The Titanic Importance of Diversity and Inclusion

Business Psychology tells us the mind is like an iceberg: ninety-five per cent of it unconscious, five percent on the surface. Unconscious bias is much in the news. As business leaders, what do we do with that other ninety-five per cent?

Most of the time we just don’t know. There are clues to what happens in our unconscious, most famously present in dreams. Psychoanalysis relies heavily on the remembered bits, the stories and images our minds show us when they’re churning away in sleep. Other clues emerge through our behaviour, perhaps especially our behaviour at work.

We all know the employee who quietly enquires after the wellbeing of a colleague outside their "in-group", risking putting their foot in it, but determined to see if they can do anything to help. And we all know the colleague who plays it "safe", remaining in their watertight compartment, and running only with the pack that validates them.

But who, from the point of view of the business, is really the safer employee?

Diversity and Inclusion has gone through many incarnations since it first began to be a focus during the 1960s. At its worst it has sometimes been a superficial labels game. At its best, it can be a place where, by practicing the skill and discipline of listening to and learning from people they might otherwise have regarded as "other", employees can achieve better awareness of the unconscious roots of their own behaviour and assumptions; and where businesses, by engaging with employees in this way, can give themselves a whole new world of understanding of the holistic experience of the people they need to attract and retain in order to succeed.

Why does this matter? Businesses often face censure for traits over which they have incomplete control. The overwhelmingly male airline pilot workforce (16 to 1 in the UK in 2016) is an oft-quoted, but still horrendous, example of this. But an airline business is only one part of a complex system in which part-unconscious gender bias starts in schools and colleges, and extends into the traditional proving grounds of university and the military. A blame game helps no one, least of all the girls and women who aspire to close the gap. But if the experience and perceptions of women and girls in relation to aviation could be understood in the round, including "softer" factors like confidence, motivation and perception, airlines could be acting in multiple dimensions to address this, right now.

AIRBUS, as it happens, is already doing this. Perhaps unsurprisingly voted Best Employer in France by the Palmarès Employeurs for a second year in 2012, it runs activities to encourage early female interest in relevant STEM subjects, and also holds specific "girls into engineering" events, many in the UK. It has also launched a three-month Industrial Cadets (IC) programme that will teach 60 girls about aeronautical engineering and aviation.

Back to the iceberg. We can never know our unconscious mind in full. But if we paid more attention to our own behaviour as we encounter the “other” there are many mistakes we would never make. We would never make assumptions that damn people on the basis of a perceived quirk. We would make better, more rational, more self-aware decisions. And perhaps most importantly we would avoid the conflicts we know cost more than they could ever achieve.

Captain Edward Smith of the doomed Titanic received multiple ice warnings via his onboard Marconi wireless. We can only guess at the workings of his mind. We know he behaved with honour. We know he was a skilled captain, narrowly averting disaster, even before the ship had left Southampton, when Titanic’s vast bulk caused the neighbouring New York to lurch dangerously towards it. But we also know that despite the ice, Titanic was steaming at Full Speed Ahead when the iceberg was sighted. The night was a lookout’s dream, crystal clear, calm as a millpond. The conscious mind of Captain Smith, the five per cent that lay above the surface, was given all the information it needed to give the ship enough time to turn.

But churning away beneath the surface of the captain’s mind were more mysterious factors. The desire, perhaps, to be the fastest ever to New York? To be the Lone Hero of the Hour? To look amazing to his employers, whatever peril this placed them, and the people for whom they had a duty of care, in? Were some of these factors in play for Nick Leeson of Barings?

The most important lesson of Diversity and Inclusion is that the iceberg isn’t somewhere out there. It’s lurking inside each of us, and will bring us - both individually and collectively - to our greatest times of test. Diversity and Inclusion driven employee engagement is so much more than a nice-to-have. It's one of the best ways we know to get a business to its destination ship-shape, crowds cheering, crew intact, oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah.