January112009
Change the Role, Not the Person
Q: We’ve spent a lot of time and money on training sessions to increase diversity awareness and a lot of people seem to respond well. Why don’t we see better bottom-line results from these programs?
A: The goal of most diversity programs is to maximize diversity and inclusion and therefore foster an improved work environment. Some believe the absence of inclusion can be remedied by exposing people to the experiences and uniqueness of other people. The assumption is that this intervention will create a change in the individual, causing them to recognize the value that each person possesses, thereby resulting in a wider harmony and better relations.
While it is true that knowledge of other people’s experiences will bring greater understanding and promote empathy between people who might otherwise not understand each other, there are two problems with this approach. First, changing people is extremely difficult. People don’t like to change and they particularly don’t like other people trying to change them. Secondly, empathy is not enough. If a business is to function better, greater empathy is only going to get you so far.
If the goal is to change behavior, trying to change people is going too far, and will likely fail. But trying to make them more empathetic is probably not going far enough. What is required is to change a person’s role rather than changing the person as a whole. And ‘role’, here, is not used to refer to an actor’s part, or a specific job. Role is meant in a systemic sense. In a system, everyone is connected. If I alter my place in the system – my role – I am changing my relationship to everyone else in the system. It is as if an invisible line connected everyone to everyone. If I move, everyone must adjust.
Some years ago, we worked with a company president who was a tyrant. He yelled, he screamed, he threatened, and intimidated everyone. One day, on his own initiative, he enrolled himself in an active listening course. Upon his return, and between his threats and put-downs, he advised everyone that he had attended an active listening course and from now on he would be active listening. After the usual demand and command performance, he stopped short, pointed to the first person in front of him and said, “I’m active listening. Speak!” And he sat and listened for the first time in the group’s experience. He listened to what each person had to say, and he learned what was really happening in his company, and he was able to be a far better president than he had been.
He had not changed as a person. He was still a tyrant. But he had redefined his role by incorporating active listening as part of what he did, and his change in behavior affected everyone around him. In this case, listening brought new ideas and better collaboration. His change in role inevitably caused a change in relations, and that created new rules for working together.
The goal of diversity is not to change people, a rare and difficult task at any time and not the responsibility of organizations. The goal of diversity is to offer individuals the opportunity to redefine their roles and relations so that they can maximize their own abilities and skills and add their wit and wisdom to the corporate effort while maintaining their exclusive individuality.
December42008
UserVoice is is an interesting forum-polling hybrid in which companies can poll their users for feedback, while users can offer suggestions unbidden. This might be project-specific or more wide ranging, and allows users to suggest organizational or process improvements, and also for someone in the organization to provide an “official” response. Each user is given an finite number of votes to cast in favor of suggestions they like, and topics are ranked by their popularity.
The voting aspect of it gives a Wisdom of Crowds angle, although it is ultimately more of a deliberative tool. That is, someone makes a suggestion, others comment and vote. Seems useful for an organzation that simply wants a way to get user feedback.
April102008
An article in the NY Times serves as a nice primer about the emerging role of prediction markets for decision making and innovation in the corporate setting. The article notes that companies such as Cisco Systems, GE Healthcare, Best Buy, General Mills, InterContinental Hotels, and Google are using prediction markets to harness wise crowds in order to figure out things like what the cost of computer chips will be in six months, will the new store in Shanghai open on time, and how can a hotel website be better designed to facilitate reservations.
Although it only touches on the subject momentarily, the article does mention one of the most exciting ways of using the crowd for engendering better ideas: customers. As potentially revolutionary as the idea of bringing a whole workforce into the decision-making process is, including customers in the process is doubly so.
And while prediction markets are the exclusive focus of the article, they should be regarded as one of several mechanisms for bringing to bear the wisdom of the crowd. Conventional polling is one possibility, as is online discussion which is shortly to become a far more practical and feasible thing with the advent of You Said It, an online discussion widget currently in beta testing: www.yousaidit.com. The days of the endless linear discussion board are numbered, thank goodness. More on this to come.
March202008
A fascinating study, authored by Samuel Sommers of Tufts University, examined decision making in diverse groups compared to non-diverse groups in a jury setting. He put together 29 mock juries of 6 people each; half of the juries consisted entirely of white people, and the other half of 4 white people and 2 African-Americans. Apart from the ethnicity, the jury selection was randomized. Each jury was then presented with a video of a trial with opening statements, witness testimony, forensic evidence, and closing arguments.
What was notable about the findings was how decision making differed between all-white and diverse groups. In deliberating, diverse groups discussed a greater breadth of information than non-diverse groups. Diverse groups also discussed more of the facts in each given case, and when evaluating the facts, were less likely to make factual errors. And when it came to looking at what information was missing from the presentations of the cases, diverse groups were more likely to examine this missing evidence.
Interestingly, the largest area of difference between these groups was that white jurors behaved differently – considered more facts and a wider view of the cases – when they were deliberating in a diverse group than when they were part of all white groups. It is encouraging that the exchange of information was greater in diverse groups. But what is even more fascinating is not just that the amount of information being passed around was greater, but that the bringing together of diversity created a “chemistry” of deeper thinking within the group. It would be fair to say that the group was smarter when it was diverse. And it is important to bear in mind that what these groups were talking about was detailed and complex. They weren’t guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar, they were weighing up a complex set of evidence, with missing pieces of information, to come to a challenging conclusion. In other words, they were dealing with situations that reflect the real world.
