and defciency in all things, whether it be emotions, actions, or thoughts. The text stresses the importance of cultivating inner virtues such as honesty, humility, and compassion, which then manifest in one’s relationships with others and society as a whole. It also emphasises the role of education and self-cultivation in achieving this balance and harmony, suggesting that personal transformation and the pursuit of knowledge are essential for achieving a meaningful and fulflling life. The Doctrine of the Mean is a key text in Confucian philosophy, highlighting the importance of personal responsibility, belonging, and ethical behaviour for the greater good of society.

Bowling

The Collapse and Revival of American Community (revised and updated)

ReD helps leaders create original strategies for the worlds of tomorrow

ReD Associates is a human science-based strategy consultancy. Since 2005, we have worked with global companies and foundations, C-suite, and boards to create meaningful change in product, sales, marketing, and R&D.

To chart a course amid winds of social and cultural change, leaders need a clear perspective on where society and markets are going, and the role they want to play: how to grow, where to focus, and the trade-ofs involved. Gaining clarity requires going beyond seeing people as individual consumers, customers, and users, in order to understand their worlds and the hidden structures that drive behaviour. Our work has helped some of the world’s most infuential businesses and organisations redefne their industries. We call our approach Sensemaking. It combines techniques and theories from the social sciences, humanities, and business to drive change that is meaningful, durable and efcient.

We are based in Copenhagen, New York, Paris, and the Bay Area.

RED ASSOCIATES

Editorial: Matthew Janney, Maria Cury and Mikkel Krenchel

Executive Team: Sandra Cariglio, Nebal Hachach, Filip lau, and Tamara Moellenberg

Design: Nanna Sine Munnecke and Matthew Kay

Contributors: Millie Aurora, Gabrielle Borenstein, Astrid Ingemann Breitenstein, Eliot Salandy Brown, Lara Casciola, Ian Dull, Ana Paula Hirano, Alexis Jakubowicz, Johanna Li, Maria Salgado, Olav Stavnem, Taylor Steelman, Charlie Strong, and Charlotte Vangsgaard

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