Category: Product Updates

The call for effective, inclusive leadership has never been louder. A staggering 42% of managers believe their organizations fail to support their leadership development. On top of that, 89% of HR leaders stress the critical need to lead with empathy in today’s increasingly hybrid and flexible work environments. 

The challenge many L&D and HR leaders face is that traditional training methods fail to meet the moment to deliver engaging and impactful learning experiences. 

Enter Pivotal Practice, a stress-free environment to learn, practice, and build critical human skills needed to create a more inclusive workplace. By leveraging GenAI, learning science, and roleplay simulation, Pivotal Practice is poised to redefine leadership, transforming managers into confident, effective, and inclusive leaders.

Personalized feedback, powered by the best of technology and human psychology

Pivotal Practice sets a new standard in leadership training, pioneering a blend of GenAI with in-depth research and insights from Praxis Labs’ in-house team of learning scientists and psychologists. This unique approach offers highly personalized feedback aimed at boosting inclusive leadership skills. These skills are proven to drive team performance and organizational outcomes. 

Central to Pivotal Practice’s methodology is its immersive training experiences that foster accelerated skills growth through real-world application. By engaging learners in scenarios that mirror actual workplace challenges, they promote the practical application of core leadership skills such as empathy, decision-making, and self-awareness. 

This hands-on approach is enhanced by GenAI-driven personalized recommendations, allowing for a tailored learning experience that prioritizes rapid skill enhancement and application. Learners receive direct and real-time feedback on the actions taken in the immersive experience, giving them clear insights on how to improve in the future. 

Built for scalable use in the flow of work

Traditional hour-long courses and winding learning paths no longer cut it for today’s busy managers. Between juggling various work priorities and team management, they rarely have time to focus on learning. 

Pivotal Practice was designed with the perennially pressed-for-time manager in mind. The product offers on-demand, bite-sized learning experiences that can be finished in 5-7 minutes. The experiences focus on highly relevant and realistic scenarios where managers de-escalate conflict, provide constructive feedback, set clear performance expectations, and more — critical skills that can be immediately applied in real-world contexts like team meetings and one-on-one conversations. 

“The new experiences and skills within Pivotal Practice will help enable the leaders of today and tomorrow to tap into personalized and deeply impactful training that will push the boundaries on both inclusivity and business outcomes,” says Praxis Labs Co-founder & CEO, Elise Smith. 

This approach not only makes learning accessible and engaging, but also deeply practical. By aligning learning experiences closely with everyday managerial responsibilities, Pivotal Practice ensures that leadership development is easily integrated into the flow of work, offering a direct and accessible pathway to improve inclusion and effectiveness without disrupting the daily grind. 

Measuring Impact

Pivotal Practice places a strong emphasis on comprehensive measurement embedded directly within its simulations, leveraging GenAI-driven assessments to track a learner’s progress. This innovative approach enables the platform to monitor skill growth from the very start of the learning journey, through the pivotal moments of learning within the simulations, and extending to the crucial phase of applying these newly acquired skills in real-life contexts. This seamless integration of assessment and learning ensures that measurement is an ongoing process, providing continuous insights into skill development.

By offering a clear, data-driven view of skill progression, learners are empowered to recognize their own strengths and areas for improvement. This comprehensive assessment and feedback loop makes it possible for learners to see real growth and make meaningful changes in their approach to leadership.

Beyond individual learner growth, Pivotal Practice provides deep, actionable insights to HR and L&D leaders, enabling them to gauge tangible skill improvements across their organization. This data-driven perspective not only highlights the overall effectiveness of the training but also equips organizational leaders with the knowledge they need to foster a truly inclusive and high-performing culture. 

Built with your data security top of mind

In today’s digital age, data security is a non-negotiable. That’s why Pivotal Practice is fully compliant with SOC2 security standards. Our commitment to comprehensive data protection ensures that every interaction with our platform is secure, providing managers a safe space to focus on their growth and development, while leadership can be free of concerns about data privacy and protection. 

Leading a deeply human future

At a time when GenAI is surrounded by fears of dampening our creativity, critical thinking, and capacity for connection, Pivotal Practice demonstrates how the latest advancements in technology can be used to deepen our ability to connect with and lead across diverse workforces. 

