Diversity

I'd like to start out by saying that I believe in diversity. Diversity in experience and culture and viewpoint are, in my opinion, the best way to make a solid decision or come up with a brilliant idea in any field. However, I'm feeling like our current experiences with diversity aren't living up to the hype. I was sold on the idea that creating diversity in our boardrooms through culture, race and gender hiring would bring about the best ideas and we'd be off to the races. But with recent news articles on the demise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion executives in corporations I'm thinking we must have missed something.

And, it's a hunch and probably controversial to say, but I don't think Diversity is the panacea that it was sold as. Again, I firmly believe it is the way forward. What I don't think is that throwing a mix of races, genders and religions into a room your are going to automagically get a good outcome.

Corporations are world class at finding ways to extract money from any situation and it would seem to me that if diversity was in any way a boost to profit then we wouldn't have to had called for diversity in the workforce or diversity in the board room it would have already happened. I'm absolutely not calling for us to stand by and shrug our collective shoulders and just say that this experiment didn't work either. I just think we are missing something.

In my little idealized brain I'd like to think that if we could get more of that special sauce (whatever it is) then we'd see an increase in diversity as it would unlock the potential for better ideas. And this is where my brain gets stuck. I think I know what the missing secret ingredient is, but I also see that I have a belief that better ideas are what is needed in corporations. I think I'm idealizing a corporation. They don't want better ideas, they want profitable ideas. Ideas that don't take long to produce, ideas that generate a large income, ideas that don't require difficulty to reach. Every corporation worth it's salt will hire a marketing team to robustly refute everything I've just said, but then turn around and instead of improving their product they'd just buy up the competition. It's the easier answer.

I think diversity is the answer to producing brilliant ideas, I just don't think that business want's ideas. As for the secret sauce, I think the answer is communication. The ability to share experience between individuals and teams is the key to unlocking all of the things that make us different. Inherent in communication are the requirement for qualities that don't go so well with business, such as patience, respect, and empathy.

So a bit of a weirdly meandering rant, but I'm thinking that the key to diversity in capitalism is to change the system to value good ideas as opposed to focusing on profit. Yeah, that's not going to work.