When numbers don’t cut it: How to use empirical design challenges as catalysts for actionable change

Diversity in the workplace has been a big topic to weigh in on this year. While the notion that ‘diversity adds value to the workplace’ is not new, the argument for diversity has been reignited by social unrest and movements like Black Lives Matter. Many of these renewed conversations talk about diversity in very vague terms, often quantifying its value via numbers devoid of any context or narrative. Broad-reaching syndicates like Harvard Business Review or Boston Consulting Group tout the value of diversity with trackable metrics like profits or the gender breakdown of S&P 500 companies over time.

As an innovation company, we too think diversity is important to driving positive change. A Boston Consulting Group report from 2017 found that a significant positive relationship exists between innovation and factors like country of origin in companies working with complex problems. A recent informal slack poll (see above) estimates that less than half of Above’s staff is actually Swedish, despite being located in Sweden.

So, according to the numbers, we’re doing a decent job of being diverse. But, that doesn’t reflect if we actually know how diversity helps our company. Therein lies the problem with quantifying undeniably human characteristics like diversity. While numbers help create a universal language of understanding, they paint a grossly incomplete picture of what it means to be diverse.

For us, diversity is about the nuance in the human experience that shapes how we perceive the world. An entire lifetime of experiences and social/environmental conditioning factor into one’s “diversity.” So, reducing it into quantifiable means simply doesn’t cut it because, at the end of the day, 2-dimensional graphs and scatterplots are a poor representation of a 3-dimensional life.

If numbers don’t tell the full story of our company’s diversity, how else can we inspect how we’re doing? More importantly, what are we doing to leverage the broad range of perspectives that can benefit our problem-solving heuristics in projects?

🧠 The Challenge:

To answer this, we needed to empirically tap into unique human experiences while leveling the playing field somehow. A design challenge seemed like the ideal tool for this task. We created a fictional background context and a challenge centering around scarcity in mental healthcare and sent it around the company. Anyone could submit a 1-page document as a response. The format of that 1-page response was left up to the participants. In fact, pretty much everything was left up to the participants. The only control factor in this whole thought experiment is that everyone was given the same brief (shown below).

We’ll admit now that using a design challenge to teach us about the diversity of our company was a total gamble. Lots of hours could have been put creating & distributing something that would solicit nearly identical responses. That outcome would have shown us that we weren’t as diverse as we thought, but not much else.

Luckily, the gamble paid off. Responses varied from highly pragmatic to deeply personal. We decided not to include any demographic data about our respondents. Instead, we encourage you to read some selected responses (edited only for brevity/clarity) and form your own opinions before we talk about why we think the gamble paid off. That’s it. No strings attached. In many ways, this article should be as much of a thought experiment for you — the reader — as it was for us.

🔐 What we learned:

As mentioned earlier, this exercise taught us a lot more than we expected. While some respondents took extremely pragmatic and measured approaches like interviewing experts, others spoke of their own personal struggles identifying when they needed mental help. We believe the range of responses confirms our idea that people’s entire lives affect how they identify problems — not just singular or even plural aspects of their demographic data like the color of their skin or region where they were born.

We do not deny that certain demographic tick boxes like race or gender do, undoubtedly, affect people’s lived experiences. But, at the end of the day, singular identifiers like race, religion, gender, or ethnicity do not solely inform how people problem-solve. Instead, it is strong experiences (negative and positive) that deeply influence how people identify, prioritize, and rationalize around problems.

Despite having different life experiences, there were some common themes that nearly all respondents had. The stigma associated with mental health seemed to be a problem that all responses voiced unanimously, despite the fact that the word stigma was not mentioned in the challenge prompt itself.

From this, we believe that the ‘strong experiences’ that shape peoples’ problem-solving heuristics can be broken down into two categories: unique and universal. Unique experiences refer to events that one might experience within a highly situational context. For example, one respondent’s notion of mental health was strongly tied to conflict in their home country. While this type of experience was deeply impactful to the individual, it would also be harder for other respondents who had never experienced that same conflict to relate to.

On the other hand, universal experiences are common events that a large percentage of people experience over a lifetime, such as the stigma associated with talking about personal struggles like mental health. These universal experiences help us relate to one another, bridging the gap of understanding created by individuals’ unique experiences.

🔜 What we’ll do:

Undoubtedly, the design challenge was a productive exercise in helping us be more self-aware of the range of perspectives in our company. Such self-awareness can be a catalyst for change, so we shouldn’t stop at enlightenment, but, rather, ask ourselves: how can we turn these learnings into actionable points in our company?

First, we think that soliciting all perspectives in a team can be beneficial to the foundation phase of our design process. It’s always difficult to get everyone on the same page when starting a new project. The design challenge showed us that is due, in part, to everyone approaching a new problem in a completely different way, influenced by their own experience and relation to that problem.

Instead of starting our foundation by brainstorming together and, therefore, creating bias together, we will start experimenting with a new format that asks every individual to give their experiential “2 cents” on how they think we should start off the project and what paths might be worth exploring. Similar to the design challenge, this could be in the form of a few paragraphs relaying how each individual thinks we should structure and prioritize problem-solving in a project.

By allowing the space to reflect on a project individually before coming together as a team, we hope to uncover the different voices that our company clearly has but may not always be heard.

Secondly, this extensive and diverse collection of personal experiences can also be incorporated into our pitch process. If we’re pitching a project to a company in India, it makes sense to consult the respondent from Kerala, regardless of what their job title in the company may be. Chances are they have valuable insight to help make the pitch stronger. While this seems logical and straight forward enough, it is often overlooked. Job titles, much like numbers, tend to box in people and hinder diversity’s potential…but that’s a topic for a different article.

The design challenge proved to be a catalyst for change within our company. It helped us unlock new ways of actually leveraging diversity in our design and business processes, rather than settling for well-meaning but ultimately superficial (re: unproductive) declarations of “we are a diverse company!” The thing about diversity is that you can always do better.

So, how can you leverage diversity in a meaningful way? We can’t answer that but can recommend starting with an empirical assessment of the diverse perspectives in your company rather than a quantitative one. After all, diversity should be about letting people speak for themselves instead of numbers on their behalf.

Thanks to Zoey Tsopela & Ana Barbosa for their contributions to this piece.