On Diversity
Diversity is a defining feature of the world we live in, and it’s an important one. Just look around, and you'll see that things are different from one another —very different. In nature, this diversity is responsible for a wide range of organisms' behaviors, which, as part of an ecosystem, contributes to the thriving of the whole. At the human level, this diversity is even more prevalent, and we're talking about the same species here. Every human is unique among billions of people who live, have ever lived, and will live. This individuality is unique in the natural world, resulting from a specific genetic endowment interacting with a particular environment, producing a wide spectrum of behaviors.
This diversity is a blessing as it allows humans to organize themselves in rich, diverse, and dynamic settings to address a complex and ever-changing environment. However, from a scientific standpoint, it can be viewed as a curse, as the spectrum of individual behavior makes it challenging for scientists to grasp. And it becomes even more complicated when group behavior is involved, as individual behavior can change at the group level—a phenomenon known as scale transformation. Smart individuals can collectively exhibit stupidity, and vice versa.
In recent years, diversity has come under the spotlight in business for good reasons. However, the application of diversity in practice often falls short of reflecting the thriving ecosystemic diversity observed in nature. Most of the time, diversity is reduced to merely gender, background, and ethnicity. This is not inherently wrong, and one can easily see the rationale behind it. When you have women and men coming from different backgrounds and having different ethnic roots, one assumes that they will behave and do things differently to address real-world problems. This assumption is a very bold one.
Firstly, as mentioned above, diversity as a building block of an ecosystem is not phenotypic in nature. It is less about the apparent characteristics of individuals, although it is nice to have. In other words, you can have “diverse” people who, when gone through the same experience and education mold, will behave quite conventionally, and this has the complete inverse effect from the initial intention. Just take a bunch of very diverse people who went to business school. They will likely apply what they were taught in conventional management. This unfortunately contributes to the spread of conventional thinking, especially given that management is no science. This is no diversity. True diversity lies not in cosmetic features. It is about different thinking, behaviors, and most importantly actions. Let’s call it effective diversity. You want people who see things differently, who approach problems from different angles, who explore novel routes especially in an ever complex and changing environment.
Secondly, diversity is just one of the building blocks of the system that we want to steer. Left alone, diversity has no value whatsoever. The other components are of much importance. They can be summarized as proper governance. It entails a culture of openness to allow different opinions and practices to emerge. Also, fostering a rich network will help ideas to easily circulate among people. And finally, when you have open people who communicate their different opinions across the network, not only new solutions emerge but also people, along with the whole system, evolve. Meaning, actions that get implemented successfully will get selected, improved, and perpetuated in an evolutionary way.
Finally, diversity is something that should be put into perspective. We can’t allow diversity to manifest itself every time and everywhere. There are domains and contexts in which bringing different perspectives is not advisable, as things need to get done. This lies within the balanced relationships between exploration and exploitation. As one can use diversity to explore and wander, exploitation is about doing things efficiently and effectively, a process that is less diversity-prone.
This can be explained from an evolutionary standpoint. In fact, companies can use the power of effective diversity to explore the landscape fitness, made of peaks, valleys, and holes with different sizes. Diversity helps explore new terrain of problem-solving. It is true that it has lots of waste. Just look at the failure rate of startups or broader innovation. But the overall system benefits immensely. Once the problem-solving solution reaches its peak of fitness, if it does of course, exploration and its diversity make room for exploitation. This latter requires efficient resources management to protect and perpetuate the high fitness solution that was very difficult to attain in the first place. All in all, diversity has its value, but it depends on the position within the exploration-exploitation continuum, and provided it is translated into the real world, effectively.
