Practicing true diversity is not the easy route. But so worth the journey.
We all love being in our bubble, our echo chambers. It is easy to talk to others who will vigorously nod their heads when we say something. Who will have similar views on the world. A similar upbringing. A comparable approach to tackling problems. Who have been brought up with similar values, ran through the same school system, saw the same movies.
But by staying in our own heads, our own bubbles and echochambers, we will mostly not create anything new or exciting. Creating new solutions,, truly good solutions, requires variability. «The new» is created by acknowledging and combining several ideas and viewpoints.
This can be a painful process.
For most of my professional life, I have made use of diversity as a tool for creating new solutions. At BrainStore, we found out very early in our quest to understand what good innovation is made of that bringing together different people with different viewpoints, from different age groups and with different fields of expertise is the most powerful way of co-creating new ideas (combined with a thorough method that allow for all those people to interact and create new ideas).
This solution is elegant for creating innovation. It allows for a wide range of variability in thoughts and solutions, it is fun, and what is more, it is over after a day or two, allowing everyone to go back to their «normal» work, where variability is not necessarily wanted or welcome.
But what if you want to create a diverse team that works together every day, that truly uses diversity as a tool for debate, for controled tension? Where you can’t go back to your comfort zone when you feel you’ve had enough, but where you are constantly in exchange with people who are very different?
I am just beginning to understand what this means, but here are my 2c that I gathered so far. They are meant to be reflexion and starting point, by no means are they final or a recipe. Nor are these my own thoughts only, but have been enriched by other people who care about diversity, for instance the participants of the EBBF breakfast meeting in Basel, my collaboration coaching colleagues within various circles, my colleagues at Project R in Zürich and my friends with whom I am reflecting on the topic.
- Diversity «is».
What a strange idea. But think about it. Even in a seemingly heterogenous group, every person brings many layers to the table that are unknown to the others in the group. Different upbringing, different experiences, different traumas small and large. Diversity is already there. It is a fact, a given thing that any group has to deal with. Diversity is not only what we can visibly see in a team, for instance if there is gender, age or racial balance. There are many other layers of diversity and if we have a team that is diverging in a more «dramatic» way this is even more true. For instance, as soon as cultural differences or experiences from very different previous work experience (very corporate, very self-organised, for instance) come into play it gets much more demanding to work with a diverse team.
2. Purpose
Any team needs a purpose, something you can believe in, to build the community and common ground in which to function as a team. If there is no common purpose, there is no direction. The purpose directs all thoughts, activities, decision making processes.
3. Common values
Diversity needs ongoing discussion about values that the team has and that everyone can agree with. Common values make sure that, even with the greatest diversity, the team has clarity about the way it is working together.
4. Explicit agreements
On the foundation of the purpose and the values, diverse teams find it helpful to develop a set of agreements that guide collaboration and decision making processes. If agreements are not explicit, they are unclear. Unspoken rules and agreements often interfere with the diversity because there could be very different underlying beliefs, cultural habits and problem solving approaches.
5. Vulnerability
Diverse teams have to get to know each other even better than more homogenous groups. It is crucial that everyone knows the things that are not explicitly present and visible because without them, the other person is even more enigmatic than it is already the case in any group constellation. Getting to know each other requires vulnerability and of course the respect of the others for being vulnerable.
6. Time
Operating as a diverse team requires much more time for conversations and learning about each other. Sometimes, understanding each other can take up so much time that it is frustrating, which again results in the need for time to recover from the frustration.
7. Rituals
Like any team, small rituals can help diverse groups to function better. One technique can be to “check in” and “check” out before and after meetings, with every person stating their current state of mind or saying something that allows the others to connect with that person. This particular ritual is a creation of the Kaos Pilots.
8. Respect, even love for each other
Being in a diverse group requires an enormous amount of tolerance from all people involved. There are things happening all the time that interfere with how one person in the group would normally handle a situation, and it is not always easy and often a messy process to come to fruitful conclusions (when a diverse team does reach a conclusion, though, it is often very beautiful and refined). This frustration level requires that the group members respect and care about each other and, like in any good relationship, can let go of the many shortcomings that everyone brings to the group. When a team reaches a certain maturity level, this can result in real love for the other team members. But also respect, with an openness to acknowledge that we are all far from perfect, is a good basis for working together.
Know your biases
One thing that is very important for diverse teams is the knowledge and awareness of unconscious biases that we all carry about other people. We all have unconscious biases about race, gender, age, sexual orientation, people from different cultures. It is not healthy to pretend that we do not carry these biases. Only by knowing that we are biased can we start working on letting go of the biases and to consciously look at the prejudices we all carry within us.
Systems, not hierarchies, benefit diverse teams
For a diverse team to function well, networked structures are much more beneficial than hierarchical structures, because in hierarchical structures we can cover up a lot of the problems that arise in diverse teams and bury them under a sort of corporate culture, but that also means that we often loose the true benefits of a diverse team, which is the strength in co-creating new solutions and in tackling problems with a broader mindset. In more networked structures (self-organisation, teal organisations), the intense interaction between all people involved creates a better understanding of everyone in the group, and only then can everyone benefit from the diversity.
