Case Study: Center for Creative Leadership reduces bias in leadership insights with SymphonyAI Eureka

Leadership Challenge Experiences Personalization without Bias

The Center for Creative Leadership® (CCL), a global nonprofit focused on leadership development, wanted to better understand the top managerial challenges leaders face while reducing bias in its data. With nearly 60,000 challenge responses from 20,000 mid-level and senior managers, CCL needed a way to identify common “challenge experiences” and ensure the results were not overly shaped by the underrepresentation of women and racial/ethnic minorities in the dataset. To do this, CCL partnered with SymphonyAI and used its Eureka platform.

SymphonyAI applied topological data analysis (TDA) modeling to group leaders by shared challenges first, then test those groupings for demographic bias. The approach uncovered ten challenge experiences for higher-level leaders and eight for mid-level leaders, while also revealing instances where bias may have influenced the profiles. As a result, CCL gained a more rigorous, bias-aware way to personalize leadership development offerings and improve the quality of its research insights, helping them avoid overgeneralizing from a dataset that was heavily weighted toward white men.

Center for Creative Leadership® (CCL)

Romesh Wadhwani

successful entrepreneur and philanthropist