I sat in on an unconscious bias workshop in the H&M office in New York, consisting of 21 managers hailing from New York and Canada. A quarter were people of colour. Nearly half had a global background and were born outside the United States. Most had been with the company for at least 10 years. And despite the elephant in the room — everyone was well aware of the workshop’s inciting incident — the mood was buoyant. I didn’t know if this was because it’s H&M’s culture, because there was an outsider in the room, or because it feels impossible to enter into a discussion as fraught as this without anything short of total positivity. I’d imagine all of the above factors were at play. When asked to describe themselves and their background, one Swedish transplant named Mark offered the following that felt like it could be the workshop’s guiding principle: “It’s my life’s philosophy to not talk about negative things.”