Visibility Engineering with N. Chloé Nwangwu

Becky Mollenkamp: Hi, Chloe. Thank you for being here and chatting with me.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Thank you so much for having me.

Becky Mollenkamp: I start every episode the same way, which I should have warned you about, but I didn’t. So, get ready. I like to ask people their relationship with feminism. And it’s okay if your answer is that you don’t have one.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: What is my relationship with feminism? I am one. I am an intersectional feminist. My feminist school of thought has been informed by many teachers, but one, in particular, is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the writer of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. She’s a brilliant Nigerian writer and gave a famous feminist speech, you know, the one that’s sampled in that Beyonce song.

Becky Mollenkamp: We Should All Be Feminists?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Yes, sampled from her TED Talk, I believe, which was viral and very well received. And deservedly so. I happened to have seen the TED Talk before it blew up because of Beyonce’s admiration. Adichie spoke about feminism in a way that finally put into words the things I’d been scrambling to articulate as a youth.

Becky Mollenkamp: I’m going to just throw out there, because I want to fully honor that she’s an important author and leader, that I also love We Should All Be Feminists. But I know she’s come under some criticism for having some trans-exclusionary rhetoric. I don’t know where that stands today. I haven’t looked at the most recent stuff, but I know as recently as a couple of years ago, there was some of that. And I hear you saying you’re an intersectional feminist, and I am as well, so I’m assuming that doesn’t align with your beliefs.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: In fact, this is the first time I’m hearing of it. I need to go check up on some stuff.

Becky Mollenkamp: I just wanted to call that out because I’m sure there’s someone listening who’s going to know that and think, Hmm. I wanted to acknowledge that, and also to say there can be people who are really important in informing our thought, but that person doesn’t fully agree with everything we believe. And that’s also okay. I don’t expect you to know everything that every person has said about everything. But I wanted to point it out just for that one person who’s listening going, Wait a minute.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: No TERF nonsense, no.

Becky Mollenkamp: I think it’s nice to address these things sometimes. So, I want to talk to you about visibility and branding, which is the work you do. But to understand how you show up with these issues and talk about these things, I think it’s important to understand the background that informs your perspective now. One of the things I find fascinating about you is that you have this background in conflict negotiation, working with—not just mediation amongst people getting divorces—but at a higher level with nation states to resolve big issues. Tell me a little bit about how you got into that, to begin with, and then what made you decide, Maybe this isn’t the path for me after all.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: I got into international mediation and conflict resolution because, graduating from undergrad, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. It’s a thing that happens to a lot of liberal arts students. All I knew was that I enjoyed traveling and using my understanding of languages and cultures to bridge divides. Lots of folks would have said, Hey, sounds like you want to be a diplomat. But even at that age, I had concerns about becoming a diplomat. I wondered what would happen if the United States insisted diplomats advocate for a policy I morally couldn’t stand behind. What would I do? As a diplomat, it would be my job to advocate for that policy. And so, even then, I had concerns about that nagging feeling at the back of my head. That’s why I stayed away from diplomacy.

Becky Mollenkamp: And when did you graduate?

