SHRM - New Diversiteria Q&A about implementing vs activating diversity in organizations
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.