Changing the Narrative

CMU alumna Y-Vonne Hutchinson is moving workplace culture forward one organization at a time

We all seem to have that one friend who accomplishes more in one month than we do in a year, a person who achieves lofty goals while simultaneously remaining humble about their far-reaching vision and concrete accomplishments. They’re an inspiration.

Carnegie Mellon University alumna Y-Vonne Hutchinson is that friend.

In 2003, Y-Vonne earned her bachelor’s degree in drama from the CMU’s College of Fine Arts, and, in 2007, she graduated from Harvard Law School and embarked on a career as an international human rights lawyer in Afghanistan.

In 2015, she founded ReadySet, a diversity solutions firm in the Bay Area where she serves as CEO. In 2020, Y-Vonne wrote a book about the sensitive topic of discussing race in the workplace during her three-month maternity leave. She is also a founding team member and advisory board member of Project Include, a nonprofit aiming to diversify the tech sector, and serves on the Pasadena Playhouse Board of Trustees.

In each of these roles, Y-Vonne tackles a range of complicated issues, lending her expertise in diversity, equity and inclusion training and institutional change.

“We use data to present a holistic view of an organization — a mirror that makes the data resonate and tell the whole story,” Y-Vonne says. “I love the detective part of my job, rooting through the data in order to figure out optimal areas of change and growth. It’s fun to find.”

How to Eat an Elephant

Y-Vonne’s main goal with ReadySet is to “empower people to see themselves” and change the way people work with each other while also maximizing the impact of inclusive and equitable organizations.

“Organizations want to run better, and they need to figure out how to engage and do business in an increasingly diverse world,” Y-Vonne says. “Every leader needs to make a choice of whether they want an organization that is growing and functional or one that remains stagnant.”

Her firm works with governments, nonprofits, universities and Fortune 500 companies and has consulted with everyone from small startups to global, multimedia companies. There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for each workplace’s culture, so Y-Vonne offers a variety of training paths and options to individualize approaches.

ReadySet focuses on capacity development, culture building and change management.

Each of those areas sounds like a massive undertaking, but Y-Vonne understands that success takes time and commitment.

She often relies on the wisdom of one of her mother’s expressions: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

“Changing culture is not something that you fix all at once, and it’s not something you do by yourself,” Y-Vonne says.

A workplace’s culture can feel amorphous — hard to describe, hard to measure. ReadySet’s quantitative approach gives a solid idea of how everyone in an organization experiences the culture and its impact.

“When the impact doesn’t align with intent or with values, we try to understand the root causes,” Y-Vonne says. “Particularly with cultures of inclusion, belonging and engagement, we look across metrics and focus on things like trust, growth and voice. From there, we figure out either the source of success or where places are falling short.”

Early Influences and Common Threads

Y-Vonne grew up in a small Texas town where no one talked about going to college outside of the state. At the Speech and Debate National Championships in 1998, she heard about Carnegie Mellon for the first time. Her high school placed third, but a member of the winning team was headed to CMU.

It instantly became her dream school. She never looked back.

On campus during a conflict resolution class that included a documentary about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Y-Vonne’s worldview changed forever. She couldn't fathom a world where justice for those victims didn’t exist.

She continued pursuing her drama degree and wove themes of justice into her work — like a project that included interviewing PIttsburgh’s homeless population.

“In college, I first saw the power of personal narrative in my work with the homeless,” Y-Vonne says. “Then, as a human rights lawyer, I spent so much time interviewing people and sharing those stories with the world in order to intervene for the good.”

Whether it was advocating for sugarcane workers in Nicaragua or supporting aid relief workers in Afghanistan, her focus was always on talking to people and telling their stories.

“It’s no different from my work now. It’s only through storytelling that the data that we collect resonates,” Y-Vonne says. “It’s empowering for people to tell their stories. It’s empowering for people to have their stories heard, and it’s empowering for people to see themselves reflected in the stories told about them. That’s how change starts.”