2012. Chloé Nwangwu: 2012.

Becky Mollenkamp: Okay, so this was before 2016.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: This was before then. Prescient, wasn’t I? In undergrad, I was part of a global leadership program, the first of its kind at my school, and I was in the inaugural class. They encouraged us to travel a lot. I remember my freshman year, I was in Russia during their conflict with Georgia, or just after. We did a lot of interviews with professors, diplomats, advocates, and protesters in Russia. And that was my freshman year. My sophomore year, I was in Japan, documenting dying dialects of Japanese while also looking into the neuroscience of aesthetics—just the wildest things. Then my junior year, I was in Cairo to learn Arabic, so I said, Let me go to the country where colloquial Arabic is most spoken, which was Egypt. I left Egypt as the Arab Spring erupted. That was when I thought, I’ve just witnessed the buildup to something wild. I want to be the kind of person who has a say in how things like this turn out. After graduating, I found a program in international mediation and conflict resolution in Israel and applied. I got in and went. During that time, the conflict with Gaza erupted again, and I had that same nagging feeling: I want to be someone who has a say in how things like this turn out. I was very lucky to be in this program because it gave me incredible access to halls of power. I worked with various municipal organizations and entities. I was often in the Knesset, had access to the Supreme Court, and spent time in the West Bank doing my own research. It was an incredible program that taught me a lot about the Middle East conflict, which is why a lot of people turn to me now for advice on how to engage with that conflict. Once I graduated, I took a job with the Anti-Defamation League, where I became an assistant education director and did a lot of anti-bias, anti-discrimination, and crisis management work. Then the election happened, and my job became as hectic as you can imagine—lots of bias incidents, swastikas, nooses, KKK rallies, breaches of trust in communities across the nation. That kind of work takes a toll, you know? Eventually, I said, I think I need a breather, and left my job with the ADL. Through a connection, I ended up as a fellow with an organization called Independent Diplomat, a group of diplomats working with states and democratic non-state actors whose needs were being sidelined in places like the UN and the EU. And that’s how I got into that world—it wasn’t a straight path, but it almost never is for that realm of work.

Becky Mollenkamp: It does answer it. And I feel like it’s almost never a straight route for anyone. There are so few of us who, by the time you go through your entire career, have that very linear path. Everything you’ve done with traveling and world events you were a witness to or a part of, trying to help resolve or manage the aftereffects, is fascinating. And now you’re a brand strategist, which just feels like Hmm. How does that seemingly 180—although I’m sure it’s not as we’re going to discover—connect? So, how did you make that leap?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Such a good question. Here’s what happened: My work in international politics—especially as a mediator—is about leveling the playing field. When you’re a mediator, you’re a facilitator between big, powerful entities. Your job is to make sure no one’s a big actor, no one’s a small actor; everyone is heard, and the accord at the end works for everyone there. That’s the goal. The file I was working on at the time was on the civil war in Yemen, and the group that brought us on wasn’t even part of the UN peace process, despite representing a sizable chunk of the Yemeni population. They weren’t in the room because certain folks could afford to overlook them, which was a big issue for me, both from an equity standpoint and efficacy standpoint if the settlement was going to last. So, I asked myself, What tools do I currently have that might address this issue? I’d been a high-functioning tech nerd, always asked to handle tech or online stuff at nonprofits, and I taught myself to code, building websites and visual identity for nonprofits. When I thought about my tools, branding came up. Brands teach others how to treat you. Every nation state has a brand. That’s why you don’t make certain moves with Germany or France because their brand informs us how they’ll respond. So, if you can shape a brand appropriately, you can unlock access to a myriad of spaces, including rooms like this one. I started dabbling in this, and by the time I left, this group was in the Peace Talks. That’s when I knew I was onto something.

Becky Mollenkamp: I don’t want you to go too far into what you were onto. What do people think branding is, and where are they getting that wrong?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: First, people often think branding is just about logos, typefaces, color palettes, and messaging—aesthetics. But scientifically, a brand is a system of ideas that influences others’ behavior. Said another way, it’s a kind of influential real estate in someone’s head. So, branding shifts focus from creating aesthetics to creating memorable assets that communicate and link back to this system of ideas in a way that continues to exert its influence. That’s all branding is—creating memorable brand assets.

Becky Mollenkamp: What I’m hearing is it’s how you communicate who you are in the world and what you demand of others, how they will interact with you. It’s almost like boundaries too, a proclamation of who I am in the world and why that matters, what I expect of others and how they’ll interact with me. But too many people get focused on the supporting pieces without actually knowing what it’s in support of.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: That’s exactly right. Those supporting pieces are just memory anchors for this proclamation so that when folks see these memory anchors, they think of this proclamation.

