As diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become more critical focal points for businesses worldwide, innovative leaders are emerging with fresh perspectives on how to create lasting change. Enter Christina Blacken, a trailblazing entrepreneur who has made it her mission to transform the landscape of leadership development and DEI through the power of storytelling and narrative intelligence.
Christina Blacken, founder of The New Quo, brings a unique approach to leadership and organizational change. Inspired by her family’s history as part of the Great Migration and her own experiences facing discrimination, Blacken has developed a groundbreaking methodology that leverages the power of personal and cultural stories to drive meaningful transformation in workplaces. Her journey from a social entrepreneurship course in college to launching a successful DEI consultancy is a testament to the impact of perseverance and innovative thinking in addressing complex social issues.
We had the honor of chatting with Blacken, and she shared with us the pivotal moments that shaped her entrepreneurial path, the core philosophy behind The New Quo Change Model, and how narrative intelligence can be harnessed to create more inclusive and effective leadership practices. She also shared her insights on overcoming common DEI challenges, adapting to the post-pandemic landscape, and her vision for the future of leadership development.
Check out our full interview with Christina Blacken below.
Can you walk us through the key milestones and pivotal moments that led you to found The New Quo? What inspired you to take the entrepreneurial leap?
Christina Blacken: A social entrepreneurship course I took and then became a teaching assistant for in college, changed my life. My professor, Anke Wessels, helped me discover how entrepreneurship practices can be a tool for solving social issues.
My family was part of the Great Migration – my grandmother and her siblings moved from Memphis, TN, in the 1950s to Utah for more opportunities and to find reprieve from violent Jim Crow laws. Growing up with this family history and story in Utah, I was passionate about social justice and wanted to make a difference, particularly due to the discrimination I and so many people I loved faced. Learning in that class that I could use business ideas to address social issues that so deeply impacted my family and millions of others was the spark that started the path to building The New Quo.
After I graduated from Cornell University I moved to NYC, and built a career across four industries – including law, non-profit, marketing and media, using storytelling and communication tools to change behavior, all while building The New Quo as a side hustle in my free time outside of work. At each organization I worked at, I moved into leadership positions, but was met with barriers, bias, and discrimination no matter the industry.
Through my in-field experiences and research, I discovered how powerful personal, cultural, and historical stories were for how bias, belief, and behavior are created, including what we believe about power and leadership and how culture and relationship dynamics are formed. I researched and built evidence-based practices on the principle that recognizing and shifting our internal stories and biases around power and leadership can improve innovation and collaboration within groups and organizations, and I developed communication frameworks to teach others how to overcome these challenges, particularly when collaborating and building relationships with people who are different from themselves.
After saving up 20k of my own funds over a number of years, I made the leap into full time entrepreneurship in 2019, with The New Quo providing corporations, nonprofits and universities transformational educational workshops, facilitated discussions, coaching, and consulting to organizations wanting to adopt more equitable approaches to team building, business policies, communication, and leadership practices.
When Covid-19 hit, I lost every client within a month as my services were primarily in person, and had to figure out a pivot quickly. I was able to build digital tools, offering workshop webinars and digital courses, that scaled The New Quo to helping 14,000 leaders across 9 industries communicate and lead in ways that built deeper trust, empathy, self-awareness, and values-driven goals across cultural backgrounds.
What is the core philosophy behind The New Quo Change Model, and how does it differ from traditional leadership development programs?
Christina Blacken: Many leadership models focus on external factors for changing behavior, and don’t address the internal mindset and habits that influence what people think and do. The New Quo Change Model improves self-awareness and empathy and influences how individuals think, communicate, and lead, particularly during times of change and when confronting differences with others, using the most powerful communication tool on the planet – story habits and story rituals. I help individuals identify and change their story habits – which is shifting from stereotypes and snap judgment stories we attach to different people and experiences to being curious and recognizing shared values and stories when going through change.
The model also improves interpersonal communication by creating new story rituals – helping leaders to establish sharing and collecting stories with the people they lead to better understand them and mentor them – whether that’s in casual conversation, meetings, emails, presentations and more. By helping individuals slow down the automated biases and stories we attach to new experiences and people, as well as creating practices around discovering and really understanding others’ cultural and personal stories, The New Quo Change Model helps individuals improve healthy communication and relationship-building skills to better connect with anyone of any background. It gives people simple strategies, exercises, and reflection tools for using personal and cultural stories to discover their unique leadership skills and values, slow down bias, and better connect with and influence others, regardless of whether they are formally recognized leaders or not.
Leaders are storytellers and everyone has a leadership story. The primary practice of leadership is to craft narratives that motivate and inspire people to adopt new behaviors and goals. The New Quo Change Model is a change management process for interpersonal communication that helps people build new story habits and rituals to share a new leadership story, overcome bias, and deepen trust when communicating a new goal or idea during moments of change.
Can you explain the concept of “narrative intelligence” and how it can be harnessed to drive meaningful change within organizations?
Christina Blacken: Humans use narrative to make sense of the world, attach meaning to our experiences, and pass on knowledge. Due to the power that story has on our brains, your narrative intelligence affects every action you take and goal you hold.
Think of your narrative intelligence as an inner library of stories that help you make decisions and communicate. When you witness a new change, idea, or experience, your mind flips through cultural and personal stories you know to attach to that experience to explain and create meaning of it. This process is your story habits, the default patterns of meaning you attach and express when interacting with others. It happens quickly in our interactions with one another and affects our decision-making and communication.
