Diversity Is Too Much About Letters, And Not Enough About Action

There are several tiers to this concept.

The first tier is about how we speak about diversity not being common or universal, even within the same industry. You’ll see DEI, DEIB, DEIBA, D&I, and more.

That tier is not necessarily surprising: acronyms allow us to easily form in-groups and out-groups around what we know and have access to . As we find our tribe within work, we become more comfortable. It also allows for easy recall. We can chunk information and reduce brain strain.

The problem there, though: Every time we introduce a new word or concept, we need a relatively-accepted definition of that term, and we need to figure out how it fits into the model and interacts with the other terms in the model. There is virtually universal acceptance on what “CAGR” means as an acronym: a compound annual growth rate. An executive may not look at “DEIBA” and see the same clarity.

A second tier: diversity and inclusion discussions are deeply tied to cultural norms, but cultural norms obviously vary in Chile and Beijing and New York City. You cannot “one-size-fits-all” diversity discussions because the concept is experienced at the intersection of generations of culture, belief, and assumption.

A third tier: so much of diversity in the past 15 months has felt performative in nature, i.e. a corporate Instagram post juxtaposed with a lily-white Board of Directors group shot. The conversation feels muddled in part because we don’t conclusively know what corporations are supposed to do. We expect a lot from them because they pay us and we spend hours of our weeks on their projects, but we seem unclear on their exact role, and what accountabilities they have to social justice issues.

What we need is something that can cut across language/definitions, cultural barriers, and help us contextualize a company’s role in DEI more.

The frame begins with the brain

Everyone has a brain, regardless of Chile or Beijing or NYC being your base. Let’s start there.

Your brain obviously drives decision-making, but also drives your unconscious and conscious biases.

My people at Neuroleaderhip Institute havedone much research on diversity and brain science, highlighted by two Harvard Business Review pieces in 2016: the first was about diverse teams feeling less comfortable and thus performing better , and its sequel was about why diverse teams are ultimately smarter.

All-in; diverse teams are smarter, perform better, and improve the bottom line.

The framing, then, should be in science. We don’t need new slide decks about belonging with flowery language about its importance. Most of us inherently know that we need others, and need to feel we belong to something, to live a fulfilling life. That’s not necessarily a compelling business argument.

The problem is often how we train the brain organizationally

The core problem with diversity training for generations has been that people don’t like being told what to believe , and anything that feels like pressure to think a certain way makes people want to do the opposite.

Backlash is also triggered by the message that differences among people are valuable . There is a deeply tribal aspect of human nature opposed to this message. People naturally divide the world into “us” versus “them,” and when you meet someone new, your brain instantly categorizes them either as an outsider or as one of your own. That tendency is so ingrained that dividing people into groups leads individuals to discriminate against out-group members even when the division is based on something as arbitrary as a coin toss.

Princeton University political psychologist Karen Stenner has long argued that people with authoritarian personalities — those valuing strong and forceful control of situations and society, a trait more common in senior leaders — can ultimately become more racist when faced with the inclusion message, not less.

“Well-meaning programs celebrating multiculturalism…might aggravate more than educate, might intensify rather than diminish, intolerance,” she has written. And this holds up in research — in a study with a sample size of 10,000+ on corporate diversity initiatives, the researchers found, distressingly:

“We found very little evidence that diversity training affected the behavior of men or white employees overall — the two groups who typically hold the most power in organizations and are often the primary targets of these interventions.”

How could we establish a clearer frame for diversity and inclusion?

When people perceive one another as members of the same in-group, racial bias — and possibly other forms of bias against groups of people — tends to melt away.

Jay Van Bavel, a social neuroscientist at New York University, randomly assigned people to two arbitrary mixed-race teams. The importance of race decreased in the minds of participants — and brain scans found that their amygdala activated when participants viewed photos of their own team members, regardless of the individuals’ race.

Thus, the way to increase inclusion in the workplace is to make everyone feel like they’re part of the same team.

“Being part of the same team” is deeply tied to the idea of psychological safety, which we’ve known for years is a major driver of organizational and team success.

The performative question

Can we make organizations less performative around public-facing DEI efforts?

Writ large, no. It’s the path of least resistance and some organizations will take it, check the box, and move on to more “business-y” concepts.

In May, Basecamp tried to ban discussion of politics at work , and the whole thing blew up on them horribly, including 20+ employees quitting. Their co-founder, Jason Fried, made a point in his initial post about the ban. It’s long, but important:

No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size. And we’re damn proud of it. Our work, plus that kind of giving, should occupy our full attention. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here. Employees are free to take up whatever cause they want, support whatever movements they’d like, and speak out on whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that (and, unfortunately, there are far too many to choose from). But that’s their business, not ours. We’re in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge. We’re responsible for ourselves. That’s more than enough for us.

Some may hideously disagree with that — and that would be your brain framing! — but some probably do agree.

It brings up a much bigger issue than we can reasonably solve here: what’s the role of a company in social justice? Those answers will vary greatly by person and their own experiences, assumptions, biases, and connection to work.

Internally, when we discuss this topic, we think that two of the biggest things organizations can do around broader social justice are:

1. Bring different people and perspectives together via hiring and retention.
2. Pay people fairly-to-above market so that they can invest in causes they care about outside of work.

If you only hire for sameness (the old “cultural fit” problem) and you pay people poorly, you aren’t advancing much — because now a huge advantage of organizational culture, i.e. the ability to work on projects with people different from you, is gone. And without money to meet your basic needs, giving becomes much harder.

If organizations focused on diverse hiring, knew the pitfalls of diversity training and focused on reducing those, reframed these DEI discussions around brain science, and paid people fairly, we’d be cutting through some of the Instagram noise and the acronym soup around these issues and starting to see a bit more change.

Can we shift 400 years+ of problematic events in 2–3 great hires and 3–4 great trainings? No. But we can begin to chip away at what needs to be done.