Becky Mollenkamp: Your focus is working with under-recognized social impact brands—people historically marginalized or not given the mic. Your interest is in folks who’ve been ignored.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Yes, that’s right.

Becky Mollenkamp: And before we talk about them, I know you’ve lived, worked, and schooled in five different countries, been in two conflict zones, are multilingual, and said you’re Nigerian. I wonder how these parts of your identity brought you to this work of helping under-recognized folks.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: My personal life is a tapestry of being an under-recognized leader, a trailblazer. There’s a sense of being visible but not seen—sometimes you’re the only woman, person of color, or queer person in the room. And even if you’re hyper-visible, they don’t really see you, and your ideas are underappreciated or misattributed to others. A small, petty thing I remember is from my high school Latin class. My dream was to go to Oxford, and my professor took promising students there every summer. So, I made sure I got the grades to be on that trip. When the names were brought up, mine wasn’t there. I asked a friend who made the list what grade he got—he said B-. I was in the B+ to A- range, but he got to go. Little ninth-grade Chloe remembers this because I did the work with an intention. It’s one example of how standards are one way in public and another in private, and it’s not even touching on the toll of being under-recognized and trying to be visible, whether for a cause or a business.

Becky Mollenkamp: It’s that not feeling seen, like you said. So you approach branding differently, bringing in brain science, psychology, and social change. You call yourself the brand scientist, doing brand awareness work. So, how does it differ when you’re using a science and psychology-based approach?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: When people hire a brand strategist, they hope for clarity around their brand and how it should operate in the world. But from a scientific perspective, what you’re after is behavior change, which means different metrics and approaches for success. Behavioral science is clear on how to go about behavioral design, so the focus is on designing behaviors individually and at scale. And that means different methods for shaping that system of ideas, managing influence, and the attention it garners.

Becky Mollenkamp: When you talk about behaviors, are you talking about your own as the brand or the ways people are relating to you, or both?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: A bit of both, but certainly more so the way folks relate to the brand.

Becky Mollenkamp: And how is that different for folks who have been under-recognized or underrepresented? Does it shift your approach to branding?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Absolutely, 100%, it does. Even when brand strategists use a scientific perspective, they don’t usually consider that visibility isn’t neutral. The set of cognitive biases that one considers in a behavior design process expands for under-recognized folks. Visibility biases, like the racial attention deficit—white Americans are 33% more likely to overlook their Black peers even when incentivized to pay attention to them—come into play. And that’s not even considering how other identities, like gender, socioeconomic status, or age, might compound these biases. There’s also the invisibility tax, which is the extra time, energy, and resources under-recognized folks pay to be visible at all.
2. Chloé Nwangwu: A great example of the invisibility tax is the ambition penalty, a concept coined by Stephanie O’Connell Rodriguez. It’s often mislabeled as the confidence gap, especially for women and girls, implying they just aren’t as confident as men. But the ambition penalty reveals that under-recognized folks know they’ll be penalized for displaying confidence, so they hold back to avoid that penalty. This penalty is one part of the invisibility tax, and I’ve identified others.

Becky Mollenkamp: I saw on your website that you also mention the validation paradox and reciprocity gap. Could you talk a bit about those?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Absolutely. The validation paradox happens when you’re given a position of power or validation, but none of the actual power to back it up, setting you up to fail.

Becky Mollenkamp: The first person who comes to mind is Linda Yaccarino at X, right? She’s given the title of CEO but has very little control, with Elon Musk still calling the shots. It’s like she has the title but none of the real authority.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Exactly, yes. And there’s also the reciprocity gap. Actually, that’s more a visibility bias than a part of the invisibility tax, but it connects to something I call the reciprocity ransom, which is the extra bit of resources that under-recognized folks have to give in order to activate a willingness for others to reciprocate or respond with goodwill. For example, think about a parent packing lunches for their kids. If that parent is a father, society reacts with, Wow, what a great dad! But if it’s a mother, it’s seen as just fulfilling her role. That’s the reciprocity gap at work. The reciprocity ransom is when society expects under-recognized people to give more and get less in return, which is why the “just give value for free” advice isn’t as effective for people at the bottom of the reciprocity food chain.