When we hear a story, no matter the type, our bodies release hormones like oxytocin, which builds trust, and dopamine and cortisol, which affect our memory and attention. Our brains also produce mirror neurons, which fire in the same region of the listener’s brain as the storyteller’s brain. Finally, story creates a process called narrative transport, which means our senses react to stories as if we’re experiencing them firsthand.
One way leaders can use their Narrative Intelligence to drive change in an organization is to recognize what values matter to the people they are leading and to tell compelling personal stories around their goals that connect to those values, as well as reducing stereotyping in stories they share about what matters. For example, if creativity is a key value, connecting how a transition in growing staff will help with more creative collaboration is a start of using narrative intelligence in how they are communicating a new change.
In your experience, what are some of the most common challenges leaders face when it comes to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace?
Christina Blacken: The most common challenge is various levels of knowledge and understanding about the concepts, and a lack of organizational buy-in of DEI as a fundamental practice of good business. Often leaders treat DEI as a punitive reactionary thing to do out of fear of public opinion or backlash, which means they don’t make changes sustainable and long term enough to see real results and improvements.
There’s also a ton of misinformation about DEI and its goals. Our education system does not consistently teach social and cultural history, so everyone has various levels of knowledge about how current inequalities are a direct result of past policies and practices.
True DEI is about creating policies, practices, and communication habits that help people have a new relationship to collaboration and power, so they can reach their fullest potential and equally benefit from the resources created and shared within a group. Leaders must first recognize their own gaps of knowledge and understanding around DEI, make a commitment to their own education and behavior change through modeling new DEI behaviors to their staff as well as offering professional development training and resources, so their colleagues and employees can also improve their knowledge and skills around DEI to really reap the benefits.
How can leaders use their personal stories and pivotal life moments to become more effective communicators of change and overcome unconscious biases?
Christina Blacken: Self-awareness is one of the most important skills a great leader can develop. In my programs I teach leaders how to discover the impact of their own personal life experiences and stories on their current values and behavior, so they can speak more authentically and share stories more confidently about their goals, desires, and skills.
How leaders can begin this process is to note the origin, adversity, success, and innovation moments within their lives, the lessons of those moments, and the skills and values learned within those moments, versus creating goals and ideas through fear, stereotype or snap-judgments, which is often an unconscious default especially when change or a stressful transition is occurring. By understanding their values and goals and how they relate to their life stories, they can give context to values in a more motivating and less biased way to the people they are leading.
In what ways has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the landscape of leadership and DEI, and how are you adapting your approach to meet the evolving needs of your clients?
Christina Blacken: People have become more isolated and distrusting due to the challenges and adversities COVID-19 created, these stresses have also meant people have higher expectations and standards for how they want to be treated at work. Older models of transactional leadership, exploitive and abusive labor practices, and designing products that exacerbate pressing global issues like climate change are non-negotiable for most employees now.
My approach is to help emerging and current leaders to adopt a new style of leadership, one that puts self-awareness, empathy, and influence at the forefront versus domination, control and exploitation. Adapting to rapid changes is challenging, but it gives us the opportunity to build something new that really serves everyone better and better meets the need of creating a truly equitable future.
How do you personally maintain your own well-being and sense of purpose while driving transformative change as an entrepreneur and public speaker?
Christina Blacken: I have a regular ritual I call musings, meditation, and movement that I use daily to ground myself, recall the values I saw and explored through the day through writing for just a few minutes daily to reflect on whatever comes to mind, and move my body to reduce stress and improve health and energy levels with something as simple as a walk in the park across the street from where I live. Our rituals matter so much in how we feel and stay balanced in the chaos of our modern world, which is why I teach story rituals in my communication and leadership model.
Where do you see the future of leadership development and DEI heading, and how is The New Quo positioned to lead the way?
Christina Blacken: Leadership and DEI shouldn’t be separate. In the future, leaders will be inherently versed and equipped with DEI principles so they can truly serve and collaborate with anyone of any background toward mutually beneficial goals. The New Quo’s mission is to create a status-quo-breaking paradigm for leadership that values our needs of belonging, acceptance, autonomy, and justice just as much as our material and physical needs. I have a passion to help every person create an authentic approach to leadership that’s based on radical self-acceptance outside of the outdated and unjust cultural myths of power.
What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly women and people of color, who are looking to create innovative solutions in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space?
Christina Blacken: Always come back to your values when thinking about how you want to design your business and your life. Your values affect how you build partnerships, design services, and products, set prices, determine your daily schedule, source materials, share resources, and more. If you aren’t clear on what your values are, it’s easy to follow a path that leads to disconnection and intractable stress and furthers oppression and inequality, even if it’s unintentional. To truly create change, we have to begin to live values-aligned lives not based on exploitation and fear, which is where most conventional business models fail. True innovation is creating a values-driven business that is outside of the norm, sets new standards for success, and creates new ways to serve people beyond what can just be taken from them.
Lastly, is there a specific mantra, quote, or affirmation that you hold close to your heart?
Christina Blacken: This quote by Bobette Buster captures so much about the magic and impact of storytelling and is something I live by in my life and work: “It is necessary for us to harness our own stories and tell them well. If not, then someone else will come in and wallpaper our culture with their stories. And then, how do we pass on to the next generation what has been lost, if not forgotten?”
Emily Sprinkle, also known as Emma Loggins, is a designer, marketer, blogger, and speaker. She is the Editor-In-Chief for Women's Business Daily where she pulls from her experience as the CEO and Director of Strategy for Excite Creative Studios, where she specializes in web development, UI/UX design, social media marketing, and overall strategy for her clients.
Emily has also written for CNN, Autotrader, The Guardian, and is also the Editor-In-Chief for the geek lifestyle site FanBolt.com
