Acceptable Diversity Zone
Companies face a constant challenge of balancing continuity with innovation, as advancement and creativity require diversity. So, how do companies confront this difficulty? By primarily establishing strategic values (company DNA) that are pushed down to different functions within the organisation, with the expectation that employees internalise them. This is the operational blueprint for recruitment, commonly termed ‘culture fit’. These boundaries create an interchangeable workforce with the intention to enable a stable and robust environment, ensuring a culture of standardised thought and behaviour.
“To surpass our limits, we built structures — giving our ideas solid form. These structures we built, in turn, shaped us.” — N.Sousanis
The impacts brought about by the technological revolution have created dynamic and disruptive market conditions, and in some cases rapidly so. This has created pressure for organisations to have adaptive yet robust systems. Adaptive to allow for disruptive thinking and innovation, which are key drivers to establishing competitive advantage and sustainable success. A robust structure to maintain functionality and business continuity. For an interdependent system to be adaptive it means it has the capability to respond to changes within the environment, but this is more achievable at the individual not whole. This leads to the concept of Acceptable Diversity Zone.
Although a familiar subject, diversity is commonly interpreted from a restricted view. Scott Page in Diversity and Complexity 2011, describes diversity in three forms. So, before considering any reformative strategies, how do you define diversity?
a. Variation within a type — measures diversity as the difference in the amount of an attribute generally through variance or standard deviation. An organisation’s workforce can be evaluated by dimensions such as skills or capabilities
b. Differences across types — refers to differences in kind, such as species in an ecosystem. Depending on the context it can be measured by distance, entropy or attributes e.g., race, gender, or ethnicity
c. Differences between communities or systems — relates to the differences in how the types are arranged. Differences in team composition result in distinct emergent properties. This considers the scope of an organisation’s structure. For example, instead of functional teams, deciding to use project-based teams
As part of understanding diversity and its impacts it is crucial to note two points. The measures of diversity compress meaningful distinctions and not all diversity enhances efficiency and robustness. The angle with which you choose to define diversity determines the impacts, varying from comparative advantage, responsiveness, redundancy, synergies, averaging, diminishing returns to collective knowledge. This then determines the required method to measure, whether it be through variation, entropy or attributes.
So how do you take an idea from concept to action?
To facilitate creativity and innovation while maintaining stability you can consider assessing the current recruitment policies as well as behavioural shifts driven by leadership.
The recruitment and on-boarding frameworks in most organisations typically function with the intention of securing candidates who ‘fit’ the mould, in turn creating a homogenous culture. An employee is hindered from being an independent thinker due to the limitations created by such an environment. A candidate’s uniqueness in skills and capabilities should not be evaluated in isolation against the current state of the organisation’s culture, but also by stakeholder and company objectives.
In a complex system such as an organisation there are internal levers of change, in this case leadership. To facilitate creativity and innovation requires a change in workplace culture. Borrowing from the field of social work, in her popular TEDxTalk, researcher Brene Brown talks of the importance of redefining vulnerability and embracing it within a company’s culture — “No vulnerability, no creativity. No tolerance for failure, no innovation.” She reflects on how vulnerability is at the core of shame and fear which are critical elements that hinder us from using our imagination to create. A shift in mindset by leadership will allow employees to adopt the required behavioural change.
