Seven Underrated Forms of Diversity

Different Kinds of Difference At Work

OK I’ll admit that this picture of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is not super relevant but she gets a couple mentions further down and yes I’ve been watching The Dropout.

Catch-up service:
Why Margaret Thatcher Didn’t Jump
The ‘Both Sides’ Problem
Notes on the Florentine Renaissance
The Good Enough Trap

Every era has its master concept: a shared idea or aspiration to which the great and good must pay homage. For the Romans, it was “civic virtue”; for the Victorians, “progress”. For us it is probably “diversity”. The word has become ubiquitous, present in every corporate mission statement.

Google Ngram

Diversity has an unambiguously positive valence. We celebrate diversity. This company is wonderfully diverse; this one, sadly not. Any institution which is not conspicuously diverse must be made more so, or risk seeming anachronistic. In recent years, the word has become more left-coded, but it is still more politically neutral than, say, equality.

As master concepts go, I think diversity is a pretty good one. It has its drawbacks, as when it’s used as an excuse for dumbing down. But the mixing-up of ethnicities, traditions and worldviews has generated a vast amount of cultural and economic value over the last 100 years, for a species that has spent much of its time on the planet in the violent defence of homogeneity. Diversity is written into the code of life itself. A planet which becomes less diverse in cultural or biological terms will be a less dynamic and interesting place.

I do think, however, that the sense in which we use the word is rather narrow. When organisations say they value diversity they almost always mean particular kinds of demographic diversity: race, gender, sexual orientation. But the principle of diversity can be understood and applied in a far greater - more diverse - variety of ways.

Here are seven kinds of diversity I think are underrated:

1. Cognitive Diversity. Since it was apparently not enough to argue for demographic diversity on moral or ethical grounds, the corporate world started to assert that it made for better business performance, as a greater range of perspectives was brought to bear on each problem. That case appears to have been wildly overstated and frankly it never made much sense: a group of middle-class graduates from elite universities is quite capable of sharing an identical outlook regardless of differences in ethnicity or gender. What companies should aim for is diversity of thought - of intellectual competencies and thinking styles (mathematical, verbal, systematic, creative, etc). That might include different perspectives derived from life experiences, but demographic diversity alone isn’t enough to deliver cognitive diversity because gender and race are not very accurate guides to how people think. (You also have to create a culture in which differences get expressed, see my book on productive disagreement.)

2. Class Diversity. Class gets downgraded or erased from the corporate discourse. This is partly because it’s less visible. Posters or pictures on a website can show men and women with differently coloured skin loving their lives in the office, but they can’t show someone who grew up on a council estate, went to a mediocre state school, and still made it to the C-Suite. (Well they can, but we won’t know their story). One significant divide in how people process the world is between those who went to university and those who didn’t, so if you value diversity of perspective, perhaps start there. Bonus: if you have a wider range of class backgrounds in your organisation, you’ll probably have more ethnic diversity too.

3. Agreeableness Diversity. A slightly awkward phrase for the simple idea that you should have a mix of nice people and well, less nice people. By the latter, I don’t mean you need any truly poisonous individuals on your team. I mean that you need people who can be abrupt and sometimes abrasive; who will prod and push at propositions until they’ve been fully tested; who will persist with a line of questioning after everyone else in the room feels awkward. Disagreeable people are terrible at charming their peers or superiors, and for that reason they often get filtered out in the hiring process or isolated at work, even when they’re brilliant at their job. But when allowed to be who they are, they can be worth billions. After a series of accidents and near-accidents involving Boeing planes, the company’s stock is in the toilet. A few years ago, its CEO spoke proudly about how he’d rid the company of “phenomenally talented assholes” - you know: those pesky engineers who whined on unreasonably about making the planes safe. The awkward buggers got replaced by management consultants with orthodontically perfect smiles and a nice line in conversation about ski resorts. Everyone got along really well.
   
   After the jump: four more underrated types of diversity, plus my thoughts on The Dropout, plus a bumper harvest of juicy links.