Becky Mollenkamp: I love how you’ve named these issues. So often in coaching, people come in feeling inadequate, and a big part of what I do is unpacking that and showing them it’s a systemic problem, not a personal failing. I bet naming these things brings a huge sense of relief for your clients.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Absolutely. One of the first reactions people have when they encounter my work is, Wait, it wasn’t me? They’ve been gaslit into gaslighting themselves, told they just need to “yes harder” to get what they want. But acknowledging that gap between outcomes is real and that it isn’t their personal failing—it’s often caused by under-recognition and the invisibility tax—is incredibly validating. It makes a huge difference to recognize that this dissatisfaction is warranted and that it’s not from lack of effort or capability.

Becky Mollenkamp: The solution, then, isn’t to play the game harder but to acknowledge it’s rigged and find a different approach, right? So when working with you, I’m guessing it’s about creating a new game for themselves.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Exactly. That’s where my methodology, which I call visibility engineering, comes in. If you’re under-recognized, the solution is a brand that’s engineered to be impossible to ignore. To do this, there are three primary building blocks: impression management, influence management, and attention management. These are the building blocks for creating your own rules of play. Everything in the status quo was created by people who architected their own rules, and now we’re told this is the way. But if that way doesn’t work for you, the answer is to create your own system using these foundational elements.

Becky Mollenkamp: Obviously, we can’t dive into every detail here, but can you give listeners a starting point?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Sure. I call this new structure your ecosystem of influence, which has three architectural pieces. The first is your platform—this is your premise, or your unique perspective on how the world could or should be different, and your positioning, or how that premise is distinct. Importantly, I focus on distinction, not differentiation, because distinction serves the brain better. The second piece is your circle of recognition, essentially your network, but structured to amplify your ideas in a behavior-changing way. This goes beyond sharing information; it’s about influencing actions. Finally, there’s motivational programming, which means creating visibility opportunities with stakeholders that build and maintain their attention. This palette of stakeholders includes more than just the typical “ideal client” and ensures that your visibility efforts actually gain traction.

Becky Mollenkamp: That’s a great framework to think through. Even just mapping out those areas could give someone insight into where they’re strong and where they need work. So, thank you for sharing that. Now, I have three quick questions to wrap up. First, what does your business name, Noby Works, mean?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: I have two first names, Chloé and Mma Dinobe, which is Nigerian and means “beauty in the heart.” Most girls with that name are nicknamed Mma, which means beauty, but my family called me Noby, which means heart. So, my business name means “heart works.”

Becky Mollenkamp: I love that. Second, I always ask guests to share a resource—a book, podcast, anything that’s been helpful to you.

1. Chloé Nwangwu: Oh, this could be so many things, but I’ll go with Change by Damon Centola. He’s a social scientist, and his work really informed my understanding of how ideas proliferate and the reality that going viral isn’t always desirable.

Becky Mollenkamp: That sounds intriguing; I’ll definitely check that out. And finally, what’s an organization doing great work in the world that you’d like people to know about?

1. Chloé Nwangwu: I’d like to mention Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy, an organization a friend of mine is starting. They’re reimagining participatory philanthropy, ensuring that big decisions and money movements involve the people most affected.

Becky Mollenkamp: I love that, and it brings us back to our conversation’s start. Thank you for sharing, and I’ll make a donation in your name to thank you for your time. I’ll also link it in the show notes. Thank you so much, Chloe. This has been an amazing discussion. We’re going to have a little separate chat in the bonus content about your experience of almost dying from anemia due to hustle culture, and I think that’s going to be a fascinating discussion. To access it, make sure to subscribe to Feminist Founders Newsletter. Thank you again, Chloe. I’ll link to everything about you in the show notes.

Chloé Nwangwu: Thank you for having me. This was lovely.