The study begins with a quotation from Thurgood Marshall that summarizes the effect of diversity in decision making groups extremely well:
“When any large and identifiable segment of the community is excluded from jury service, the effect is to remove from the jury room qualities of human nature and varieties of human experience, the range of which is unknown and perhaps unknowable. It is not necessary to assume that the excluded group will consistently vote as a class in order to conclude, as we do, that its exclusion deprives the jury of a perspective on human events that may have unsuspected importance in any case that may be presented.”
March72008
Here’s a new Q&A piece by James Borwick of Diversiteria posted at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website. Scroll down at the SHRM site to the Q&A section. It is accessible to SHRM members only. For those who don’t have SHRM membership, the posting is reproduced here:
What is the difference between implementing diversity and activating diversity, and why should I care?
It is not enough to have a spectrum of demographic characteristics within an organization’s workforce. To bring about the advantages and benefits of having a diverse group of people in your company, you must actually do something. That something is activation.
Activating diversity begins from the notion—popularized by James Surowiecki, Cass Sunstein and others—that a sufficiently large and diverse group of people will generally produce better decisions than a non-diverse group, a group of experts or an individual. The implication of this startling idea is that it allows for an entirely new approach to promoting diversity in an organization. With this new mind-set, diversity ceases to be an uphill struggle to change behavior, and instead becomes a process of taking advantage of dormant or underutilized assets within the organization: its latent diversity. Activating diversity is that process.
Implementing diversity means having a diverse mix of people within the organization. If you’ve implemented diversity, you are diverse and you are filled with the potential for great things to happen, for the power of diverse-group decision-making to take place in your organization. Activating diversity is what you do to bring that about, to fulfill that potential. Implementation is planting the seed. Activation is water and sunlight.
Implementation is pretty well understood by people in the diversity business: recruitment, promotion, retention and so on. Activation is far less understood because it is often assumed that if you put the ingredients together, if you implement diversity, then the magic will happen. This is not necessarily so.
Activating diversity, on the other hand, requires an environment where diverse groups are employed as a decision-making engine, a built-in resource for managers who want to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds.
First, it requires educating people within the organization about how and why diverse groups are better at making decisions. Second, it requires creating processes for accessing group opinions within the company, for finding out what the diverse group thinks. Fortunately, once the education is achieved, these processes are likely to emerge naturally so long as people are encouraged and allowed to participate in decision-making activities.
Activating diversity also requires an inclusive environment that sincerely welcomes all opinions. Within that environment, people are being asked to offer up their best qualities, their best ideas and their most creative selves. It is the antithesis of the keep-your-head-down culture in which hiding yourself behind a curtain of adequate competence is the norm. Activating diversity asks people to give more of themselves and in return offers true participation in the life of the organization.
Happily, activating diversity fits in well with existing diversity programs since most such initiatives are geared toward creating an inclusive environment. A workforce that is already familiar with the precepts of an inclusive workplace is particularly well-primed to understand and accept the power of diverse groups to generate better decisions.
March42008
A nice quick description of Kluster, the latest of several companies which attempt to organize, formalize, and monetize crowdsourcing for companies looking for innovation from outside their own workforce. Probably the first of these companies was Innocentive, which was started up by Alph Bingham, a very clever fellow who, among other things, pioneered prediction markets at Eli Lilly’s eLilly division with great success. Cambrian House and Idea Crossing are two other players in the crowdsourcing business.
Each of these organizations takes a somewhat different approach to creating a crowdsourcing model, and differ quite markedly in style. Innocentive comes across as the most grown-up of the bunch, corporate friendly, and seems to have the longest track record, although this is a very new field and it remains to be seen how things will shake out. Kluster, the subject of the NYT article, is the most youthful, not surprising as it’s founder is 21 years old. Their website, though certainly well put together, has a bit of a skateboard aesthetic, especially when the young man in the wool cap makes his cameo.
March22008
For all its limitations - a lingering sense of unreliability being foremost - Wikipedia has been a remarkable success story. Who would have thought, when it began, that an encyclopedia written by anyone who felt like adding their two cents would turn out to be as accurate, not to mention greatly larger in scale, than Britannica. But is it an example of the wise crowd at work? Chris Wilson at Slate argues that it is not, and that “chaperones”, an elite group of uber-contributors, dominate.
The problem with Wilson’s argument is that it is based on one statistical calculation, the meaning of which is not at all clear. That statistic says that 1% of Wikipedia contributors make about half the edits on the site. What we don’t know is how many people that 1% constitutes. If it’s 10,000 people, that’s a pretty large crowd. We also don’t know what kind of edits that 1% of contributors is making. There is reason to believe that much of it is administrative and grammatical rather than content-altering in nature. Meanwhile, much more than 1% of contributors are making the other 50% of edits.
The Slate article reveals a misunderstanding of the wise crowd phenomenon. To gain the benefit of the crowd’s wisdom requires a large and diverse group, but not necessarily every single person who makes an edit on Wikipedia. Even taking the 1% stat (which was itself arrived at with questionable methodology), if that comprises a large and diverse group, then the phenomenon will likely work.
