Diversity + Psychological Safety Optimizing for Creativity and Innovation
More diverse teams produce more innovations. The larger the problems you are trying to solve, the more of a profound impact diversity can have in helping to solve them. In the Diversity Bonus, Scott Page lays out some compelling arguments that prove the case for diversity. The innovation argument, all by itself, is a robust and compelling argument from a business perspective, and I’ve seen it pay off in spades in my own work with teams. I have been building software products for the better part of two decades and can tell you from direct experience that I observe more diverse teams to be consistently more innovative. The Harvard Business Review published this article in 2016 that explains this phenomenon. More diversity gives teams the following benefits:
>> They focus more on facts vs. instincts.
>> The challenge facts more intensely.
>> They bring more divergent ideas to the table.
It is not always the case, however, that diversity leads to more innovation. If our intent is to maximize innovation and creativity, we need to find ways to tap into the power that lies in that diversity and creates the space for these three benefits to manifest.
TYPES OF DIVERSITY ARE IMPORTANT
Let's start with a discussion about what diversity is. We typically think about diversity in a set of limited categories like sex, race, or sexual orientation, but that is a limited view of what is possible. There are a near-infinite number of other ways to improve the diversity of your teams and that can extend way beyond these traditional boundaries. Every ecosystem benefits in different ways from different types of diversity. It is important to recognize the value of stepping out of the echo chamber requires improving the diversity of your teams.
Here are a number of examples, but again, the possibilities are endless:
Socioeconomic Background Diversity: The range within this is extreme from very poor (think a rural upbringing in an emerging nation) to very wealthy (think the Hamptons and an Ivy League college.) The perspectives available within these two extremes can be valuable to many teams. In some scenarios, it may be incredibly useful to have empathy and perspective from either group.
Geographic Diversity: Again, this is a near-infinite range with tremendous implications about the perspectives. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, it is incredibly useful to have perspectives that represent the geographic regions in which you intend to operate in, as they have lived there, and it may also be useful to get perspectives that have never set foot in that region.
Military Background Diversity: This is a highly specific example, but I’ve been involved in more than one situation where it mattered, so I am using it as an example. In some situations, you may want to source people who were “military brats” as kids and have been in the military their entire adult lives while at the other extreme, it may be useful to include people who have never set foot on a military base to improve perspective.
Athletic Diversity: In some cases, it may be useful to source people for your team who were professional athletes and now run marathons and to include folks who have never thrown a ball of any sort to get improved perspectives in some domains.
Ability Diversity: This one is close to home for me in the software space, as my company wants to build applications and software accessible to all. There are very few cases where we shouldn’t be thinking about people with limited abilities and how our products and services show up for them. Unfortunately, this is one type of diversity that is often overlooked.
Age Diversity: This is another one that is really important in many ecosystems. People with more time on the planet might bring more authentic wisdom to conversations, while younger generations are generally much closer to current trends, and technologies, and clearly bring different mindsets. Figuring out how to take advantage of both types of knowledge and perspectives can be extremely valuable.
We could go on for days with lists of attributes that would improve the diversity of your teams. What I think is important for leaders to do is to sit down periodically and look authentically at their teams and the diversity of perspectives that they have so that they can be purposeful about improving diversity when opportunities to do so present themselves.
All other things being equal, teams should always choose the more diverse candidate.
I can’t help but think of the Zen Buddhist concept of the “child’s mind” when I think about diversity and how important it is to have people whose minds aren’t necessarily filled with certainty about the way things work.
The more experience and education you have in any domain, the more likely you are miss or overlook simple ideas that may lead to innovations.
IMPROVING DIVERSITY
Historically, it is my conjecture that teams have done a poor job of sourcing for diversity. If we care about innovation, we need to change that. On the Product Momentum Podcast, I had the chance to talk deeply with Dr. Timothy Clark about his four stages of psychological safety. His elegant framework shows a clear hierarchy among business teams and their relationship to psychological safety. He says there are four levels that teams exhibit starting with “Inclusion Safety,” and working through both “ ”Learning Safety” and “Contributor Safety.” He claims the ultimate teams have “Challenger Safety,” where they authentically feel as though they can assert their ideas even if they may not be in accordance with the status quo and differ from those in power. When you combine his work with Amy Edmonson’s work with Google on Project Aristotle, you can see a clear demonstration of the relationship between psychological safety and innovation.
Bernadette Smith, in the book Inclusive 360, gives strategies for building an equitable organization. Her framework for Asking, Connecting & Respecting is a brilliant way to systematically improve conversations at the ground level and organizational diversity at scale. Implementing tools like these creates forcing functions for systematically improving diversity by being objective and proactive about the factors that lead to it in organizations.
“Respect the data, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Respect the data, especially when it doesn’t make sense.”
— Bernadette Smith
Here is a simple four-quadrant model that explains how important both of these concepts are if you want more innovation from your teams. If we put Diversity on the vertical axis and use Dr. Timothy Clark’s model of Psychological Safety on the horizontal, some patterns emerge that make it clear. If we want innovation, we need to invest in improving both factors.
Lets discuss each quadrant, in turn:
The Prison of Predictability: The bottom-left quadrant describes an environment with a homogenous crew that has a low level of safety. Without diversity, and without psychological safety, we can write off innovation. In these types of team environments, leaders need to provide a high degree of structure and cannot expect much learning or improvement to occur.
The Zone of Untapped Potential: In the upper-left quadrant, we may have a team with a broad base of life experiences and perspectives, but without psychological safety, they may have ideas and contributions that aren’t even heard. It will likely result in a frustrated staff with high turnover.
The Echo Chamber: In the bottom-right quadrant, we may have achieved success with psychological safety, but we are missing the value to be gained from diverse perspectives. You may see a lot of affirmation of ideas, head nodding, and back-patting. You may have candor and ideas being challenged, but will not likely get the production of diverse or unexpected ideas in this environment.
The Innovation Zone: When you have both a high degree of diversity on your team and a high degree of psychological safety, you can bet on getting unexpected and diverse ideas to experiment with. Innovation requires divergent ideas. It requires the ability for teams to converge upon the problems at hand, challenge current ideas and tap into their diverse experiences and knowledge to derive unique ideas with which to experiment.
The link between diversity and performance has been well-established in academia. Extending performance in the context of innovation is important for the future of your organization. Without ideas about how to improve the future, firms are on the path to irrelevance.
Innovation is required for adaption to future changes in any market.
In summary, here are some things you can do today to help you derive more innovations from your teams:
1. Pay close attention to the diversity of your teams. Understand, to the greatest degree possible, how diverse your perspectives are.
2. When opportunities arise to change your team, all other things being equal, increase the diversity of the group.
3. Create forcing functions and systems that improve diversity.
4. Model and ensure people are included and heard.
5. Pay attention to your people’s learning and growing.
6. Model and ensure your team’s contributions are valued.
7. Model and support the challenging of ideas frequently.
REFERENCES:
The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy (2017)
Diverse Teams are Smarter, HBR 2016
How to Champion a Product Inclusion Mindset, ITX (2021)
Zen Mind, Child’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki
Timothy Clark Podcast Episode, Product Momentum (2021)
The Four Stages of Psychological Safety, by Timothy Clark Ph.D. (2020)
Inclusive 360, by Bernadette Smith (2021)
The ARC Method, The Equality Institute
Extreme Teaming, by Amy Edmonson (2017)
To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety, by Henrick Bresman, Ph.D. and Amy Edmonson, Ph.D. (2022)
