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Optimizing Diversity 25 July 2005
Innovation thrives on diversity. Not diversity based on gender or ethnicity, but rather diversity of experience. When a group of people brings a variety of perspectives and backgrounds to bear on a complex problem, the eventual solution is predictably better than the one arrived at by a more homogeneous group.
Researchers and books have provided case examples as well as theoretical models to demonstrate the large value that diversity of viewpoints gives to any kind of creative project. MIT’s Deborah Ancona described “X-teams,” whose members come from a variety of functions and organizations. These teams perform significantly better on innovative tasks than do those with a more homogeneous cast of characters. Harvard’s Dorothy Leonard has written about “creative abrasion,” the process by which divergent views shape a distinctive and successful product or service.
Given the strong results that come with diversity, it’s surprising how insular many teams remain – often all of their members are drawn from the same level of the same company; frequently they all belong to the same functional area. The scope of diversity is limited.
This occurs because, while diversity brings innovation, it also poses a number of challenges. Consider these two issues in managing diversity:
1. Most people prefer to work with those who are similar to themselves
Given a choice, most people would prefer similarity over diversity. They prefer similarity in outlook. In a 1990 study by Ancona and Caldwell on team performance, for example, the authors found that team members communicated more with outsiders who had similar functional backgrounds. Engineers like to talk to other engineers; marketers talk to other marketers.
In a different, but related context, researchers have found that opposites do not attract -- most people prefer similarity in marriage. A 2003 report by Cornell researchers Dr. Stephen T. Emlen and Dr. Peter M. Buston reported that: "humans often seek in a spouse the sort of person they know best: themselves.”
There are understandable reasons why people would prefer to work with those of similar backgrounds – it makes work life easier, more predictable, and more efficient. Communication can be streamlined and made more nuanced if you’re confident that your colleague “speaks the same language,” with the same understanding of terms and their unstated meaning.
Diverse teams generate more conflict – there are more disagreements. Many researchers have found that this conflict is ultimately very productive, as per Dorothy Leonard’s “creative abrasion.” However, for the people involved, this conflict is both uncomfortable and time-consuming.
2. While some diversity is good, more diversity is not necessarily better
Finding the right amount of diversity in a team is a difficult problem. If we were to put it in graphical terms, we might see an “inverted-U”- shaped relationship between diversity and team success:
Diversity and Performance
If this schematic accurately describes the problem, it also implies that most companies will have less diversity than they should – they’ll be at the red ‘X’ in the diagram above. This is because the problems coming from too little diversity are less than those coming from a group that is continually mired in conflict.
Over time, a number of management solutions have arisen to address this diversity dilemma. Here are two:
n Mandate cross-functionality. There are many good reasons to assemble a team with members from different functional areas. One of these is its effect on diverse perspectives: by definition, different functional managers will bring different perspectives to a project.
n Bring in outsiders. Many of those who work on creative projects, like ad agency people or auto designers, move around between employers. The designer of Renault’s new Logan, Kenneth Melville, came to Renault from DaimlerChrysler. Bob Lutz, now head of product development and Vice Chairman at GM, started his career at Ford and then went to Chrysler.
While these approaches should increase diversity in product teams, I suspect that, at least initially, the general tendency of most organizations will be to try to subvert these solutions, because they create discomfort.
Here’s an example of subversion: when a large automotive manufacturer began creating “cross-functional” teams, they interpreted this to mean “across engineering disciplines,” generating a “cross-functional” team of mechanical-, industrial-, and electrical engineers with no members from other functions such as marketing or manufacturing!
In other situations, the working team is composed of one function, while other functions sit on a review committee without being part of the work. In theory the team is cross-functional; in practice one function does most of the team’s work. This is more comfortable for all involved in the project, but it reduces the scope of information and perspective on the working team.
It may be true that most people prefer to work with folks who are similar to themselves. There are certainly, however, many people who seek out situations where they can work with people who have different perspectives. For those charged with improving the quality of innovative efforts, one of the challenges is to encourage the tendencies for diversity in environments that tend towards homogeneity.
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