As our Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Heather Shen, puts it: “By leveraging Praxis Labs’ technology to deepen humanity in the workplace, we can unlock the unlimited potential for collaboration, innovation, and, ultimately, organizational success.”

Find out what all the buzz is about. 

Knowing how to give effective feedback is one of the most sought-after, yet difficult skills to achieve in the workplace. For decades now, the question of improving feedback has been synonymous with improving employee performance and satisfaction. And this conversation has taken on a new relevance and urgency in recent years.

The ongoing experiment of “radical candor“, popularized by Kim Malone Scott stands as a key milestone for discourse around workplace feedback, and has faced both praise and criticism since its release. Based on the principle of “caring personally while challenging directly”, Scott introduced a new framework for giving feedback that balances caring for one’s colleagues while still holding them accountable for poor performance. Yet, some critics have noted that in practice, radical candor has sanctioned harsh and biased criticism that mostly impacts members of underestimated groups.

This issue here is not with the concept or theory of radical candor, but with how people understand and practice it.

Until today, organizations and business leaders have not had effective solutions to train people on how to give actionable feedback. That’s why the team here at Praxis Labs is thrilled to announce our latest product release: Pivotal Practice.

Pivotal Practice: Redefining feedback training for lasting impact

Pivotal Practice brings together the latest innovations in Generative AI, learning science, and interactive simulations. This new product offers organizations a solution to improve feedback skills, foster empathy and collaboration, and enhance communication and innovation across diverse and global teams.

At our core, Praxis Labs helps organizations embed core human skills through a diversity lens. By immersing learners in real-world scenarios that map onto key moments of the employee experience, they have the opportunity to practice navigating difficult conversations and collaborating across diverse, global, and remote teams. Pivotal Practice is an extension of our commitment to elevate and transform the workplace through an equitable and science-backed approach. It comes at a time when actionable, effective, and unbiased feedback is needed most.

Research shows that employees who receive timely feedback see higher levels of performance, have more confidence, and feel a greater sense of job satisfaction. 72 percent of employees report that feedback can directly improve their performance.

“Candid and actionable feedback is one of the most sought-after yet difficult skills to cultivate in any workplace, and it’s essential to driving career growth, development, and engagement. Yet, there is a lot to be understood around how to give inclusive feedback across diverse teams,” said Elise Smith, Co-founder and CEO of Praxis Labs. “We see enormous potential in harnessing the latest advancements in AI and immersive technologies to build the confidence and skills needed to provide feedback that helps people of all levels and backgrounds advance in their careers and that supports a more inclusive and collaborative workforce.” 

Pivotal Practice builds upon this foundation. It does so by offering bite-sized, experiential opportunities for learners to help them build and reinforce their communication and feedback-giving skills. All of this occurs within a safe, judgment-free environment.

Driving feedback development at scale

Pivotal Practice marks an innovation not only for teams looking to improve how they work, collaborate, and innovate together. It extends its impact to the broader corporate learning industry. The product introduces a novel way to combine immersive technology and gen-AI to drive skills development. Moreover, it gives learners the practice and experience needed translate learning into action.

Key Pivotal Practice design features include:

Generative AI Grading and Research-Backed Feedback 

Learners deliver feedback, either by voice or over text, ensuring flexibility and accessibility for different learning and diverse communication preferences. Trained by Praxis Labs’ team of in-house learning scientists, gen-AI assesses participants’ responses. It specifically focuses on inclusive leadership skills. After evaluation, gen-AI offers personalized recommendations that clarify and improve participants’ feedback. This approach makes every practice session a valuable learning opportunity.

Perspective-Taking through Immersive Technology

In-the-moment learning enhances memory retention and skill development in areas like empathy and communication. With immersive simulations, learners navigate nuanced situations across differences and deepen their understanding of people with different identities and lived experiences.

On-Demand Microlearning at Scale

Packaged in 5-10 minute experiences, learners can practice giving feedback where they learn best and when needed most — like before performance reviews, 1:1s, and team meetings. 

Unlock team performance with human-centered and inclusive feedback

Radical candor isn’t just a catchphrase; it’s a philosophy that promises transparent communication and transformative growth. Yet, its execution requires finesse and skill that many find elusive.

This latest addition to our platform offers an opportunity for organizations to reap the benefits of a culture that prioritizes effective feedback and inclusion. Join us as we unveil Pivotal Practice—a solution designed to revolutionize how feedback is given and received.

Ready to embark on this transformative journey? Discover the impact Pivotal Practice can have for your organization.

Learn More 

At Praxis Labs, our mission is to help make society more equitable. We’re targeting workforces because that’s where we are confident we’ll reach the most people and have the greatest impact at scale.

We believe that if we can help each and every employee become a conscious and inclusive leader, that will have a catalytic effect. Our vision is that these learners will not only transform their workplaces, but that their impact will permeate to the places you and I frequent every day.

How We Work.

Praxis Labs moves the needle for individuals and organizations by helping employees develop into conscious and inclusive leaders. Our learning platform: 

• Leverages Virtual Reality to build empathy for the experiences of others: Through VR, we create immersive learning experiences with our flagship curriculum, Pivotal Experiences, that give employees the opportunity to experience someone else’s perspective, allowing them to take on different intersectional identities across race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, body size, religion, age and power in the organization. They either experience incidents of bias or discrimination firsthand, or from the perspective of someone complicit in an incident.
• Provides opportunities for reflection and practice identifying barriers to equity: After each immersive experience, learners reflect on the incidents of bias they experienced on our platform and are taught the language context and definitions to identify these barriers in their own workplace.
• Encourages employees to take action and make commitments to increase inclusion and equity in their own lives: Each experience on our platform leverages the virtual world to provide space for learners to practice intervening in the moment – either by self-advocating or by advocating on behalf of others. They can then apply this to real life, making commitments to practice research-backed behaviors and interventions in their actual workplace.

Through this process, we’re able to provide tangible, actionable insights – both to the learners and to the organizations they work for.

What Sets Us Apart. 

We’ve all seen articles and studies that say D&I trainings don’t work. So why do we think our learning experiences will be any different? Traditionally, the effectiveness of D&I training has been based on “how valuable” individuals thought it was on a scale of one to five. As a field, we weren’t applying the rigor of learning science to D&I education and we were failing to measure attitudes, mindsets, and behaviors, which made it nearly impossible to show that trainings were making a difference. 

At Praxis Labs, we’re changing the way companies measure D&I at both the learner and organization level with a laser focus on impact and efficacy. Through this approach, we’re able to measure a learners’ growth in empathy, their ability to identify barriers to equity, as well as the actions they take during and after the learning experience. We collect learners’ reflections on their workplace’s culture of equity and inclusion and aggregate that data to our clients, identifying hot spots before they become real problem areas. Together, we’re increasing empathy, reducing bias and creating sustained behavior change. 

Why we do it. 

For me – and for many folks like me from underrepresented backgrounds – D&I work is personal. My parents’ stories of overcoming systemic barriers to access high-quality education instilled in me at an early age the understanding that access and opportunity weren’t distributed equitably. It’s why I’ve been drawn to using technology as part of the solution – specifically focused on technology’s potential to help scale access and opportunity. My co-founder Heather’s family has similarly inspired her – as a daughter of immigrants, she grew up celebrating and working across cultural differences. 

The Praxis Labs team shares our mission and lives our values every day. We’re a diverse group by design, and we bring our lived experiences to bear to create lifelike simulations that will help lead to the outcomes we care so deeply about.

Join Us.

We’re grateful for our investors – SoftBank’s SB Opportunity Fund, Norwest Venture Partners, Ulu Ventures, Emerson Collective, Precursor Ventures and Firework VC – a diverse set of backers who invested in two women of color, believed in our vision and care deeply about the impact we will have together. 

We’re inspired by our clients – Google, Target, Amazon, eBay, and Uber – who have been with us since the beginning as we’ve tested and iterated on the learning experience and are continuing with us on this exciting journey with the goal of advancing equity, inclusion and belonging in their organizations. 

We’re humbled by our learners – Our clients’ employees – who have been brave, vulnerable, and open-minded. They’ve been willing to try new things to better themselves and their work cultures.

And we’re excited to meet you! We invite you to join us in making workplaces – and ultimately society – more equitable.