It inevitably happens every Pride Month – someone trolls one of my personal or our corporate posts harping that we shouldn’t be talking about diversity. And as an aside, so glad that there is a troll emoji in the latest update! I usually just ignore and block said 🧌, but this time, coming right back from vacation, I had the energy to educate. And while it may be quixotic (as well as mixing metaphors) I thought I would try and explain why diversity is a very good thing for the workplace.
As an American of recent Irish ancestry I grew up not just having meals where multiple types of potatoes were served, but also hearing about the Irish Potato Famine regularly. As a skeptical kid, I never understood how a crop failure could wreak such havoc – over one million dead. Only as an adult did I fully understand, and it taught me a valuable lesson about diversity.
I remember seeing the ancestral family land with adult eyes a decade ago and wondering how they could raise 12 children to adulthood on such poor, rocky soil. The answer was the potato. It is hardy, nutritious, calorie-dense, and easy to grow in Irish soil. By the mid-1800s nearly half of Ireland’s population relied almost exclusively on potatoes for their diet, and the rest incorporated it regularly in their diets.
But in the 1800s, Irish farmers became entirely dependent upon one type of potato – the Irish Lumper. The Lumper flourishes in nutrient-poor and wet soil and was adapted to growing conditions in Ireland, particularly western Ireland. Lumpers were grown from clones of one another – monoculture – that were well adapted to the local conditions and helped feed the growing Irish population. As long as conditions were good.
But when the environment changed and the blight swept through the country in the 1840s, the potatoes and the Irish population dependent on them were devastated. The genetically identical Lumpers were all very susceptible to blight, which turned them into inedible slime. Because Ireland was so dependent on this one strain of potato, one in eight Irish people died of starvation in three years during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.
Yes, I know that was a long introduction and more than enough discussion of potatoes to push your glycemic index to dangerous levels. But, just like evolutionary theory teaches us that populations with low genetic variation like the Lumper are more vulnerable to changing environmental conditions than diverse populations, the same is true in the workplace.
When we think about team dynamics and workplace productivity, it’s easy to get trapped in the idea that quick alignment is the best path to success. And it is true that a consistent corporate culture is shown to have a positive effect on productivity. It can also be easier to build a team if everyone comes from the same background, is the same gender, has similar education, and other common characteristics.
But there’s a dark side to the “monoculture” mentality, and it is dangerous to let its blight infect your team or company – groupthink. Groupthink is the tendency for members in a given group to gradually drift toward the same beliefs and styles of thinking. It has been shown to lead to conformity of thought, resistance to change, and rejection of potential risk. There are numerous business cases documenting groupthink failures or near failures, because teams and companies aligned their views too narrowly, ignored upstart competition, and were reinforced by groupthink. Bottled water would never be a threat to the soft drink industry, the iPhone didn’t have a keyboard and couldn’t compete with Blackberry, and even the ice shipping industry of the 1800s turned down the patent for ice-making machines because that wasn’t their business.
The best way to build an agile business that can weather the inevitable market and technology changes is to encourage diversity of thought, and the easiest way to build that is to bring together people from diverse backgrounds and create an environment where they can voice their opinions to contribute new approaches. Even just having someone challenge preconceived notions can help make a business plan more sound. With highly diverse teams, contrary opinions will be more commonly voiced, helping break the myopia of groupthink and enabling great ideas to turn into great products that meet and adapt to market needs.
I can think of countless examples of times when someone from a different work, environmental, educational, gender, etc… background raised a point about a product plan that made the team rethink how we developed it or took it to market and ended up making the project more successful.
So, my dear Lumper Troll, this is why companies care about and foster diversity.
Techno Tchotchke 